A Heroic Threshold for Pain
So we should start tonight with the SITREP situation report.
It is Wednesday, the 9th of January.
It is about 9 o'clock in the evening, one true time zone.
And as of right now, I'm still here, but there is a 50-50 shot that I'm going to have to run out of this episode in the middle of it.
So this is going to be an adventure for all three and kind of four, and I guess you could almost even say five of us.
As I might need to leave, Aaron might need to go to the hospital, and Sprig may be here.
I mean, it is theoretically feasible, although I certainly don't hope it's the case, that by the time this show stops recording, I could have needed to leave, go to the hospital, and Aaron could hypothetically birth our second child before you two showed up.
That could happen before you leave the house.
Let me tell you.
Let's not even go there.
Oh, God.
Do you want to tell that story?
Yeah, John, you have some experience with this.
And I don't think I've told that story at length on this podcast.
We don't need to do it today.
We should start with some follow-up, though.
Let's talk about Meltdown, Spectre, and all the things that are happening.
My timeline's a little fuzzy because I've been a bit preoccupied.
So we did have this link from Apple during the last recording, right?
We did not.
Oh, we did not.
Okay, I'm sorry.
They hadn't posted it yet.
You guys been talking about the WebKit one?
No, no, no, no.
This is the original official.
Oh, okay.
Because the WebKit one is also excellent.
Yeah.
I didn't get a chance to read that.
I've been preoccupied.
If you have that link, put it in the notes.
I'll take it out.
I've already downloaded the update, but I didn't read the note for it.
It's nice that they released the Safari update for old OSes.
I'm staring at El Cap right here, and I got the Safari update.
Which, I mean, that's another complaint people have about the Spectrum Meltdown thing and how Apple is handling it.
They're like, so where is the kernel update for any version other than the very, very latest version of macOS?
But that's not really how Apple rolls, which is kind of disappointing.
you would hope that apple would there's one aspect that apple should adopt a little bit more of the enterprising mindset to say for super critical security things maybe consider backporting some number of versions instead of just saying no the only thing that exists is the very very bleeding edge but you know apple's gonna apple apple is gonna apple all right so can you walk me through the official apple statement if you don't mind john
There's nothing much there.
It's just another one of these fairly straightforward explanations.
Just the last time, Apple didn't even have one.
They were just a little bit late in putting it out, but it's not a super great explanation.
Lots of people have been sending links to explanations that help them understand what this is all about.
Most of them I found to be not to my liking because it's a difference in audience.
It's like if you...
If most of the words we said in the last show didn't make any sense to you, you need a different kind of explanation.
So those people who need that kind of explanation are the ones reading articles where they compare it to a waiter or to like music or a factory or all sorts of things that use analogies to real word things to try to explain to people, you know, how instruction pipelines work, what speculative execution is, what branch prediction is, stuff like that.
And so it's been interesting to see the different variety of analogies and metaphors that are used in those articles, but apparently a lot of them are really helping people understand this in a way that, for example, our previous show would not have and did not.
So we apologize for that, but we're glad there's lots of good explainers out there for you.
I think the Raspberry Pi folks had one of the more popular...
let's say uh lay person's explanation of it with it with a great capper at the end where they say after many many paragraphs of laborious explanation raspberry pi doesn't suffer this because we use cpus that don't have speculative execution which is not really something to brag about because that means they use cheap very old very weak cpus um because you know raspberry pi is a small cheap low-powered thing uh but uh that's it's nice for them um
Let's see, what else has come out about this in the meantime?
Oh, the second link here in the same topic is this is the best web page I've found showing what the speed hit is on the Mac for the patches that work around this.
uh and as always it's not you know there's no clear-cut answer so as the summary of this this article says uh the main question to be answered is if the performance impact exists yes it is very clear you look at the graphs there's a performance impact is it relevant it depends and that's the worst kind of answer what do you mean it depends it really totally depends on exactly what you're doing exactly how many system calls you're making another interesting thing to come out of this uh
Article is another measurement of the performance hit of APFS versus HFS+, which they weren't intending to measure that, but they sort of accidentally did when they compared Sierra to high Sierra without the patch to high Sierra with the patch.
The performance impact of APFS, the negative performance impact of APFS, encrypted APFS, far outweighs the impact of this security patch.
Yeah.
I don't know if we've talked about that before, but AVFS in general is slower than HFS Plus in most of the benchmarks, which I would think is to be expected because HFS Plus was a file system that was tuned to be acceptably fast on a computer in like, you know, 1989 or whatever.
So it's massively overmatched by the power we have now.
And APFS has way more features and is a way more modern file system.
And so it's not going to be as fast as something that used to run really well on a Mac SE.
hopefully apfs will get faster in the future right but uh you know it's very new uh but it also it's just plain does more it has more features than hfs plus and more safety the space gray peripherals are selling for hilarious prices on ebay uh the three of us were kind of giggling about the thought that oh since these are so rare that they may command i mean probably will command some amount of premium over what a regular device would look like so quick refresher
The iMac Pro, since it's that sexy space gray, the peripherals also have to be sexy space gray.
And by default, you can order the computer with a 10, what do you call it?
Full size.
So not a 10 keyless, a full size Bluetooth, Apple keyboard, and either a Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad.
Or you can optionally, for some amount of money, I don't remember how much, you can get both the trackpad and the mouse.
These are only available if you buy a iMac Pro, so naturally they're very, very fancy and special.
Somebody has dug up some eBay listings that, if you're listening to this far in the future, will probably not be available.
But a triplet of Magic Keyboard, Trackpad, and Mouse, not going for, went as of yesterday for $1,080.
So that's $1,000 for a trackpad, a keyboard, and a mouse.
Oh, and presumably a bespoke lightning cable, actually.
um oh the black lightning cable when you include that of course it puts it over the top of course i got a black lightning cable i refuse to believe these are real people these have to be speculators but there's at least like if you if you search ebay sold items for like space gray magic trackpad you get all these listings and it's there's no yeah no there are that's that's why i put this in there because we thought they wouldn't sell for that much and they totally are selling for a lot of money the question is who are they selling to and that's the secondary thing is like
So are real people actually putting this much stock on this or is it speculation where people believe that this will be a high ticket item for a long time?
I continue to believe that Apple will eventually that Apple will eventually allow you to buy.
peripherals that are this color separately which will of course destroy the market for these things so i hope the people who bought them are able to resell them at a profit before that happens but i don't know when that will happen presumably i mean this is kind of like trying to be like an iphone speculator like on like the biggest market for these things is behind us and it's going down every day not up so like anybody buying these for this price like they're the worst speculators in the world like it's they're like
These are only going to get more common and more available over time.
And they're really cool right now or really two weeks ago because they're brand new and no one's seen them before in these colors.
But that is a very temporary thing.
The window of time to make a profit there is very short.
The only way it would work is if Apple never makes another space gray computer with space gray peripherals, like if the iMac Pro, like they continue to make the iMac Pro, but it changes color.
And this was like the only generation of these things.
Then you could have some value.
But just ask somebody, Stephen Hackett, with an Apple TV.
Not that one.
No, no, not that one.
No, the other one.
No, not that one.
No, not this black one.
I don't know how to refer to the Apple TV.
It was a giant Macintosh computer that could also be a television.
It was also hideously ugly.
It was also black.
And that was it.
There wasn't a huge collection of black desktop Macintosh computers surrounding that.
Even that doesn't retain its value that well.
Yeah.
I mean, now, Marco, you've got me convinced.
Now I'm starting to hope that these really are individual people because, like, if they're speculators, they're probably going to be disappointed.
But if they're individuals, maybe they're happy with their $1,000 purchase of a keyboard and mouse.
Yeah.
black lightning and black apple stickers we forgot about that you can get those with the mac pro though those are a dime a dozen just go buy a trash can yeah you know they'll throw in buy some black stickers they'll throw in a trash can for free so regardless as of the time of this recording that full set went for a thousand dollars a trackpad is for sale for three hundred and ten dollars or more and a magic mouse is for sale for two hundred and ninety five dollars or more and really uh while you guys were talking it occurred to me that that
If Erin really and truly loved me, she would go ahead and have this baby immediately because I'm going to be purchasing my full set from Underscore, and he has told me that he will bring them down when he comes to visit to meet Sprague.
So the quicker that she can pop this baby out, the quicker I can get my fancy black peripherals.
So really, this is all about me, and that's what she really needs to be considerate of.
I mean, there is a faster way to get them.
On eBay, you mean?
You got to wait for the auctions to end.
I believe it's apple.com slash iMac dash pro dash buy or something like that.
Yeah, yeah.
It's only five times expensive as the peripherals by themselves.
That isn't that unreasonable.
I already bought mine from Jason, by the way.
I use the Apple messages payment.
Is that the first time I use it?
Maybe I sent Casey some money.
It is called Apple Pay Cash.
And I have now sold two computers with it.
Anyway, mine is on my way to me, my keyboard, just the keyboard itself.
I did not pay $1,000.
Jason took pity on you and answered, no, I'm not going to sell the keyboard.
It's not for sale.
I just noticed today I had a friend of mine had purchased for me a couple of pieces of clothing from the Apple Park Visitor Center, and I paid him with Apple Pay Cash, apparently disclosed at some point that I'd forgotten or just not well disclosed that if you use a credit card for Apple Pay Cash.
There's a 3% service charge, which I was not aware of.
So this $50 transaction was like a $52 transaction.
Not a big deal, but it was very surprising when I'm looking at my iMessage history and seeing it was $50.20 or whatever the hell it was.
And then I'm looking at my bank statement and saying it was $52 or, again, whatever the numbers were.
And I did not expect that.
So pro tip, if you're going to be using Apple Pay Cash, use a debit card.
But did you get frequent flyer miles or Amazon Prime points or cash back to offset that 3%?
I will eventually get a smattering of cash back, probably less than 3%.
Yeah, but you're not going to get 3%.
Exactly.
This is the entire rack of the credit card business.
They have these interchange fees, something like that, which is part of that 3%.
But usually the vendor pays it, not you.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's no way to charge money to a credit card without somebody paying a fee of at least around 2.5%, depending on their merchant deal and everything.
It's like someone's paying that somewhere if using a credit card.
Debit cards are all different and don't work that way.
Bank transfers are different and don't work that way.
But credit cards all work that way.
Someone is paying that fee.
John is right.
Usually it's the vendor.
In this case, it's like if you want the person to receive...
this money, then you have to pay the fee.
You know, if you want them to receive 50 bucks and not 47 or whatever, you know, you're paying 52 to give them 50.
But that's just the nature of credit cards and sending money online.
Yeah, I'm not, you know, like disappointed by this, or if I am, I'm disappointed myself for not having remembered, but it was something that I did not expect.
So this is your PSA, ladies and gentlemen, use a debit card if you can.
Also note that the rewards that you're going to get for that are probably not exceeding about 1.5%.
The really good rewards end up being along the lines of 1.5%.
Anybody out there who thinks like, oh, I'll pay the surcharge for something, but I'll get it back in rewards.
No, you won't.
The house always wins.
We had a couple of people write in that are either ex-Apple geniuses or Apple geniuses, and they made the same point, which was part of the reason that Apple geniuses tend to be reluctant to do a battery replacement is that oftentimes that isn't really the problem.
You know, sometimes a slowdown or perhaps a really tough
tough battery situation is because you've been playing a shed load of Pokemon Go and you didn't disclose that when you were talking to the genius.
And the easier answer, rather than either charging Apple money or charging the customer money, even more importantly, is to just say, hey, maybe cool it on the catch in the Pokemans.
Maybe that'll do a little better for you.
So that was an interesting point I hadn't considered.
Yeah.
Like you said, we got this feedback a lot and it's not like they're
refusing to do it for your own good it's the what they're trying to avoid is a situation where a customer comes in and says i have a problem and then the customer and this must happen all the time the customer decides they know what the solution to the problem is this isn't exclusive to battery it's just whatever anything it could be your car or
a vacuum cleaner or whatever, you know, customer has a problem and customer says, and by the way, I'm also sure I know how to fix this problem.
I want you to replace the belt on my whatever.
I want you to, you know, give me a new whatever.
Like they, they have diagnosed the problem.
They know exactly what's wrong.
And they just say, look, just don't, don't give me a run around.
just, you know, put a new battery in my car.
Right?
I mean, that's the marketing with these stupid electric cars.
You know what I mean?
The 12-volt thing.
Flat acid.
I have one of those, too.
Maybe the problem is, like, an engine control unit or maybe it's a gasket that's blown or whatever.
So the person who wants to look at your car says, let us, the car-fixing experts, look at your car and run all our little diagnostics and we'll tell you what's wrong with it.
But it's like, no, no, no.
The customer says, I don't care what you find.
I know that this is exactly what I need.
And...
And service centers or Apple or whatever are reluctant to do that because if they say, OK, we'll do it and they do it, even if they do it for free, but but especially if they charge you to do it.
Right.
And then they give the thing back to you and say, OK, we did what you asked.
We replaced your whatever.
Here you go.
Then they come back the next day and said the problem is still there.
And now you have the argument.
It's like, well, you know, we didn't say this would fix your problem, but you insisted we do this because you thought it would fix your problem.
But it turns out it didn't.
And that's a conversation you never want to have with the customer because they're going to be like, I don't care, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So what Apple wants to do is you, customer, just describe your problem and then we'll figure out what it takes to fix it, whether that's give you a completely new device or replace a bunch of parts or whatever it's going to be.
But if you come to us and demand we do a specific thing, especially if you demand we do it for free under warranty, it could just be a waste of both of our times.
So that's all well and good.
And we've heard that from a lot of people.
And I know where they're coming from.
And sometimes I know where customers are coming from.
But sometimes I'm that customer who says, look, I just just do this.
Just just replace this thing.
I won't yell at you if it doesn't work, but I'm pretty sure this is it.
But my question to a couple of these Apple geniuses was, OK, fine, whatever.
Say somebody comes in like I did and says, there's nothing wrong with my phone.
I don't actually have a problem.
All I want to do is give you money in exchange for that money.
You take out the battery that's in there and put in a new one.
And for the most part, the Apple genius has said, yeah, we'll do that.
Like as long as we're all on the same page that there's not an actual problem that we're trying to solve.
Like there's no acknowledged problem at all.
It's just a thing you want to happen.
um not going to do an under warranty for free if there's no problem obviously because that's just wasteful and that was one angle that some people brought up is the waste of like if you have a perfectly good battery us replacing it even if you pass is not particularly environmentally conscious because batteries are all filled with the you know heavy metals and other uh
things that are not great so why would you take a perfectly good battery and throw it away and replace it with another one um so i kind of see that angle too but in the end i feel like if someone comes in with a lot of money especially if it's 80 and not 30 and says my phone has no problems but please replace my battery you should do so and like i said i did that and they did replace it for me but there was a weird pause about it so it's
It would be better if there was less mystery surrounding this process, and it would be much better if more customers knew how accessible battery replacements are for their iOS devices.
Of course, this, or I should use past tense, how accessible they were, because the other strain of feedback we got is from
long-suffering apple retail employees who are now in the midst of what they described as a terrible situation where many many angry customers are coming to the stores wanting new batteries and they don't have any new batteries and there's like a week-long wait time and people are super angry and like i want my free battery and the public understanding of this problem as we predicted
is not very good.
People are just angry and just want either new batteries for free or new phones.
And they're even more angry when you tell them that even if we could give you what you want, you have to wait a week.
So bummer for Apple, but it's kind of their own deal.
This is kind of it reminds me of the Takata Takata, whatever it is, airbag recall, because I got a notice for my car.
Jeez, I want to say like a year ago, maybe even more that, oh, your airbag is screwed up and hey, it may kill you.
But there's nothing we can do about it right now because we don't have any.
And it wasn't replaced until just a couple of months back.
That to me is a far more egregious issue in that if I got in an accident, the airbag that's supposed to save my life might actually injure me.
Whereas this is just, oh, my phone isn't working as quickly as I want.
And man, I took a lot.
I heard a lot of grumpy people that were upset at me for not, you know, taking Apple, you know, behind the shed and shooting in the face or whatever, because I was not extremely grumpy about this battery issue.
That analogy fell down as soon as I opened my mouth.
Casey has interesting child discipline techniques.
That fell down as soon as I opened my mouth, but it was too late.
But anyway, we'll fix it in post.
The point I'm driving at, though, is there were a lot of people that were really grumpy.
I know we won't.
That were really grumpy that I wasn't grumpy about this slowdown thing.
And
I'm sorry, but like, hey, I'm sorry if an older phone isn't as fast as it once was.
Like, everyone needs to take a damn chill pill.
It's frustrating, yes, but holy cow, people are really worked up about this.
It's not an airbag.
It's not a malfunctioning seatbelt.
It's a telephone.
it'll be okay speaking of cars and recalls i had an annoying experience with my honda recently they had some recall thing and i was i was think i was going in for regular service anyway or maybe it was just encouraging me to go in but anyway some recall i'm like fine whatever do my recall thing it's free you know not a big deal it was like a battery it was one of those paranoid things where like if you get a bunch of salt on this battery terminal it could potentially spark and do a blah blah blah and it's like
That's never going to happen.
Like, yes, there's salt everywhere, but I'm not afraid my thing is going to explode.
You can, you know, I can see the battery.
It's sitting right there.
It's not in danger of spewing flame.
Anyway, whatever.
So fine.
They do some battery terminal.
What's your moosey?
And I thought it was fine.
And then like two months later, I get another recall message.
I'm like, oh, I can ignore that.
I already did that recall.
And moreover, like, no, this is a different recall, like for the same thing for the battery terminal.
And my vague understanding of this, I was mostly just too annoyed to look into it very deeply, was that the first recall was like a temporary patch where they just threw some goop on something or sealed something up to prevent this potential sparking giant explosion from the battery.
because they didn't have enough of the replacement part that they wanted that they should have replaced it with and the second recall is hey guess what we got the replacement parts now so come back in and we'll get rid of that little temporary fix we did and put in the replacement part i suppose it's nice that they would do two recalls for free but as anyone with a car knows
you know even more so than with phones and maybe equally so with uh an all-in-one computer like marco's imac the worst part of any of these things is having to go in to the dealer or having to go in at all it doesn't really matter what they do when they're there or if it costs no money the time and hassle of just getting the car to the dealer and waiting while they do whatever it's so much worse than any other aspect of the experience that it almost doesn't matter what they do
Uh, so yeah, I had to go to the dealer two times.
Um, at least with the Apple thing, you only have to go once unless I suppose you take a two hour drive to the mall and get there and find out they tell you that you have to come back in a week when they have batteries in stock.
Yeah.
I've had similar issues with service issues with Tesla.
Like they just are out of every part ever all the time.
And like they had a battery, they had a, um, a, uh, parking brake recall last summer, uh,
I still haven't gotten it done.
I'm still waiting for them to call me to tell me they have my part in.
I've called them every three months or so to check on this.
They still don't have anything.
In the meantime, don't park on hills?
What did they tell you?
It was apparently a minor thing.
I ordered snow tires in early December sometime.
And when you order something from Tesla's online parts store, something like that, that like has to be installed somehow somewhere, what they do is they just deliver it to your local service center and then they call you or email you when it's ready and you set up an appointment to get it installed.
So here are these snow tires in early December.
time goes by i got nothing i get no emails there's no order status lookup page there's nothing like this is it's like a it's like an online store designed in 1992 like there's like it's the most bare bones thing ever you halfway expect to see a clear form button on the bottom like it's that it's that bare bone so like middle of last week i'm like you know it's snowing constantly i really could use the snow tires where the heck are they
And I still had nothing from Tesla.
And I got an email saying, please rate your recent service experience at Tesla.
I was like, I didn't get any service recently.
I wonder if maybe their system just didn't send me that email, screwed up in all these different ways, but maybe it thought that them arriving at the service center was a service visit and generated that email.
So I called the service center and sure enough, they're like, oh yeah, we have them in now.
like oh they've just been chilling out thanks for telling me they're the office mascot now you're for snow tires yeah they're like oh yeah when do you want to come and have them installed yeah thanks since i have you yeah it's like but yeah it's like everything with tesla service and parts is a disaster in just trying to get things there and availability everything's constantly backordered and like the cars are so great i'm so happy with the car but god if you ever need to wait for a part it's not a good experience
Yeah, it's a bummer.
All right, so tell me about iPhone X screen burn-in.
There's a question we had about the Apple's first OLED phone.
OLED has burn-in issues, supposedly worse burn-in issues than LCD.
But, of course, Android phones didn't have OLED screens for a long time, so presumably it was a known quantity.
This is the first test I've seen of an actual iPhone X versus a couple of popular Android phones with OLED screens for burn-in.
unfortunately it is all in what are we going to say is that chinese korean i'm not good at uh looking at uh text and telling exactly what's i mean korean i usually look for the closed circles because there's this looks more korean to me but i'm not sure
Yeah.
Chinese and Japanese don't have the close circles.
I think I can identify Japanese the best.
Anyway, all that is to say, I don't know what it says except what Google Translate tells me.
There's a YouTube video and an article, but the upshot of it appears to be that the iPhone X resisted burn-in much, much better than the two other Android phones that they tested.
Did they...
They had it on full brightness on the same image for like hundreds of hours to get very mild burn-in.
So it looks pretty good.
Probably better than like, say, my iPad 3 or many other past LCD iOS devices that I found suffered pretty severe image retention after a couple of years.
Obviously, this iPhone X is newish.
It's not a three-year-old iPhone X, but compared to a couple of contemporary phones, it looks like it's pretty good.
So I think Apple got a pretty good screen here.
Chatroom says Korean.
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I do have a very quick review of my iMac Pro after finally having a week of real use.
In this week, I have done lots of podcast editing.
I have done Xcode work, programming work with iOS apps, with my one iOS app.
And I have also done a lot of video transcoding.
I ripped a couple of Blu-rays and did some video transcoding work, including some pretty heavy ones like trying to do H.265 and everything else.
I have yet to hear the fan spin up.
I have thrown everything I can at this CPU.
Granted, I've done almost nothing to the GPU, because my workload is typically very CPU-heavy and pretty light on the GPU.
Oh, I also imported, I think, 400 pictures from the Sony a7R III, which we got to.
and did uh rent had lightroom render one-to-one previews on import which i usually do for various reasons um so i threw everything i could at the cpu i've seen all the cores either be maxed out or be almost maxed out for sustained periods i cannot get the fan to spin up into a to a level that it's audible did you play games no of course not i don't play games but it was you had to play some games on your computer
why we have we have the nintendo switch it's the best it's the best game platform ever why would i play games on my computer because you want to stress this the cpu and the gpu at the same time double the heat no but i don't care do you play games in your fax machine like no it just this is for science not for you it's for science
Anyway, so all this is to say that so far in my week of using this computer pretty heavily, I'm just incredibly happy with it.
It is so good.
It is so fast.
It is so quiet, and it just has no limits for me.
Not everything is perfectly fast and stable, but that's down to software, not hardware.
It is just so damn good.
I'm incredibly happy with the iMac Pro, and I would say it is...
I wouldn't say extremely likely that I wouldn't ever need another Mac Pro again.
Okay.
Everyone mark this down.
I'm just saying it is somewhat likely that I might not need the Mac Pro.
Well, I don't need the Mac Pro, but I might not want a Mac Pro after this.
This is so, so damn good.
that even though i mean i think you know john's assertion last episode was correct that there's pretty much no chance that i don't at least buy the mac pro so so i am i am probably gonna buy it but uh man this is good and anybody who thinks oh maybe this won't be as good as the mac pro i should wait honestly i don't think you need to wait this is the new mac pro for all intents and purposes and it's so good
that if you have a need for this kind of computer right now, just get this.
It's amazing.
I'm glad you like it.
I really am.
I think it's hilarious that you think you would even, for a fleeting moment, say no to a Mac Pro.
I mean, this is like when I was talking about the Apple Watch that I didn't want.
There were like three or four things in a row that I told everyone I didn't want and then ended up immediately reneging on.
BMWs, Macs.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't think I want a HomePod, so let's just put that on record right now.
Yeah, I don't think I do either.
You have no problem sticking to that one if they ever ship it.
Good point.
But I think it's pretty obvious that both of us will end up with a HomePod.
So to address me mania in the chat, can you functionally tell that this is a much better computer than the regular iMac without benchmarking or stress testing?
That's a very good question.
You can tell that just whenever you do anything multi-threaded, it is noticeably faster, obviously, because I'm going from four cores to ten.
So, like, you're going to see that difference.
Like, that's a big difference.
It also, you know, besides, like, you know, the cosmetic stuff, like the space grain and everything, it also just...
Being able to operate no matter what you throw at it in silence is a pretty big difference from the 5K iMac.
The 5K iMac, as I mentioned last episode, I haven't used that computer for three years.
It's a great computer, and for a lot of people, that is plenty.
That's fine.
But the one thing that always got me about it that was not true of Mac Pros is that you would hear the fan spin up, up and down, up and down.
If you were pushing the CPU really hard for things, you'd hear the fan come up and down with it.
Whereas with this, that doesn't happen.
So that is a pretty big difference if you're doing things that really stress it and if you care about fan noise.
If one of those things is not true for you, then you're fine with the regular iMac.
But you are definitely getting something for the additional money here in addition to the performance increases and the different architecture and the ECC and stuff like that.
I would say the ability to run in that silence could easily come to the iMac, to the regular iMac, if they redesigned it thermally to be more like this.
But they can't do that, as far as I can tell, until they remove all ability to put a 3.5-inch hard drive in there.
Because if you look at how the internals of these things are laid out, the reason the iMac Pro is able to cool itself, not only to cool itself with just such a high thermal load with all these high-end components in it, but I think one of the reasons they're able to do it so quietly is because they have a giant heat sink and fan assembly located right in the middle of the back, the thickest part of the enclosure.
And that is right where the three and a half inch hard drive goes in a regular iMac.
So if they continue to ship iMacs with hard drive options available, which honestly, I think the time for that is just about done, you know, probably the next major generation of iMac, I assume they're probably going to drop the hard drive option.
And if they do, then they can adopt this kind of thermal design and then they can run it in silence too.
The other place people might notice a speed difference on the iMac Pro, which is unfortunately undercut by an even more dramatic speed difference, is if you're coming from a computer like an iMac 5K or even older that has a spinning drive, even if it's in a fusion drive configuration, and you do lots of reading and writing very large files, and I was going to say, oh, you really notice it when you...
duplicate a three gig file but unfortunately apfs makes duplicating a three a file the same volume instantaneous so it kind of kills your ability to see the benchmark what i'm getting at is that the ssds and the imac pro are very very fast especially for large bulk transfers of huge files it could be that it ends up being you know if if you're not cooked up to 10 gig ethernet your three gigs per second of disk io you're never you're never going to see that
uh you're never going to see it on the same volume because the apfs will instantly copy it and you're never going to see it across the wire because you're limited by the speed of ethernet uh but rest assured that the disk is much faster so if you do things that have do a lot of ios hey just reading a very large file into ram or saving out a large file you may notice those progress bars speed up and that's not a multi-threaded thing it's just like you know if you're ever used to staring at a progress bar when disk i was going on that progress bar should go faster on the imac pro than it does on other computers um
But yeah, if you're just running single-threaded applications, the iMac Pro is actually slower than the top-end 5K iMac for some single-threaded tasks, depending on how many cores you get in it.
But it's all about the multi-core.
And I suppose if you're doing anything having to do with the GPU, the GPU and the iMac Pro, even though Marco never uses it to do anything except for show Windows on his screen, is way, way faster than the 5K iMacs.
I think Lightroom uses it.
Well, plus, I've heard reports from Marco, from Underscore, and from Jason Snell about how much faster FFmpeg is and in transcoding video is on their fancy pants iMac Pros.
And pretty much everyone has independently concluded that it's about twice as fast as their...
prior 5k imax now i think everyone had older 5k imax than i have but nevertheless it's basically a 2x improvement and that makes me sad because although i don't uh transcode stuff as much as i probably paint it i do it often enough that i wish i had more speed with which to do it but do i want to spend five thousand plus dollars to transcode videos quicker no no i don't
Speaking of spending a shed load of money, Marco, tell me about your camera.
I love that.
My name always comes out to that phrase.
It sure does.
So sometime last year, I described that I had sold my formerly beloved Sony a7R II to Stephen Hackett, incidentally, because I was not happy with its...
Speed and battery life were the two big issues with it.
And I had gone back to Canon SLRs, back from whence I came, and I was very happy with the handling and everything of Canon SLRs.
I was never as happy with the pictures I would get out of the Canon SLRs because the Sony had not only a pretty big megapixel advantage, and the camera I'm talking about on the Canon side is the 5D Mark IV, which is an amazing camera.
But the main problem was that it didn't have the megapixels.
It did have the anti-aliasing filter over the sensor, so you couldn't quite get the level of sharpness out of the Canon.
And it didn't have as advanced of an autofocus system.
And so my hit rate was not as good.
It also didn't have in-body stabilization.
So it also kind of further lowered the hit rate.
And it couldn't quite achieve the high ISO numbers or dynamic range and shadows that the Sony could.
It was very close.
But it was a noticeable downgrade in those areas.
But I was happy with the Canon because it was just so much more pleasurable to use because everything was so much faster and it handled so much better and everything.
And I would still stand by the fact that if you are...
shooting events like if you're in some kind of pro role i think the canon line is still what you want um and maybe nikon too i'm sorry nikon fans i don't know anything about nikon really i rented a d750 once and it was great um but when it came time to buy i wasn't that convinced by the lens lineup for what i actually would want in my lenses and so i didn't i didn't go nikon at any of these points but
Anyway, the main problem I had with the Canon, again, was just that I wasn't getting my favorite images out of it.
As I was looking back, most of my favorite images were shot by the Sony.
And the Canon was so much more pleasurable to use and way faster, and the battery life was way better.
But I just was not getting images that blew me away out of it.
It really is made for pro use.
And that's where it really does excel.
But that's not what I needed.
I really just wanted a camera that gave me shockingly good images that just made me feel something about how good they were.
And the Canon just didn't do that.
uh late last late in 2017 like you know a couple months ago uh sony announced the a7r3 and it doesn't actually change that much from the a7r2 but two of the big things it changes are battery life and performance the two big problems i have with the two yeah um it's the same sensor a couple of minor improvements here and there but uh for the most part it's fairly similar um but
a battery that's like two and a half times the size, and a significantly upgraded image processor and interface and everything else.
So it's just a lot snappier.
I decided since the Christmas season is by far my heaviest photography time, I decided right before Christmas, you know what?
I
Let me try it.
Because one thing I did when I left the Sony ecosystem, I kept my two favorite lenses, the 35 2.8 and the 55 1.8 primes.
I kept both of those thinking, you know, if I ever go back, I'll have these lenses.
I want to rebuy them.
If I don't go back after a couple of years, I'll sell them.
They'll still have a lot of value and it's not going to matter whether I sell them now or in a year or two.
So I still had the lens.
So all I did was buy the body and I figured, you know what?
Let me try it.
If it's terrible, I can return it or sell it or something.
And so I shot all through Christmas with it, and it is fantastic.
It is so, so good.
It is still not to the levels of performance and battery life that the Canon offers, that most SLRs can offer.
But it's now close enough.
It's now like those things are not huge hindrances that annoy me while using it.
They're just now very minor limitations.
But it's a massive difference in those two areas.
And
I have taken shots that I just love from this camera.
It is just so good.
And because of the features it offers and some other performance areas it offers, especially in regards to autofocus features, autofocus performance, and low-light performance and in-body stabilization, it is just an incredibly high keeper rate of what I shoot compared to my regular SLR use.
So...
I'm now back in the Sony world, I guess.
And it's really, really a very good camera.
And it is not cheap.
None of this stuff is cheap.
I mean, the camera is like $3,000 and the lenses I just mentioned I think are $700 or $800 each.
This is not a cheap thing to do.
But no camera that offers this level of performance is cheap.
The Canon SLRs aren't cheap either.
So within the realm of what you get, I think it is well-priced.
And it is really, really good, and I'm very glad I have it.
So what does Tiff think of it?
Because she was, even when you had the R2, she was the SLR, the Canon SLR diehard who didn't want to come over to the Sony side of the fence, or the mirrorless side of the fence even.
Yeah, she very much prefers the Canons.
But she said over Christmas that she was glad that I got this because it is... The Sony has pretty big advantages when you're shooting indoors in low light, which a lot of our Christmas shooting is exactly that.
And so... And it's also just, you know, small and unobtrusive and easy to handle and easy to, like, have around, like, in the living room while we're opening gifts and stuff like that.
So it's, like...
it was a very very good camera for our needs for christmas and so even though it is not her favorite camera the rest of the year she was very happy i had it and uh and you know it's going to continue to be my camera basically and the canons will resume being her cameras the way they used to be uh but yeah so far she's got your around to use the camera she doesn't like
Yeah, pretty much.
Looks good on you, though.
And she's glad that I no longer need to use hers.
Don't laugh at that.
You didn't get that reference.
I didn't.
No, I didn't.
I was laughing at your voice, really.
Exactly.
Trust me, that was a dead-on imitation of the thing I was referencing.
Good.
Congratulations.
I give you one point.
As far as you know, it's dead on.
And may God have mercy on your soul.
Actually, that was no points.
Yeah, that's all right.
Yep.
Anyway.
All right.
So you like your camera.
That's good.
So what are the, what are the complaints about other than cost?
Like, so are you, are you a hundred percent happy now or outside of the fact that you're broke or are you just 90% happy?
I am pretty happy.
I mean, the battery life is now good enough.
Like it's, it's to the point where you can, I was able to shoot with it like all day and not have to, not have to swap batteries.
And that's, that's way different than the a7R II.
Um,
um you know like i left the a7r2 when it when it came out it came with two batteries in the box that's how bad the battery life is on the a7r2 that they ship it with two batteries like i've never seen any electronic of any kind that came with two of its own batteries because the battery life is so bad they knew you would need both like that's the
I've literally never seen that before or since.
But this one only comes with one for a reason.
One is fine.
I have a second one just because I was afraid.
So I bought a second one and I did swap it a couple times during downtime on Christmas Day when we had...
you know, no need to shoot for like 20 minutes.
I would swap anyway, but I didn't need to.
And it's, I swapped twice and I like compared like the, you know, the percentages.
I was like, Oh, I didn't need, I didn't even need to swap at all.
This is, this is great.
So battery life, huge thumbs up the performance of things like, you know, reviewing images quickly to make sure like you got the focus right and everything.
Um,
It is way faster than it was.
It also has a pretty good feature where on the A7, this is really nitpicky and no one who doesn't own this will even care.
But quickly, this is a pretty big upgrade.
The A7R II, if you would try to do something while it was writing to the card, it would say operation not available for a lot of things that you try to do.
This one doesn't do that anymore.
That's a huge... So, like, that's like a big waiting point from A7R II that is gone on A7R III.
So, anyway, stuff like that.
There's a number of big and small improvements that remove tons of friction and annoyances from this camera that were there in the A7R II.
And the A7R II is an awesome camera already.
So to be able to improve on it so substantially in only, I think, two years from the original release, that's pretty good.
So very, very happy.
At the moment, I really have no major complaints about it.
Good.
Did they change the interface, the horrible, as far as I'm concerned, like menu system interface, the Sony thing?
Oh, yeah.
They changed it from one disaster to another.
So it's a lateral move.
It's different.
I don't think it's better, but it is different.
So they had to learn where to find things all over again.
Was that under the suitcase on screen seven?
Yeah.
It looks like they added a little joystick to the back of it, too, for focus moving and stuff.
Yes.
I don't really use that very often, but it is nice when you need it.
and they replaced the weird sony af mf switch with a uh switch with a button in the middle of it that's gone now oh yeah the weird am the yeah the dmf thing that's now that's in the menu somewhere i don't know that's i i usually keep it in continuous focus i use that middle button for i autofocus do you ever use i autofocus is that on this i always use i autofocus that's one of the things that makes the focus engine so awesome on this do what button do you have that assigned to
Oh, I just have it on all the time.
I thought it was a button.
At least on my camera, I think it's a button you have to sign it to.
I know they upgraded it in some way for this.
I never used it on the two, so I don't know if it's that different in that way.
But yeah, the eye priority autofocus is great, and I use it frequently.
Because on my camera, when you do it, half button down, it will never do eye autofocus.
You have to press another button that you assign to be eye autofocus.
And then the little green square zooms right in on their eyeball and you know it's doing it.
Like you get the tiny little green square.
Oh, maybe I'm not doing it.
Face thing.
I think you're not doing it.
There's face priority autofocus.
I have that always enabled.
But there might be a different thing.
Yeah, the eye autofocus...
you'll know you're doing it because it makes the the green focus rectangle literally the size of the like their iris and it just pin pinned onto their iris all right i'll play with it because i just get like the whole face as as the green rectangle yeah the reason i bring it up is because i use that middle i use that button in the middle of the afmf switch to be my autofocus switch because it's like a thumb thing but now with that button gun replaced by the joystick i'm not sure what i'd press although you have those programmable buttons like a
what the hell they call it there's there's like six different buttons you can program to do whatever you want so it's there's you definitely have options also one thing with the battery life being so much better it allows me to turn on features that the a7r2 had but that i didn't use because it would kill the battery more so one example of that is i believe it's called pre af
where it kind of tries to keep autofocus in a reasonably ready state before you actually push the button halfway down, just as you're looking around through the viewfinder.
That I can now leave on because the battery is not so bad that you have to turn off half the features to conserve battery life.
And that's pretty as f***.
Wow.
LAUGHTER
i couldn't help it i'm sorry i know i it's that's fine yeah did you uh did they make the the grip bigger on the body too like the little part you grab with your right hand does it like poke out from the camera more um i no longer have the two so i can't do a side by side comparison but um the whole camera body got slightly deeper
um so maybe oh like the overall grip on it might be slightly bigger um but it's not a it's not a huge difference i'm trying to figure where they put the two and a half times as big battery like because the battery is in that grip like the part where you hold it so the hole where the battery goes has to be bigger so maybe the grip is bigger i
I think that's why the whole body is bigger, honestly.
It's mostly for the... Oh, there's also now dual card slots.
The cards have... The bottom card has UHS-II.
It has the whole extra row of terminals.
So does the iMac Pro card reader.
So that's way faster now.
The camera also has USB 3, and it has both a micro-USB and a USB-C port, either one of which can be used to power the camera, charge the battery, and transfer photos.
Oh, that's nice.
USB-C on camera is my dream.
Every time I plug in that terrible...
It's a micro USB or whatever that connector is.
It always feels like it's broken and you have to stare at it for 10 minutes to make sure you have it the right way before you try to jam it in.
Yep.
That's a big quality of life improvement.
And just A, having the camera be able to charge itself over USB, which the two could do, but Canon's can't.
I love that feature alone because that means for most places you would bring it, you don't have to bring a separate battery charger unless you really need super fast charging while one battery is in use.
Now, hold on.
I think you're underplaying this, even with your amount of enthusiasm.
My beloved, and I love this camera, my Olympus OM-D EM10 has an external battery charger that is not terribly small, and the cable is not terribly conducive to being wrapped up cleanly and nicely.
It drives me insane, and I would give almost anything to be able to charge the battery within the camera itself.
That in and of itself would make me give all of my money to Sony or Olympus or what have you so I could charge the stupid batteries in the camera.
That's tremendous.
Most Sonys offer that feature, by the way, including John's, I believe, right?
Yeah, but before you say that, though, you should consider what, like, I don't know who came up with this design.
It probably wasn't Sony, but anyone who has a camera, fancy or otherwise, is probably familiar with the idea of...
a panel somewhere on your camera, probably with, like, a fingernail ridge on it that they expect you to, like, disengage somehow, and then it just swings out of the way on this flimsy single pivot and hopefully doesn't crack off.
Like, the doors you have to move to get at the USB things are, like, the worst-designed, flimsiest, most terrifying, they're going to snap off of my $3,000 camera in two seconds if I'm not careful, doors.
And it doesn't have to be that way.
Like, it's possible to make...
a sturdy door covering a bunch of ports but cameras don't they they do like literally the it's like by how little material can we attach this flimsy plastic door to our camera can we do it by like a like a human hair then do that and i and and then you can't quite swing them totally out of the way i'll tell you what though i've never had one break
i know because everyone is super careful with them you treat them with kid gloves you're like oh this looks delicate so you're super careful with it the one on my camera is actually not that bad it actually slides like back and then out and it's almost like a double hinge thing but i see the picture of the a7r3 it's got three giant flimsy door doors all connected at one point all of which partially block the ports unless you like twist them like 720 degrees around like rotate them out of the way until you find the position where they're not blocking the ports
I really wish they would fix that.
I'm not asking for waterproof cameras here.
I'm just saying, like, make the doors a little bit more sturdy to match.
The rest of the camera looks pretty rugged, but those doors, no good.
Well, I wish you didn't like this camera as much as you do, Marcos.
I was hoping you'd be like, oh, no, it's still no good.
I go back to my Canon because now I want this camera and it costs too much money.
I mean, that would be funnier on the show if I did that.
But unfortunately, I don't see it happening.
I'm just so much happier with like, as I said, like the A7R II was such a great camera, but just was let down by a few of its, you know...
lacking technologies or choices and this one fixes them all so it's it's really good you were pessimistic about it too by the way when the camera came out like oh no one had gotten to test it you know you were like oh no it's probably not going to be that great maybe the battery life's better but whatever but
Yeah, because we had an Ask ATP question three or four months ago when it came out from somebody saying, am I going to get it?
And at the time, I said, I'll see what the reviews say, but I don't think it would be a better enough battery or better enough performance to make it worth it.
And then all the early reviews were so glowing and positive, especially on those two fronts.
that and actually what made me get it was one of the reviews that said the little nitpicky thing I said earlier where like you can keep navigating menus while it's writing to the card as soon as I read that I'm like oh my god huge difference buying it that was it have you tried the insane frame rate for the burst photos on anything
No, I don't usually do high-speed bursts.
I think it can go up to, like, 10 frames a second, something like that.
It goes way higher than you ever really want it to.
Like, the iPhone goes pretty insanely high, too.
But, like, you know, I do lots of burst photos because I do action photos on, like, you know, the ocean or vacation.
And I don't think I've ever gone above the mid setting, which is, like, half of the rate that my camera is able to do it.
I think this one is able to go.
You practically take, like, slow-mo movies with the number of frames per second.
It's pretty ridiculous.
Yeah.
Then unlike the iPhone, you don't have like keep only one frame from the burst.
You have to sort through all 900 photos you just took by holding down the shutter button for three seconds.
And every one of them is like a 45 megabyte raw file that takes Lightroom like 10 seconds to import.
Burst photos, especially at the highest speed, it's like a...
It's like a stress test for your ability to do pics from your own photos, right?
Because you have to go through like 100 pictures, all of which are nearly identical to each other, and decide, do I want this one or that one?
This one or that one?
This one or that one?
You're like, they're practically identical.
They're two pixels different.
Which one do I delete?
It's lots of fun.
Yeah, I have rarely found bursts worthwhile.
I used to, like, back when I was, like, earlier in my photography hobby, like, you know, five, ten years ago, I kept it in continuous shooting mode and would frequently shoot, like, a three or four picture burst for whatever I was getting, and that would be over about a second.
But...
Over time, first of all, I just kind of got better at timing it, and so I didn't need the burst as much.
But also, I realized it was never worth the time or the storage overhead or the processing overhead.
I wasn't getting enough out of it.
So I just switched to single shot most of the time, and it's totally fine.
Well, for sports, you still need a burst.
Like, that's what I'm using.
If people are in motion, playing a sport or running or, you know, jumping in the ocean waves, burst is the way to go because there's just no other way to get the shot that you want.
But yeah, burst is annoying as anything for situations where people are not performing a sport.
because you end up like with three pictures of everybody yeah yeah burst makes a lot of sense for like for like pros or people shooting soccer or pros shooting soccer but yeah my family is not that high motion i would recommend that even if you know if people are like playing badminton in the backyard at a family gathering try burst for those things you know for people doing sports if they're performing a motion like they're you know swatting at the little birdie thing or they're hitting a volleyball or blocking a jump shot uh even just a burst of three or four
you know usually all of them are crap but every once in a while one of them is good and you realize if i had taken a single shot the odds of me getting that one weren't good so when people are in motion in very bright sunlight obviously uh you know you use that uh that sport preset on your sony camera that
You know, cranks down the shutter speed and turn on burst mode, not on the high setting because then you'll get like every hair moving on their body, but just on the, you know, on the mid or low setting to get a couple of choices.
That's how I've gotten most of my good ocean pictures because...
you're in waist deep in the ocean and waves are crashing on people you need a couple you need a burst to get anything good out of that and you know very often both ends of the burst are garbage so you're like boy it's a good thing it's a good thing i got that middle part there if i had just put the shutter down when i thought it was happening got one picture odds of it being good are very small
nostalgia null in the chat suggests maybe you could binary search through the burst it's like all right start in the middle does what i want before or after this the problem is the judgment the the problem is the judgment the judgment call like you will get down to sort of more or less the the portion of the pose that you want but then you will have five pictures to choose from that if you had to put them side by side you'd be hard pressed to say are these the same picture or are they different
yeah i think if if you're getting that little variation then either your frame rate is too high or you don't need to be shooting bursts that's why i said don't go above mid because these things the frame i forget what it is i think it's like is is it like 40 or 60 i don't know it might be faster than the the a9 is the sport oriented model that one i think can go faster i think the a7 r3 is either like 7 or 10 frames a second but the a9 i think might be 15 or 20
No, it's got to be faster than that.
Mine is faster than that.
Is it because the giant sensor can't get the data onto the card fast enough?
I believe it can't get the data off the sensor fast enough.
I think that's usually the limitation.
Yeah, no, mine is faster than that because I have a smaller sensor.
And we're not talking about video mode.
We're talking about, like, photos.
Yeah, camera, just plain old photos.
Yeah, okay, the A9 is up to 20 frames a second.
Anyway, 10 pictures for one second goes by faster than you think.
It is 10, yeah.
So A7R3 is 10, A9 is 20.
Speaking of video, have you shot any video with it or are you still just iPhone only for that?
I'm just iPhone only for that.
I really I don't shoot.
And I know this is like it's weird, like high end cameras like this have themselves in a weird market where basically around the time of the Canon 5D Mark II, which came out in 2008, the the SLR market shifted dramatically because the Mark II was the first like the first widely available SLR that could shoot really good video.
And so good that it was actually better than a lot of pro video cameras at the time.
And that trend has continued.
And while pro video cameras now are now better in certain ways and certain things, a lot of video is shot on SLRs and high-end mirrorless cameras.
Like a lot of pro...
level video is shot using these cameras.
And so video dictates a lot of their feature set because that's the people who are actually buying these things.
So it's funny, like it's hard to find good reviews of these cameras if you're not into video because so many of the reviews focus so heavily on videos.
That's what so many of the buyers are.
That's what so many of the features are for.
That's what so many of the changes are every year.
I really don't shoot video with fancy cameras very often.
And it's not because it's not good.
It looks great when you do it.
it's because I'm not a good enough videographer to do it.
And if I just shoot video with my iPhone, it turns out way better because the iPhone does a way better job at autofocus and also the iPhone tends to be way better at... Oh, and also it has built-in stabilization, of course, but also the iPhone is way better at audio.
Like, whatever it does with...
It's built-in mics and the noise cancellation that it does between them.
It is way better at its built-in audio than the crappy little built-in mics that are on SLRs.
And granted, pro video people don't use the built-in mics.
At least they shouldn't.
So, you know, there's not much of a market demand for the camera makers to make their camera built-in mics awesome.
But if you're just a casual person shooting with what you have in your hand without any external equipment...
the iPhone will shoot way better video and way better audio along with it than most of these cameras will do, you know, in a layman's hands.
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So programming note.
Baby?
No, but I think we should choose wisely.
So I have ARM Windows PCs.
We have different goals here.
Your goal is to end the show early.
My goal is to have you have to leave the show to have a baby.
Because I think that would be amazing.
We're going to avoid that.
Or we just jump to Ask ATP immediately, and then we'll check back in and see how we're doing.
All right.
Then you'll just restitch it all in post?
No, we'll just have a longer after show.
Yeah.
Oh, all right.
I'm okay with that.
We'll just keep going the after show until that baby comes, damn it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, Casey, tell us more about your Jeep Wrangler ambitions.
Well, since you've asked.
I saw a broken down Wrangler on a tow truck bed the other day.
I thought of you.
oh thanks buddy i saw i saw a wrangler with uh purple uh i assume led rings on the headlights during the day so it was like during the day but there was two purple circles looking at me i think that's i think that uh that that's now stock on the newer ones not purple of course but like the new ones i think do have like angel eye style i might be wrong about that so uh double double check my work on that but i think that might be stock now that's anyway
I love that the Jeep Wrangler, if you just look at not only how they can be configured stock, but just look at what people do to them after the fact.
It's just a wonderful tour of bad decisions and bad designs and tackiness and horribleness.
Oh, stop.
It's not that bad.
It's just a different purpose.
The purpose isn't to be luxurious and fancy.
The purpose is to break shit.
Hopefully not itself, but whatever.
Well, unfortunately, that doesn't happen.
Unfortunately, it breaks itself quite often.
It occurred to me, I think it was earlier today, that I don't want the Accord because you can't get any of the nice fancy bits with the one I would get.
I may or may not want the Wrangler because it has, obviously, as much as I'm trying to defend it, a whole world of its own problems.
I don't want a Golf R because I want a sunroof.
I really friggin' love sunroofs.
You can think I'm weird.
You can think I'm crazy.
I like a sunroof.
It makes me happy.
I'm with you on that.
Sunroofs are awesome.
Right.
And the Gulf R you can't get with a sunroof.
So what do I, I'm out of options.
I either go BMW and hate myself slash maybe get a divorce or I get like a GTI, which is wrong wheel drive and not as fast.
Then I'll hate myself for not having the Gulf R. No, no, no.
What do you do?
What do you do?
I'm not, that's a rhetorical question.
Keep fixing your car until something better comes along.
That's probably the answer.
But at that point, I'm going to run out.
That's my Mac Pro technique.
Yeah, it's true.
Ten years later.
That's a very good point.
That's a very, very good point.
Oh, man.
That's funny.
Well, or alternately, keep fixing your car until you are like consulting millionaire and you can buy Julia.
yeah that's that's the answer actually that doesn't have sunroof either the the anyway i know i mean in a week it didn't bother me sunroof stink i'm anti-sunroof well because you're tall and you hate things all right there's nothing worse than having your hair touch the headliner nothing that is that is the best summary of your perspective on uh on sunroofs is you're tall and you hate things
it's true have you I'm gonna say Marco hasn't for various reasons but Casey have you ever had your hair touch the headliner in a car oh it's infuriating but I have a couple of friends I guess this one in particular that I'm thinking of that is about the same height as you so I am like six foot give or take an inch depending on the day and you're what six two is that right
Yeah, but I got more neck.
More of my height is above the belt line.
Oh, man.
John, I love you.
But anyway, the point I'm driving at is that he hates sunroofs because sunroofs, sunroofs, whatever.
Because he's constantly complaining and moaning about his head hitting the headliner.
Because apparently it's worse when you have a sunroof.
I don't really understand that.
Yeah, it intrudes into the interior space.
That's why I never buy cars with sunroofs.
Because most cars fit me with no sunroof.
As soon as you put the sunroof in, head hits the headliner.
Almost always.
No matter how low you can make the seat go.
It's even true in Hondas.
Yeah, because the sunroof is thicker, and they don't make the car taller.
They just make it intrude into the interior space.
And they don't make the seats go down lower either.
They could do that.
They could say, okay, on the sunroof models, the seat goes down an extra two inches, but they don't.
The problems of tall people.
Yeah, and I thought I had the poofier hair of the two of us, but, you know, whatever.
I used to have the poofy hair in my youth.
See, this is only a problem if you are tall and have tall hair.
No, you don't need to have tall hair.
If your physical skull hits the headliner, which can happen depending on the car, it doesn't matter what your hairstyle is.
But it's almost worse when your skull doesn't hit it, but your hair just barely hits it because it gets all staticky and it pulls.
It's the worst.
It's the worst.
Yeah, I really feel bad for you guys.
That sounds awful.
You should.
You should.
I feel bad for your head sunburn, and you should feel bad for my tickly hair headliner thing.
Savage.
Wow, this is getting aggressive.
All right, let's tone it down.
I do always have to wear a hat in the summertime.
It's funny.
I actually can't use my sunroof in the summertime usually because I have to wear a hat.
And when I do, it blows off like if it's windy.
So usually I get most of my sunroofing done in the off season in like the fall, winter and spring when I can have it hat free and hopefully not get a sunburn on my head in January.
that's why casey wants a wrangler no roof right i'm saying uh although it'll totally up my hair every time and so then i have a whole new world of problems oh yeah you're too vain for a wrangler never mind i know i'm saying uh and by the way tim underscore underscore underscore i have never driven a gti and everyone i know who has ever had that's the key phrase here had a gti always says that i'm crazy to want the gulf r the gti is better but i do know that i f***
I hate front-wheel drive with all of my being.
And so that is one major reason why I suspect I would not like a GTI.
I should try it, and I probably will try it if the time ever comes.
But I hate front-wheel drive.
And I'm swearing like a sailor because I'm assuming none of this is making the show.
You used to hate automatics, too, and then you got the Giulia.
Touche.
Fair point.
Honestly, you're really getting yourself into a BMW.
I know.
But look, it's not a big deal.
Just no going into it.
In the same way, when you buy an Apple product, we all love Apple products, but we also know that, okay, in two years, they're going to release something that makes this look ancient.
And if it's an iOS product in two years, it's going to be a lot slower than when I bought it because the new OS will be slower on this hardware.
You just kind of know that this is going to degrade in my satisfaction or in actual usage in certain ways over time.
You know that going into it.
And so you plan for that.
You do what you can to complain about it on a podcast.
But for the most part, you're kind of stuck with it.
And so you deal with it because it's better than buying Windows, right?
And so in this case, if all the attributes of a car that you actually like a lot seem to really pretty much only be available on BMWs,
it's not that ridiculous for you to buy another BMW, even though your current one has given you lots of service trouble.
Just know going into it, make the decision accordingly that like, this is going to cost money in repairs if I have to repair it.
So you can then either, you can make different decisions about things like, you know, how much do you spend on it in the first place?
Maybe like, do you save a budget for repairs later?
Or do you lease something or finance something under warranty and then get rid of it or sell it when it's out of warranty?
You can make different decisions.
It doesn't mean you need to get something that is severely lacking in areas you care about just to spite this company that couldn't give less of a damn about you.
Yeah, that's fair.
I don't know.
And part of the reason why the Volkswagen line or train of thought is appealing to me is because they're now offering six-year warranties.
As far as I'm aware, anyway, they're offering six-year warranties on all their cars.
And I tend to own a car for between six and ten years.
Yeah.
There is something appealing to me in having a car that is warrantied for that long.
And granted, I could get like an extended warranty for – I could have gotten an extended warranty for my car.
Oh, don't get those.
Those are pains.
No, those are ripoffs.
Right.
And that's the thing is that even if – like a buddy of mine who has a 2011 335 –
he got an extended warranty for his and had some sort of actually similar problem to my valve train, although I guess it was just starting to go and then fixed itself or something.
I forget the details.
I know that sounds funny.
Just go with it.
So anyway, he asked the extended warranty people, hey, can I go ahead and get this repaired?
And they were like, well, if the car is not actively exhibiting the problem, then no.
Despite the fact that the BMW tech was like, hey, we saw that this was a code that was thrown, so...
presumably it didn't do that for funsies yeah so it's just it's it's insurance all over again right it's just a freaking nightmare but anyway you you're you're cheating and using my weakness to keep me on the microphone right now and talking about cars um but we should totally accidental what we should do is we should do some ask atp and clint asks so do you think if you went bmw do you think it would be do you think it would be m3 m2 or m235i
None of the above because I can't afford it.
Because you're making me quit my job.
The 235 line is really not that ridiculous.
I can't put any kids in it then.
That's true.
By the way.
Why am I letting myself get into this?
Stop.
Stop.
We need to ask ATV.
Have you given any more thought to quitting your job?
No.
I've given an unreasonable amount of thought to that.
Stop.
Why am I allowing this?
How many offers have you gotten?
Just ballpark.
I have gotten probably, I would say less than 10.
Listeners, you know what to do.
Keep going.
Keep going.
The problem is, to be honest, I've barely explored those because I've been so swamped with pre-baby insanity that I probably seem like the most reluctant...
independent worker ever because I have a couple emails that I need to reply to.
I just haven't had the time yet.
But anyway, we'll see what happens with that.
But we should talk about Ask ATP where Clint asks, do you think Apple will delay the Mac Pro?
Why do you have to put kids in your tiny car?
You have an XC90.
You could get a car that could fit in the XC90.
That is true.
However... The M235 is a pretty small car.
And a pretty good one by all the reviews, right?
Haven't you driven one?
Yes, I did drive a several-year-old one now.
It was like three or four years old.
Well, if it was still around today, the guy who owned it has since unloaded it for basically my car, actually.
But at the time, it was maybe two years old, and it was magnificent.
Bingo.
Among other things.
Used M235.
That's a good answer.
But the problem with that is, A, I'd want the M2.
B, those are impossible to find and slightly unaffordable in C or 3.
I don't remember which one I was going for.
I do a preschool run with Declan, and I would like to be able to take both kids in the car and not leave Aaron stranded, because although Aaron is capable of driving a stick, Aaron doesn't think Aaron's capable of driving a stick, which means Aaron can't drive a stick.
So it's a bad situation.
But can we please do Ask ATP?
I need to start ignoring the car talk because you know it's my weakness.
Is the M2 available with a DCT?
So Clint asks, do you think Apple will delay the Mac Pro?
John, would you tell me, if you don't mind, do you think Apple will delay the Mac Pro release?
Car and driver test the BMW M2 DCT, so obviously it exists.
Let's see.
That looks pretty nice.
And Aaron could drive a DCT.
We can do car stuff after Ask ATP, Marco.
Don't worry.
We can string them along later.
We just got to get through this.
Just work with me, people.
Work with me.
So, good luck editing this one.
I'll see you next time.
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So Clint asks, do you think Apple will delay the Mac Pro release until a new CPU architecture has been designed?
I personally don't think that'll be the case unless Intel says, hey, it's already designed and it's imminent and we'll have it out in a month, which will never happen.
So no, I don't think so.
Marco, what do you think?
Oh, man, Sam McGeet just found a used listing for a white M2.
This is your car.
This is perfect.
Concentrate, Marco.
It's a Mac Pro question.
You should be excited about this one.
I'll answer because Marco's not into it.
The reason Apple better not wait, because I think it's actually going to be longer than people think before there is a literal new CPU architecture that works around this issue, because this issue is deeply embedded into the way CPUs have been designed for many, many years.
And unless Intel started on this project four years ago,
a new cpu that solves this problem is not coming anytime soon uh but more importantly like i don't want apple to delay anything like they're going to continue to sell imac pros and all the other computers with these cpus that are vulnerable to this with os level workarounds and that's what they're going to do with the mac pro 2 so no no delay for no delay for this anyway yeah the last thing you want is to give apple a reason to delay the mac pro please don't give them reasons even i would agree with that
And that's not a thread on the Spectre Meltdown stuff, like exactly how long the timelines are for a new architecture.
If you start today, oh, we haven't been doing anything to mitigate this as yet, you know, this unknown, you know, we didn't know about Spectre Meltdown until, you know, a couple weeks ago or whatever.
let's start today on a new architecture let's take whatever project we've been working on and modify it to account for this the timelines are long it's not like well give us a couple months and we'll have a new cpu out if you look at how long it takes to go from idea to actual design to you know laying out i don't know if they still call it taping out
to fabbing and verifying like those timelines are long so don't hold your breath for brand new cpu architectures that completely eliminate this category of error there could be smaller fixes coming to minor revisions of existing chips that help either help mitigate it or help make it so that the os level workarounds are not don't have as big of a performance hit that could happen in the near term if they scramble but
But it's such a big change to actually make this category of bug not exist and also maintain performance that I think it's going to be years.
Also, keep in mind that the Mac Pro and iMac Pro use Xeon chips.
Xeons are the last chips in Intel's lineup to get new microarchitectures.
So whenever they fix it in their consumer chips, you're not going to see it in any kind of Xeon workstation for another year and a half to three years after that.
Yeah.
Even I don't want this to be delayed.
And God, I just need to get through the Mac Pro discussion.
And if I can get through the forthcoming Mac Pro discussion, like in future episodes, whenever it's announced, then I think the show may be able to last forever.
Because if I can make it through that, I'll be good.
Bryson asks, John, I heard you say that High Sierra root bug.
We got a great message from a friend.
That's why I was distracted for a half second.
Messaging the three of us saying, can someone explain RxSwift?
It's important.
I know there's a cold by tomorrow morning.
Thanks.
Casey, I think you know something about RxSwift.
Can you help our friend out after the show?
No, stop it.
Maybe after the show.
Why are you using all my weaknesses against me?
Also, today I learned I have like 17 different flavors of kryptonite.
Anyway...
So what is Rx?
Is that prescription Swift?
What is that?
What does that mean?
Yes, it's prescription Swift.
Oh, God, I hate all of you, including our nameless friend.
Bryson asks, John, I heard you say about the HighCR root bug that you keep your root account enabled anyway, so you already had a strong password.
For what reason do you need the root account?
Why not just use sudo?
What does root do that sudo can't?
I'm actually curious to hear this as well, because I don't have a root account with a password, and I just use sudo for everything that I would need.
And I do dive into the command line daily, but I strongly suspect I am not doing near as much in the command line as you are, John.
So can you address this?
What's the purpose for the root account having a password, or is it just you needing a tinfoil hat?
Yeah.
It's the opposite, actually.
What you're doing is the better way to do things.
Do everything as the user, only do sudo when you need to do something with heightened privileges.
But the worst habit that I do, because I'm old, is just hang out as rude all the time.
You know, because I don't use package managers.
I compile and install things, you know, myself.
And
it's just convenient to just always be root and have all of my source files owned by root and build everything as root.
And that's incredibly dangerous to do that.
You should not do this.
I do not recommend this practice, but it is my habit.
And because it's my habit and it's my computer, I do it.
And many years of experience, including accidentally destroying a couple of OSs in my youth, has led me to be pretty careful and pretty safe.
But still, it's not a good idea.
You should do everything as your user and just elevate privileges.
briefly only when you need it marco any thoughts no about this about this specifically for the love of god you know i i'm thinking of traveling to manhattan i want to know if you had any pizza recommendations so many cryptos one recommendation yeah it'll be quick uh john's a bleaker moving on jim andway asks marco did you ever buy a sonos one with alexa and if so do you like it
No, actually, I pre-ordered it, and then before it came out, when the reviews started coming out, I canceled the pre-order because I realized I didn't care that much.
I have some Sonos stuff, but I wouldn't say I'm super in the Sonos ecosystem.
I find their app fairly clunky for the things I want to do with my music, so I almost never want to actually use it for anything.
So, in the other side...
I love the Amazon Echo and use it constantly.
And it's very, very nice.
And one of the things that the Sonos One, I think, was worse about is, you know, like every Echo that comes out since the original Tower and Dot, it doesn't have the hardware volume dial on the top.
And some of the other reviews said that they thought the microphones might be a little bit worse, or at least that they were having some trouble with them.
And so I just decided, you know what, I don't need this, so just cancel it.
And I'm very happy with my first-generation Amazon Echo with the big hardware volume knob and the nice microphones, and it's totally fine.
And I haven't bought any of the new Echos yet either because, you know, same reason, basically.
I'm very happy with the old one, and we don't really have any needs for any additional ones at this time.
All right, so how do we want to approach this?
Do you want to do ARM and keep me here for 17 hours?
Yes.
Or do you want to do... No, no, that's it.
That's it.
Time for the after show.
I thought we were doing a longer after show.
Are we talking about cars?
Don't worry, we've got plenty of stuff for the after show.
What do we have for the after show?
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Linode, and Fracture.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
And if you're into Twitter, 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.
They didn't.
Accidental Tech Podcast.
So long.
My first question for Casey is, what system have you established for this podcasting recording tonight to be notified that it's time to stop podcasting?
There are several mechanisms.
There is iMessage.
There is Aaron coming in the room.
Actually, I guess that's really it.
It's basically either iMessage or Aaron storms in here and says, it's time.
Or screaming.
I was going to say that, but we are basically on opposite corners of the house.
So yes, that would work, but it would need to be significant enough that it would wake up me and well, not that I'm asleep.
You know what I mean?
Like it would, it would have to get through me and it would wake up Declan and Aaron has a, I don't want to use the word heroic, but I can't think of a better adjective, just a heroic threshold for pain.
Um, and so because of that, I wouldn't be surprised if she could go through something that would render me unconscious and she just would, you know, have like a little, eh, that hurt, you know, or something like that.
So, um, anyway, I would expect that she would either I message me or she would just come storming in and say, this is it.
I was worried that she's like having contractions now and she can't bring herself to even do a text message.
She's just down on the other side of the house, bearing down, wishing you would know that it's time to stop podcasting.
And here you are continuing to podcast.
That certainly could be.
But as of about half an hour ago, I was being kept abreast of the situation.
And I sincerely doubt that's the case.
It's time to turn the baby monitor on mom so you can be aware of what's going on.
Actually, come to think of it, we did get an entire second baby monitor for Sprig, which we planned – well, actually, what we ended up doing was just pairing the second – the camera from the other baby monitor to our existing baby monitor.
But it was like –
20 bucks more to get the whole monitor rather than to just get an extra camera well you know what i mean or something like that it was it was it was silly not to just get a whole redundant setup so anyways i bring all this up to say i could hypothetically put that baby monitor camera back on air and and take the redundant monitor in here but no as far as i know she's asleep which means if i sent her a text message right now she'd probably be like yep it's it's coming sooner rather than later but we'll see
You think she's asleep right now?
As far as I know, she was trying to.
I mean, that's wise.
Honestly, you should be sleeping right now if you're expecting this to happen tonight or tomorrow.
Indeed.
With my first kid, my wife's water broke at midnight.
We were up, we were about to go to bed, but broke at midnight and the doctor was like, you should just go to sleep and come to the hotel.
Come to the hospital in the morning.
I don't think it's possible when you're having, certainly your first kid and your wife's water has broken.
Oh, we're just going to get some sleep now.
Yeah, sure.
Everyone will just nod right off.
Nothing will be occupying our minds that keeps us from sleeping.
So we just sat there in the bed, not sleeping for five hours, then went to the hospital.
Oh, God.
They're told, or at least in our experience, Aaron was told, you can't eat anything anymore.
And so because of that, you know, everything becomes uncomfortable.
Not that it wasn't already uncomfortable, but everything becomes more uncomfortable for the woman once you arrive at the hospital.
So for a lot of reasons, most doctors will say.
For the best that you can or to the best that you can, try to avoid coming into the hospital until it's really getting on go time.
And on the way into the hospital, go gorge yourself on some sort of fast food because especially the mom is not going to be eating for a long time.
Yeah.
um as far as if i were to wager a guess unless something is going on in there that i'm not aware of um i think tomorrow morning we're probably going to wake up find somebody to well i mean we have plenty of options but find somebody to take care of declan and probably call it in oh yeah that reminds me like other than the system of notification declan's still hanging out in your house snoozing away right now too what's the uh what's the handoff plan there
So we have neighbors that live very close by that, you know, like walkably close by that could come over.
Aaron's youngest sister is a short drive away and Aaron's mom is about 20 minutes away.
And so there's, you know, a multi-tiered approach that we can go to if we need to leave in the middle of the night.
I'm getting flashback anxiety from the fact that you don't have someone in your house right now.
and stand by declan duty the idea that you're going to have enough time for someone to show up at your house so that you'll be able to divert right because it was my situation was we had we had a friend all lined up too all hours of the night no worries like you know if it's 3 a.m the time just give us a call we'll be there and my friend was good to his word he you know was there uh but by the time he showed up the baby was out so there's that yeah
Yeah, I that honest to God, your birth story, your and Tina's birth story that has weighed on me heavily for the last month or two.
And I'm not saying that to be funny.
Like I really, really has because so often Aaron will be like, not just her.
I'll be like, you know, oh, well, your mom, your mom will be here in like 20 minutes.
I'm sure that'll be fine.
And then one of us will say to the it should be.
It totally should be.
I mean, you know how long it was, Declan.
You have plenty of time.
Exactly.
And Declan was a very long birth and so it should be fine.
But then I think about Portina who says, hey, why don't you go get the neighbor because I think it's time.
And then next thing you know, oh, there's your youngest in the bedroom in your hands.
There was a lot of screaming and blood between those two phases, but yeah.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that I kid you not.
I'll say it again.
Like your birth story, your mutual birth story for when your daughter was born has weighed heavily on me, especially in the last month.
But for Declan, you know, it was, I think, Monday morning.
It doesn't really matter.
But it was one morning.
I think it was a Monday morning that Aaron woke up and was like, well, I'm having a lot of Braxton Hicks and then went about her day.
Then it was the middle of the night Tuesday that it was becoming obvious that, no, this was it.
And we went into the hospital.
I want to say it was Tuesday morning.
And, you know, by the time we went to the OB to see if this was it.
And the OB took literally didn't even make her second leg in the doorway to look at Aaron.
She only had one foot in the doorway in the examination room.
and turned around and shouted down the hall, Hey, can you call L and D we have one coming.
And so, um, that was a Tuesday morning and Declan was born at like five 36 o'clock on Wednesday morning or something like that.
So clearly not all of this was, well, it's easy for a dude to say this, right.
But not all of this was like the hyper intense labor, but it was labor for like two full days.
Um, and so it stands to reason.
He says, as he knocks on his glass desk, because there's no wood nearby that, uh,
that Sprig will not make a your youngest styled appearance.
But we'll see about that.
Is it possible, given Aaron's stated tolerance for pain, that you already have a second kid?
Right.
I mean, we were talking about the iMac Pro for a long time.
That is true.
And then cars are even longer.
It is certainly possible.
I did send her a text message about 10 or 15 minutes ago and she has not responded, which means either she is trying to sleep, is asleep, or there's a kid in the other room and I just don't know it.
I mean, you are on the other side of the house.
Anything is possible.
Do you want me to go check?
Is that what you're trying to tell me?
But yeah, it's funny because Aaron and I, I don't know how much this comes across on the show.
And I mean, I know you two know this, but for your average listener, I don't know if it's obvious.
But
Aaron and I are both like super duper type A, super anal retentive, love to have every T crossed, every I dotted, every minute planned.
And it's funny because with this one, there's not a lot of planning you can do for a kid unless you have a scheduled induction, which we do have for a few days from now, but it's certainly not looking like we're going to make it.
The official due date was yesterday, right?
No, it's today.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
So, I mean, it's on schedule.
It could be right on time.
Yeah, exactly.
But I bring up us being anal retentive because when it comes to Declan, we're basically like, as soon as we have done that initial handoff that you were asking about, John, as soon as that happens, whatever, just somebody amongst you, my family, Aaron's family, just figure it out amongst yourselves and make sure he's still alive in a day and a half or whenever it is that we can get him in the hospital so he can meet his little brother or little sister.
Yeah.
It's been funny for us to just have to embrace being that, like, I don't know, freewheeling, if you will, and just be like, hey, you know what?
He's three years old.
He's reasonably self-sufficient in the sense that he's not going to, like,
you know live in a poopy diaper for 18 days because he's not using diapers you know except at night he's he's able to find like in a desperation scenario for some reason i'm sure he could scrounge up a little bit of like crackers or something not to say we're gonna leave him home alone i'm just saying like in the world ending you hear that deck then the new baby has already stolen your parents love
Yeah, just like that.
Just like that.
There's none left for you.
Sorry.
Like you realize in these scenarios, like you're going to jail.
Oh, yeah, yeah, exactly.
We would never do that.
I'm just saying, you know, if for some reason there was some sort of miscommunication and I don't know why my this is a terrible.
Do you have a thing planned where like where the new baby is going to give Declan the present?
We did.
You know, we've waffled.
We've waffled back and forth on that and we don't have a present.
So I guess the answer is no.
We I don't really have a good answer on it.
I see both sides of that story.
And because we're so fresh off of Christmas and Hanukkah that there's nothing that he's told us he's really seeking at the moment.
You know what I mean?
And I know that doesn't mean we can't get him something anyway.
He doesn't know what he wants yet, but what he actually wants is not another sibling.
Well, right now he's very enthusiastic about his other sibling.
Oh, yeah.
They're great when they're inside mommy.
Exactly.
Yeah.
This is all going to change in just a minute.
They might get along.
But we did the gift.
I don't know.
This is probably my wife's idea.
But here to tell you, it did not help.
with my particular two children it did not help maybe maybe a strategy is you can give him a gift that is worse than a new sibling um in some way that seems like like man like when i was a kid i remember like one christmas i begged and begged and begged only having seen it on commercials for the remote control typhoon hovercraft and boy was that terrible oh yeah i had one of those why you don't let your kids watch commercials oh it was great except it was terrible
There's a reason why you don't see a lot of hovercraft to noose in the world, and one of the reasons is you can't really steer them very well.
Turns out friction is really nice, and they don't really have a lot of that.
Also, they're incredibly loud, at least the little remote control one.
It's like, you know, two little like hair dryers on the back of this thing for the five minutes or so that the battery lasts before it dies.
I was just about to say, because you're powering three different motors off of this like mid 90s, maybe even early 90s battery tech.
Yeah, it was a big like NICAD battery pack, like the size of like eight double A's, one of those big yellow rectangles.
It's like, oh man, it was truly terrible.
It was no fun at all.
Oh, who is this?
Who is this in the chat?
No, Chloe de Guzman.
I'm sorry if I pronounced that wrong.
Just put the link in the chat.
And this is what I had.
Although I think mine was green, but this is what I had.
And oh, my God, it was amazing for the two and a half minutes it was working.
But it's funny because in this commercial, you see it running across water, which hypothetically it should be able to do.
Oh, no, you can't do that.
But that's the thing, because if you take your finger off the throttle for even the slightest moment, then the I don't remember the term for it, but the bag under it, like the buoyancy bag skirt will deflate.
Yes, the skirt.
Thank you.
The buoyancy bag, the skirt, the whatever will instantly deflate and then you sink your hovercraft and that's that.
So you have to like really, really commit if you're going to go across water.
And I think possibly the most stressful moment of my childhood was when I did put it in a pool for like five seconds and drive it, you know, and I think I was standing within like arm's reach of it.
So if it started to sink, I could grab it because I loved this thing, even though it was a colossal piece of garbage.
like i would just try to play with it indoors and you just can't like you're crashing into walls constantly like there's nowhere you can go with it and then yeah like i remember like at the lake uh i saw somebody have one and they broke it because they took it onto the water the back end of it sunk down for a split second and when they put the fans back on the the propeller of one of the rear like propulsion fans hit the surface of the water and just broke
Like it was just these things were not built well.
And yeah, this was just not it was such a bad toy anyway.
So I'm saying if you get definitely one of these as his new awesome gift, it is so much worse than having a new baby that he might then see the baby as like the upgrade.
You know, Marco, I got to be honest with you.
I think, you know, we've known each other something like 20 years and we're pretty good, pretty darn good friends.
And I'm gonna have to tell you, I'm a little disappointed in you because clearly the right answer for a gift for Declan is either a brand new M3 or a brand new Wrangler.
That's the only reasonable solution to this problem, am I right?
No, M2.
Honestly, the M2 is the better car for your purposes.
I mean, the only thing is that, yeah, you do lose the four-door-ness of the M3.
So in that way, I guess you probably should get an M3 because it's the more continuation of what you already have.
But as like an enthusiast car...
I really think the M2 is the way to go.
Not to mention, it's probably a much better value.
Downside, of course, being, as you mentioned earlier, that there's not that many of them, and most of them are not used.
And yeah, of course, two doors.
Now that you're on the automatic bandwagon and BMW is in a down period, you should consider something like DeMuro's car, like an E63 AMG or the modern one.
These are fast, high-quality, four-door cars with plenty of room that are very safe, reliable, not that expensive if you get an old one.
And you'll be fine with the automatic.
You don't need to shift anymore.
You're talking about good Mercedeses?
Aren't you too young for that?
Yeah.
In the current generation of cars, like I said, BMW didn't finish in any of the car driver's 10 best for the first time in a very, very long time.
And there are Mercedes in there.
The Mercedes E, especially the AMG ones, are...
Fast and fancy.
I mean, the Giulia's still a better car than them, but the Mercedes are probably more reliable, definitely more swanky, and we know how Casey needs to be babied in his old age.
No, but see, but the problem is he's not old enough.
Like, okay, like 15 years ago, WRX would have been the right move.
15 years from now, Casey, might be Mercedes.
But right now, Casey?
Oh, you got the wrong image of Mercedes.
This is not your father's Mercedes.
Plus, as soon as that second baby arrives, it will age him instantly like 10 more years, so...
It's a multiplier for, it's a multiplying for how old, how old you feel.
He's still going to do five more years before they're going to let him into a Mercedes dealer.
No, you get the, the AMG ones.
It's fine.
No, it's actually to speak about how old and entitled I am.
Who was I talking to just the other day?
Shoot.
Um,
Oh, it was my buddy who just got the brand new Accord, coincidentally.
And he was saying that he had to bring his in.
I think he was getting like an aftermarket but dealer installed.
Oh, Erin is awake and she has not had the kid.
Real-time follow-up.
All right.
Baby still inside wife.
Repeat, baby still inside wife.
And it seems that things are just not regular.
So whatever.
Anyway.
Are things ever regular?
fair point um uh the accord guy took his car in for service to get like some aftermarket thing installed i forget what it was i think it was like rear a rear usb charger or whatever i think there was like a honda part that he could have installed so you can charge something via usb in the back anyway he was talking about how he had to go to enterprise to get a loner and i was just like my face kind of imploded it was like that oh like that oh god you have to go to get a loner to like they don't just give you one oh yeah so you're
So this is the show how you can't go back again to live like the little people.
Right.
No, I'm serious.
I'm saying this partially to be funny, but I really did have that brief reaction of like, oh, God, that's right.
You would have to go somewhere to get a rental.
And that just sounds fricking terrible.
And like, listen to how obnoxious and entitled I am.
Like, I'm not proud of this.
I'm really not.
I'm just saying as soon as you cross that threshold into quote unquote luxury automobiles, you start to get used to this thing.
And it's hard.
Like, this is why I can understand why all these like athletes and movie stars and whatnot are entitled because it's
Once you get exposed to that, it's like, well, I don't want to go back to having to worry about going down to one car while my car gets serviced.
That seems barbaric.
And then the next thought that goes through my head is, wow, Casey, you're an a**hole.
It's really not a big deal.
Fair point, fair point.
The one tip, though, for people who are peons like me who have Hondas and go to Honda dealerships is depending on your dealership, you can find... My dealership, speaking of Enterprise, has Enterprise rental counter right in the dealership.
And if you get any significant amount of service done, you get the rental for free.
So essentially, you get a loaner Honda for free as part of your service without having to go in anywhere.
So it's like the...
I mean, I'm going to say low rent, but it's the it's the equivalent version of so you bring in your BMW.
Here's a BMW to drive.
So you bring in your Honda.
Here's a Honda drive.
No charge.
If you're the thing, whatever you're having done is above some minimum amount of money.
And if you're going to a dealer, it probably is because dealers charge a million dollars for everything, even Honda dealers.
Um, but yeah, it's a little bit different, uh, not having that be an amenity of the dealer, but having it be like, well, we have this, we have this relationship with enterprise and you know, I've never paid for an enterprise rental, but I have gotten free enterprise rentals many times.
How I know, uh, how much I hate all of the, the Honda Accords that I didn't buy is all from, uh, essentially loaner cars when my car is getting serviced.
The other way I do it, how the way the little people do it is I sit there and wait for my car to be done.
I've done that from time to time.
Confession, my first thought was going to be to complain about my local BMW waiting area because it just isn't as cushy and nice as some other BMW dealers I've been to.
How far gone am I?
How much of a frigging jerk am I that the first thought that jumps through my head is, yeah, but John, you don't understand that the service area in this local BMW is just okay.
It's very nice.
A service area.
You mean a bunch of chairs shoved next to a water cooler?
That's what I'm saying.
How obnoxious am I?
I need to get a regular person's car so I don't lose myself forever.
I need to buy a pedestrian Civic.
Oh, God.
I'm so terrible.
Well, it's different amounts of luxury because the number of valve trains I've ever had exploded in any of my cars is zero.
So I have that going for me.
That's true.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't need a loaner if the thing is never getting serviced for more than an hour at a time.
I've never had a repair that has cost as much as my car was worth.
Truth.
Too soon.
Oh, how much?
So that repair, you didn't pay for it, right?
Because it was like warranty or whatever.
But if you had paid for it, it would have been like five grand or something.
The valve train issue.
Yeah, it was like five or six grand of which I paid, I think, five or 10% of it.
What ended up happening was for all the things that were done during that visit, I think the total bill was like six grand of which I paid about a thousand.
And so what was the value of your car at the time you had a $6,000 repair?
That's $20,000 to $30,000, I think, and now it's probably $10,000 to $20,000.
So you were like a quarter of the value of your car in repair?
Yeah.
I mean, it's something like that.
And then, remember, it happened again about a year, year and a half later, but they covered that, not literally under warranty, I guess.
It's scheduled.
It's coming up soon, right?
Your next one.
That warning light that it threw.
Why you do this?
i was i was thinking of you uh when i was reading oh this is scary i don't remember i was reading it it might have been a paper magazine might have been the internet it's really hard to tell these days but it was talking about bmw's uh
electric car programs and how battery technology is getting better and BMW engineering bragging that their service lifetime of their electric cars is exactly the same as it is for their gasoline cars.
And all I could think was, that's nothing to brag about given the apparent service lifetime of Casey's car.
It's like, this battery will last you 15 years.
Hmm.
Hmm.
No.
They're like 70% capacity after 15 years of use.
It's like, well...
What is the service lifetime of... How old is your car now, though?
It just had its seventh birthday.
Like, it was delivered to the original owner in early December of 2010.
I feel like that's not a 15-year service lifetime.
I mean, it is.
Like, again, I'm very frustrated with my car.
But really, in the grand scheme of things, like, this was a pretty significant repair.
A very significant repair.
But in the grand scheme of things, like, the car sitting here now, as far as I'm aware, I drove it...
earlier today, the car is operating very, very well.
It has a few squeaks and a few rattles, but nothing too terribly egregious.
It's really running pretty darn well.
The thing is, I've had to pour way more money into it than I think I should have had to.
And that's the problem I have with it.
This is in comparison to Aaron's Mazda, which I was happy to get rid of.
But that thing we took delivery on her birthday in 2007.
So that was August of 2007.
And we got rid of it in July of 2017.
And I think we might have done an alternator once.
And I think we did a battery.
And other than that, it was just like tires and brakes and, you know, normal wear items.
And so in 10 years, we put, let's get aggressive.
And let's say we put like two grand of non-wear item worth of repair into that Mazda.
In 10 years.
And I did that in 10 minutes when my valve train exploded for the first time.
Do you know what I mean?
So it's hard because on the one side, I feel like, oh, this thing has been on the whole reasonably reliable if you discount all the times that it exploded for a week.
As much as I am slightly bothered by Doug DeMuro videos, one thing I have to admit that he has going for him is he picks interesting cars to review.
Not the new ones, obviously, because whatever everyone's doing, fancy new cars, or not even the fancy exotic ones, but when he goes to older cars, he tends to pick cars, at the very least, that have some meaning to me.
The most recent one he did was the...
The late 80s, very early 90s Mercedes S-Class.
I saw that that was a thing, but I'm way behind on YouTube because I'm way behind on podcasts.
Yeah, my friend's dad had one of those that he bought used.
He didn't buy it new.
He owned his own business and he had some money, but not new Mercedes money, but he had used Mercedes money.
And I took a couple of trips with his family in that car.
I think that's where I started to get super impressed by Mercedes because even just being a passenger, the difference in every aspect of that car from even from the fancy yuppie cars my parents had like a series of Volvos and stuff and Hondas and before that a bunch of American junk cars.
uh it was very impressive so i've just started that video but it's really taken me back to see like the switch gear on the 80s mercedes and those those mercedes i mean they're they're not sporty cars like let's put it this way but they were just they just felt so solid and every part of it was so ridiculously over engineered uh very very german in the best possible way and i i think sometimes i think that you might be happier with a
older used car that you get cheaper that you it's so old that you know you're going to be sinking money into it but you pick it based on like character or nostalgia or you know something like that where you instead of going for it has to be like modern super fast like resign yourself to actually getting a slow old car that has a lot of character maybe that's what the wrangler is to you i don't know in which case you should not buy a new wrangler you should buy a used one
So the real answer to what you're describing is I would kill almost everyone I knew for an E39 M5.
So this is early 2000s.
It's six-speed only, V8, about 400 horsepower.
Yeah.
In a lot of ways, I think that's the right answer because they can be had for – last I looked, which is a long time ago, between $10,000 and $20,000 for a reasonable example that hasn't been too badly obliterated.
But the thing is –
As they get older and older and older, they get more and more and more finicky and thus require more and more and more repairs.
So now I'm trading a reasonably modern BMW that's constantly in need of repair for an older and more interesting BMW that's constantly in need of repair.
But it costs way less.
Like, just set aside double the price of the car for repairs for the next eight years.
Like Marco was saying.
And you still come out ahead versus buying a brand new Mercedes at some ridiculous price once you add all the options in.
Yeah.
Like, the price of getting a car new is so much more than maintaining an old one, generally speaking.
Like, if what you're concerned about is total long-term value, John's right.
Well, and that's why I bought the BMW used is, you know, I suppose if you balance the checkbook, if you will, we could have afforded to buy a new 335, but it would have been a financially unwise decision to make.
And that's why, you know, I saved like 15 grand off the sticker by buying the car that I just told you was delivered in December 2010.
I bought it in September 2012.
Yeah.
And saved like 15 grand.
And the reason that I'm harping on new cars for me, because otherwise, were it not for what I'm about to tell you, I would absolutely be looking at either lightly used new-ish cars or something ancient like John's describing.
But the problem I have is that I've gotten it in my brain, for better or worse, that I really, really do not want to buy a car that does not support car play.
Because to my eyes, that kind of future proofs the infotainment in a way that my car can't be.
And I can get updates for infotainment to some degree, but it's never going to change the fact that it's like a five pixel by five pixel display and that it's got a terribly slow processor that can't handle zooming.
Like, remember, Marco, when we were in the M5 and I zoomed the map for the first time, or maybe you zoomed the map, and I was like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
It actually zooms.
It doesn't just jump between zoom levels.
It actually animates the zoom and it blew my mind.
And so because of that, I've gotten it in my brain that I want something with CarPlay.
And I'm pretty darn sure the Wrangler has it.
I know the Gophar has it.
That's part of the reason why – that and the sunroof are reasons why I genuinely don't think money no object I would have the Alfa Romeo because it does not support CarPlay and the infotainment system was at best mediocre.
And so once you – if you look at my obnoxious requirements, like I'm the world's worst consulting client, right?
Because I want –
Three pedals that go zero to 60 in five-ish seconds, that's not front-wheel drive, that supports CarPlay, that has a sunroof.
These requirements, the only thing, and this comes back around to what Marco was saying, pretty much the only thing that meets all these requirements is a brand-new 340.
But the other requirement I have is not BMW, so now what?
Your requirements are so defined by your experience with BMW, though.
That's what I'm saying.
If you get an older car, forget about CarPlay.
Just get a phone thing that clips into the vents and shove your phone in the dash.
There's your navigation.
It will never go out of date.
You keep buying new phones and clipping them in the clip.
And then just get a car with character that has some sort of nostalgia value that you can get cheap that you will put $5,000 into every single year, and it'll just be your little...
hobby fun thing and it will be slow that'll be slower than a civic type r or whatever but you know just uh i don't know i don't know i guess maybe the mac pro strategy is is the thing to do and just keep on keeping on until that thing really explodes for good
I mean, that very well may be the thing.
And actually, it was funny because just before we got on the microphones tonight, I was brushing my teeth and I was thinking to myself, you know what?
If I really am serious about this consulting or whatever thing I want to do instead of a jobby job, if I'm really serious about this, the number one thing change I need to make in my life is
Yeah.
Or at least, at the very least, drive my BMW until I've proven to myself that, you know, Casey List Incorporated is making money.
You know what I mean?
And that's not a bad thing.
That's a perfectly fine decision to make.
It's just a less exciting decision to make.
This is going to be a year of lots of changes.
Even if you don't change your job situation, you still are going to have a second kid in three minutes.
That's going to be a huge, massive change in addition to all of the developmental stages and things that Declan is going through during this time.
You're going to have a big change this year.
You might be, you know, in many ways, this might be a bad time to buy a new car because you're just too busy with other stuff.
You know, like buying a car, especially for somebody like you who cares about it, is a time consuming endeavor, as you know, because you just bought the Volvo like, you know, two weeks ago or whatever.
Like, you know, you know how much time it consumes to go through that process.
You also, therefore, can probably see, like, even if money wasn't the problem, it's still not probably a good idea for you, car nerd Casey, who cares a lot about things, to embark on that kind of mission right now.
Well, let me get this straight.
Starting a consulting business, good time.
Buying a car, no, you're too busy.
Honestly, yes.
Because look, your job stuff is going through a bunch of transitions regardless because you have this time off and you have this new person that they hired or whatever.
You have training and time off, and then you're going to have to go back and get plunged into the deep end of, oh my god, I'm back to work again in two months or whatever.
And that's going to suck completely.
No matter how happy you are with that job and how happy they are with you, that's going to be a massive transition to jump from paternity leave, full-time dad at home, to...
Still having to be full-time dad at home and also then jumping back into work.
That's a huge transition.
So it's going to be a very busy spring for you.
Even if you don't go back to... Even if you don't do consulting instead of going back to work, it's still going to be a very busy spring for you.
So it's only a question of which of these busy paths you take.
But to add on top of that...
buying a new car as a car enthusiast, I don't think it's a good time for that.
Well, I see both sides of this, right?
Because part of the reason it took us forever to buy the Volvo is because we were trying to extract the lowest possible price that we could achieve from several different dealers in several different states, right?
And that's partially because the Volvo was, if I'm honest, a little outside the price that we were willing to pay, but we were reaching, just like a first-time homebuyer, at least this was my experience—
When we bought the house we're in now, you know, we found it even despite the fact that it was more expensive than we told ourselves we would we would be willing to pay.
But anyways, I think if I really was hell bent on buying a car and I had carte blanche from Aaron to do it.
Which I think, you know, if I looked at her and said, no, really, it's time I need to get one.
I don't think she would really be opposed to it.
But anyways, if I think within a day or most a weekend, I could drive the three to six cars I would like to drive to try them out to see what I think.
And if I'm not nickel and diming the dealer to death over every little thing.
I think I could have it done in a weekend like I understand what you're saying Marco and the typical Casey approach is to nickel and dime and to email every dealer in a three to five state radius and say this is what I want and what's the best price you can give and then argue with them when they inevitably don't tell me the best price they can get because they're incentivized not to tell me the best price they can get even beyond that.
There's the research beforehand.
There's all the thinking and reading and stuff you're doing beforehand.
Yeah, but I do that constantly anyway.
That's true.
But there's all that.
Then you get the car.
Then you have to do registrations and license.
There's paperwork to have a car.
There's things that you have to change or activate about the new car.
There's a lot of overhead.
And, you know, if you're going to be spending a lot of overhead in the next few months on something, I think priority one is baby.
Priority two is Declan.
Priority three is Aaron.
Priority four is yourself.
And then priority five is job situation.
And, you know, then maybe priority like 11 is, oh, I kind of want a new car also.
Like this is such a weird time to do that.
Like, you know, it's just not.
Yeah, that's not good.
Yeah, fair.
i don't know john you've been quiet what are you thinking i'm thinking you should go to bed i like that i get all that restful sleep that you're gonna get get the sleep while you can no i was saying i think you're probably not gonna get a lot of sleep especially yeah well i i guess we're gonna lose this i i guess i guess you're not gonna have a baby on the air let's pick some titles you still got time oh god bless america you're right
Would it be insensitive for me, like if Aaron ran in to say this is time, would it be insensitive of me to ask you to please put your file in Dropbox before you go?
Actually, yes, because I'm going to bring my adorable with me.
And as you both well know, unless it's a...
He'll have plenty of time while she's, you know, seriously doing the hard work of birthing a baby.
He'll be sitting there tapping away on his laptop.
How's it going over there?
Well, no, maybe a lot of just waiting.
No, I'm serious.
I had my computer with me when when Declan was born.
And up until the like the overnight when he was born, you know, like I said earlier, he was born at like five in the morning.
Up until that overnight portion, she was basically just waiting around getting – what's the drug that makes the – that they use for inductions?
Pitocin?
Thank you.
Yes.
She was getting her pitocin drip or whatever and just kind of waiting.
It took forever to get to the point that it was all hands on deck.
This is it.
And so –
I had a computer, and I don't remember what we were doing, but I definitely had some downtime.
In fact, you should have seen Erin's face when I asked her where my Switch was, and I told her it was because I wanted to bring it so we could play Mario Kart together.
She did not find that funny at all.
I thought it was hilarious, and I was also serious, but she did not see the humor in it at all.
I mean, if you're going to bring the Switch, you've got to at least bring a Pro Controller for her so that she's comfortable while using it.
Right?
I mean, I was debating bringing the dock, but I won't.
But I will have a HDMI adapter.
What are you going to plug it into?
The TV in the room.
Yeah.
Why not?
Casey's got a whole little setup over there.
He's got snacks.
He's got a switch.
He's got a little TV set up.
He's got a fan blowing on him.
You bring in like a dorm fridge?
We have snacks packed.
Don't even worry.
Sir, the birthing tub is for your wife.
Oh, it is?
My bad.
I've actually – I've been trying to get the most recent episode of This Is Us onto my adorable so the two of us can watch that while she's just sitting there waiting for things to happen.
But anyway, so – Is that how she sees it?
Just sitting there like waiting?
To some degree because she knows how Declan went and she knows that there was a lot of sitting and waiting.
But here again, there's Tina's second – well, Tina and John's second birth where it's like, are you sure you're going to be doing a lot of sitting and waiting?
Because you have lights.
I mean, it'll almost surely go faster than the first, but how much faster?
Who knows?
If it's half the time, it's still many, many hours, right?
Exactly, exactly.
Anyway, we should do titles.
My pick is a heroic threshold for pain in honor of Aaron.