The Thermal Paste Lottery
John:
he didn't follow my go-to statement that even casey missed i'll move it up here you go go to fail nice because i didn't want you just running off the end like you go that you got to end up going back to ask atp and then then i guess you just run off the end again and it loops what can you do it's basic
Casey:
Last we spoke, which feels like 13 years ago, or maybe it was just last year, I guess.
Marco:
It was exactly seven days ago.
Marco:
Was it really?
Marco:
No.
Casey:
God, I'm so out of whack.
Marco:
You forgot the joke already?
Marco:
It hasn't been that long.
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
As soon as I said, was it real?
Casey:
I was like, no, wait, he's making the joke again.
Casey:
No, I've been off for two weeks, so I haven't had a job, and it's totally screwed up my schedule.
Marco:
We're going to talk about that, by the way.
Marco:
I know it's not in the list, but we're going to talk about that.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Anyway, so exactly seven days ago is what I said.
Casey:
It was before Apple issued their December 28th memo entitled, A Message to Our Customers About iPhone Batteries and Performance.
Casey:
So this is Apple trying to do some PR cleanup about the battery gate, if you will.
Casey:
The last time we spoke, this hadn't been shared yet.
Casey:
A lot of people seemed semi-angry with us that we didn't take Apple to task more about this.
Casey:
A lot of people deeply believe that the only reasonable explanation for this battery stuff isn't science.
Casey:
It isn't chemistry.
Casey:
It's greed.
Casey:
The only logical explanation for this is that Apple's greedy and wants us to buy new phones.
Casey:
So Apple's been doing a lot of cleanup.
Casey:
So I'm satisfied with this, but I was obviously the least punchy about this issue in the first place.
Casey:
So I don't know, John, you haven't had much to say.
Casey:
Let's start with you.
Casey:
How do you feel about this PR push?
Casey:
And does this make you feel better, worse, different?
Casey:
Don't care.
Casey:
Tell me.
John:
The PR message was good.
John:
Apple's usually pretty good with PR.
John:
Like you can read it and it uses like regular English sentences and says and explains things in a straightforward way without tons of weasel words in it.
John:
I mean, it's not going to convince anybody who's still convinced that Apple is, you know, doing evil things on purpose, whatever.
John:
But, you know, it's straightforward and I think it's worth linking to for people who haven't read it because.
John:
Very often, companies will put out a press release, and you'll kind of have to read the tech side of your choice to get an explanation of what the press release says.
John:
But in the case of Apple's things, I think you can just read the press release.
John:
You don't need someone to interpret and to translate from corporate ease into regular language.
John:
And again, it doesn't mean you're going to find it convincing or like, oh, now I'm convinced.
John:
Before, I didn't believe it, but Apple told me they're not doing anything wrong, and now I believe it.
John:
Whatever.
John:
But anyway, you can read it and hear an explanation.
John:
And it is typically vague because they don't want to go into super techie details.
John:
And I still have some curiosity about the super techie details, mostly because I want to have something else I can tell people who have...
John:
have questions about it um i know this is just about the press release uh and we'll get to the little thing that renee ritchie uh tweeted about it in a second but the question i have and maybe you guys know the answer maybe you read something more about it is because a lot of people are wondering hey is my iphone is this happening to my iphone right so there's lots of people say oh you can run this thing it'll check your battery health and if it's below a certain percentage then it's probably doing it and blah blah blah but the other way people have to test it is
John:
Uh, you know, I'll run a benchmark and, you know, my wife has a brand new version of the same phone as me and she runs a benchmark and it gets this number.
John:
And now we're on my phone with an old battery and I get that number or I run the benchmark and then I get my battery placed and I run the benchmark again.
John:
Like the idea that running benchmarks and getting some numbers as a way to sort of gauge the
John:
whether you're subject to the throttling and the question i have about this and i don't know the answer to it but like i think might be sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy is if apple's throttling thing is there to as apple says and as most people seem to agree
John:
like mechanically speaking, like how does it actually work?
John:
Like that it clocks things down to prevent sort of the maximum power draw.
John:
Like these, these things, if they run at their maximum speed and they draw the most power that they can draw, sometimes it's just too much and the battery, old batteries can't keep up.
John:
And so what they're trying to do by downclocking is to prevent you from ever drawing that much.
John:
Right.
Yeah.
John:
but during normal use like my question is is it down clock all the time like from boot time on it's like we normally we would run your thing at you know uh one gigahertz but now we're running it at 800 megahertz so i'm just making up numbers these aren't real um and we just run it that way it's from the boot time on and we never change the clock speed it's 800 instead of one gigahertz the whole time or
John:
does it downclock in response to demand in other words it's running at full speed until you go and try to run something extremely intensive like a benchmark and then it down clocks you because if it didn't down clock you down clock you would see that you're about to draw too much power i don't know the answer to that but i think if that is the case if it's dynamically downclocking then by running a benchmark uh you are forcing your phone into the down clock mode and for all you know when you're sitting there
John:
reading twitter or sending text messages it is actually running at full speed all the time and it only gets down clocked uh when you do something demanding so again i don't know the answer and that's that's a place where i wish apple would be more forthcoming with the technical details but you know obviously that's not going to be in a press release and so far i haven't seen any official word from apple explaining in nitty-gritty detail exactly what it does to your uh to your clock speed
Marco:
I don't want to get too far into the weeds on this.
Marco:
I did want to mention there was a great discussion about lots of different sides of this issue, not just how Apple has done the PR and everything, but a lot of very good questions being brought up on last week's episode of The Talk Show with John Gruber and Jason Snell.
Marco:
It's The Talk Show episode number 210 for the show notes.
Marco:
And it was a really good conversation because there's a lot of sides to this that either we didn't cover or we only briefly covered.
Marco:
And a lot of questions that have come up kind of since then with more time to think about it from exactly seven days ago.
Marco:
And I think one of the biggest things is like there were so many factors that made this a problem that are totally Apple's fault.
Marco:
Things like, the OSs really do run too slowly on old hardware, and it really does seem like they don't care that much.
Marco:
I'm sure it's somebody's job, and maybe a lot of somebody's jobs, to make the OSs work on the older hardware, but the actions speak louder than words, and it clearly is not as high of a priority as it should be.
Marco:
And that's been true for years.
Marco:
So that's one of the many problems.
Marco:
that really exacerbated this for Apple.
Marco:
The reason why people have been thinking for years that Apple secretly slows down their phones to make them buy new ones is because new OSs so often run so much slower than old ones when you install them on a one or two generation old phone.
Marco:
So that's a big question.
Marco:
I would also... One of the bigger questions that I think people have been asking over the last couple of weeks is...
Marco:
Why did this only happen from the iPhone 6 forward?
Marco:
And is it happening faster than it should?
Marco:
We've heard all sorts of crazy reports all over Twitter and email and everything.
Marco:
But a lot of people are saying that they're seeing this battery throttling happening on a phone within its first year.
Marco:
or its second year.
Marco:
And I don't think that's reasonable.
Marco:
And somebody... Honestly, I haven't had a lot of time to do research on this.
Marco:
Somebody said Samsung makes some kind of guarantee about a certain battery health percentage after two years.
Marco:
I don't know enough about that.
Marco:
But it certainly seems like...
Marco:
Yes, batteries do degrade over time.
Marco:
And yes, they have problems.
Marco:
And this is actually a pretty clever engineering solution to try to make phones with severely degraded batteries still usable.
Marco:
But I would like to hear maybe from people who know more about this stuff, who know more about battery hardware design.
Marco:
Is this actually inevitable at the scale and timeline that it's happening?
Marco:
Or is there possibly some kind of bigger design problem here?
John:
so just to get to what renee uh communicated like apple in this press release had said that they were going to start this like 30 battery replacement thing uh in mid-january but actually they're starting it now like they're you know their supplies may be limited but they're not waiting so if you want to go to an apple store right now because you think you have a bad battery and you want to get the 30 deal you can do that like you don't have to wait um so that was the
John:
minor announcement as to what you were getting at marco i think a lot of it is explained by some of things we've experienced or you've experienced multiple times with like the new laptops um it's a combination not anymore my laptop's awesome now yeah yeah i know it's a combination of uh processors
John:
getting more powerful and having uh and being more power efficient by you know uh turning off or down clocking or momentarily uh increasing and decreasing their clock speed like basically a larger delta between how much power does the cpu draw when it's not really doing anything and how much does it draw when it's doing all the things that that is that gap has gotten wider and
John:
And at the same time, Apple has been aggressively making their things thinner and their batteries smaller.
John:
And maybe around the iPhone 6 is when it started to cross that threshold of, hey, this system on a chip has a really big range between I'm doing all the things, playing a game, and I'm just scrolling a text message screen.
John:
And at the same time,
John:
you know the battery was getting bigger to power the bigger screens but also there was still like there was sort of the end of the thinness race uh they don't think they really got much thinner after the six model six and seven and eight are kind of the same and actually the 10 is even a little bit thicker than those um so i those phones could sort of be the phone equivalent of the 2016 2017 uh macbook pros where the battery can last a long time if you're scrolling web pages in safari or using text edit or something and
John:
uh but if you're doing anything aggressive on them your battery life goes in the toilet because the battery is scaled to sort of a low average usage but if you use all the cpu and gpu all the time it destroys the battery um and that's just that's you know obviously it's not shutting off your computer or whatever but uh we discussed before the the uh the throttling uh presumably for thermal reasons on uh
John:
on the MacBook Pros.
John:
But I think this, that as to whether this is inevitable, I think it's a natural consequence of essentially chips getting better about power efficiency because they have all these things that if they use all of them at once, it's tremendously fast and uses a lot of power, but it's relying on the fact that most of the time you're not doing that.
John:
And so they can get away with putting a very small battery in there.
John:
If they had to treat the system on the chips in the iPhone 6, 7, 8, and 10,
John:
as if they're running at full blast all the time, the batteries would be three times as big, right?
John:
They wouldn't be able to get away with a battery that small in there.
John:
And the other possible thing is heat.
John:
I don't know what kind of factor that is.
John:
I don't feel like the phones get particularly hot, but that could just be because the heat is being trapped on the inside.
John:
But any kind of excessive heat, or I suppose cold, really hoses your battery.
John:
And I always, I don't know if this is founded in battery chemistry.
John:
Some battery expert can tell me or not, but I always get the feeling that like,
John:
The margin of error on a really small battery
John:
is just so much lower like that.
John:
It's thinner that, uh, the temperature gradients can get to like the middle of it.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like faster.
John:
There's just so wafer thin that if it's hosed in any way, uh, if it's stressed or hosed in any way, there's so little, there's so little battery there.
John:
Like if it's made hot or cold, the whole thing heats, heats through or gets cold straight through immediately because it's, it's like wafer thin, right?
John:
As opposed to if it was like a battery, like in an old power book, that was just huge brick and
John:
And subjecting that to external heat for a short period of time, it's like, well, the outside might get hot from whatever warm thing it's next to.
John:
But it's going to take a while for that heat to penetrate all the way through the entire cell if the heat is an external source.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
the solution to all these things is, uh, you know, make processes to take even less, uh, less energy, even when they're going full blast and put in bigger batteries because bigger batteries, you know, it's the, it's the cure all, it's all battery related things.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Everything gets heavier and it takes longer to charge, but if you're having problems delivering enough power,
John:
or your battery is getting damaged in some way or whatever.
John:
If you just have tons of headroom and lots of excess battery capacity, then even if the thing degrades by 20% in the first year, if you are over provisioned on battery by 50%, you're still good.
Casey:
Yeah, I think to hopefully put a period on this whole topic, I think the thing that's most unfortunate and distressing about this is that a lot of it, if not all of it, could have been avoided with better messaging from Apple.
Casey:
And if Apple had just been more upfront about, hey...
Casey:
you know the the unfortunate reality is your phone's battery is a little older than you know it's designed to be or not it's not up to the snuff that we hoped it was so the bad news is it's not going to run quite at full speed like we you know the cpu won't run quite as full speed as we want it to but the good news is it won't randomly shut down on you and you know if you have the time why don't you go to the apple store and we'll charge you a little bit of money to replace the battery and
Casey:
And, you know, had it been messaged more appropriately, I think it would have been a much smaller story.
Casey:
And I think that we can all agree that.
John:
But or a thing about what you were talking about with the messaging, aside from people like just not believing the messaging and everything which we went over last show.
John:
It's kind of the other problem with that that makes it tricky and maybe one of the things that motivated Apple not to do it.
John:
It's not as if there is like a little thermometer gauge or a single number that pops out of the battery that tells you how good or bad your battery is.
John:
it's a lot of guesswork and sort of like, well, last time we went through a charge cycle, here's what the curve looked like.
John:
And here's what the voltages were at various times.
John:
Like it's a lot of guessing.
John:
And it's like, well, but it was just, it was in a really cold car then.
John:
So does that counter?
John:
But now it's really warm.
John:
And like, there are just so many variables.
John:
And because batteries, like they're not like bananas where you get a good one and a bad one, or it's an overripe one or whatever, but they are not as, they're not quite as,
John:
uniform as other components might be because it's all just a big chemical soup and they try to make them all uniform and try to make them all good but it really depends on how you use your phone you leave your phone on the dashboard in the sun or in your car and when it's freezing cold weather because you leave it in your car and you forget it for two hours like those things hurt your battery um so
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Uh, and the other possibility is that you are an unlucky person who happened to get a battery that either was bad from the factory or got damaged by some excessive, uh, temperature changes during shipping or, or something like that.
John:
Like someone, if all of all the components that you could potentially get that are end up being like, you know, bad, right?
John:
Most of the other components have good, easy ways to test them, but batteries, uh,
John:
You can test it at the factory and it'll be like passes all tests with flying collars.
John:
But after three weeks of charge cycle, some internal weakness or flaw in the battery causes it to not be performing well.
John:
And in that case, I mean, in that case, the messaging is good for the consumer to say, like, oh, I've got a bad battery, and presumably they'd get it replaced under warranty.
John:
But it's like, how do you distinguish that from the case I described before, where actually your battery is fine and the thing is just freaking out for no good reason?
John:
So I'm not sure what the solution is.
John:
A lot of times people have battery issues with their phone, and the easy answer is to just get a new battery.
John:
And one of the things I think I learned from the feedback from last show was
John:
is that a surprising number of people who listen to the show either themselves or didn't know or know people who don't know that you can replace the battery on an iPhone.
John:
Like, that's even a thing that can be done for any amount of money anywhere.
John:
I assumed it was a thing that everybody knew, and I was definitely wrong about that.
John:
A lot of people were saying, until this thing, I didn't even know you could replace a battery on the phone.
John:
If I had known I could have just replaced the battery, I never wanted to get on a new phone.
John:
Some people were saying if I had known a battery replacement would fix the problem.
John:
But other people were saying, I didn't even know that was a thing that you would do.
John:
Or maybe they didn't think it was a thing that Apple would do.
John:
Like maybe you could find some sketchy vendor who will crack open your phone and give it a go.
John:
Or you could try to do it yourself.
John:
But that it's an official Apple thing that you can do.
John:
And the final thing on that is lots of people have been reporting...
John:
um and i don't know if this is apple policy or informal policy or not but before this all happened if you took a phone to an apple store and say hey i'm having problems with my battery they would run your phone through like a diagnostic to check like your battery health according to whatever you know whatever rules and number pops out says your battery is like 80 okay or whatever and there was some number and if it was below that number they would say okay
John:
we'll replace your battery for 80 bucks or whatever, like whatever they were charging, right?
John:
But if it was not below that number, if it says your battery is 99% healthy, according to our tests, that they wouldn't do the replacement for you.
John:
And that you would throw your money at this.
John:
No, look here, money, $80.
John:
Take this money and replace my battery.
John:
And they said, no, sorry, our diagnosis tell us that your battery is still good.
John:
So we won't replace your thing, right?
John:
And enough people gave me that story that it seems like a thing that's really happening.
John:
And the reason I was interested in it is because
John:
uh we had an iphone 5s that we were it was gonna be a hand-me-down phone for my son and i and we thought like oh before i you know it had been it had been well used it was i had been used for at least two years maybe longer uh heavily used and so we're like oh well i don't want to give him a phone with a two-year-old battery you know we want to be able to reach him and he's probably not going to be very good about charging it so before i give him this phone let me go to the apple store and replace the battery so i brought the 5s to the apple store to replace the battery and
John:
I gave it to the outburst.
John:
I said to here I made a genius bar appointment and I said, you know, I just want a new battery in this phone and
John:
and he takes it from me and runs it through a diagnostic and says oh this battery actually looks like it's pretty good it's like 85 i'm like yeah i know i i don't it's not there's nothing wrong with the battery i just want to replace it because i'm giving it to my son as a gift and i want him to have a fresh battery and the guy said oh okay and he did it for me right and only now in retrospect do i look back think back to the like the strange pause and the way he kind of said oh to think
John:
maybe he was doing me a favor like i wasn't like aggressive about it i had no expectation that i was going to be told no i was just explaining oh yeah no sorry sorry to make you think i had a problem with my battery i don't have a problem with my battery i am just here saying just period i want a new battery didn't argue with me and didn't tell me they have a policy they do but he did do a little pause so i don't know i don't know what to think anymore maybe apple geniuses can chime in and say what was the policy before
John:
this whole uh throttling pr thing but uh either way at 80 i feel like apple should have replaced the battery for anybody who could throw that money at them at 30 i feel like apple's probably losing money in every one of these battery replacements so i kind of understand if they're not going to give you the 30 deal if your battery is like brand spanking new and their test says you have you know 95 capacity or whatever
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So tell me about phone throttling and how it's not always the explanation.
John:
This is another big thread of feedback.
John:
Hey, my phone takes 25 seconds to launch the messages application.
John:
Damn Apple and that thermal throttling.
John:
A lot of things can be wrong with phones.
John:
I want to tell people that if your phone is super slow and doing all sorts of terrible things, possibly related to this start after the iOS 11 update or whatever it may be,
John:
there are many, many things that people have experienced and have written to us about and that I've experienced personally where your phone gets unreasonably slow when it's doing nothing hard and with a brand new battery.
John:
And I can tell you,
John:
that those things are not related to phone throttling those are related to something else terrible and i wish i could tell you what it was lots of people like wipe and restore your phone and that would fix it which is the worst possible like you almost wish that what doesn't work like please don't let this work because it's the worst kind of sort of cross my fingers plug in and unplug it thing
John:
But very often that actually does work, which is terrible.
John:
That should not work.
John:
You would love to know what the problem is.
John:
But all I'm going to say is if your phone is like really slow, like someone just wrote and said they press play on like, you know, a podcast player and it takes five seconds for audio to start.
John:
that is i'm pretty sure that's not uh cpu throttling right because the throttling is not we slow your cpu to one percent right and so if you're getting any kind of performance problems that are pervasive everywhere throughout the operating system and really really slow like a hundred times 200 times slower than it should be like you're waiting three minutes for messages to launch
John:
that is not this issue that is another issue that is probably worse and we can't even tell you what it is and if you want to go get a new battery anyway go ahead but for those things uh like you know it's sometimes it's not a tumor and sometimes it's not phone throttling sometimes it's something even worse uh
John:
And yes, sometimes it does coincide with an OS upgrade, and I have no explanation for what it is, but I can tell you it is definitely a thing.
John:
I experienced it myself.
John:
My wife experienced it on her phone.
John:
Wiping and restore fixes it for me about like 60% of the time, and I hate that it does.
John:
And I don't really recommend people wipe and restore as a matter of course, but unless someone else knows a better way to figure out what the heck that problem is, you just want to make the problem go away sometimes.
John:
Unfortunately, sometimes wipe and restore doesn't fix it, and then what do you do?
John:
I don't even know.
John:
But anyway, all that is to say, if there's something wrong with your phone and it's still under warranty, bring it to the Apple Genius.
John:
Let them sort it out.
John:
If they can't figure it out, maybe they'll just give you a new phone.
John:
But it's not always throttling.
Casey:
I find in my experience, it's usually lupus.
Casey:
Speaking more of throttling, let's talk about the iMac Pro and its thermal throttling.
Casey:
This is the show about throttling, apparently.
John:
Yeah, this is slightly different.
John:
But anyway, people have iMac Pros now, including Marco, which we'll get to later in the show.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And some of the people who have had them are testing them out.
John:
And one of the interesting tests that you can do with these now that they have them and they have something that can measure all the temperatures of all the little bits is, hey, let's see if anything we can do with this iMac Pro causes any of the parts inside it to not run as their normal clock speed.
John:
And the answer is that, yes, there are things you can do to make both the CPU and the GPU dip below their normal clock speed, albeit briefly.
John:
This is an Apple Insider article, and they ran it through a bunch of benchmarks on CPU and GPU.
John:
And for the most part, it stays pegged at whatever its rated speed is.
John:
But there's nice little graphs where you can see it dips for a second or two down to a slower clock speed.
John:
uh and it goes back up to the top um and the interesting part i think about this throttling and this has nothing to do with battery obviously because this guy's plugged in uh the interesting this is all about heat the interesting part of the throttling is i say during all these tests the fans are not really going nuts right in other words that it seems like
John:
this throttling could be avoided if the system was tuned to crank the fan speed up a little bit more right um so it seems like at least as far as this current iteration of whatever firmware and os combination determines all this stuff that the imac pro is tuned to be quiet as quiet as possible while more or less maintaining maximum speed speed and
John:
Again, you can't instantaneously crank up the fans and instantaneously extract heat that's going to cause the thing to throttle itself, right?
John:
So I think their option would be to avoid these brief...
John:
you know one or two second dips below normal clock speed right to avoid that you would actually have to run the fans louder and sooner perhaps to a significant degree and instead they've chosen to tune this thing to be as quiet as possible while allowing for occasional dips and clock speed which is an interesting trade-off which means that i bet this machine is pretty quiet and again marco you will get a chance to explain
John:
all your experiences with this eventually um but also that this is another way that i feel like this thing is hopefully probably potentially differentiated from the mac pro because again if a machine is ever going to be tuned to never dip its clock speed because it can't get enough heat away from it
John:
a purpose-designed modular doesn't have a screen attached to it yada yada yada like pro computer would be the one to do it and the all-in-one sleek slim amazingly compact pro components jammed behind a screen is the one that is going to stay as quiet as possible but occasionally allow dips in clock speed so it doesn't have to be too noisy
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by FlightLogger.
Marco:
Go to flightlogger.co or search for FlightLogger in the App Store.
Marco:
FlightLogger lets you easily search and save your flights, organize them into custom trips, share your travel schedule with friends and family, and much more, all from a very easy-to-use app and, in my opinion, a really nice-looking one.
Marco:
Flight Logger brings the ease back to air travel with a visual timeline of your itinerary to keep you on schedule no matter where you are in the world.
Marco:
You can use Flight Logger to keep track of all your travel information.
Marco:
Any updates or changes, it will alert you.
Marco:
You will never miss a flight again with their real-time notifications on terminal and gate changes.
Marco:
You can track and get notified of arrival and departure times, delays, and baggage claim information, which is awesome.
Marco:
It'll tell you what claim your bags are coming on.
Marco:
And you can share your flight information with friends and family for no waiting airport pickups and peace of mind.
Marco:
Flight logging and flight tracking and flight status apps, honestly, the ones I've seen that aren't flight logger, they're kind of a dumpster fire.
Marco:
It is not an easy to use, attractive category of apps, generally speaking.
Marco:
And I actually used flight logger before they were a sponsor here because I've heard them recommended strongly on other podcasts.
Marco:
And I got to tell you,
Marco:
The hype is real.
Marco:
It's a great app.
Marco:
And it's miles ahead of the others in terms of having a nice appearance and making the features easy to use and easy to understand.
Marco:
It really is great.
Marco:
And it supports all... I mean, there's so much stuff.
Marco:
I can't even tell you it all in an ad.
Marco:
You can locate the aircraft on a map.
Marco:
You can see your flight as you go, which I love.
Marco:
You can import flights via email forwarding.
Marco:
You can just forward your confirmation to a special email address and it'll import automatically.
Marco:
There's so much to see here.
Marco:
And they even have a cool little trick...
Marco:
Go to the settings menu and shake your phone and you will get a new entry that I think ATP listeners, especially John Siracusa, might appreciate.
Marco:
So check it out.
Marco:
Go to flightlogger.co.
Marco:
That's flightlogger in the app store or flightlogger.co for an incredibly nice, easy to use app for easily tracking, saving and getting alerts for your flights.
Marco:
Once again, thank you so much to Flight Logger, a really cool flight tracking app for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
You did order an iMac Pro, as it turns out.
Marco:
As it turns out, yes, I did.
Marco:
And?
Marco:
And I am now running High Sierra.
Casey:
Oh, welcome to months ago.
Marco:
Yeah, my fonts are now overly smooth and blurry because my font smoothing setting is not fixed.
Casey:
Let me interrupt you right there.
Casey:
I have heard you, you know, conventioning about this for months.
Casey:
I don't understand what it is that you're so angry about, but I really kind of don't want to know because I don't see it right now.
Casey:
I don't see the arrow in the FedEx logo and I don't want to.
John:
You haven't changed your settings.
John:
Marco is changing his settings from the defaults for font smoothing.
Marco:
I mean, I used to expect that if a setting is going to be there that it should work properly.
Marco:
Otherwise, why have the setting?
Marco:
Wait, so what do you set it to?
Marco:
So the setting I'm talking about is in settings general, turning off, use LCD font smoothing when available.
Casey:
Yeah, mine is off.
Casey:
So what am I supposed to see that's garbage?
Marco:
It's off?
Yeah.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Open Xcode or something else that would truncate text automatically with an ellipsis.
Marco:
Look in the source list, make it nice and narrow.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Casey:
Slow down, man.
Casey:
Slow down.
Casey:
I was trying to find out the right project.
Casey:
Okay.
Marco:
Launching Xcode.
Marco:
Bounce, bounce, bounce.
Marco:
Launching Xcode on your non-pro iMac must take ages.
Casey:
oh you're such a jerk okay anyway so so i see an ellipsis in one in the middle of one of the folder names in this particular project so what what should what you should see if that setting is unchecked is you should see that the text with an ellipsis should be rendered thicker than the text without the ellipsis oh you marco oh god bless america you see it right i'm never gonna be able to say i'm never gonna be able to unsee this now
Marco:
Right, and that isn't the only place that this shows up.
Marco:
Basically, if text is being rendered with certain, I don't know the details, but with certain core text behaviors that are being applied to it, they basically make it ignore that setting and make it always use LCD font smoothing.
Marco:
And that's new to High Sierra, that is not yet fixed.
Marco:
In whatever apps and workflows and things I use, that shows up a lot.
Marco:
Um, so I'd rather just live with my blurry text everywhere than have it be inconsistently blurry.
Marco:
Uh, so I, right now I am living with that setting back on, which is the default, uh, and it sucks, but it sucks less than having everything be inconsistent.
Marco:
I think it also applies to finder windows and stuff like it.
Marco:
It applies a lot of places and it's annoying.
John:
So why do you think, uh, LCD font smoothing is blurrier than plain old anti-aliasing to my eyes, anti, plain old anti-aliasing with gray pixels, uh,
John:
is blurrier than the little sub-pixel thing that the LCD thing is doing.
Marco:
I haven't ever taken a macro lens to my screen and really compared how they're doing it, but it seems like the effective visual thickness of the fonts, like how thick they appear to be, appears slightly thicker when it's using the LCD font smoothie, which is their version of sub-pixel anti-aliasing.
John:
See, I don't think it was the opposite.
John:
In old non-retina monitors, like the one I'm staring at, I always find the opposite, that LCD font smoothie makes them appear thinner and
John:
Plain old anti-aliasing with a series of grayish pixels makes them look thicker.
Marco:
Yeah, that's what I would assume.
Marco:
But regardless, the way it appears visually to me, the perception of how it looks is that...
Marco:
when the sub-pixel anti-aliasing is being used, which is the default, the fonts do appear thicker.
Casey:
Yeah, I would agree with that, that when I ticked this checkbox back on, everything appeared thicker to me than otherwise.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Weird, though.
Casey:
Well, thank you for ruining that.
Marco:
Yeah, you're welcome.
Marco:
You can go back to Sierra.
Marco:
It won't happen anymore.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So how's your iMac Pro?
Casey:
It's beautiful.
Casey:
I've seen one once at WWDC.
Casey:
In fact, John was with me.
Casey:
I can tell you they're beautiful, but tell me, other than the physical appearance, how is it?
Marco:
Honestly, ask me next week because I've had it for literally one day, a day during which I have been able to do very little on it because I've been very, very busy.
Marco:
The one thing I will... I mean, I'm using it right now.
Marco:
It's wonderful so far.
Marco:
It does look incredible.
Marco:
All the black things on my desk now look cool.
Marco:
The few remaining silver things on my desk, like my speaker and headphone amps, now look really out of place because they're silver instead of black.
Marco:
So God knows what I'm going to do about that.
And...
Marco:
Yeah, what about all your shitboxes?
Marco:
Those all are silver, right?
Marco:
They are, yeah.
Marco:
It does have black versions of some of their products, so I might look into that.
Marco:
Oh, God.
John:
I could just move them or just deal with it.
John:
I can get you a can of Krylon.
John:
You can fix all those silver boxes real quick.
Marco:
Yeah, anyway.
Marco:
My initial impressions, I don't really have any yet because it hasn't been enough time.
Marco:
However, one thing that is immediately striking, besides the look,
Marco:
is just how incredibly quiet it is even quieter than the 5k it for me at least and maybe that's because my 5k is old and the platters are full of bad blocks or whatever the apple people told me i i don't know but more likely the inside of the case is filled with uh dog hair
Marco:
My dog doesn't shed.
John:
You're right.
Marco:
It doesn't shed.
Marco:
That makes a difference.
Marco:
And he really doesn't.
Marco:
He needs a haircut very badly, but he does not shed.
Marco:
Anyway, so it's strikingly quiet.
Marco:
Like, it is ridiculously quiet.
Marco:
So I am very much enjoying that.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
That, if nothing else, will push me to very aggressively move this into being Tiff's computer as soon as the Mac Pro is presumably released if I want it.
Marco:
Because I want her computer across the room to be this quiet as well.
Marco:
It is shocking how quiet it is.
Marco:
And how quiet it seems to remain under load by all the reviews.
Marco:
But I have not experienced that yet.
Marco:
But ask me again next week.
Casey:
So both Jason Snell and Underscore have told me that FFmpeg encodes tend to be twice as quick on the iMac Pro as compared to my 5K iMac.
Casey:
And although I don't do FFmpeg encodes as often as I probably paint it, it happens often enough that
Casey:
I am salivating at the thought of it.
Casey:
And then I see the price tag, and I'm reminded that I don't need one of these after all.
Casey:
My goodness.
Casey:
It seems like it's just so much faster, and I'm super jealous.
Marco:
I just think all my RAM errors are being corrected and detected.
Marco:
Oh, man, this is so great.
Casey:
That's so harsh.
Marco:
It's so nice to be back on a Mac Pro again.
Casey:
Oh, you are so mean to John.
John:
Yeah, like I said in the follow-up, but I do find it interesting that this machine appears to be tuned for quiet above all else, which is like...
John:
Interesting way to go for, you know, like what it says to me that actually that they do actually have cooling, more cooling, especially since they chose parts that are clocked lower, like whatever these special number parts that they use from Intel, they're like similar to other parts that Intel offers, but a little bit lower clocked.
John:
Like, they would have the headroom, but they wanted it to be quieter, right?
John:
Rather than having it, like... It's almost as if the design goal was quieter than the 5K iMac.
John:
Which you could see them maybe saying, it should be as quiet as the 5K iMac, but it ends up being quieter.
John:
Like, you know, dramatically quieter.
John:
And not because...
John:
it can be that quiet and never throttle but it can be that quiet and almost never throttle like just little blips little blips here and there like i'd encourage people to check out the apple insider article and look at the graphs it's mostly never throttling little dips here and there and so and again like
John:
it's probably varies on the ambient temperature of the room how good the thermal paste is on the model that you happen to get all sorts of things like that that's something else that uh a couple of follow-up uh youtube links and unfortunately i don't have for the show notes but uh if you just go into youtube and look for like imac or apple thermal throttle cooling blah blah blah uh power book uh power book sorry macbook thermal throttling one of the things that the the pc uh
John:
builders like to do is take apart apple computers and take off the heat sinks and the heat pipes and scrape off the thermal paste and put on like their fancy thermal paste sometimes they put on multiple kinds of fancy thermal paste which boggles my mind that they take the entire thing apart scrape off the thing clean the cpu and the heat sink put on thermal paste set reassemble the entire thing test it and then repeat it only to scrape off the paste they just put on and put an even more ridiculously expensive
John:
special thermal paste made with like, you know, Arctic silver.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Like made, made with these, uh, adamantium elements that make the, the things like more expensive than printer ink.
John:
Um, but they get like, you know, double, you know, singular, even sometimes double digit increases in, uh, or decreases in temperature just for merely applying new thermal paste or better thermal paste.
John:
And this is true, not just of laptops, but of all computers, uh,
John:
uh as it ages and as that you go through heat and cool and heating cool cycles over and over again the thermal bond between whatever is pulling heat away from your chip and the top of the chip itself degrades right and i've always wondered why apple doesn't use whatever these very fancy thermal pastings are maybe they maybe these ones last even like they're they're good when they're installed new but after a
John:
maybe it's just a cost saving thing maybe they can't get thermal paste of that quality in the volumes needed to sell millions and millions of whatevers um but it's always something i suspect when i hear someone says like oh i got a 5k iMac and it's like super loud or you know that happened with the playstation 4 so a lot of the playstation 4 is like i got a brand new playstation 4 and it sounds like a jet engine is taking off and
John:
Again, getting back to the battery as being like the sort of touchy-feely, squishy element that could be like you get a bad banana, right?
John:
The touchy-feely, squishy element of almost all electronics these days is...
John:
how how well assembled and was it like how good is the thermal bond between the hot little square or rectangle and the apparatus meant to pull heat away and so you may end up getting a playstation 4 where the it's just not seated properly or there's not enough thermal paste or there's too much thermal paste or it's crooked or some other problem with it and right out of the box the fans run at max speed you're like oh what's wrong with this thing it's like
John:
yeah that part of it like the silicon chip is solid state and they can test it and verify it and if it's good it's probably good but and you know the assembly process if they over torque or under torque a few screws it doesn't matter but if one of those screws is one of the screws that keeps the heat sink properly seated on the thing or if like
John:
the little machine or person that puts the thermal paste on got it off by a few millimeters or like just so many things can go wrong that seem like sort of very analog uh and if that goes wrong it's like you just feel like you you lost the lottery like you're bummed out or you you won the crappy lottery like most of the time everything's fine but every once in a while you get a lemon and you're like why are these fans so loud it's like uh like if you're one of those people you could crack it open and try to fix it but if you're not you have to just
John:
try to return to try to they'll say oh fan noise is normal you when you're playing a game the fans just spin up it's like yeah but when i just turned it on like listen to this you can tell there's something wrong with it right and you have to argue with the person and beg and it's like my worst nightmare i've had pretty good luck with with fans so far um but like imagine you get a new 5k iMac who was the one who did this was it stephen hackett was complaining about his noisy 5k iMac someone we know i think recently got a brand new 5k iMac and
John:
and could not believe how loud it was.
John:
And whenever I hear that, I'm like, maybe they just expected it to be quieter, or maybe they lost the thermal pace lottery.
Marco:
Yeah, well, and I think that one was actually a defective one.
Marco:
But I will say that, now having used the 5K iMac full-time for three years, my only complaint really was that under load, it got loud.
Marco:
And it was kind of annoying to hear the fans when it was under a load.
Marco:
And so to have this brand new, awesome, high-end generation of the iMac basically not do that at all, or do that to such a small level that most people don't even notice it's doing it at all, basically to have it be quiet under most loads, that is a huge upgrade.
Marco:
And you could argue, as some people on that Apple Insider comment thread did, you can argue it's a pro machine.
Marco:
It should never throttle from thermals.
Marco:
But
Marco:
I think there's a question of degree there.
Marco:
If it can be really, really quiet under most workloads and only give up like 1% of its total throughput on the CPU, I would probably take that trade off and I bet most buyers would too.
John:
Yeah, especially since you would have to run the fan, not just like, oh, like during those blips, just make the fan a little faster.
John:
I think to get rid of those blips, you would have to
John:
um substantially run the fans substantially faster much earlier than you think you would have to it's not as if you can react to them in real time with fan speed and so it is actually a trade-off and so basically like these things look like they're pretty much never throttling in exchange for very quiet performance and you could go to you could go to absolutely never throttling in exchange for iMac 5k sounds performance you know
Marco:
right but like i don't want that like i would i gladly would give up that last little tiny percentage of performance for a computer that is quiet pretty much all the time than one that is that does what the 5k mac does which is just ramp up ramp down ramp up ramp down like you can always hear those things moving and we just wait for the mac pro and have it all
Marco:
We hope, right?
Marco:
That's right.
Marco:
Until it's introduced, it's the fantasy computer that solves everyone's problems.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
So Max Uck in the chat asks, is it possible that I would ever stick with the iMac Pro and not buy the Mac Pro?
Marco:
That is possible.
Marco:
Again, we won't really know until the Mac Pro is released what it is.
Marco:
Correction.
John:
It is impossible that you won't buy the Mac Pro, but it is possible you can buy it, return it, and then go back to the iMac Pro.
Marco:
Truth.
Marco:
It's possible.
Marco:
I am going to probably be incredibly satisfied with the iMac Pro in the meantime.
Marco:
As I mentioned on previous shows, if the iMac Pro was it, if there was not going to be another Mac Pro, if this was the only Mac Pro Xeon workstation that Apple was going to make,
Marco:
I would totally just buy it and be fine with it.
Marco:
And I would occasionally complain if I had to bring in my computer for service and I lost my whole computer because the monitor had a dead pixel.
Marco:
That would make me upset.
Marco:
But otherwise, I've been using a 5K iMac for the last three years because I decided the overall package of the iMac with the wonderful retina screen and everything was better for me than the 2013 Mac Pro.
Marco:
I might make that same decision again after seeing the Mac Pro, the next Mac Pro.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The next Mac Pro will also be apparently, allegedly coming with a new Pro display.
Marco:
I assume it's going to be at least a 5K Retina display, if not bigger.
Marco:
Man, it'd be awesome if it was 8K or something, but I don't know how likely that is this year, but...
Marco:
If they release something that ends up being less compelling to me than the iMac Pro, then I'll get an iMac Pro for myself and give this one to TIFF.
Marco:
Maybe I'll wait until the next generation.
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
I've seen a lot of people, a lot of Mac commentators and everything, saying...
Marco:
We really have to see how often Apple updates the iMac Pro.
Marco:
They're expecting annual updates.
Marco:
And don't expect that.
Marco:
Because even if Apple is serving this line responsibly and as well as they possibly can...
Marco:
they probably won't update the iMac Pro in a meaningful way annually.
Marco:
They might and they should update the GPUs annually.
Marco:
I don't know that they will, but the most responsible way to update this machine would be to update the GPUs basically whenever there's a new major update to the GPU line that it uses, which is usually about once a year.
Marco:
But the Xeon CPUs that it uses are not updated every year.
Marco:
Usually Intel gives meaningful Xeon updates about every 18 months to two years.
Marco:
So that's the kind of upgrade cycle that I hope to see here.
Marco:
Anything less than that I think is optimistic.
Marco:
And they would only be able to update the GPU, maybe the SSD, but probably not any meaningful CPU updates more often than that.
Casey:
So, so far so good.
Casey:
Not a lot to say because it's brand new.
Casey:
An hour in.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Are you, I was going to be quick, remember?
Casey:
Are you keeping your peripherals?
Marco:
The black ones?
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Hell yeah.
Casey:
But you won't be using the keyboard, I assume.
Casey:
Is that correct?
Marco:
No, that's true.
Marco:
The keyboard I am not planning on using because I use a natural keyboard.
Marco:
The keyboard I use is the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard, which happens to also be black and gray.
Marco:
So that works out well.
Marco:
It looks awesome with all the new stuff.
Marco:
So I do have the black trackpad and the black mouse.
Marco:
The black keyboard is still in the box.
Marco:
And I don't know.
Marco:
I'll probably just send it to John or somebody.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Do you want it?
Marco:
I'm already buying snails.
John:
Oh, I was going to give you mine for free.
John:
If you want to send me it for free, I'll also take it.
John:
Casey, do you want it?
Casey:
Well, I am acquiring underscores, coincidentally.
John:
What do you call it?
John:
The black market, so to speak, for iMac Pro peripherals is alive and kicking.
John:
The space gray market.
Casey:
Coincidentally, underscore.
Casey:
This is the thing.
Casey:
If I were to order myself an iMac Pro...
Casey:
Whether or not I wanted any of the peripherals, there is absolutely no chance I would not order all three of them.
Casey:
I would order the keyboard, which of course you have to get.
Casey:
I would order a mouse and I would order a trackpad because why would you not get the whole set?
Casey:
And Underscore did that.
Casey:
And even though I am not a trackpad kind of guy...
Casey:
When he told me he had the whole set, I was like, all right, just send me an Apple Pay Cash request for whatever the sum total of that would be.
Casey:
I don't even want to know what it is until you ask for it.
Casey:
So I can't back down because I'm sure it'll be like $300.
Casey:
But I'll just take the whole set off your hands.
Casey:
And I'm very looking forward to it.
Marco:
So about, I don't know, a year or two ago, I added a trackpad to my setup.
Marco:
So I have left hand, left trackpad, right mouse.
Marco:
And that's what I plan to do.
Marco:
Keyboard in the middle.
Marco:
It's really nice.
Marco:
It takes only days to get into the habit of using the trackpad with your left hand.
Marco:
So I'm not using it all the time.
Marco:
I'm basically just switching off.
Marco:
If I need to reach something with my left hand, I can.
Marco:
If I need to move with the mouse, use my right hand, I can do that too.
Marco:
regularly using more than one input device even with your non-dominant hand it's really nice and now like i'll occasionally have like i'll need the desk space for something else for like an hour and i'll move the trackpad like up you know to a different spot where it is so it's not accessible to me
Marco:
And I miss it immediately.
Marco:
I keep putting my hand where it is, expecting to use it, and it's not there.
Marco:
So it really has worked itself into my setup very, very fully.
Marco:
And it's really nice.
Marco:
And I miss it when it isn't there.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know how much I'll use it in general, but in the brief amount of time I've used Final Cut Pro, oh boy, do I wish I had a trackpad for a lot of that.
Casey:
So I am a devout mouse user in general, but for that, I am very looking forward to having the trackpad.
Marco:
Yeah, it's very nice for the two finger scrolling gestures in both directions.
Marco:
And so like, you know, I started it for Logic when editing podcasts so I could scroll the timeline left and right.
Marco:
That's probably why you want it for Final Cut Pro, right?
Marco:
Yep, yep.
Marco:
Now I'm good and I'm precise enough with it that I can pretty much use regular mouse functionality at pretty much full speed with my left hand whenever I need to.
Marco:
And it's wonderful.
Casey:
That's pretty cool.
Casey:
Yeah, I want to use it for scrolling laterally in the timeline and also zooming, you know, so making, you know, I don't know, I don't know what the technical terms are for this.
Casey:
But you know, rather than showing the entire timeline of a maybe 15 minute video all on screen at once.
Casey:
Maybe I want to blow it up so that there's only 10 seconds of video being shown on my entire 5K screen.
Casey:
And I'm doing that deliberately because I'm like really trying to tweak timing on something.
Casey:
So I'm looking forward to pinch to zoom and all that.
Casey:
So, yeah, I'm going to be freaking broke, but I am looking forward to these stealthy, you know, space gray.
Casey:
Don't call it black, black peripherals.
John:
You guys both need 27 inch iPad pros.
John:
So you can do multi-touch editing of your podcast and video.
John:
True.
John:
Like you're, you're, you're like one degree, like you're doing this indirect thing where you're, you're swiping around while staring at a screen.
John:
It's like, just bring them together.
John:
You're so close.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Use all your fingers and your hands and your elbows.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Casper.
Marco:
Start sleeping ahead of the curve and get $50 towards select mattresses by visiting casper.com slash ATP and using code ATP at checkout.
Marco:
Terms and conditions apply.
Marco:
Casper mattresses are wonderful.
Marco:
They are perfectly designed for humans, engineered to soothe and cradle your natural geometry.
Marco:
You spent a third of your life sleeping, so you should be comfortable, and Casper helps you do that by providing all the support the human body needs in all the right places because it's fairly complex.
Marco:
You can't just have the same foam layering or the same density at all parts of the mattress because our bodies have these shapes that need to be supported in different ways, have different weights to them, and Casper has engineered this.
Marco:
They've designed and developed and engineered these mattresses all in the U.S., by the way,
Marco:
with these wonderful, breathable designs to help you sleep cool and regulate your temperature throughout the night, with multiple supportive memory foams for a quality sleep with just the right sink and just the right bounce.
Marco:
With over 20,000 reviews and an average of 4.8 stars across Casper's online store, Amazon, and Google, it is very quickly becoming the internet's favorite mattress.
Marco:
They now have three mattress models, the original Casper, the Wave, and the Essential.
Marco:
And they also have a wide variety of other products to ensure a great sleep, like sheets and pillows.
Marco:
And all this is available at very affordable prices because they cut out the middleman and sell directly to you.
Marco:
All this is very easy.
Marco:
It kind of sounds crazy to buy mattresses online, but they have wonderful, easy shipping.
Marco:
It comes in a box.
Marco:
You can even get it upstairs if you need to.
Marco:
Then it expands out, and it's wonderful.
Marco:
And they have no hassle returns after 100 nights if you are not completely satisfied.
Marco:
Free shipping and returns in the U.S.
Marco:
and Canada, they couldn't be easier.
Marco:
Start sleeping ahead of the curve with a Casper mattress.
Marco:
Get $50 towards the light mattress models by visiting casper.com slash ATP and using code ATP at checkout.
Marco:
That's casper.com slash ATP with code ATP for $50 towards the light mattresses.
Marco:
Terms and conditions apply.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Casper for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Anything else about the iMac Pro before we move on to this Intel thing?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Do we have time for the Intel thing?
John:
I think we have to get to Ask ATP, and we can push the Intel thing off until next week, by which time planes will be falling from the sky.
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
We have time for at least the opening of the Intel thing.
Casey:
We'll talk about it for a little bit, and then I think Ask ATP will be quick.
Casey:
Famous last words.
Marco:
The thing is, the Intel thing, it's huge news.
Marco:
but we don't really know a lot about it yet.
Marco:
So we need to talk about it, but we're going to be talking about it more next week.
John:
I know enough about it to give a reasonable summary.
Casey:
All right, so let me take a stab as chief summarizer-in-chief, and John, whenever you get fed up with it, just interrupt me and we'll move along.
Casey:
It appears that on Intel CPUs for sure, but probably on other CPU architectures,
Casey:
There is an exploit wherein – and I have to back up just a half step.
Casey:
As a CPU is executing instructions, as it's executing code, one of the things that modern CPUs will do is they'll start looking ahead to what code is coming.
Casey:
And they'll start actually pre-executing some of that code in some circumstances to get kind of ahead of the game.
Casey:
This is like when you grab a book and jump to the last page and see who killed who or who survives at the end or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
So these CPUs will look a little bit ahead and start to execute stuff that they think is coming.
Casey:
And that's true of most modern CPU architectures.
Casey:
But what's a little bit different between CPU architectures is that some of them, or I understand that some of them have some protections around what's considered like operating system or really kernel code and what's considered kind of, quote unquote, the user's code.
Casey:
You're straying.
John:
You're straying.
Casey:
All right.
John:
Morning, morning.
John:
All right, here we go.
Casey:
I'm bored.
Casey:
I'm bored.
Casey:
Then just cut in now.
John:
Cut in now.
John:
All right.
John:
So yeah, everything you set up to that point is good about speculative execution.
John:
And again, I'm not an expert on this either, and it just came out today, and I'm reading about it after work, so forgive me if I'm getting some parts of it wrong.
John:
But...
John:
uh the the exploit as as it has been explained to me in various articles and over twitter so take that for uh what it is is that during the speculative execution of instructions uh
John:
it will spec it will start executing instructions before it's sure whether they are valid things to do and depending on what what mode your cpu is in and what address is trying to reference and so on and so forth um there are certain things that you could be trying to do that are invalid reading from a memory location that that you you're not allowed to read from because it's not mapped into your process or something like that or whatever um or reading from kernel memory um which is a distinction that exists in pretty much all modern processors of
John:
uh having memory space that belongs to the kernel that can't be read by usual and processes and it will do the speculative execution and then eventually figure out oh i wasn't you're not supposed to do that i wasn't supposed to do it and i'll be like oh well okay i'm not allowing that to proceed you're not going to actually be able to do whatever it is you were trying to do even though i kind of sort of already executed part of it but never mind let me undo that and so it undoes it right but
John:
given how far ahead of itself it does speculative execution, not just like one or two things ahead, but several things ahead.
John:
If, if the destruction, if the instructions are dependent on each other, so I'm going to speculate execute this instruct, this operation here.
John:
And then I'm also going to speculate execute the next one, which depends on the result of the first one.
John:
And then it turns out like you weren't allowed to do that one.
John:
And so it rolls everything back.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's not like you actually successfully read something you weren't supposed to.
John:
but the side effects of doing those operations can leave a bunch of crap in the cache and you're like well so what the stuff that's in the cache is not the stuff that i wasn't supposed to read because that never got there because i wasn't even supposed to do that read but because the thing you weren't supposed to read participated like influenced where it influenced what got put in the cache from the other instruction you can back solve and figure out
John:
the what that thing what the place you weren't supposed to read from was based on how the result of that was used to get i know this is very confusing like it's basically like looking at the side effects of an operation that you weren't supposed to do and that was actually rolled back just just to figure out what that number must have been what what that in that memory address must have been
John:
And in that way, you can figure out someone was saying even like just a bit at a time, like you can figure out what like what the most significant or least significant bit of that address used to be.
John:
You can slowly but surely reveal the entire contents of physical memory.
John:
many of much of which belongs to processes that you're never supposed to see and that is a pretty terrible bug which basically means all the protections of saying you just can't read arbitrary memory on the system because all sorts of stuff is in memory like encryption keys and the password that someone just typed and all sorts of stuff is in in memory like in physical memory on your computer all the protections of the operating system and the cpu and all that stuff is supposed to prevent you from reading you know
John:
memory from processes that belong to the operating system itself memory from processes that belong to other users for example if you are using aws amazon web services or other shared hosting where your stuff may be running on the same real or virtual cpu as other people's stuff and you have no visibility and you don't see their other processes or whatever but physically speaking
John:
The machine that you're running on in RAM next to your information is somebody else's information.
John:
If you can dump all RAM by using this X point to slowly reveal every single address and memory.
John:
that's really really really bad uh and this is not just like oh someone like there's a bug in this processor like the fdiv bug or something and they'll just fix it by making a new version of the processor this is more or less inherent in the way speculative execution works like their whole their whole cleanup process actually does the cleanup but they didn't realize that the thing that was valid to do if it was influenced by the thing that was invalid to do can leave information in
John:
hanging around such that you can back solve and figure out what the invalid information you're supposed to be getting at was that's my attempt to explain this and why it's not just like oh there's a mistake in intel cpu and they'll fix it it's why it affects like all intel cpus for the past many many years not just like one thing
John:
It's why it also affects ARM CPUs.
John:
ARM came out and said, yes, this affects our CPUs as well.
John:
AMD says it doesn't affect their CPUs because they do speculative execution in a different way.
John:
And it's not like this is unfixable, but you will have to...
John:
to fix it in hardware you'll have to change the way the hardware works and like the general trade-off they're making here is the hardware wants to be fast so it's like we'll clean up after ourselves and try to be secure but if we don't have to clean something up like that the that information that was pulled into that cash line or whatever oh you don't need to clean it up because that was from the valid operation so that one is fine like it's garbage data but it's not insecure it's not like we're leaving information in there that will let someone get something so just leave it there because it's it it would be caught more costly to erase that right
John:
And they're going to have to make different tradeoffs to get rid of this because it's not like something they can, you know, first of all, they can't fix it in the CPUs that are already out there because it's out there is out there.
John:
and they can fix it in future architectures if they take it into account, but it's going to make a big difference.
John:
Now, the fix for it in software that people are slowly rolling out and that actually is in a macOS 10.13.2 has this fix, according to one random person on Twitter.
John:
The fix they're doing is basically to say that when you're in a process, don't map the kernel into the same address space as the process.
John:
put it in an entirely different address space, entirely separate address space, so you can't use this exploit, so that you would have to switch modes and switch memory images and go into an entirely different address space, which is slower, and people are doing benchmarks and saying, okay, with this software fix where we shove the kernel into an entirely different place, instead of allowing the kernel to virtually live inside the same virtual address space as every user land processor, which makes it really easy when you switch into kernel mode to do kernel stuff, then use your stuff, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It makes it slower to do that if you more widely separate them, but it fixes this vulnerability.
John:
So everyone now is benchmarking how much slower is it?
John:
Is it 30% slower?
John:
Is it 1% slower?
John:
Is it only slower when you do heavy IO?
John:
Is it only slower in our synthetic benchmarks, but it's just the same as normal?
John:
Does the frame rate of my game go down?
John:
So now everyone's, you know, applying patches to their...
John:
Linux kernels are trying the Windows patch version or whatever and trying to see if, you know, just how bad the performance hit is.
John:
But this is a really critical, serious bug because the only way it's really, truly going to be fixed at the hardware level is for them to make different design decisions, different fundamental design decisions about speculative execution in their CPUs.
John:
And they're going to have to figure out a way to do that.
John:
So it's fast, too.
John:
And everyone's freaking out about it, especially for things like shared hosting, because you can exploit this from anywhere, basically.
John:
If you can just get code to run on the CPU at a low enough level...
John:
then you can just dump the entire contents of memory of that machine no matter you know your processes other people's processes the operating system everything is like heart bleed times a thousand like not just get information about the process that you're exploiting get information about the you know anything else that is running on the hardware which is slightly terrifying and
John:
uh so understandably everyone who does shared hosting and everyone has an operating system is all busily trying to update their kernels to work around this thing at the cost of a potential speed hit and then dealing with the fallout of that speed hit um but but yeah so apple's already got the fix in the latest version of high sierra um
John:
There was some tweet about the upcoming version of High Sierra having something else in regard to this.
John:
Someone in the chat just pointed out that there are JavaScript proof of concepts.
John:
When I say you can get something to run on the CPU, it doesn't matter what it is.
John:
Imagine...
John:
Running imagine running JavaScript that accidentally dumps the entire contents of your machines RAM.
John:
That's that's bad.
John:
That's that's pretty bad This is like one of those exploits like you'd see in a movie and like that's so stupid You can't run something on a web page.
John:
It dumps the contents of RAM.
John:
There's a little thing called memory protection dummy
Marco:
Now, wait a minute.
Marco:
So I think you might be either you're misunderstanding these or I am basically.
Marco:
So there are two big bugs or two big exploits that we're talking about here.
Marco:
The names, I think, finally came out tonight.
Marco:
One of them is called Meltdown and one of them is called Spectre.
Marco:
And the meltdown is the one that basically allows the cache priming effects that you were talking about earlier.
Marco:
Like when you try to access an invalid address, you can basically run timing, like run very precise timing benchmarks to figure out, like, is something cached or not?
Marco:
And then you can figure out based on that, like...
Marco:
what roughly what addresses certain kernel functions map to that have been randomized using using address space layout randomization and so that's how you can like but you can't read other processes memory space you can only read the kernel memory because the kernel memory has been shadow mapped into your process space
Marco:
And by the way, I am so sorry to anybody listening who this is over your head.
Marco:
We can try to explain it, but it would take a long time because we'd have to explain virtual memory and addresses of functions and interrupts and everything, and it would be kind of a problem.
Marco:
So I'm so sorry.
Marco:
Feel free to skip the rest of the chapter if you want.
Marco:
But anyway, so that's the Meltdown attack.
Marco:
And then the Spectre attack is not about revealing kernel addresses of things.
Marco:
It is about actually dumping kernel memory and being able to access the contents of kernel memory.
Marco:
But it's only kernel memory because it is mapped into your process, not the memory of other processes on the system.
John:
I'm pretty sure from the explanation that I read, I'm pretty sure that either the combination of these exploits or one or the other can actually eventually iteratively go through the entire address space and eventually get all the contents of RAM by presumably by walking your whole giant, you know, address space and causing it to page in to physical space.
John:
Every one of the things that you read, pushing out everything else in turn in RAM.
John:
It may just be kernel space.
John:
Even if it's just kernel space, that's still pretty bad because tons of interesting information is in there.
John:
But it seemed to me that the reason people are scared about shared hosting and how you could...
John:
jump uh read processes in a different virtual machine is one of the other proof of concepts in like the google paper that's bad right yeah that that's not just looking at the kernel space that's in your process but that you're able to look into the memory inside other virtual machines makes me think that you can actually get just dumps of the contents of ram uh but these are you know so we'll put a bunch of links in the show notes all of which i have not had a chance to read because again this is all coming out just you know today now as i'm leaving work these things are coming out
John:
Uh, there are, there are abstracts, there are white papers, there's proof of contract, uh, proof of concepts on these things.
John:
There's a nice Google site.
John:
Uh, Google has one of the projects that are called Google project zero found either one or both of these exploits originally.
John:
Um,
John:
google also has a good page that explains in sort of much simpler language than we're doing here a very broad vague kind of thing about speculative execution exists it's supposed to clean up but some stuff gets left around like that's the you know that's all you really need to know to understand the nature of this thing
John:
we're trying to get down to the nitty-gritty details but a google also lists okay here's all the google the things google has we have all of our different services and gmail and google cloud things and you know like and they go through them all one by one and say here's how this is with respect to this bug we've patched these we haven't patched these uh this will be patched soon and which is nice i was looking for a similar page from apple but i suppose such a thing is not forthcoming or maybe there's you know come out with it tomorrow or whatever um
John:
But every every person out there, I'm assuming Amazon is doing something similar, has to now explain to you how many of their systems are vulnerable, how many have been have had their kernel patch to fix this and what the timelines are and, you know.
John:
what you can expect as the customer.
John:
Like, if you have an Android phone, is that vulnerable?
John:
Like, how old is your Android phone?
John:
Who makes it?
John:
So on and so forth.
John:
Because this type of vulnerability is really scary.
John:
Like, basically, if someone, if you cause untrusted code to run on your CPU, and again, trying to do it from JavaScript just shows you, like, code, I wouldn't run untrusted code.
John:
Oh, do you load web pages?
John:
Because you're running essentially untrusted code, then, you know, bad things can happen.
John:
um now as for the performance issues when i first thought this was a performance bug i wasn't that worried about it because i was like well no matter how big the performance problem is if you're not worried about being exploited you know what i mean like i can imagine like having a toggle switch that says switch into this mode and i'm just going to run a local game that i trust right and i'll get full performance from my game um but the more i hear about this bug the more i think that
John:
whatever the performance hit is we're all just going to have to live with it until intel and and arm and everybody else who is susceptible to this update like produce new versions of their micro architecture produce new chips essentially like there's nothing you can do about the the iMac pro the mark we got now he's just going to have to run it in the slow mode to be protected from this i mean he already is basically because he's got the latest high sierra so guess what you're already doing it but uh
John:
there's nothing you can do until you wait for intel to come out with a new chip that is not susceptible to this because it's not like i said it's not a a bug or a problem or someone made a boo-boo and they meant it to work one way and it works the other way this is working as designed it's just an attack that they didn't account for and so there's really nothing to do except go back to the drawing board and say how can we design a cpu
John:
that is fast but that is not susceptible to this category of attack it's not just one clever thing with one like silly value that trips up something it's an entire category of attacks that exploit the predictability of what's supposed to be unpredictable like one one uh part of one of these exploits i think was like they had completely figured out exactly how the uh the branch predictor works on a
John:
cpu that helps them uh predict what it's going to do in various situations because you do have to manipulate the speculative execution to get it to do what you want to put you know you need it to you need to know which things it's going to speculate execute in which order so that you can set things up to produce a side effect that gives you actionable information about the thing that wasn't supposed to be read right anyway if your eyes are glazing over we apologize um take take a look at all the various pdfs
John:
And web pages we will link in the show notes.
John:
And then I guess we'll come back next week.
John:
And if we're all still alive and the entire world hasn't burned down in a year 2000 style apocalypse, then we can talk about it more.
Marco:
In the year 2000.
Marco:
It seems that it's probably going to be... It's probably going to end up being a really interesting thing to extreme nerds.
Marco:
And most people are probably not going to notice, at least on Macs.
Marco:
On other platforms, I don't know how big the differences are because of how they manage memory and stuff.
Marco:
But on Macs...
Marco:
People are saying, who know more about this than we do, that any Mac that has the PCID feature on the Intel chip, which pretty much all modern chips do from the last five or so years, it's not a major performance hit if your Mac is one of these.
Marco:
And again, the problem with us trying to talk about this this week, it's so big of a story, probably,
Marco:
That we really can't ignore it.
Marco:
We really can't say, oh, we'll talk about this next week because we don't know enough about it yet.
Marco:
The reality is we're going to talk about it probably both this week and next week because we're going to understand it better next week and more news will have happened.
Marco:
More of the patches will be out.
Marco:
We'll be able to see some of the performance impacts that it has.
Marco:
So this is probably a really big story.
Marco:
But we don't really know yet.
Marco:
It could just be fixed and nobody notices the impact and we all move on.
Marco:
So we apologize.
Marco:
We'll do our best to cover it next week also if there's more news to cover.
Marco:
And I guess we'll just see what happens.
Marco:
But if you are a user who has somehow made it through this explanation and has not skipped the chapter yet and you don't really understand it and you're worried about it,
Marco:
I would say there's probably not reason to be significantly concerned as an end user from what we know so far.
John:
I would just, you know, update your operating systems, though.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Marco:
Like, install the updates and everything.
Marco:
But, like, it's not going to all of a sudden make your computer super slow.
Marco:
It's not going to throttle your battery.
Marco:
Like, it's not going to.
John:
That should be the new thing.
John:
We should tell people that Microsoft is throttling your Windows computer and Linux is... If only Linux was a company.
John:
Tell people it's a company.
John:
They'll believe it.
John:
The Linux company is throttling your Linux computer by introducing a kernel patch that can produce up to a 30% speed loss.
John:
Look at this select one benchmark in Postgres.
John:
Look how much slower it is.
John:
Linux is slowing down your computer.
John:
To make you buy a new Linux.
John:
Which is true.
John:
They literally are.
John:
They're literally patching the kernel to make it slower.
Marco:
Oh my God.
John:
And so did Microsoft and so did Apple, but no one is benchmarking Apple to, you know, no one is running servers on, you know, Mac servers and mission critical things.
John:
Like the AWS thing, I heard a bunch of people like that.
John:
If you had a bunch of systems that were near the edge of their performance envelope on like the EC2 instances that you've provisioned and they all take like a 2% performance hit and suddenly you're really close, you go that next few percentage and now you kind of have a problem and have to get some more hardware.
John:
Like this could actually...
John:
effect, you know, even though it's a small effect, anything you do in sort of cloud computing can have a ripple effect if you're close to the edge of your capacity.
Marco:
So I feel kind of bad that, you know, they have to update.
Marco:
If this has a big effect on you, besides the fact that, like, pretty much every server and cloud instance is probably going to have to be rebooted in the next few days, that's going to be a bigger problem.
Marco:
Like, rebooting all the servers is going to be a more disruptive effect of this than I think anything else.
Marco:
But
Marco:
Well, it could disrupt your monthly bill.
Marco:
Yeah, but if it disrupts your bill by a meaningful amount, then either this problem is way worse than we thought it was on Linux, or you were already running too close to capacity anyway.
John:
That's the thing, it depends on workload.
John:
So if anything is going to have a weird workload that happens to be super I.O.
John:
intensive or something like that, it's some sort of running a database server that all it does all day is just tremendous amounts of I.O.
John:
and a 5% hit.
John:
to your you know your million dollar bill that five percent is uh it's a big increase in the amount of hardware we have anyway we'll see how it is
John:
I bet most people will just patch and update everything.
John:
But like any one of these problems, you're like, but not everybody's going to patch.
John:
And so this is like Heartbleed even.
John:
You never know, like, for how long are there going to be systems with, like, the known vulnerable hardware spans many years and probably many vendors, at the very least Intel and ARM.
John:
How long is that bum hardware going to be out there?
John:
And how much of the hardware will never be updated to run a kernel that is patched to avoid this vulnerability?
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Squarespace.
Marco:
Start building your website today at squarespace.com and enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off.
Marco:
Make your next move with Squarespace.
Marco:
Squarespace websites are so incredibly easy to make because these days, no matter what project you're tackling or what new hobby you want to start or what new creative work you want to try to do, chances are you need some kind of website for that as a home base or promotion or as part of the thing itself like a podcast.
Marco:
And with Squarespace, you can make websites to do so many different things.
Marco:
Blogs, podcasts, portfolios, corporate sites, hobby sites, so many different things.
Marco:
Even digital storefronts to sell digital or physical goods.
Marco:
And all of those are incredibly easy to make.
Marco:
You don't have to worry about installing software, configuring things, security updates, version upgrades.
Marco:
There are so many parts of running a website that are kind of a pain if you do it really pretty much any other way.
Marco:
And Squarespace takes care of all that for you.
Marco:
In addition, it's all super easy to actually use.
Marco:
So regardless of your skill level, whether you are a novice to a full-blown web programmer, Squarespace can be for you.
Marco:
It is very, very easy to use.
Marco:
You never have to see or touch any code.
Marco:
Everything is what you see is what you get.
Marco:
And if you want to get super in there and get really involved and actually see the code, you can do that too.
Marco:
And everything in between.
Marco:
It is so easy to make great websites with Squarespace.
Marco:
You will wonder why anybody does it any other way.
Marco:
Try it there first.
Marco:
Whenever you need to do something, just try it there first.
Marco:
See how far you get.
Marco:
I say give it like an hour.
Marco:
And you'll see, as I have, just how awesome it is to spend a very small amount of time on Squarespace to get a whole site done and then move on and do the thing you actually made the website for.
Marco:
Check it out today at squarespace.com.
Marco:
Start building your website right now with a free trial, no credit card required.
Marco:
Enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off.
Marco:
Squarespace, make your next move.
Casey:
So Aaron Bushnell writes, suppose you had to give up your Mac and solely use iOS, but Apple agreed to add one iOS feature of your choice.
Casey:
What would it be?
Casey:
And let's start with Marco, please.
Marco:
I had a really hard time with this question because if I were to solely use iOS, I mean, that presumes a lot of things like, can I still make iOS apps on iOS?
Marco:
Like, is there a way for me to do that?
Marco:
Because otherwise, my career has a problem.
Yeah.
Marco:
um so ios has a problem if there's no way to make ios out well that's true yeah that's yeah so like i mean technically i suppose i should say my answer is the ios feature that would make me use ios would be xcode um but it's so much more complicated than that like you know so let's assume that somehow somehow the soft the tools to do software development exist as part of this new theoretical world where i'd be forced to use ios um
Marco:
Other than that, I think I would have to say just larger screen devices.
Marco:
Like John's wish for the 27-inch iPad.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't love that concept for myself for the way I work, but...
Marco:
Whenever I try to do anything on iOS that is non-trivial, I run into screen size limitations really fast.
Marco:
And I've tried the 12.9 inch iPad briefly.
Marco:
I didn't find that that was for me.
Marco:
Just physically, it felt weird to have a handheld device of that size for me.
Marco:
So I don't know how this would be in practice, but...
Marco:
Just some way to get larger screen space.
Marco:
I mean, if only there was a way that the physical size of the input devices that I was interacting with was not tied to the screen size of the device I was using.
Marco:
Maybe we could have like a little proxy touch device that I could touch that was smaller.
Marco:
Maybe like the size of a large iPhone, maybe.
Marco:
I could touch that, maybe put on the desk.
Marco:
And then I could have a nice big screen, like a little bit back, maybe vertical, so I could see it better, where I could arrange a whole bunch of small apps in little rounded rectangles that maybe I could move around and rearrange as necessary.
Marco:
Something like that.
Casey:
I see what you did there.
Casey:
John?
John:
marco cheated because it was supposed to be an ios feature and he started describing hardware but we'll let it slide in just a time um my ios feature uh i think i would probably go with external storage support because it doesn't sound fancy but it's it's a really annoying limitation that on an ios device you can't just plug something in and then like go to the files app and just like drag things around in it and like like go to go from dropbox and drag things like
John:
mounting storage so that it's available to every single application sort of natively everywhere it's just an unnecessary thing that impedes you know like it it seems like the battle world where instead of there being like sort of an equivalent of the finder or whatever uh that everything is application specific so yeah the photos application can read from your sd card or whatever but sd card is not universally available and mounted as a volume uh
John:
to any application that wants to look at it because that's not the way ios rolls with the file system so if i had to use it all the time uh i would want it to act in a slightly more mac like manner with regards to storage
Casey:
For me, I was going to say like a real true-to-form terminal, which I know you can get from like jailbreaking.
Casey:
And I know you can get, you know, wonderful apps like – what is it?
Casey:
Prompt?
Casey:
Is that what I'm thinking of?
Casey:
Yeah, Panix.
John:
But that doesn't open up a local terminal.
John:
That's for connecting to other machines.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
But I think if I had to choose just one, what I'd actually choose is just being able to sideload apps without going through the App Store and understanding their risks involved and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
But I think I would just want to be able to sideload apps, and I think that would make a tremendous difference.
John:
That's a good one.
Casey:
And I mean like being able to download a binary in the same way that you can on a Mac or the same way you would get a binary from the App Store but have it not come from the App Store.
Casey:
So that's what I would say.
Casey:
Brandon Butler asks, and I'm going to slightly tweak the verbiage here.
Casey:
Could all of you give some specific details about why you don't like Windows?
Casey:
I'm genuinely curious.
Casey:
As the most potential most recent Windows user, I'll kick this off and say...
Casey:
I haven't used Windows for more than a few minutes in about a year and a half.
Casey:
But the last time I used Windows, which was Windows 10, I believe, the things that bothered me about it the most were high DPI was not pervasive throughout the entire operating system.
Casey:
So some things worked at what we would call retina resolutions in the Mac world.
Casey:
and some would not.
Casey:
They're clearly in the midst of a, or they were at the time in the midst of a transition.
Casey:
So there was like a control panel, but then there were like other places to tweak a lot of the same settings, or sometimes some settings were only in the control panel or only in other places.
Casey:
And it's really, really, really frustrating, especially if you're not deep in the Windows world to figure out, okay, which one of these two or three places do I need to go to in order to say, change your desktop resolution or something like that?
Casey:
And third of all, the third-party apps, while there is an unbelievable amount of third-party apps for Windows, most of them, in fact, I would almost say the overwhelming majority of them are utter garbage.
Casey:
And look at something like, the last time I used Audacity, it was very, very powerful, but it was visually, I'm not going to say offensive, but hideous.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And Audacity is available on the Mac as far as I'm aware, but it is like the quintessential GarageBand equivalent for Windows.
Casey:
And it is just hideous to look at.
Casey:
And I just don't think that third-party developers on the Windows platform really take design nearly as seriously as your average third-party developer on the Mac.
Casey:
I believe we started with Marco last time.
Casey:
So, John, let's move to you.
John:
Luckily, this question just says some specific details of why I don't like Windows.
John:
I don't have to be exhaustive.
John:
You already touched on a bunch of them.
John:
I'll throw out some that are near and dear to my heart.
John:
The basic interface paradigm of not having a menu bar at the top of the screen, but instead of having the menu bar embedded in the window.
John:
For someone who likes to have a lot of windows and arrange them, repeating the menu bar in every single one of those windows is incredibly wasteful and infuriating, and it makes it hard to know where the menus are.
John:
And, you know, you've got the whole infinite height target, yada, yada.
John:
Not that I had used the menu bar that much, but just the space savings alone to say, look, we're going to burn the top part of the monitor for the menu bar, but that's it.
John:
No matter how many windows you get open, no more space is taken up by the menu bar.
John:
um the obsession with full screen and the the tiling features which unfortunately the mac is copied where oh slam the window against the side of the screen now it's taking up half or the top third or the bottom third that's not how i use windows i don't want that to be that way i hate full screen um i don't like the
John:
you know taskbar whatever the hell they're calling it these days in the bottom that's mutated a lot i've never liked it i don't really like the doc that much either but i like the doc better than that stupid thing um the the aesthetics uh of its sort of dos origins with backslashes instead of forward slashes and all caps file names that are shouting at me and you know dot three extensions and many of those limitations you know have been slowly winnowed down over the years but tons of them are still there including stupid things like drive letters which is aesthetically
John:
just give me the willies and I do not like, uh, the, the mouse cursor is, uh, the pointer is white instead of black, which is wrong.
John:
Um, I mean, just, I, I, I don't use windows a lot, but as part of my work, I use it in a virtual machine enough to, to be enough to know that it just doesn't appeal to me in so many ways.
John:
Like, I guess like fundamental ways, like how window management works and how applications work and sort of the connection between like, uh,
John:
uh applications and windows and how they appear in the taskbar to just little tiny picky things are just plain old aesthetics of what icons and menus look like and what font rendering looks like and uh you know and drive letters i mean just drive letters that should have been all i had to say
Marco:
Marco?
Marco:
You guys basically covered it.
Marco:
I mean, it's like, you know, death by a thousand cuts.
Marco:
I mean, it's hard to nail down specifics, you know, without having used Windows in a very long time.
Marco:
A lot of it comes down to, you know, what John said about just like design preferences.
Marco:
A lot of it comes down to, Casey, what you said about the quality of most software available and the community around it just being pretty lacking.
Marco:
It's
Marco:
It's kind of a wasteland of mediocrity and bad decision making.
Marco:
If I really had to use something that was not macOS, I honestly think I would be more inclined to try to use Linux than Windows at this point.
Marco:
And I used Windows for a very long time.
Marco:
It's not that I didn't know... I know what I'm missing, basically.
Marco:
And while granted I haven't used the versions from the last probably literally 10 years or so,
Marco:
from what people say they aren't that much better in, in a lot of pretty critical ways or just kind of in like ecosystem conditions.
Marco:
Uh, so I do think I'm speaking from some position of experience, you know, probably not as much as Casey, but more than John.
Marco:
Um, and it, it, it just does not fit for me.
Marco:
It just, it really seems incredibly mediocre.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And if it's the only thing that I ever knew, and it's the only thing that was available, I could make it work.
Marco:
I would just be annoyed with it pretty frequently, like I was when I was using it full-time.
Casey:
And finally, Mark W. asks, if podcast advertising went away overnight, would you still do the show?
Casey:
I haven't talked to you guys about this, but we used to, semi-regularly, ask each other, hey, is everyone still cool?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Now we just assume it, I guess.
Casey:
But when we started Neutral, when we first recorded, to my recollection, we didn't think we had any sort of advertiser at the time.
Casey:
And then Marco was able to get, was it Squarespace?
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
Yeah, for neutral, we got Squarespace for the entire run of it.
Marco:
Kind of at the last minute, right before we were going to record and release the episodes, my contact there said, yeah, we'll take them all.
Casey:
So it was before we recorded?
Casey:
I thought it was after, but you would remember better than me.
Marco:
It was at least before we released them.
Casey:
That, yeah, that I agree on.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Casey:
What I was driving at, though, is that one way or another, at least for me, when I started doing this, I was doing it just for fun.
Casey:
I just wanted to talk to my buddies about cars.
Casey:
And it's turned out to be lucrative, which is a tremendous blessing.
Casey:
And I'm super duper thankful for it.
Casey:
But yeah, I think, I certainly hope it doesn't go away tomorrow, but if podcast advertising went away tomorrow, I would absolutely still talk to my two good friends for a couple hours about nerdy crap each week.
Casey:
I would suffer through.
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
I would do this podcast even if it made a lot less money than it does.
Marco:
And the fact is, if the advertising went away and we had to switch to a direct payment model, I think it probably would make a lot less money than it does.
Marco:
But I would still love to do it.
Marco:
What's nice is that having the money coming in from the ads more strongly justifies putting in a lot of time and doing it on a regular schedule.
Marco:
If we didn't have the ad money coming in, it would be a lot easier to say like one week when it's really busy.
Marco:
Oh, you know, I can't do it this week.
Marco:
We'll skip this week and we'll just do it next week.
Marco:
Or we'll skip the next two weeks as some of us are traveling and it's hard to schedule it or something.
Casey:
Oh, that's a very good point I didn't consider.
Casey:
And I completely agree with you.
Casey:
I mean...
Casey:
I don't remember exactly when it was that we decided this was really a thing, but it was somewhere around the middle of 2013, which is almost five years ago.
Casey:
And in almost five years, we have not missed a week.
Casey:
And sometimes, particularly in summertime and particularly around Christmas time.
Casey:
We have to do some really ridiculous scheduling in order to get everything to line up such that all three of us will be here every single week.
Casey:
And with one exception, when we deliberately traded John for Christina Warren, we have always had all three of us every week for like four and a half years.
Casey:
And that is normally very easy, but occasionally extremely difficult.
Casey:
And I agree with you, Marco.
Casey:
We would definitely punt that.
John:
i wouldn't say frequently but a lot more than never if there was no if there was no real money involved i think you guys covered it i mean practically speaking the show is big enough now that we just do like patreon or some sort of direct payment and it would and you know we would just continue like and i'm not saying that would be the same as advertising like marco said it would almost certainly be much much less but you know it would be enough to uh to make it so that we i think probably maintain the exact same commitment that we have now
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Casper, Squarespace, and Flightlogger.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Casey:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Marco:
So you are off work, Casey, for a long time, as discussed on the most recent episode of Analog, right?
Casey:
I'm not.
Casey:
No, I'm not.
Casey:
I worked from home today, but I worked today.
Casey:
So the agreement was once the baby is born, I'm taking... Which is any day now.
Casey:
Any second.
Casey:
Literally, it could be happening.
Marco:
Any day is Mac Pro Day and also Baby Day.
Marco:
It is possible that the baby might come out between the time we record this and when I release it tomorrow.
Marco:
That's true.
Casey:
That is possible.
Casey:
Unlikely, but possible.
Casey:
So anyway, the agreement with work, which when we recorded Analog...
Casey:
I was going on the assumption that baby would be born before the new year.
Casey:
And there's reasons why I assume that it's not really worth getting into.
Casey:
But suffice to say, Smart Money said it was already going to be here at this point, and it isn't here.
Casey:
So once the baby is born, I will be off of work for roundabouts of eight weeks, something like that.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I'm going to my company changed from 2017 in 2018 to giving us three weeks of paternity leave instead of two.
Casey:
So if the baby was born before the new year, I would have only gotten two weeks of paternity leave.
Casey:
And since it's been since the policy has changed and it will be born sometime in 2018, I am getting three weeks of paternity leave, which is excellent.
Casey:
And if you're from another country and you think that's barbaric, hey, welcome to America.
Casey:
This is how it works here.
Casey:
Because three weeks of paternity leave is unheard of around these parts.
Casey:
Anyway, so after those three weeks of paternity leave, I've told work, hey, I'm just going to take some unpaid leave.
Casey:
I'm going to leverage FMLA, which is a law in America that says basically they can't fire you or lay you off when you have to deal with a big medical issue like a birth.
Casey:
And so I'm going to take some FMLA and they don't have to pay me and they won't be paying me, but I'm just going to take a lot of time off.
Casey:
So the thought was that once I was supposed to come back in January, I would just basically blow off January and February.
Casey:
In reality, what's going to happen is I'm going to blow off all of January, probably all of February, and maybe even a little bit of March, depending on when this baby comes in.
Casey:
And that's because I want to give Aaron some time to adjust to having two kids.
Casey:
I want to be there, of course.
Casey:
And I want to, you know, adjust to having two kids.
Casey:
And it would just be nice to, you know, have some time with the family and to bring this back to the SKTP that we just finished.
Casey:
And really, the express reason that I am able to do this, other than just being reasonably financially savvy and not spending, you know, eight times what I make, in no small part, the reason that this is possible is because of every person listening to the show.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And to that, I owe all of you, and especially my two co-hosts, my deepest gratitudes, because were it not for the extra money that this show provides my family, I don't think I would be able to do this and take some unpaid leave to be with my new baby and my family.
Casey:
I'm really excited by it.
Casey:
I have all these visions of all these outside-of-work endeavors that I want to work on, like a video of Aaron's car, which I've filmed a teeny bit of, but very little of.
Casey:
I want to do an iOS app that's half-cooked, but I have a lot more I want to do for it.
Casey:
And there's all sorts of other things I want to do.
Casey:
But the reality of the situation is your your life is destroyed in the best possible way for like two months.
Casey:
Once a baby, well, at least two months once a baby is born.
Casey:
And so because of that, we'll see if I accomplish getting changed in the mornings or if I'm just stuck in the same PJs for like two months.
Casey:
But we'll see.
Casey:
Anyway, why do you bring it up, Marco?
Marco:
I would like to make you a little bit more uncomfortable right now.
Casey:
Okay.
Marco:
So I apologize in advance.
Marco:
You're going to hate this.
Marco:
No, no, no.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
Go ahead.
Marco:
You need to hear this.
Marco:
This is your chance to quit your job.
Marco:
Listen, I'm serious.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
What you're going to have is two or maybe almost three months of not going to your job every day.
Marco:
Basically not having a job.
Marco:
So you're going to have a nice little preview.
Marco:
of what it is like to be independent.
Marco:
Oh, it's going to ruin me.
Marco:
Oh, it's going to ruin me.
Marco:
So, A, yes it will.
Marco:
B, your job can't fire you for taking this time, but you're certainly going to probably be knocked down the favorites list.
Marco:
I wouldn't assume that you're going to be long for that job anyway.
Marco:
And C...
Marco:
You've been talking for years about wanting – how great it would be to work for yourself full-time at home, basically, to be there with your family and basically to do the kind of life that I hope that I do, which is like I'm here when the family needs me.
Marco:
I can be present for moments.
Marco:
I can help out around the house.
Marco:
I can also do some work sometimes and make some money, right?
Yeah.
Marco:
The reason I'm able to do it is because I have good income from a podcast and I have software development income making that even better.
Marco:
Well, I know how much you make from your podcast because we split this evenly between the three of us.
Marco:
So you make the same amount that I make and we make the same amount that John made.
Marco:
So I know exactly how much you make from this show because it's the same that I do.
Marco:
And so I know that's pretty good.
Marco:
And I know, of course, it's irregular with when the hell advertisers pay and everything.
Marco:
And
Marco:
We get, like, bursts of money here and there and then nothing for months and then big bursts of money.
Marco:
So, like, it isn't like a normal income.
Marco:
It doesn't provide health insurance and stuff like that.
Marco:
So, you know, I augment this with software development.
Marco:
That's basically what you do, too.
Marco:
Your software development is from a job.
Marco:
Like, you're working for somebody else.
Marco:
They're paying you.
Marco:
They're handling a bunch of crap for you.
Marco:
It's pretty consistent, etc.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
This is a chance for you to try not to do YouTube full-time, because that has a very, very slow ramp-up.
Marco:
You're not going to get to a YouTube career in two months.
Marco:
That's not going to happen.
Marco:
This gives you a chance to become an iOS consultant as the other part of your income.
Marco:
So you, too, will have...
Marco:
software development income, as well as podcast income.
Marco:
That is enough to have a pretty nice life.
Marco:
And so I'm telling you right now, I think you should go into this break seriously with the expectation that you might not go back.
Marco:
And now I'm telling the listeners, because I know the kind of listeners that we have,
Marco:
Make Casey do this.
Marco:
No, I'm serious.
Marco:
Make Casey do this because by sending him work, if you have consulting work, Casey did not ask me to say this, and he's probably really mortified right now that I'm saying this.
Marco:
If you have consulting work that Casey could do for your company, hire him now so that he can get this going, and then in two months, he won't have to go back to his job.
Marco:
This is your time to do this.
Marco:
This is an opportunity.
Marco:
Because look, some people are naturals at going into independent life.
Marco:
Some people, they jump right in or they make a big plan and execute that plan and they're able to do it right.
Marco:
That's not what I did.
Marco:
I was pushed into it.
Marco:
I was quit fired.
Marco:
I was like I had been kind of wanting to maybe do it like you say sometimes, but I didn't choose when that was when that was happened.
Marco:
I was pushing the deep end and I was so incredibly thankful for that.
Marco:
It was like the best thing that could have happened to me.
Marco:
It was an external force forcing me to do something that I should have done because I needed that push.
Marco:
You have that push now, sort of, in a way, because a baby's coming into your life again.
Marco:
You know how much work that is.
Marco:
So you're taking this nice sabbatical from work to have paternity leave to get things going.
Marco:
This is your push.
Marco:
Make it happen.
Marco:
And I'm telling you, audience, please, for the love of God, hire Casey.
Marco:
Make him do this.
Marco:
We will all be so thankful, including Casey, if he... Because look, you will be so much happier.
John:
You know someone who might not be thankful and might not be happy?
John:
No, there isn't.
John:
No, there is this one person that I think might not be so happy about this and might not be so thankful.
John:
And that's Aaron, who expects Casey...
John:
to be on paternity leave because he's going to help with the new baby and Declan.
John:
Where if instead he's on paternity leave working on himself, starting his consulting business while she juggles two screaming children,
John:
I'm thinking maybe she's not going to be so thankful for this advice.
John:
Like, this is the flaw in this plan.
John:
Like, I'm with Marco right up to the point where, oh, and by the way, Casey has a new baby.
John:
Like, the whole point of this vacation is not let's launch Casey's independent career.
John:
Like, he's taking his time off for a reason.
John:
And everything you're describing takes time away from the reason he's supposedly taking off for.
John:
And so I feel like this is maybe not the right time.
John:
And secondarily...
John:
having a screaming baby at home is going to make casey long for the office on some place it's going to be like i wish i could leave this house and go to a place with adults and just do work in quiet peace like everyone has those moments with babies it's just a fact of life and so
John:
unfortunately when he's at the end of this time he may find himself begging to go back to the office which is exactly the opposite of what you want to get him like booted out into the independent lifestyle so i'm thinking maybe maybe the timing isn't exactly right obviously when is the time right if you really wanted to make this happen marco you need to get him fired from his job but i think uh in that case casey and aaron both wouldn't be very thankful to you so i don't know what the solution is here
Casey:
So I appreciate it.
Casey:
First of all, let me say I appreciate it.
Casey:
It's funny because I really don't have any particular interest in going back to consulting.
Casey:
And let me provide a verbal glossary for a minute.
Casey:
When I say consulting, I mean both flavors of consulting because there's a consulting that I did in years past, which is I was part of a company and a group of us would be given poor choice of words, but given to another company.
Casey:
to do work for that other company.
Casey:
And then that work would cease.
Casey:
And I would, and I would go back to my original company.
Casey:
So I'm always an employee of my original company, but I bring this up to say, I didn't have to pay for healthcare.
Casey:
Well, I did, but you know what I mean?
Casey:
Like there was a company healthcare.
Casey:
I didn't have to drum up work because there was a sales team that did that for me.
Casey:
So I basically just showed up, build my hours and left.
Casey:
And so it was still consulting in the sense that I had little to no control over my destiny because
Casey:
But it was not consulting in the same way that you're talking about, Marco, because the work just fell in my lap.
Casey:
And if it didn't, that wasn't really my problem.
Casey:
This is different, what you're discussing, because it would be forevermore my responsibility to figure out how to put money in my pocket and thus how to get work on my desk.
Casey:
And that scares the ever-living crap out of me.
Casey:
Um...
Casey:
You're right to say that the only way I would leave my job is if I had a considerable amount of work lined up in advance.
John:
You never will.
Casey:
I know, I know.
Casey:
But hear me out for a second.
Casey:
So the thought is if I really want to go down this road, I think John's right that I don't think I can really do this anymore.
Casey:
I don't think I could actively start the Casey List Consulting Corp.
Casey:
The Casey Consulting Corp.
Casey:
Very alliterative.
Casey:
Anyway, I couldn't start Casey Consulting Corp while I was off because John's absolutely right.
Casey:
The point of this break is to be with the family, and I don't really want to taint that with work.
Casey:
But if I knew that at the end of this break, so early to mid-March, I had...
Casey:
maybe a month or two of solid work lined up, I would certainly consider not going back to my jobby job.
Casey:
But that's a really hard thing to do.
Casey:
And you're absolutely right, Marco, to say, eh, it's not quite so easy.
Casey:
But it would take a lot for me to take this stable, well, what I perceive as a stable paycheck.
Casey:
And yes, we can get into the argument that no paycheck is stable, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
But to say no to the stable paycheck and health care and instead say, you know what, I'll just figure it out.
Casey:
I'm not a I'll just figure it out kind of guy in a lot of ways.
Casey:
All of that said.
Casey:
No, I know.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
And all of that said, what I haven't mentioned yet.
Casey:
is that I've been talking to a lot of our mutual friends and feeling out, hey, I know you probably don't have enough work for a full-time partner, but do you have a little bit of work you could send my way?
Casey:
And I hadn't had a chance to ask you this question, Marco, but you were on the list of people I wanted to talk to about this.
Casey:
Marco doesn't work well with others, sorry.
Casey:
I know he doesn't, but yet here we are four and a half years later.
Casey:
So there is something to be said for Marco's ability.
John:
It's not programming work.
John:
I know.
John:
Marco even fired his support people.
John:
He can't even have someone do support.
John:
I know.
John:
It's better to just not do support than to hire someone do support.
John:
He works alone like Batman.
John:
Sorry.
Casey:
Can I not be your Robin, Marco?
Casey:
Can I not be your Robin?
Casey:
No, but seriously, though, I've been polling a lot of our mutual friends to say, hey, you know, and my thought has basically been, well, if Marco can give me five hours a week fairly reliably, like, and I'm not asking you to say yes or no right now.
Casey:
I'm just saying hypothetically, Marco says... What would that cost?
Marco:
Honestly, I'm asking.
Marco:
I don't even know.
Marco:
I have no concept of what consultants cost.
Casey:
Well, the thing is, I don't really either, which means I haven't really done my homework.
Marco:
Would this be like $1,000?
Marco:
I have no idea.
Casey:
I think what it would basically amount to is... More than that.
Casey:
Yeah, okay.
Marco:
So we're talking like $5,000 a month at least?
Casey:
So a reasonable hourly rate is anywhere between $100,000 and $100,000.
Casey:
$300 depending on geography, skill level, et cetera.
Casey:
So call it, let's split the difference and call it $150 an hour times, say, five hours a week times four weeks a month.
Casey:
That's like three grand a month, right?
Casey:
So, and again, I'm not asking you to say anything right now.
Casey:
I'm just trying to pose a hypothetical here.
Casey:
So if you say to me, you know what, Casey, I'm good for three grand a month for at least a couple of months, maybe even six months.
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
I would do that if you quit your job.
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, that's what I'm saying.
Marco:
I'd find something for you to do, whether it's working on stuff on the app that I can't get to or doing the web app or you can make yourself a Mac app.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
I'd do that.
Casey:
Well, I appreciate that.
Casey:
Genuinely, that's very kind of you.
Marco:
I'm serious.
Casey:
I know you are.
Marco:
Only if you become a full-time consultant.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Oh, I know there's caveats here.
Casey:
It's like Kickstarter.
Marco:
You've got to do the whole thing.
Yeah.
Casey:
So, yeah, that's kind of what it is, though.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So you you dedicate, you know, five hours, five hours a month for six months and and underscore dedicates another five hours a month for six months or five hours a week.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Five hours a week for six months.
Casey:
And underscore says, yeah, you know, I think I could get five hours of work your way for six months.
Casey:
Suddenly, you know, I'm at 10 hours.
Casey:
And if I do that four more times over, that's a full workday.
Casey:
Well, but to an American anyway, 40 hours a week is full work week.
Casey:
Now, maybe the answer is I just understand that I'm taking a pay cut and maybe I only work 30 hours a week and I just am OK with that.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
So, like, I haven't really taken this too seriously yet, but I will say that I've talked to a few of our mutual friends, a couple of our mutual friends and started to float this idea of, hey, if you have things that you can't get to or don't want to be bothered by and you're willing to throw money at that problem.
Casey:
Hey, think of me.
Casey:
You know, I can maybe make that work.
Casey:
And I don't know if that's going to work out, but that's like my fantasy world where I have all of the perks of being my own man and leaving the jobby job and doing my own thing.
Casey:
But at least in the beginning, very little of the drama about it, hypothetically.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
In that I've already established that between you and underscore and Bob and Susie and Timmy and Sally, I know that I'm going to get, you know, 40 hours or 30 hours or whatever of work out of you for at least a few months to at least get me going.
Casey:
And then at that point, in theory...
Casey:
And it should hopefully start taking care of itself.
Casey:
And I can either, you know, talk to local businesses if I need to, or maybe it turns out that you and I work super well together.
Casey:
And in this capacity, and maybe you say, you know what, let's go have and half and half on over.
Casey:
Obviously, I'm talking out my butt here.
Casey:
But you know what I mean?
Casey:
Like,
Casey:
So maybe that'll start to figure itself out after that.
Casey:
And that's like my fantasy land, but we'll see what actually ends up happening.
Casey:
But the tough thing about it is just what John said.
Casey:
Like, I think I can do some of this.
Casey:
I can do some of the hustling during this two months, but I don't think I can do the actual working during this two months, you know?
John:
Even your optimistic projections make me think that your consulting work will pay for the health care you're giving up by leaving your job based on how much Marco is paying for health care as an independent, you know.
John:
Like, Adam, maybe it's cheaper where you are than it is in New York.
John:
Well, I'm sure it is.
John:
But health care costs a lot.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, because that's the main thing I feel like you're giving up.
Marco:
Well, it's just a number, though.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
So many people, myself included, were scared to go independent because of health insurance.
Marco:
And that's a big reason.
Marco:
But it's just a number.
Marco:
So it isn't that you can't buy it.
Marco:
It isn't that you can't have health insurance.
Marco:
It's that you have to figure out a way to make that much money.
Marco:
Remove the emotional drain of it as being this big thing in your life and just consider it like...
Marco:
if I'm going to be independent, I have to at least make this amount more than I think I do to pay for the health insurance.
Marco:
And that's all it is.
Marco:
It's just a number.
Marco:
But it's a big number.
Marco:
That's the point.
Marco:
Yeah, it's like over $1,000 a month for almost any situation with a family.
Marco:
But like...
Marco:
Again, that's just a number.
Marco:
You're paying that now with work taxes and what they pay you versus what they're charging.
Marco:
Someone's paying it now.
Marco:
Your healthcare now is free.
Marco:
It's being paid for somehow.
Marco:
But anyway, this is an incredible opportunity that you have here.
Marco:
You basically have the ability...
Marco:
you have the opportunity to dip your toe in the water of this market to see if this is the kind of thing that you can and want to do now granted as john said like you're also going to be taking care of a family with a newborn in it so that's that you know you're going to be busy and tired but this is an opportunity that that is that is unique in your life right now like
Marco:
you're not going to get a better chance to try this out than this for a long time.
Marco:
Like, this is a really good chance.
Marco:
And also, I've really, again, knowing nothing about, you know, the people at your company or the politics of your job, because we don't talk about that, I really don't think...
Marco:
That this job is going to be as long-lasting or stable as you might want after you take this break.
Marco:
I don't know any company that would look favorably upon this.
Marco:
Even if they say it beforehand.
Marco:
They might think that.
Marco:
Somebody who matters might think that or might be saying that.
Marco:
But the reality is you're going to be kicked down to the bottom of a totem pole after this.
Marco:
And if push comes to shove, if they want to change things up in the department or they get new leadership or something, I would not assume this job would still be there.
Marco:
So at some point, you're going to be thrust into this probably of like, oh, what do I do now?
Marco:
Right now, you can do that without taking any risks because you've already booked yourself for this paternity leave and this sabbatical kind of thing, whatever you're calling it with the company.
Marco:
You're already doing this.
Marco:
You have this chance now laid out for you.
Marco:
I highly suggest you take advantage of it.
Marco:
And I'm please, I'm asking the audience,
Marco:
Just bury Casey with offers for consulting work just to show him how possible this is.
Marco:
This is totally a thing that people do that can happen.
Marco:
Most people are like, geez, I would love to get more consulting work, but I don't have any way to reach people.
Marco:
Turns out you have some ways to reach people.
Marco:
And even though you won't use them this way, I will.
Marco:
So for the love of God, bury Casey with work.
Marco:
Give him consulting offers from your company's people.
Marco:
Give him your money.
Marco:
That's what Casey needs.
Marco:
Because you need that push.
Marco:
I know because I needed that push and I could tell.
Marco:
Many of the things you're saying about the way you look at these things is the way I was looking at things.
Marco:
You need this push.
Marco:
This is a great opportunity to have that.
Marco:
For the love of God, audience, make him take this opportunity.
Casey:
I appreciate it.
Casey:
And yeah, we'll see what happens.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I would love for it to be the case.
Casey:
And yeah, we'll see what happens when this episode is released.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It's a scary thought.
Casey:
It's a super scary thought.
Casey:
I am super fiscally conservative within the family's financial world.
Casey:
I am super scared of risk, and I always pronounce the word wrong.
Casey:
I always want to say adverse, and that's not right, is it?
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
Averse.
Casey:
Yeah, thank you.
Casey:
I really don't like taking risks.
Casey:
And the worrywart in me, the chicken little within me, says, are you insane?
Casey:
I'm adding another mouth to feed, another person to be responsible for that I am wholly responsible for because I am lucky enough that Aaron doesn't have to work.
Casey:
And yeah, now I'm going to take this reliable paycheck again, understanding that not all paychecks are really and truly, well, really no paycheck is truly reliable, but just go with me here.
Casey:
I'm going to take this reliable paycheck and say, no, thank you.
Casey:
Like that's bananas.
Casey:
Why would I do that?
Casey:
But on the other side of the coin, I totally understand where you're coming from.
Casey:
And yeah, you know, if it ends up that I think I can scrounge up, you know, 30 to 40 hours of work for at least a few months at at least passable rates,
Casey:
It would be hard to say no to that because having the flexibility to be with the family would be pretty darn nice.
Casey:
So we'll see.
Marco:
I'll tell you why you'll do it.
Marco:
Because you are the kind of person who highly values that presence and time with your family.
Marco:
That's why you've been talking about it for years.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because you do want to be there.
Marco:
And, by the way, another reason to possibly give this up, you could make more.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Oh, certainly.
Marco:
Have you considered that?
Marco:
It's not like you're taking a huge pay cut forever.
Marco:
You're taking probably a small pay cut for a little while.
Marco:
And then after that, you could make more than you were making before, all while being home much more often.
Marco:
And this is even setting aside, like, yeah, you're going to have to have some times where you can't help out the family because you're busy working.
Marco:
That's going to happen, of course.
Marco:
That's a thing.
Marco:
But you're still going to have way more time at home than you do now.
Marco:
And you'll have also way more flexibility.
Marco:
And that is so, so nice.
Marco:
I go to all of my kids' doctor's appointments.
Marco:
Because I can.
Marco:
Little things like that...
Marco:
that like that stuff just it adds up and it ends up you just have so you can have so much more presence in your family's life if you can if you can be working at home for yourself and kind of dictate how you spend your own time like it's a pretty big change and upgrade of lifestyle and
Marco:
And the only reason a lot of people don't do it is because a lot of people can't do it.
Marco:
And I totally understand that.
Marco:
But you, I think, have a chance here and an opportunity here that a lot of people would kill for.
Marco:
And that's why I think you should take it.
Marco:
And rather than viewing it as a huge risk to taking a big pay cut and giving up this income instability you have...
Marco:
I would instead view it as an opportunity to make even more money with way more freedom and way more presence to your family to establish what would probably end up being the most stable and bulletproof type of income you can have.
Marco:
because you would have diverse sources that are all within your control.
Marco:
And there's overall market forces that might affect it, but that's way less likely to be a problem for you than one particular job that you happen to work for, things going bad there or changing there or that company having problems or whatever else.
Marco:
so for the love of god people hire casey right like now like i want people to flood you with offers in the next like two weeks because obviously like probably in the next week you're having a baby so like that's you know the next week is going to be busy for you but like you don't say the week after that start looking at offers and start doing the math because babies i i know they're a lot of work but they do sometimes sleep not for very long necessarily but you will have time but
Marco:
where you will be able to browse your phone while you're heating up a bottle or something.
Marco:
You will have time.
Marco:
That's when Declan's going to stop napping.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
There will be opportunities for you to check your email and to read your phone and to run some numbers in silver.
Marco:
This exists.
Marco:
Take this opportunity to really give this a try.
Marco:
Because the worst thing that happens is...
Marco:
you decide either you hate this and you want to go and you want to rush back to work like like there's a reason i don't tell john to do this because i know john would hate this kind of thing so i don't tell john to do this john loves his day job or at least do i john loves having a day job that's the correct phrasing for that statement
Marco:
That's also not true.
Marco:
Yes, it is, John.
Marco:
Come on.
Marco:
You're a company person.
Marco:
I'm with Marco on this.
Casey:
If you have to work at all, if you have to work at all, I think you love having a regular, standard, stable day job in many of the same ways I do.
Casey:
I'm not trying to paint you as like a loner on this.
John:
You don't know my life.
John:
We know your life.
John:
I don't want to work more than anybody, more than all of you combined.
Yeah.
John:
Because Marco's a workaholic and literally doesn't know how to not work.
John:
And Casey, I think, is just middle-of-the-road normal, but I desperately don't want to work.
Marco:
Yeah, that's probably true.
Marco:
But the point is, I think, of the three of us, I would never recommend John go independent because I know he would... I would never do consulting, I can tell you that.
John:
If you want to nail something I hate, consulting is like my idea of a nightmare.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I know you would hate this, and so I would never recommend this to you.
Marco:
But I know, Casey, you could do it, and I think you would appreciate... I think whatever... Because consulting isn't all roses, but... Oh, no, it's not.
Casey:
In a lot of ways, I hate it.
Casey:
But you're about to say, I think, what is absolutely true, that in this fantasy world where...
Casey:
I have enough work laid out in front of me that I can perhaps even be mildly choosy about it.
Casey:
And in this fantasy world where I'm able to work from home and actually get work done and be there for the family at hours wherein I need to be there, all of that would make the juice worth the squeeze, where even though I really hate the idea of being a full-time consultant again, all those perks would make it worth it if I could be there for the family, if I could...
Casey:
If I could make my own hours and choose my own clients, et cetera, et cetera.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Like, I really think you could do this.
Marco:
I really think this is a great chance to do it.
Marco:
And I think the audience would come through if you need them to.
Marco:
And you do.
Marco:
I really think they could make this happen.
Marco:
Because look, look at the opportunity you have.
Marco:
You have two or three months of free, in the sense of they're not going to fire you, free leave from work, during which you could set this up if you wanted to.
Marco:
You have a platform where we can beg people to hire you, and 100,000 people are going to hear this.
Marco:
And you don't need 100,000 people to hire you.
Marco:
You need like 10.
Marco:
No, but if all 100,000 would like to send me an offer... Surely at least 10 people in the audience can send you a serious offer.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
That's hilarious.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, we'll see.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
We'll see what comes out of this.
Casey:
But it is very kind of you to make the impassioned plea, and I very, very deeply appreciate it.
Casey:
Well, one of us has to.
Casey:
Well, and for the listeners, too, if you've stuck around for this part, I also, again, I appreciate you guys affording my family.
Casey:
The ability for me to take that time off, even if I squander it and just go crawling back to work, it just the fact that I can take that time is is is an extreme blessing.
Casey:
And I'm really thankful for it.
Casey:
It's funny with my job.
Casey:
You know, I think I'm more valuable than you're painting me.
Casey:
But I think that's more about circumstance than it is necessarily about who I'm so fancy.
Casey:
As it turns out, the particular employer that I work at, we have two teams, one on the West Coast, one on the East Coast.
Casey:
And on the East Coast, the iOS team, as it stands right now, is myself and an intern.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So it is not in my work's best interest to get rid of me unless they're getting rid of the entire East Coast operations for iOS, which is certainly possible.
Casey:
And for a long time, I thought we were on the precipice of doing exactly that.
Casey:
Now, I don't think that's the case.
Casey:
Here again, I acknowledge you'll never really know.
Casey:
It could happen tomorrow, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
I am fully aware of that.
Casey:
But I think I am at least mildly valuable by circumstance, if not by ability.
Casey:
And I think I'm relatively valuable based on ability.
Casey:
Certainly not a lot of people really understand RxSwift and whether or not you like it, whether or not you think it's a good idea.
Casey:
It is a unique skill.
Casey:
So if anyone is interested in – if anyone happens to want an RxSwift consultant, let me know.
Casey:
But I think I have more flexibility in this job than I have in most jobs to be at doctor's appointments and be at home when necessary.
Casey:
And I think that I am more valuable at this job, again, either by circumstance or ability or both, than I am at a lot of places.
Casey:
However, I still by and large agree with your points that, you know, there's no amount of flexibility that is more than working for yourself.
Casey:
And I did the semi-hard work in 2017 of setting up an LLC for myself.
Casey:
So some of that administrivia is already taken care of.
Casey:
And in some ways, I'm even better equipped to run with this, which is kind of neat.
Marco:
You're already dealing with having to do estimated taxes and everything from the income from this show.
Marco:
You're already dealing with that from side income from your podcasting.
Marco:
And let me offer an alternative perspective on your current status.
Marco:
You and I have talked before about the whole company having West Coast and East Coast things.
Marco:
I didn't know whether you wanted to bring that up on the show, but since you did bring that up, let me give you an alternate perspective on what you just described as your status there.
Marco:
your company seemingly used to have a lot more iOS people on the East Coast.
Marco:
Now, they're on the West Coast, and the East Coast has just you left, and you're about to take off two months.
Marco:
I would look at this as a really good opportunity for the company to consolidate their operations in a new location.
Marco:
And I agree with you.
Marco:
And also...
Marco:
you're saying you're super awesome and valuable to the company, but you're about to take three months off, and they're going to have to figure out how to do things without you, and so they will.
Marco:
Oh, totally.
Marco:
I'm not saying that you're going to walk in and march and be immediately laid off, but I think this is... If they're looking to consolidate on the West Coast, which certainly looks possible, I think this would make my list of incredibly reliable paychecks.
Casey:
No, and I agree.
Casey:
Now, for what it's worth, what I haven't mentioned is we actually have a new iOS developer starting next week, I believe, or week after.
Casey:
And that person is fairly junior.
Casey:
So the understanding was, is that they were just going to kind of do their thing until I get back and then I'll tutor them on the ways that we do things at my employer.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I'm not saying you're wrong by any stretch.
Casey:
I'm just saying it's not the sort of thing where I've turned the eight ball over and it says all signs point to you getting laid off.
Casey:
I'd say some of the signs point to me getting laid off, but not all of them.
Casey:
But who knows?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
In a perfect world, I will either get a bazillion wonderful job offers, and I'll have to choose who I would like my clients to be, or there will be nothing but crickets, and that will solve the problem a different way.
Casey:
But we'll see what happens.
Casey:
But anyway, I appreciate you giving me the nudge, and that's very kind of you.
Marco:
Oh, I'm dead serious.
Marco:
This is not a nudge.
Marco:
This is a push.
Marco:
Audience, you know what to do.