Smell the Wind
Casey:
So we should probably catch everyone up in case they weren't aware.
Casey:
Aaron did, in fact, have our baby early Thursday morning.
Casey:
So for those of you who may have heard the last episode, you may recall that that was recorded Tuesday night, and I didn't really want to get into it during the show, but Aaron was actually starting to have contractions during the show.
Casey:
It was shortly before the show that
Casey:
We looked at each other and said, oh, yeah, this is probably it.
Casey:
So we we went into the OB the following morning, Wednesday morning, and the OB had said, oh, she'll definitely Aaron will definitely be done by evening time.
Casey:
And as we got closer and closer to the evening time, oh, it'll be definitely done by midnight.
Casey:
And as we got closer and closer to midnight, oh, it'll be definitely done any second now.
Casey:
And sure enough, a little after three in the morning, Aaron blessed our family with a little girl whose name is Michaela Charlotte.
Casey:
And we are overjoyed and very tired, which is exactly the normal response for having a newborn.
Casey:
Oh, and I started to say earlier, and then I got myself sidetracked,
Casey:
We did what appears to be the inverse of the Syracuse family approach because our first child was, or at least my hazy memory of Declan, was reasonably easy in the grand scheme of things.
Casey:
Like any child is a royal pain in the tuchus, but nonetheless, Declan was reasonably easy, whereas Michaela is...
Casey:
Starting out, anyway, considerably more challenging.
Casey:
And it may just be that my memory, which is already bad in general, has just blocked the new baby phase from my mind.
Casey:
But, oh, boy, this is something else.
Casey:
And if I recall correctly, John, you said that your son was, what did you call him?
Casey:
I was asking Aaron this earlier, like a scream-a-pillar or something like that?
Casey:
Scream-a-pillar, yeah, from The Simpsons.
John:
It was one of his many delightful names.
John:
He basically screamed for the first several months of his life continuously.
Yeah.
Casey:
And yet you somehow decided to have a second child, which you're going to roll the dice.
John:
You know, like the only thing that kept this doubtful is like, what if the next one is worse?
John:
Like, I'm like, is that even possible?
Casey:
Is it possible?
John:
What could be worse?
John:
Like literal fire coming from the baby?
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
It could be.
John:
It could be worse.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Alex was was inconsolable.
John:
Nothing consoled him in any way.
Casey:
you know rocking walking burping feeding and he refused to eat for a long time oh okay so you're worse off than we are because the one the one thing that we do have going for us is that if Michaela's attached to Aaron everyone is happy well except Aaron but everyone is happy and I say except Aaron only because uh as it turns out which I didn't know until we had a kid breastfeeding not fun not easy who knew
Casey:
Um, and so Aaron is, you know, extremely happy to be able to do it.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong, but it is not an intensely pleasurable experience for Aaron to have this like leech latched onto her all the time.
John:
I mean, it can be depending, but like, but yeah, there's definitely a learning curve that most people don't think about.
John:
And one of the extra difficulties with Alex was because it was our first, we didn't have like the experience to know that this is a thing we could successfully do.
John:
like you know aaron had with she knows like i'm capable of this like it's a pain and it's annoying and lots of things can go wrong and you know be a bother and be painful and things gotta whichever but she can do it but alex was like look or you know can can we accomplish this why does our child refuse to to feed why is he just screaming at me like surely this child is hungry but no it's only hungry for screaming oh he's hungry for more screaming
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
So it wasn't.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Michaela isn't as bad as Alex in that regard.
Casey:
This is a lot of complaining, which is truly and utterly unfair.
Casey:
You just hit me at a tired moment.
Casey:
The reality of the situation is, and I'm being serious, is that if I take a step back, we have been lucky enough through the miracle of science.
Casey:
And I say that with no hyperbole intended.
Casey:
We have been lucky enough through the miracle of science to have two kids that that nature by itself wouldn't let us have.
Casey:
And that is really tremendous.
Casey:
And we're deeply, deeply, deeply lucky for it.
Marco:
um aaron's labor was difficult um every labor is difficult i'm not saying hers is more or less difficult than any other um well regardless big congratulations casey you guys went through a lot on both fronts with both kids and uh we're really proud of you and big congratulations it's all smooth sailing from here totally that's exactly how it works
Marco:
So, you have a newborn.
Marco:
Everything is in chaos.
Marco:
You haven't slept at all.
Marco:
You got a self-employment gig set up yet?
Casey:
Yeah, totally.
Casey:
Lining right up.
Casey:
No, I do not.
Casey:
I have not even thought about it.
Casey:
Although, because this is what I need to do with my time, I'm working on a Mac app.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Sort of.
Casey:
Kind of.
Casey:
That was the correct reaction.
Casey:
Nursing clock pro.
Casey:
Yes, that's it.
Casey:
That's exactly it.
Casey:
Overcast for Mac.
Casey:
Overcast for Mac.
Casey:
And by the way, I'm billing you tomorrow.
Casey:
No, I... God, I'm trying to think of the short, short version of the story.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I have a very esoteric and very weird photo management workflow that works for me.
Casey:
I understand that it's complete garbage to everyone else on the planet, but it works for me.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
The problem with that workflow is it's based on a bunch of Python that I basically understand but can't really create anymore.
Casey:
I'm not very good at writing Python.
Casey:
I've done a smattering in my day, but very, very little.
Casey:
And these scripts came from Dr. Drang.
Casey:
I've tweaked them ever so slightly in order to do what I need, but they're almost entirely what Drang had written.
Casey:
So anyway, so Apple, in their infinite wisdom, has decided to release new image codecs or formats, whatever you want to call it, with HEVC and HEIC, whatever.
Casey:
I don't even care.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
I'm tired.
Casey:
Point is, there's new things, and those have ruined my workflow.
Casey:
And so rather than trying to hack apart Drang's script, which is great.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say his script is bad.
Casey:
It's a Casey problem.
Casey:
I don't really understand Python very well.
Casey:
Although I do approve of using white space as delimiters.
Casey:
Don't at me.
Casey:
But anyway, the point is I've decided to write a Swift command line app in order to do basically the same thing, which is to say look at a folder full of images and videos, figure out what the date was that those images or videos were taken, which could be as simple as the file creation date, but oftentimes it's not.
Casey:
Rename them to a given format.
Casey:
So in my case, I prefer, and this is one of the few cases where I like 8601.
Casey:
So my preferred file format or my preferred file naming is 2017 or 2018 hyphen 01 hyphen 17 space.
Casey:
hour hour hyphen minute minute hyphen second second that's just the one i like if you don't like it that's fine this one is mine um that's a reference john anyway point is uh the the script that drang wrote does all of this for me but i decided i don't i don't like the way i hacked it up to work with live photos and trying to figure out what's the associated movie with a particular image and so i'm just rewriting it as a swift command line app that'll do all this for me and in the
Casey:
I feel like I'm about a third of the way through, which means I'm actually about a tenth of the way through.
Casey:
But that's better than nothing.
Casey:
And that's exciting.
Casey:
And I will probably either never release this or at most open source it so other people can laugh at how hacky this is because I'm not writing it for a job.
Casey:
I'm writing it for me and hashtag YOLO.
Casey:
But that's what I've been doing on and off when I've had a moment to breathe, when I've not been entertaining Declan or keeping the Scream of Pillar from screaming.
John:
Don't try to steal my screaming pill.
John:
You've got to come up with a new name.
John:
You had your pre-birth name with Sprig and Sprout.
John:
You've got to have a post-birth name.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
I thought Michaela was good enough.
Casey:
Seems not.
Casey:
Anyway, what else is in follow-up?
Casey:
What do we got here?
Casey:
So there's another black desktop Mac, I hear.
John:
Yeah, this is one I did not know about.
John:
Why?
John:
Because it's Europe only.
John:
So many things.
John:
Europe only.
John:
I like this model of Mac.
John:
This is like the, I don't know what you would call this case.
John:
It's the sort of iMac looking all-in-one, but the nice looking one.
John:
They made a lot of Macs in this particular form factor, but apparently one of them came in black in Europe, so more cool stuff to get.
John:
I was also trying to find...
John:
I looked for the link for the second thing.
John:
Uh, there was a story that went around a while ago about, uh, how Europe or some European countries or some sort of international standards body had some requirement about the specific color of computers.
John:
I think the story was like, here's why all computers used to be beige.
John:
It's because of this like ISO specification.
Casey:
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
And I couldn't for the life of me find the link.
John:
So if anyone knows it, send it to us and we'll put it in the show notes.
John:
But anyway, the important part of that story, other than the silly, uh,
John:
you know sensational headline was that to comply with this apparently apple had to create a bunch of power books whose keyboards were grayish and it looked just awful because power books were all kind of like dark gray or black and they had keyboards that either matched or complemented that except for this they would make them for i think it was just germany but maybe it was all european countries they'd make a nice sleek black power book and put it like a light gray keyboard on it and it was gross so kudos for europe for having this black power mac 5500
John:
And whatever the opposite of kudos is for making Apple make their computers ugly for you.
Casey:
Cheers and cheers, John.
Casey:
Cheers and cheers.
John:
Yeah, but it's the opposite of kudos, though.
John:
Cheers and cheers works.
John:
Kudos and dookies.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Dookies is kudos backwards, right?
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
all right moving on so tell me about the p calc about screen and how it is as quoting and i am now quoting from the show notes the refer of fans yeah so uh marco's mighty imac pro uh was recently purchased by james thonson creator of p calc the uh an imac pro configured like mine not like my actual one i didn't sell mine to him yes yes uh and p calc has been around for many many years it's a calculator application and it was able to run his fans at full blast how can a calculator
John:
run high mac pros fans at full blast well if you haven't been keeping up with peak halk uh and you really should be uh there is an interesting feature hidden in the about screen that starts to uh make more sense when you understand that it's rubbing the fans so i don't want to spoil it for you but it does other things as they say on seinfeld
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They are totally different than the regular like fluffy soft pillows that most of us are used to.
Marco:
It's kind of like a bean bag in like texture and consistency and it's filled with buckwheat hulls.
Marco:
So it doesn't spring back the way a foam pillow does, and it doesn't make your face all hot and sweaty all night.
Marco:
It's filled with these lightweight buckwheat hulls, so it really does kind of move, and you can set it like a beanbag.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
You can change throughout the night and you can totally adjust it how you see fit because it is really just this nice, wonderful organic cotton case made right here in the USA
Marco:
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Marco:
So it's this nice high quality materials, but in the end of the day, it's kind of just a big bean bag.
Marco:
And so this is really flexible for however you want to support your head and neck.
Marco:
And this really ends up being a lot better than traditional pillows in a lot of times.
Marco:
And for a lot of people, they find these way more comfortable in a lot of times, especially if you're a hot sleeper or if you tend to fold your pillow in half or stack two pillows to try to get enough support.
Marco:
Give Holo pillows a try.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Buckwheat is really a nice, natural way to sleep.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Once again, go to holopillow.com slash ATP and try a wonderful Buckwheat pillow for 60 nights risk-free.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Hullo for sponsoring our show.
Oh.
John:
So this is an older story about people announcing ARM's Windows PCs.
John:
This is kind of Microsoft's second run at selling you ARM hardware that runs Windows.
John:
Remember, what was it?
John:
Windows RT was the first one.
John:
They were going to sell like x86 versions of, I think it was their Surface stuff or whatever, and also ARM versions with a special version of Windows that runs on it.
John:
they did they actually did it yeah no one bought them but they did it and it was it just wasn't that popular uh a lot of people speculated because like well it's all well and good and it runs windows and it has some advantages but it was a while ago uh arm pcs weren't as powerful as they are now and the main thing is like well i can't run office or i you know not an office but i think they ported office but like all the software that runs on windows
John:
unless the developers recompile for arm i can't run it so their second run at this is cleaner without a special you know without it being like windows uh you know suffix type thing it's just windows 10 for arm they have uh an emulator that will run x86 software so everyone doesn't have to port like they're doing a better job of like you know supporting a second architecture still remains to be seen whether it will succeed for them because i really think or you know i don't know the only examples i have
John:
that i'm knowledgeable about are the many transitions apple has made to different cpu architectures and in all cases apple has made a transition from one thing to another it has not tried to sustain on an ongoing basis two things at the same time so i'm not sure what when uh microsoft's end game here is but anyway i'm not not really interested in microsoft's ongoing strategy to find ways to sell people more copies of windows and uh making interesting hardware
John:
I'm mostly interested in this because of the consumer experience that is offered by these various ARM PCs.
John:
These are all laptops, obviously, or portable things.
John:
And a lot of these products offer to the customer statistics like 20 hours of battery life.
John:
And one reviewer said that he has been using it for five days without charging the battery.
John:
This was, you know, an ARM-based PC was testing.
John:
And most of these things come with LTE.
John:
Now, the modern, the slightly more modern than December twist on this is CES happened recently, which I mostly do my best to ignore, plus or minus the new televisions.
John:
But apparently at CES, people who were there were saying...
John:
you know you can't throw a rock without taking a laptop that has lte so this combines two new ways for marco to reiterate old complaints about apple laptops one battery life doesn't seem to be that great and two they don't have lte and i have to think this is kind of one of those if you know again if microsoft is successful with these things like maybe they find a way to sell them the emulator works well enough to to make people consider them but like
John:
It's not like they get a little bit more battery life than like a MacBook durable because 20 hours is enough more than five or six hours that it's in a different ballpark.
John:
It changes how you would use this thing.
John:
If you could buy an Apple laptop that was...
John:
MacBook adorably-ish, you know, form factor.
John:
With LTE, they got 20 hours of battery life.
John:
People would flip their lid, right?
John:
And so the question is, why can't we buy that?
John:
The LTE question we've talked about many times in the past.
John:
It seems like it is within Apple's grasp to do that, but so far they haven't.
John:
And the ARM thing we've also talked about in the past, but this is another scenario, kind of like the Microsoft Surface Studio and various other things that Microsoft does, where I look at it and I think Microsoft is...
John:
has better hardware ideas than apple and is merely thwarted by the fact that their platform is not as successful and they have lots of other problems that are you know so you can say well you know you kept saying the microsoft server studio is such a big deal but it's not really setting the world on fire yes they have other problems like you don't win just because you have interesting hardware but it pains me to see microsoft being more innovative in its hardware when i think if apple just did those same things plus also stayed good at all the things that it's good at and it's much more you know sort of
John:
popular on the upswing platform i think we would all all love products like that and i'm not saying it's time for apple to go to arm or whatever i'm just saying the longer apple waits the more its laptops seem like they are i don't know i'm not going to say like from another age but going in a different direction than everybody else if i i can't think of any person who you know who is a current macbook adorable owner this is the the 12 inch macbook with one little board on the side of it also known as the macbook one
John:
and saying great you like that and everything but what if i gave you the same thing and it had to run some of your existing software and emulation but you get 20 hours of battery life and it has lte i think a lot of people would be willing to give that a try i i know i would oh absolutely i was just thinking earlier today that i love my my adorable i freaking love this thing but i would i was also thinking i would kill everyone i knew for a second port but that's a different issue um
Casey:
I do love this thing, though.
Casey:
I really and truly and honestly do.
Casey:
It is not exceptionally fast.
Casey:
It is only one port, which is very frustrating from time to time.
Casey:
Not always, but from time to time.
Casey:
But I love this computer.
Casey:
And if you told me that I could get two times the battery life... Not to say that I have a problem with the battery life... But if you said, hey, charging once a day isn't even necessary.
Casey:
Charge once a weekend...
Casey:
And or you said, oh, and by the way, you can have the Internet anywhere.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
I would pay twice as much as I paid for this thing.
Casey:
I think I paid like two or three thousand dollars for this thing, whatever it was.
Casey:
It was not insignificant, given that it's the tiniest laptop that Apple sells.
Casey:
And I would do anything, just like John was saying, I would do anything to have that this phantom device.
Casey:
this phantom laptop with you know twice the battery life in lte i don't care if it has arm or not that that to me is mostly irrelevant like obviously it's an interesting conversation for us three nerds but as a consumer i don't care if it has arm or not i just want it to last forever which it sort of does now and have lte would be tremendous yes i understand you can tether i get that but to me i'd prefer to have it on board if i could
John:
So the ARM factor is, you know, it's like if you put X86 in there, it wouldn't get 20 hours of battery.
John:
Like, that's the contention of this being ARM, right?
John:
And it starts to be ever more plausible when you think about how, like, the iPhone benchmarks against the adorable in single and multi-threaded, like the modern iPhone.
John:
And then you compare the size of the battery in the iPhone X to the size of the battery in the adorable.
John:
Granted, the adorable has a massive screen on it.
John:
Like, it's not apples to apples.
John:
It's not 100% clear to me that, oh, just magically replace the CPU with ARM and you get 20 hours of battery life.
John:
But, you know, like I said, from a consumer perspective, they don't know or care what hardware is inside these except as it might impact their software compatibility experience.
John:
And that's where the emulator comes in and maybe that hurts the battery life.
John:
But either way,
John:
If they treat this as a transition and go all the way, this is an experience that Apple currently can't compete against.
John:
It's very far from competing against.
John:
And the other angle we didn't even get to here is the sort of Vittici angle where...
John:
If you were to go to the story that will link in the show notes from Ars Technica and look at these products, you would say, but wait a second.
John:
That's not a MacBook adorable.
John:
That's an iPad with a keyboard.
John:
That's like a Windows 10 convertible, blah, blah.
John:
And remember, Windows has the one OS strategy that handles touch and blah, blah, blah, and Apple doesn't.
John:
And that brings us into a second conversation that I think I had probably around December, whenever I was on upgrade with Jason Snell.
John:
talking about iOS laptops.
John:
And since then, or maybe it was before that, I remember Jason's written a couple of articles about it.
John:
Vitici has talked about it forever and it's come up again.
John:
And so...
John:
You know, maybe the answer isn't an adorable 20 hours of battery life.
John:
Maybe the answer is an iOS laptop, which is another thing that people are climbing for.
John:
And as I said, an upgrade, Apple should totally make one because it is a known proven form factor.
John:
And some people really like iOS.
John:
And I can see you getting 20 hours of battery life from an iOS laptop.
John:
So if you're not going to do it with the actual adorable to make hazy happen, do the iOS laptop thing.
Marco:
I think the iOS laptop thing is a thing that they should do.
Marco:
I don't know how good it would end up being, but I know a lot of people who would buy them.
Marco:
I would probably buy one.
Marco:
Ever since the 9.7 Pro came out, I have dramatically increased my iPad usage because I got it with the smart keyboard.
Marco:
And the smart keyboard cover, it transforms an iPad for a lot of people.
Marco:
And I'm one of them.
Marco:
And I know I'm not the only one.
Marco:
And it's pretty much always in it.
Marco:
I never take it out of that cover.
Marco:
I do occasionally, like if I'm going to be sitting on the couch for a while, I will occasionally fold the keyboard behind it.
Marco:
But I'm not even detaching it.
Marco:
I consider that keyboard part of my iPad.
Marco:
So if we had basically what tablet PCs offered like 15 years ago, which was the convertible form factor where it looks like a laptop, except the hinge, you could rotate the screen like all the way around and then flip it back to fold it back on itself.
Marco:
You know, PC makers still make laptops like this.
Marco:
Like this is still a thing you can get.
Marco:
that some version of that as an ipad that had a permanently attached keyboard that was a really good keyboard that and then the whole thing could be shaped and weighted the way a laptop is shaped and weighted and have a lot of benefits there that would be an amazing device for a lot of people and this is not to say that all ipads should become laptops obviously that's not true um but
Marco:
what we've seen with the stopping the fall of iPad sales and starting to have some growth again in the last few quarters, I think that's directly attributable to two big changes in the iPad line.
Marco:
Number one, that awesome new cheap 329 iPad.
Marco:
That's a big thing.
Marco:
And then number two, the iPad Pro finally giving a lot of
Marco:
high-end and business users what they've been begging for for the iPad since day one.
Marco:
I made this tweet about it that was kind of quick on this point, but it's like the history of the iPad has been like Apple tries something.
Marco:
They say, we don't need legacy thing X, Y, or Z. And the customer's like, eh.
Marco:
i don't know i i think i think we kind of do need that and apple's not trust us you don't need it and sometimes they're right a lot and and that's why i think they they make that bet so often and they're so stubborn on it for so long most of the time because a lot of times they are right about that but sometimes they're not and like you know if when you have like a pretty decent sized portion of your customer base like
Marco:
hacking keyboards onto iPads in weird ways in these like you know crappy like cases and brackets and things eventually you're like okay well let's actually just make the iPad do this well and we will we will make the iPad supported better the same way like the iPad one didn't have any support in the hardware for a case and
Marco:
And that's where the iPad 1 case was that horrible vinyl pocket thing.
Marco:
That was a disaster because there was no good way to attach a case to an iPad.
Marco:
The iPad 2, they realized, oh, everyone is attaching cases to this, so we'll build in the magnets to have this magnet connector on the side, and that can support the case.
Marco:
Over time, you know, these needs expand.
Marco:
Eventually, we get where we are with the iPad Pro now, where we have the smart connector.
Marco:
We have a nice, easy way to attach keyboards without dealing with Bluetooth or batteries or anything.
Marco:
And Apple makes this nice one.
Marco:
It really hasn't panned out that much in the sense that nobody else really makes anything for the smart connector, but Apple does at least.
Marco:
And so I feel like going towards this, like, you know, clamshell iPad option or this convertible iPad option as kind of a half laptop is
Marco:
That is a perfectly valid place for the iPad line to go.
Marco:
Not all of them, but for that to be an option.
Marco:
They already sell it in like four different sizes.
Marco:
People are always like, well, they only want to ever make one.
Marco:
They want to minimize SKUs.
Marco:
No, that's not true anymore.
Marco:
That has not been true for a long time for most Apple product lines.
Marco:
They're fine making additional models if it expands the market.
Marco:
And so I think this would expand the market by enough to make it worth the additional cost of having it.
Marco:
So that aside for a minute, let me just rant about LTE for one more time.
Marco:
This will be quick.
Marco:
We don't have to think about why Apple might or might not want to put LTE in Mac laptops.
Marco:
We don't have to.
Marco:
This does not have to be theoretical.
Marco:
Because PC laptops have offered LTE built in as an option for over a decade.
Marco:
It's not theoretical at all.
Marco:
We can see why people want it.
Marco:
We can see that people buy it.
Marco:
We can see the good and bad that comes from it.
Marco:
We can see how it can be managed and sold.
Marco:
All of this has been shown by the PC world for over a decade.
Marco:
The only good reason, they might have some bad reasons, but the only good reason why I don't think Apple has LTE in Macs
Marco:
is because mac hardware has spent so much of the last few years especially but you know honestly a lot of the time since ios came out mac hardware has spent so much of this time in neglect and in seemingly the entire platform has seemed to be in maintenance mode in a lot of ways and we see signs of this maybe not being true anymore with things like the imac pro
Marco:
Where this is like, you know, this awesome computer, lots of custom engineering and everything.
Marco:
So, you know, maybe we're coming out of this time.
Marco:
But there is no question in my mind that there is no good reason why we can't have LTE as an option in MacBooks.
Marco:
There are only bad reasons.
Marco:
And if Apple wanted to make it happen, if they cared to make that happen in the Mac line, if they thought that was a thing that was worth their time, they could do it.
Marco:
It would be totally fine.
Marco:
Mac OS has had support for distinguishing cellular connections on network API requests since, I think, Mountain Lion or something.
Marco:
It's been there for a while now.
Marco:
So the software support is there.
Marco:
There are apps like Trip Mode if you really need to watch it more than that.
Marco:
But these are all solved problems on the software side.
Marco:
The hardware side is, okay, is it a cost issue?
Marco:
Charge more for it.
Marco:
It's a cost issue on the iPads too.
Marco:
You can get a $1,000 iPad Pro and then you can add LTE to it for like $150.
Marco:
That's okay.
Marco:
Whatever you need to charge, charge it.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
We will bear that as the market.
Marco:
People want this.
Marco:
Yes, you can tether, as you mentioned earlier, Casey.
Marco:
But tethering sucks.
Marco:
It's not always on.
Marco:
Your phone isn't always with you.
Marco:
You're draining two batteries instead of one.
Marco:
Like, that sucks.
Marco:
Nobody wants that.
Marco:
Yes, you have to have another plan for another device.
Marco:
But these days, we have plans for our watches now, for God's sake.
Marco:
Plans for additional devices have become easier and easier over time and cheaper and cheaper over time.
Marco:
There are so many people who would buy a MacBook Pro or a MacBook, whatever, I don't care, buy some Apple laptop running Mac OS, I don't care what it's called, who would buy that with an LTE option for an extra, I don't know, 200 bucks.
Marco:
and would gladly pay an extra $20 to $40 a month to have that on a cellular plan.
Marco:
This is not theoretical.
Marco:
The entire PC world has done this for a decade.
Marco:
We know this.
Marco:
We see this.
Marco:
We know it can be done.
Marco:
Apple, for God's sake, it's way past time.
Marco:
Just do it.
John:
So in that category of things that Apple sees other people doing and says we don't need to do that, one very minor one.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't think it's that minor because I continue to be annoyed by it despite the fact that I'm not really in the market for this thing.
John:
Take a look at the picture at the top of that Ars Technic article about the Windows 10 PCs.
John:
So this is a great example of...
John:
a convertible ipad ish type thing and it's got an os on it that runs your desktop apps but you can also touch it and it's got a keyboard and it's got a little kickstand this is actually a less less laptop and more smart there's a little loop where you can store your pen look at that a it's got a pen which is in the earlier category of things that apple didn't seem like it needed until i realized yeah but b guess what it has a place for you to put the pen that you're going to use with your tablety thing and there are a million third-party ways to do that
John:
But I'm not entirely sure what Apple expects people to do.
John:
Like, do they expect people to put it behind their ear?
John:
Like, you know, a carpenter or something?
John:
By the way, the third-party ways all suck.
John:
I've tried many of them.
John:
They're all terrible.
John:
Right.
John:
I just saw one today of, like, another one of these things, like a case with a big long stick that magnetically attacks to the smart cover or whatever.
John:
It's like...
John:
It's almost like we had it better in the Palm days where all those devices came with a little slot where you put that tiny little stinky plastic stylus.
John:
Hell, the Newton had slots for you to slide a stylus into.
John:
They had a collapsible one where it went in sort of horizontally and the message pad 110, it went in vertically.
John:
They sell a stylus now, a pretty good one, and people like it.
John:
And the people who like it...
John:
want to use it with their ipad because as far as i'm aware you can't use that stylus anywhere else can you like it doesn't work with anything except for an ipad so the only reason you own it is to use it with your ipad and i guess you just carry the pencil in one hand and the ipad and the other it's just this just seems like a huge oversight and so my tiny tiny miniature wish list thing that apple should do obviously lte is bigger and you know ios laptops is bigger but like
John:
if we can't get either one of those things apple give us an officially supported place to put the apple pencil so that you can carry both it and the ipad that it goes with together in some way where there is a reasonable chance that they won't immediately detach and you'll lose it yeah there's also i mean i honestly i think the pencil could use a lot more consideration than that but uh maybe that's for another show
John:
Yeah, but anyway, Microsoft obviously has been on that page for a long time because there's sort of a kitchen sink thing.
John:
Oh, it's a laptop.
John:
It's a tablet.
John:
You can draw on it.
John:
You can touch the screen.
John:
It's got a stylus.
John:
It's got a – hell, the Surface Book thing had that – whatever, that little cylinder thing that you stick on the screen and turn and do all sorts of things.
John:
Yeah, they're trying all sorts of stuff.
John:
I'm just saying like –
John:
we've crossed the stylus Rubicon here.
John:
We're all in stylus land.
John:
We just need some place to put it.
John:
And I say this, I own one of these, and you know where mine is?
John:
It is on my nightstand next to my iPad.
John:
And no, it doesn't roll off because it's vaguely weighted and I have it on the inside instead of the outside, but
John:
It just annoys me.
John:
Like one of the reasons I never have my stylus with my iPad is I don't have a way to attach it.
John:
And all those third party ways always just seemed a little bit, I don't know, inconvenient for me, especially since I'm not like a super heavy stylus user.
John:
But honestly, there should be there should be an Apple supported way to do it, please.
Casey:
I just want my MacBook Adorable with LTE.
Casey:
Yes, I would pay the extra fees for it if I really thought it was useful.
Casey:
You wouldn't complain as much as a watch.
Casey:
You know why?
Casey:
No.
John:
Because the Adorable is so much bigger than the watch.
John:
And the watch is so small.
John:
You shouldn't pay money for a small thing.
Casey:
Why should I pay for that?
Casey:
It's just sipping data.
John:
Who buys batteries?
John:
That's why Mac apps get more money, because the screens are bigger.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Well, I feel like we kind of got sidetracked, though, on the idea of ARM.
Casey:
Us?
Casey:
Yeah, I know, right?
Casey:
Do we think that this is realistic?
Casey:
I feel like we went through this like six months ago or something like that, and I don't remember what conclusion we came to.
Casey:
It seems to me like...
Casey:
If it wasn't for the fact that there's so many third parties that would need to get on board this train, this would have maybe already happened at this point.
Casey:
It seems like Apple would want to control the entire stack.
Casey:
They're clearly very good at making ARM CPUs.
Casey:
The ARM CPUs they make are clearly very power efficient.
Casey:
In so many ways, I'm slightly surprised they haven't dipped their toes into this water.
Casey:
Although I agree with, I think it was John that said earlier, that they don't typically straddle two platforms.
Casey:
They will just decide, okay, we're going from PowerPC to Intel, or we're going from Intel to ARM, etc.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like this is an inevitability, but remind me of this in like 15 years when we're still on Intel processors.
John:
Well, they're playing chicken with that inevitability.
John:
So we all see it as an inevitability, but the game of chicken is that inevitability of like, look, they've got to do ARM.
John:
They're so good at doing ARM CPUs.
John:
Their ARM CPUs are getting better and better.
John:
Isn't it only a matter of time?
John:
The car racing in the other direction at that eventuality is...
John:
Yeah, but if they keep holding on, eventually the Mac will just fade away on its own and we won't have to deal with it because iOS has always been ARM and so problem solved, right?
John:
It gets back to the Mac investment thing.
John:
And, you know, in our past discussions, like, look, if you really want to go ARM on the Mac...
John:
it's very difficult to support both for a long time which means you're kind of signing up to build like an 18 core arm processor to compete with xeons if you're still going to be in the market which as of last year apple has decisively said yes we want to be in the market marco's sitting in front of one right now so if you want to go arm on the mac oh no it's not just yes great so we can take the phone cpu and turn it in a laptop and we're like oh that we're good to go there it's perfect fit
John:
What do you put in the iMac Pro?
John:
And then you got the Thunderbolt issue.
John:
And it's like, yeah, we could solve all these problems.
John:
You could totally do it.
John:
If the Mac was a growing platform and it was the future of the company, they would do that.
John:
They would make ARM CPUs with 18 cores in them that compete with Xeons.
John:
And they would figure out the Thunderbolt thing and they'd be fine.
John:
But...
John:
that's not where the mac is right now and so it's like do we really want to put that much money into a platform that we sell so little of maybe if we just hold on long enough we won't have to worry about this problem and it will solve itself so that is the game of chicken i see on the arm cpus like in the fantasy engineer world it seems like a no-brainer that apple would do it because they're so good at it and surely they do a great job or they'd work out the tech issues but in the reality where
John:
You have to look at sales numbers and consider how much you're investing and yada, yada, yada.
John:
It does not look like a sure bet that, you know, a clear, clearly the right thing for Apple to do.
John:
So, you know, every year, like you smell the wind and be like, is this, is this the year farm?
John:
And I suppose that the thing that could make it happen sooner rather than later or not at all is Apple could actually decide we're going to do two, a two CBU strategy.
John:
We're not going to bother trying to compete with the Xeon.
John:
But all these, you know, next year's set of ARM system-minded chips for iPhones and iPads could cover such a vast portion of their laptop line at this point, right, in terms of CPU power and GPU power for that matter, that they could sell more than half of their Macs with ARM CPUs without having to basically build new chips.
John:
Like I say, we're building these anyway for the iPads and the iPhones.
John:
Repurpose them.
John:
do all the work we have to do to the OS, voila, ARM on the Mac and, you know, the Mac Pro and the iMac Pro and all that other stuff.
John:
You know, we're not going to put that much money into ARM to build chips for those.
John:
So those will just stay with x86 and we'll just continue to ride this out with two CPU architectures.
John:
But so far, Apple's never done that.
John:
And I don't think that strategy is a good idea.
John:
I think the strategy is commit and convert.
John:
Either go big or go home.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It'll say something like three egg whites, two dates, six almonds, and no BS.
Marco:
And that's really, honestly, what it is.
Marco:
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Marco:
I've been eating these things since before they became a sponsor.
Marco:
I'm not even sure they know that I've been eating them because they booked it through our agent, so I don't even know if they know that I like these so much.
Marco:
But they're great.
Marco:
I've been eating them myself.
Marco:
I love them as my mid-afternoon snack when I'm hungry, but it's not dinner time yet.
Marco:
I also use them on long car rides.
Marco:
I brought them on my last plane ride.
Marco:
They're great if you need to toss it in a backpack for a bike ride or a hike or involving it before or after a workout.
Marco:
They're wonderful, and it really is what it says.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
This is a big problem with so many of these protein bars.
Marco:
They're just packed full of sugar.
Marco:
The only sweetness in this comes from those two dates, and that's not that much sugar.
Marco:
It's hardly any.
Marco:
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Marco:
They use egg whites for the protein, dates to bind it together, nuts for texture.
Marco:
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Marco:
They come in 11 different flavors, as I said.
Marco:
I honestly can't pick a favorite.
Marco:
Whenever I'm buying them, I just buy one of everything.
Marco:
They have a variety pack.
Marco:
You can try that because I just like them all.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
That's a great deal.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to RxBar for sponsoring our show.
Oh.
Casey:
John, tell me about Windows 10 sets.
John:
I've been keeping up with Windows 10.
John:
I have not actually ever run Windows 10.
John:
My Windows stuff at work is Windows 8 or earlier.
John:
I still retreat to the comfort of Windows 7, the relative comfort of Windows 7 for someone who's not a Windows user, obviously.
John:
Although I bet Windows users are comfortable in Windows 7 too.
John:
Like, yeah, that was the last one that still seemed vaguely like Windows, but Windows 8 screwed it all up.
John:
Some people like Windows 10.
John:
But anyway, Windows 10 sets.
John:
I'm assuming this is an official shipping feature, but I can't really tell because it's just a YouTube video for all I know.
John:
It's just a speculative thing.
John:
But you know my love of window arranging, and so to see any OS vendor coming up with new strategies for dealing with windows is interesting to me.
John:
Now, obviously, the Windows windowing model is so different from the Mac, and I like the Mac windowing model better.
John:
But given the Windows windowing model where everything is its own damn window and its own little taskbar item and its own independent entity and potentially also its own duplicate running instance of an application, like everything flies in the face of the Mac model.
John:
But given that model on Windows, we got a lot of Windows floating around, many of which are actually independent instances of programs.
John:
It's difficult to figure out how to to come up with a sort of a system or to create any sort of hierarchy like on the Mac because you basically can't have, you know, technically you can.
John:
But from a user's perspective, you can only have one instance of an application running at once.
John:
Right.
John:
So if you start Safari and it shows up in your dock.
John:
What if I want to run a second instance of Safari?
John:
Well, you can't.
John:
Now, obviously, if you know what you're doing, you can make that happen.
John:
But regular users, if they double click Safari again in the finder, it doesn't launch a second Safari on your dock.
John:
If you click it again on your dock, it doesn't launch a second Safari.
John:
You've got Safari.
John:
And within Safari, you have multiple Safari windows.
John:
And then within Windows, you have multiple tabs.
John:
that hierarchy on the Mac application is one level and then drill down one level.
John:
Each application can have zero or more windows.
John:
That's one fundamental aspect of the windows.
John:
It's not like that.
John:
So if you don't have that hierarchy, I mean,
John:
Windows kind of had that hierarchy back in the day.
John:
Maybe you two Windows victims can tell me about this.
John:
Do you remember the windowing model?
John:
I think maybe Visual Studio did it at one point.
John:
There was a name for it that I used to know, where you'd have a parent window.
John:
MDI?
John:
Yeah, and all child windows were inside the parent window.
John:
Called MDI, Multiple Document Interface.
John:
Yeah, that was a terrible idea.
John:
But anyway, there is still that hierarchy because you can launch one instance of IE and have multiple tabs.
John:
And many applications, you could launch one instance of the application and open multiple documents, even though depending on the taskbar model.
John:
That's what Photoshop has always done in various ways.
John:
Yeah, because that started as a Mac app.
John:
So you have some flexibility to do it.
John:
But in general, it's much more flat in Windows.
John:
So Windows 10 sets, it's kind of like when Apple added...
John:
framework support for tabbed windows on the mac where it was easy for a mac application to say we're going to support tabs that look and behave vaguely like safari tabs so previously you'd have my document based application text edit you know you launch text edit and you open a bunch of new documents and each document is in a new window
John:
uh and with the framework support for tabbing it's like oh it's pretty easy for text edit to say now i support tabs and you could take your two text edit windows and merge them together and now they're in one tabbed window that kind of looks like a safari window with little safari tabs right they added that a couple years ago well windows 10 sets adds tabbed windowing sort of to the window manager so that an os level you can assemble windows from multiple different applications into one tabbed
John:
mega window to make a set of documents so you've got a web browser window a text editor window your graphics application window all are tabs within the same you know master window so it's not like it's seven powerpoint documents it's a powerpoint document an ie document like a finder window whatever that look all in windows you know the file system thing showing you know your disk explorer yeah is it even called that anymore who knows um
John:
And that's their way of organization.
John:
So instead of just being a flat stew of windows, which is one of the many reasons that windows usually love to full screen, because look, there is no hierarchy, so just give each window the entire screen, and I will just furiously alt-tab between them, and I'll feel efficient.
John:
Now that you have the ability to...
John:
make sets of windows based on whatever task you're doing kind of like i've talked about making sets of tabs in my web browser say this is my like i'm shopping for a new you know screwdriver window and i have like seven tabs of different sites looking at screwdrivers right this could be i'm working on a project here's all the graphics from the project here's my research window here's
John:
uh you know a text editor window here's a web preview of what i'm doing put them all together into one big set and then the cloud twist is oh and also microsoft will cloud sync those sets so if you go over to another windows 10 computer and log in as you you can recall that set and say what was i working on bring up that windows set you know that from that thing i was working on and all those windows appear on your new computer all those tabs or whatever um
John:
So I think that's very intriguing.
John:
I would love both that statefulness and the ability to sort of mix and match Windows in a task-oriented way.
John:
It doesn't work really with the Mac windowing model.
John:
So I don't think Apple should look at this and adopt it wholesale, but I'm kind of excited by Windows itself.
John:
taking another look at something as basic as window document and application management and trying to come up with a you know i'm not gonna say it's novel because i'm sure 57 x windows managers have done this exact same thing uh but i found it interesting and there are parts of it i find attractive especially the cloud syncing and statefulness uh
John:
of course all the caveats apply does this require support from application vendors will the only person who supports to be microsoft if you take a bunch of credit when his application has tried to use it with this will they not behave correctly historically when microsoft has had a harder time getting all its developers to adopt new technologies apple has done better uh they're a little bit spotty in recent years especially with things like auto save and state restoration and stuff like that that kind of flew in the face of uh
John:
Mac orthodoxy and was sort of only half-heartedly implemented by some Mac applications but in general I think Apple has a better time at it so once again I'm in the position where I'm forced to praise Microsoft and be proud of what they're doing and wish Apple not did the same things but innovated with a similar spirit like when's the last time Apple looked at window management in the Mac and had some bold new ideas like they added like some vague slightly annoying
John:
uh snapping thing in like sierra uh and then like the the you know the tiling thing was that sierra too they've added a couple of minor features in half-hearted ways in recent years but nothing that tries to not fundamentally rethink but add a dramatically new feature akin to like you know mission control or uh expose or whatever like
John:
in the early days of Mac OS 10, uh, you know, that's what they were doing.
John:
They were saying, you know, we have a new idea of how you might want to manage windows and we call it expose and later we'll rename it and make it even more confusing.
John:
And then spaces like this is not a new idea, but Hey, we think it's maybe worth bringing to the Mac and then we'll refine it and try to make a different model.
John:
Uh, I, I miss that.
John:
I miss those days of, of windowing innovation.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, this is just one more area where it feels like the Mac is in maintenance mode.
Marco:
One of these times, one of these cool experiments by somebody else is going to take off.
Marco:
Microsoft is doing a lot of things.
Marco:
They're trying a lot of things.
Marco:
And yeah, they aren't all working.
Marco:
But some of them are and some of them will.
Marco:
And it's both in hardware and software with what they're trying over there.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Apple is really not trying that much on this level with the Mac.
Marco:
The touch bar is probably the only thing that was on anywhere near this level that they tried.
Marco:
And that was more of a hardware... I know the implementation crosses everything, but that was more of a hardware feature than a software feature from the user point of view.
Marco:
And it wasn't particularly well received.
Marco:
And I think history will judge it as a flop, if the president has it at least.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
that doesn't mean they should not try anything else.
Marco:
That just means the one thing they tried that was anywhere near this type of thing didn't work out.
Marco:
But they need to keep trying because the PC industry is.
Marco:
And we forget sometimes quite how small, percentage-wise, the Mac has compared to PCs in market share.
Marco:
And
Marco:
The Mac is much more influential compared to its market share of size than you would expect.
Marco:
But if people are on their work PCs and they're using all these things at work and they get used to something like this sets feature, then the Mac just looks bad by comparison for not having it.
Marco:
As time goes on,
Marco:
the more Microsoft tries things, some percentage of them will stick.
Marco:
Some of them already have, like touchscreen laptops.
Marco:
Again, we all made fun of that.
Marco:
Apple makes fun of that.
Marco:
But the reality is, people use them and like them, and it's fine.
Marco:
And Apple doesn't do that.
Marco:
And so when somebody who is used to being able to scroll the screen on their laptop occasionally with their finger or poke a link with their finger sometimes, they go to a Mac and that doesn't work.
Marco:
And that doesn't make Apple look like great product visionaries.
Marco:
It makes the Mac look broken or outdated.
Marco:
And over time,
Marco:
the number of things that cause that feeling in new buyers is going to increase.
Marco:
That's my concern with the Mac stack dating, is that Apple can keep the Mac kind of in maintenance mode for a lot of the platform, and you might think, oh, well, Apple's fine.
Marco:
They're selling iPhones and iPads.
Marco:
Yeah, it's fine.
Marco:
But the rest of the industry that the Mac competes with is moving forward, with or without Apple.
Marco:
They are moving forward.
Marco:
And if Apple is not even really putting in a strong effort to compete with them, the Mac isn't going to remain constant over time.
Marco:
It's going to decline over time.
Marco:
It's going to start falling behind in big ways.
Marco:
And I don't want that to happen to my favorite computing platform of all time.
Casey:
I'm just tired of being sad, man.
Casey:
I'm tired of being sad.
Marco:
I'm happy with this.
Marco:
I'm my pro, I'll tell you that.
Marco:
But it has nothing to do with the software.
John:
Yeah, I was going to say, the touch bar, as Marco said, is a reason to be happy because, look, there was a pretty big investment in it and a pretty important, dramatic, clearly Mac-only feature.
John:
doesn't seem to have worked out whatever but that's exactly what we're asking for you know you gotta you gotta try things right um but i would say that the t2 in marco's imac pro is another example of granted mostly hardware based but interesting innovation that you know it is it's borrowing technology from ios like it's building on other successes that's just smart business but
John:
They didn't have to do that.
John:
They could have made a more traditional Xeon-based PC and slapped it inside an iMac case, but they didn't.
John:
There's extra cost and expense involved in adapting that iOS hardware and software to the Mac.
John:
And they did it.
John:
And that's an exciting avenue for innovation, I think, to make Macs less like iOS.
John:
Less like Apple-branded Hackintoshes and more like, you can't assemble this from parts.
John:
This has advantages over a PC that you would build in terms of performance, power draw, security, all the areas that we expect Apple to innovate in, which for many years, even in the Mac's heyday, in the jobs, PowerPC, G3, G4 era, when Macs were very exciting and were the bread and butter of the company,
John:
Those Macs inside were more conventionally like PCs than Marco's iMac Pro is.
John:
They didn't have some weird custom ARM chip implementing secure boot.
John:
They were more or less on the same, you know, what is it, EFI and later the...
John:
all of intel's uh security features like they but it wasn't like apple was building these giant custom chips to do all of its like image processing from the camera and to run the ssd and to do a secure boot and stuff like that that i think is innovation it's not software innovation but it is innovation and investment in in the mac so i'm heartened by the renewed interest and yeah we all would have liked the touch bar to maybe be more to our tastes you know maybe some people like it but for the three of us it hasn't really
John:
set the world on fire.
John:
So I guess more of that.
John:
More of that, please.
John:
And, you know, with a higher batting average.
Marco:
Well, and, you know, it seems like there's obviously a lot of different areas in which Apple is innovating or not innovating or moving forward or just in maintenance mode.
Marco:
My main complaint about stagnation is in frequency of hardware updates, number one, and number two, the much bigger problem, I think, is the software platform.
Marco:
John, I think there's a lot of parallels to be made to your Copeland 2010?
Marco:
to that article, like, you know, the arguments you made back forever ago, which is like, you know, at some point, forgive me for trying to paraphrase your argument, but at some point, you know, they can't continue doing this forever.
Marco:
Like, something has to change.
Marco:
There has to be a next generation version of this at some point.
Marco:
And I don't know, we don't know, we don't have enough insight into Apple to know, like,
Marco:
Is there a next generation version of Mac OS that they're working on?
Marco:
Because, you know, we don't see any signs of that.
Marco:
And obviously we probably wouldn't until it was much further along and almost ready to ship.
Marco:
But like if there isn't, that's a big problem.
Marco:
That's a really big problem.
Marco:
Because the OS we're using right now on the Mac is, you know, it's fine in a lot of ways.
Marco:
It's world class in a lot of ways.
Marco:
But it's really ancient and creaky and has a lot of baggage and does a lot of things in really outdated ways.
Marco:
That is catching up to it.
Marco:
It has been catching up to it for quite some time.
Marco:
It's going to keep catching up to it more and more.
Marco:
And for Apple to move the Mac forward, they need to be investing heavily in it.
Marco:
They need to be giving it its next generation operating system, a next generation platform.
Marco:
And so things like the Touch Bar and the T2 are awesome on the hardware side.
Marco:
The iMac Pro is amazing.
Marco:
I continue to be incredibly happy with it as a computer.
Marco:
But macOS is starving for attention.
Marco:
It is stagnating.
Marco:
It is falling apart.
Marco:
It is starving.
Marco:
High Sierra is, in many ways...
Marco:
pathetic and scary in how sloppy things were done with it, how many bugs there still are in a lot of areas.
Marco:
The security bugs are embarrassing.
Marco:
I mean, it's getting worse.
Marco:
Every release seems like it's getting worse.
Marco:
Sierra was a terrible release also.
Marco:
very unreliable, lots of bugs, lots of problems, lots of subsystems and things that were seemingly rewritten for vague reasons and then were worse and more buggy.
Marco:
This is increasing over time because they're not putting the resources into the OS that it needs to be stable and secure and to be moved forward.
Marco:
That's my concern area.
Marco:
It's not about the T2 and the touch bar.
Marco:
It's that macOS itself is not being properly maintained and invested in.
Marco:
And hopefully I'm wrong.
Marco:
Hopefully I'm totally wrong.
Marco:
And they're working on an awesome new next generation, you know, OS 11 or whatever it would be called.
Marco:
Not that, but, you know, hopefully I'm wrong about all this.
Marco:
But we have seen no signs in that direction.
Marco:
So we have no way to know.
John:
If there's a next-gen operating system, I don't think it would be a next-gen macro operating system.
John:
It would be a next-gen Apple operating system that would span the range, right?
John:
Because what you're really talking about for next-gen operating systems, and honestly, I don't think Apple is at the Copeland 2010 point just because if you look at the rate of important advancement in computing, lots of really important sort of
John:
Industry-changing, paradigm-shifting stuff happened really early on in that beginning part, going from very simple computers to more complicated ones.
John:
And it just so happens that Apple's success with the Apple II and the Mac happened to hit right before all of the personal computers got on the memory protection and preemptive multitasking bandwagon.
John:
So it was unfortunate timing that they were successful with a slightly older platform.
John:
But there's nothing out there as clear-cut as memory protection.
John:
like you either have it or you don't and it's a pretty big innovation and if you are unfortunate enough to be massively successful with a platform that doesn't have it it's very hard to add it after the fact everyone else has it and it's not a minor thing now but i mean there's no room for an extra operating system but i think apple can
John:
get along with their you know mock bsd amalgam as they've shown they can bring that down to watches and all the way up to max so it's fairly flexible and it's pretty neat and they can piecemeal replace parts of it and improve it so it's still got life left in it left in it but eventually you want a next generation operating system that next generation operating system is not a next generation ios and not a next generation mac operating system the next generation apple operating system
John:
They'll probably have to run on their self-driving cars and your, you know, your watch and your glasses and your whatever.
John:
Like, that's where they would go.
John:
And I don't think it's pressing for them to do that now.
John:
But they, you know, all their, you know, their car projects and any other weird things they've tried with glasses and rings and whatever...
John:
Those are avenues to experiment with different kernels, real-time operating systems, things optimized for neural nets, which, you know, arguably they're experimenting with on the phone with the, whatever that, what's the little thing, the name, the branding name they gave to the neural processing.
Casey:
Core ML?
John:
No, no, no.
John:
Bionic?
John:
No.
John:
Oh!
John:
Some part of the chip that was dedicated to.
John:
The new thing.
John:
Anyway, I've heard lots of rumors of experimentation with different sort of kernels and, you know, sort of core OS designs.
John:
uh and also anything they're doing with the car i've also heard rumors that that stack was potentially different from the bottom up than a lot of the existing ones whether those things go anywhere you know i guess i don't think it's pressing but if and when a next generation apple operating platform comes along i fully expect it to span the range of all their products and to finally end decisively the the dichotomy between uh
John:
mac and ios which is to say i don't think it is it is imminent we're more much more likely to get something sooner as we talked about in a couple shows ago with the unified ui framework right that is a much more reasonable incremental step towards that that goal um and you know right now like
John:
it could be argued that apple currently has a unified low-level os across all their products because under the covers it's all mock bsd darwin however you want it like that's underneath all of them it's not like the watch as far as i'm aware is running a dramatically different operating system from the kernel all the way up than your mac is like so there is a common foundational platform with various bits stripped down on it and obviously different architectures and different optimizations and stuff like that
John:
uh it's just that as you get up to the higher layer this uh you know historical somewhat artificial distinction appears oh this is a mac app and that's an ipad app no they're they're totally different they look kind of the same yeah i know but just they're same core os same current yeah i know but they're not it's not the same thing so i think apple can address that top layer before they have to go all the way down to the bottom and start uh you know
John:
And what was that?
John:
Google has a project like that?
John:
What is it called?
John:
This is the show where I can't remember the names of anything.
John:
Fuchsia?
John:
There we go.
John:
I pulled it out.
John:
Pulled it out before the chat room.
John:
Ha.
John:
Their Fuchsia operating system is sort of like an out in the open.
John:
Let's try this experiment with another potential platform, which is such an un-Apple-like thing to do.
John:
It just like sows confusion.
John:
It's like, wait, so...
John:
Are you still doing Chrome OS?
John:
And what about Android?
John:
And what the hell is fuchsia?
John:
And not an Apple move at all, but Apple should be doing things exactly like that internally.
Casey:
Maybe they are.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's just weird because in the last 24 hours, as I mentioned previously, I've been reminded how much I freaking love this MacBook Adorable, even the keyboard, which admittedly is not the most reliable thing in the world.
Casey:
But I do love the feel of it, something tremendous.
Marco:
It turns off by itself sometimes, but it's fine.
Marco:
I won't mention that for six months.
Marco:
It's not a big deal.
Casey:
um no i love i love this i love this little laptop and i love this little laptop hardware design but i tell you max the apple software is not not doing it for me and for a fleeting moment earlier today actually it was yesterday
Casey:
It's all a blur, you guys.
Casey:
Anyway, for a fleeting moment sometime in the last 48 hours, I thought to myself, man, I wonder if I should just try Windows again.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Because – well, and I know that that's the answer.
Casey:
But I'm looking at – and I think I tweeted about this.
Casey:
But I was trying to pull pictures off my iPhone.
Casey:
And Image Capture, which is an app that comes with the operating system that is designed to do specifically this and almost nothing else, Image Capture –
Casey:
says oh i can't do that because of error negative 9917 and i was like well crap at this point i'm basically using windows already that's a useful error message negative 900 9917 no only mac only the mac operating system has negative number error messages right it's probably an os status that's that's uh that's that's deep mac flavor negative number in a dialogue error dialogue
Casey:
All I'm saying is it was a completely non-actionable error.
Casey:
And I could not find anything useful on the Internet about what to do about it.
Casey:
And I don't know if the issue was that something on my iPhone is corrupted and the issue is iOS software is kind of broken, or at least for me anyway.
Casey:
I don't know if it was something that was wrong with my Mac.
Casey:
I tried two different Macs, had different but similar problems across both.
Casey:
It's just things like what drew me to the platform.
Marco:
I can tell you what the problem was.
Marco:
You were doing something that Apple does not give.
Marco:
They could not possibly give less of a shit about.
Marco:
You were connecting an iPhone to your Mac with a cable.
Marco:
And then you were launching an old program from the Mac OS utilities folder to try to take data off of your iPhone over a wire.
Marco:
Apple could not give less of a shit about that.
Marco:
So it's never tested.
Casey:
And I think you're probably right.
Casey:
And that's just really too bad, right?
Casey:
And maybe the problem is me.
Casey:
Maybe the problem is Casey again, in that maybe I just need to accept iCloud Photo Library.
Casey:
But for reasons that are not interesting and that I don't care to explain, I'm not all in on iCloud Photo Library.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
Because in the past, it was always fine because I would have to remember to pull things off my phone, but no big deal.
Casey:
It worked every time.
Casey:
100% of the time, it worked every time.
Casey:
Now, 60% of the time, it works every time.
Casey:
That's also a reference, John.
Casey:
So anyway, I found myself, and I think I made the same speech again like six months ago.
Casey:
I found myself just more and more annoyed that things that used to reliably work don't work anymore.
Casey:
And it was such whiplash because in the same day or two window, I've just head over heels fallen in love with this MacBook Adorable and thought to myself, you know what?
Casey:
Even though I'm not the kind of person to buy computers hourly like Marco, I will probably get a new Adorable whenever it's refreshed because I want more of this Adorable.
Casey:
I want more speed.
Casey:
I want more ports.
Casey:
And if they don't give me more ports, that's fine.
Casey:
But if they give me more speed, that's great.
Marco:
The adorable fans have to buy every one because each one is barely usable.
Marco:
So any improvements like, oh, my God, please.
Casey:
It's not that bad, but I understand your point.
Casey:
I understand your point.
Casey:
So I go from like just being overjoyed by this adorable.
Casey:
And generally speaking, I'm pretty overjoyed with my iPhone X.
Casey:
And then I just see these software issues that are just depressing and disheartening.
Casey:
Depressing may not be the right word, but just disheartening.
Casey:
And it makes me just feel like it's like that.
Casey:
Throw your hands in the air and don't wave them like you don't care because you do care.
Casey:
You just throw your hands in the air and then plop them down on the desk.
Casey:
And you're just like, well.
Casey:
Now what?
Casey:
Now what do I do?
Casey:
Because I'm just screwed.
Casey:
I mean, where am I going to go?
Casey:
And it's a rhetorical question, and I don't think we need to answer it.
Casey:
But it's just frustrating because it used to be this was my happy place.
Casey:
And maybe the problem is that I'm clinging to the Mac and the Mac is dead.
Casey:
Again, we don't need to go there.
Casey:
We spent so much time there.
Casey:
It's not even worth it.
Casey:
Plus, I don't want to give Federico and Mike the...
John:
the pleasure but one way or another it's just i don't know where the issue is if it's me if it's the mac if it's apple if it's software if it's hardware where it is in this case like you just said your your photos workflow is a little bit old right and so and like marco said you are exercising code paths that are not
John:
popular anymore with most other people.
John:
So they're going to be abandoned, not tested as much.
John:
So you're keeping your habits.
John:
Hey, I use image capture.
John:
This is how I do my photos.
John:
This is just the way I like to do it.
John:
And time marches on and everyone else has different photo workflows that do not exercise this code path at all.
John:
It's kind of like if you, you know, I manually arrange my
John:
I don't want to use iTunes.
John:
I manually arrange it and I play the stuff manually from the finder.
John:
You can keep doing that for a long time, but once everyone starts using iTunes, it's hard to swim against that tide.
John:
You're like, oh, now they sell music and I'm forced to use iTunes because it's the only way I can buy music because they can play the Fair Play DRM.
John:
How long can you keep doing it the one old way that you did it?
John:
You can keep doing it the one old way forever if you never update anything else about your computing life.
John:
But it's hard to hold on to that.
John:
So it's like you're using third-party software that...
John:
fewer and fewer people are using for the task you're using it for and you're asking more and more of it because you're taking more bigger more complicated pictures in different formats right so it's not you know i'm not saying you're doing anything particularly wrong but it's it's explicable right and i i think there's it's inevitable in situations where you're like that we all have computer habits that are like that we're like i'm just going to keep doing it this way until i can't do it anymore i think you may be approaching the until you can't do it anymore
John:
uh thing because unless you're going to write the mac app yourself to handle this which you were just entertaining the idea of doing um probably there's not a big market for other people to write mac applications to support these kind of workflows uh so as i think we have all done at various points there comes a time where you say i will give in and try
John:
whatever everyone else is doing try the you know iCloud photo library try google photos try get back on the code path that is being actively developed that has lots of people using and that if it breaks spectacularly at least you'll be suffering along with millions of other people who will cause the thing to be fixed whereas here you are just screaming into the void about
John:
a very high number negative uh error code from uh from image capture and by the way i put a link in uh in our notes for the good old days of negative numbers and error messages from the mac when most of them were single or double digits before we got into negative 9478 we had good old negative 27 and it was like a good friend and then you'd have to turn your computer off and back on again no memory protection
Casey:
So I agree with everything you said, but with one small correction.
Casey:
The pieces of this workflow that are falling down right now that I was complaining about a moment ago, that was all first party.
Casey:
You had said third party, maybe that was accidental, but this is image capture, which is first party using
John:
yeah it was like marco said it's something you're digging something out of like is that in utilities folder but anyway yes it is first party there's lots of applications that come with the mac that haven't been touched in forever or and that if they stop working who's gonna notice like when's the last time you launched the chess application does that still work are there bugs in the chess application i don't know
Marco:
Also, the conditions that this is operating in are changing.
Marco:
Now that iCloud Photo Library is on phones and that photo management is kind of automatic and managed on the device, the interface to interface capture, like exposing a DSIM folder and exposing photos through a virtual file system on the phone that the computer can just copy off of...
Marco:
I think that's all simulated at this point or something like it's, it's different.
Marco:
It's all weird now because iCloud photo library messes with what photos are actually on the phone and what control you have over that.
Marco:
And like, if things try to access them, weird things might happen.
Marco:
So like, it's probably running into something is different now with that versus with maybe the, you know, the HGIC and he, you know, uh, change over and not to mention the high Sierra appears that nothing has been tested at all in the entire OS ever.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So, like, you know, it's a combination of all these things.
Marco:
Like, yeah, one of those one of those things is going to make your incredibly low priority use case not work.
Marco:
But this is like, you know, this is not an excuse.
Marco:
This is probably just the reason.
Marco:
Ultimately, this is like I totally share.
Marco:
I think your your disappointment here.
Marco:
It's like.
Marco:
Clearly, both the hardware and the software on the Mac were really being neglected for a few bad years there.
Marco:
It seems like they have righted or are righting the ship on the hardware side.
Marco:
But the software side, I don't see any sign of that.
Marco:
So we're just going to keep having more and more embarrassing, disheartening OS releases where it seems like more gets broken than gets fixed.
Marco:
That's my concern, and I hope that doesn't come to pass, but so far that is what's happening.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Is there something happy for us to talk about?
Marco:
Well, there actually is.
Casey:
Let me... I was saving this, but... Well, do you want to do Ask ATP?
Casey:
That's always pretty happy.
Marco:
Yes, let's do Ask ATP, and then I have an after-show gift for you, Casey, to celebrate your new baby.
John:
Is it another baby?
Marco:
No, it's literally, it is a gift for Casey.
Marco:
You'll see.
Marco:
All right, let's do Ask ATP.
Casey:
If we're talking about the Mac Pro, I'm hanging up.
Marco:
We're not.
Marco:
First of all, part one of the gift is we're not talking about the Mac Pro.
Casey:
All right, fair enough.
Casey:
All right, starting with Ask ATP, Eric Berlin writes, do you expect the release of the iMac Pro will slow the update cadence of the non-Pro iMac?
Casey:
For example, would Apple hold back a six-core Coffee Lake iMac configuration in 2018 because it would outperform the eight-core Xeon W configuration in the current Mac Pro?
Casey:
It's an interesting question.
Casey:
I would think that it would not...
Casey:
slow things down because they're they're serving different purposes and and okay maybe single core is way better on the non-pro iMac but presumably multi-core will always be way way way way way better on the iMac pro so i don't think this would be the case but i am not terribly confident in my guess here
Casey:
Marco, what do you think?
Marco:
I am terribly confident.
Marco:
To me, it's no question.
Marco:
The iMac Pro, they're not going to hold back new releases of the regular iMac that outpace or come close to the iMac Pro's performance in certain ways due to the progress of the consumer CPUs versus the progress of the Xeons.
Marco:
Because they already have them.
Marco:
Yeah, I know this because not only is the current iMac faster in single core than most of the iMac Pro configurations... And it will always be, almost.
Marco:
Yeah, but also, they already did it once.
Marco:
The 2013 Mac Pro cylinder that came out was bested seven months later or eight months later when the iMac 5K came out, and those processors were faster than in single core.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
They've already done this in the past.
Marco:
It is currently the case.
Marco:
They don't let that control them at all.
Marco:
Apple is confident enough and neglectful enough with the Mac Pro.
Marco:
It's a combination of like, you know, they know that like iMac Pro buyers are not going to not buy the iMac Pro in meaningful numbers because the newest iMac is now slightly faster in single threaded tasks.
Marco:
that's that's not a major factor for most pro buyers also i don't think apple would care and also they you know that they're not they would never hold back the the the release plans of consumer lines in order to favor a mac pro line they don't care enough about the mac pro to do that most of the time yeah and if they had to wait on zeon timelines they would never update anything it would be ridiculous like part of this is intel but like but but honestly it's like
John:
The single core differences, like it's good for bragging rights and benchmarks, you're a few percentage faster.
John:
But the multi-core difference, when you have 18 cores for a good Parable thing, is you're many times faster.
John:
So it's the difference of minor percentages and bragging rights versus...
John:
a fundamental change in your workflow like if i can do this three times faster that's why you buy a pro mac if you know and if you want fastest single core performance apple sells you one of those like if that's what you want like for you know you have some task that is you can't make multi-thread and you want the absolute fastest machine you can do it apple will sell you one
John:
but it's going to make a change in your life that is in like single or double digit percentages.
John:
It's not going to be like 500% faster.
John:
Like it might be if you go from a, you know, a low core count on, on a low end iMac to 18 cores on the top end iMac pro.
John:
So I honestly, I don't think, I don't think they really compete with each other.
John:
Now it could be argued that, you know, for the people who just want everything all the time, which, you know, we've been so conditioned to expect a little, we're not asking this, but yeah, you can take, uh,
John:
one of those uh intel cpus that has the fastest single core performance and wedge it into an iMac pro if they make one of those that supports ccc ram like the i9 or whatever or something like that like you could say why why won't apple sell me an iMac pro with a low core count that is just as fast as the iMac 5k
John:
yeah you know like i don't think again i don't think there's a demand for that like if you want that buy 5k imac um because you know it's not it's not appreciably different right you're not getting the big multi-core performance the reason it's so fast in single core is because well it's that's not the z online so it's revved more and because you can go faster when you don't have so many damn cores shoved inside there so um
John:
It's a long way of answering Eric's question to say they won't hold it back.
John:
Don't worry.
John:
They might not ship new iMacs for other reasons, but believe me, it's not because they're afraid of stomping on their Pro Max.
Casey:
All right, Andy Hume writes, what are John's plans for his cheese grater after he replaces it?
Casey:
Sell it?
Casey:
Donate it to the Hackett collection?
Casey:
And I'm going to add my guess, which is it'll go in your attic, never to be seen again.
John:
Yeah, I had a collection before Hackett was in short pants.
John:
Wow.
John:
A giant collection of stuff in my attic.
John:
That's probably where it's going to go.
John:
But I have a half of mine to answer this literally because I actually do have plans for and...
John:
collections of actual cheese graters.
John:
Oxo used to make a cheese grater that I used to grate Parmesan cheese.
John:
It was the one hard cheese grater that I found ergonomically satisfying.
John:
And they stopped making it.
John:
I love you so much.
John:
They stopped making it because it had like a design flaw.
John:
Like it had, it had this, this flappy plastic part of it that would eventually crack.
John:
So I kind of understand why they stopped making it because, you know, it would last like a couple of years and then that thing would crack.
John:
So it's like, Oh, you know, we need to go back to the drawing board because yeah, this thing is great, but eventually it cracks.
Yeah.
John:
And the one they replaced it with is terrible.
John:
It is ergonomically bad.
John:
You don't get as much mechanical advantage when, you know, compressing the cheese against the grating part that turns or whatever.
John:
I continue to wish and hope for and have many times thought about trying to tinker my way into...
John:
a an electric powered one of these because it is difficult to do and tiring and kind of tedious if you use as much parmesan cheese as i do to constantly have to be grading it by hand you can't really use a food processor or any other things for a variety of other reasons you kind of need something that's slow high torque anyway i've thought about it a little bit but in the meantime these oxo cheese graters they don't make anymore i think either i or my wife or some combination
John:
Like we waited too long.
John:
We realized we went to like buy a new one after one of ours cracked.
John:
We're like, we can't find it anymore.
John:
What happened to it when you found it?
John:
It was discontinued.
John:
And we tried a bunch of other ones and they all sucked.
John:
And it was like, we need to, there's no, we need to just find every one of these things that's still for sale.
John:
So I have like a collection of three of them, I think in the basement.
John:
My current one is slowly cracking upstairs in my kitchen right now.
John:
And when I go through those three, like, I don't know what I'm going to do.
John:
Maybe at that point it's time for me to build my electric powered one.
John:
But anyway, my plans for my cheese graters are grim.
John:
Like, I don't know what I'm going to do after I go through all three of them.
John:
But my personal Mac Pro is it will go into my attic alongside its brethren.
John:
Surely it will, because this is one of my champion Macs of all times.
John:
It will have a place of honor next to my SE30.
John:
Wow.
Casey:
I never in a million years did I think that that was where this was this question was going to end up.
Casey:
And this is one of the reasons I love this show so damn much is because that's where we ended up.
Casey:
All righty.
Casey:
And finally, in our diversion to ask ATP, that's going to make us happy again.
Casey:
Kurt asks, hey, remember messages in iCloud?
Casey:
Womp womp.
Marco:
Is this a really question?
Marco:
Honestly, I almost forgot about it.
Marco:
Look, there's no news here.
Marco:
They announced it.
Marco:
It isn't here.
Marco:
It probably got delayed until the next OS release.
Marco:
Oh, well.
John:
Not oh, well, because that was one of the features I was most looking forward to.
John:
I had it actually as a topic in the list for a long time, and it kept getting pushed down.
John:
And I want to say to this question...
John:
yeah i remember it i was looking forward to it every time i go to messages and i see a different collection of messages and a different conversation contents on my mac and on my phone that are like sitting two feet from each other i think why why does this have to be this way so i really hope fine if it's not done like by all means like wait until it's done right but i really really hope that this feature appears eventually
Marco:
Yeah, me too.
Marco:
There's a reason why it got a noticeable applause during the keynote where it was announced last summer.
Marco:
It's the kind of thing like, look, if it's not done, don't chip it.
Marco:
If it's unreliable or if it's broken, the system we have now is already unreliable and broken.
Marco:
We don't need it to be broken in new ways.
Marco:
Let's wait until it works right and then chip it.
Marco:
I'd rather have it late than wrong.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Hello, and RxBar.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
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.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
So Casey, I have a gift for you.
Casey:
Okay.
Marco:
I was wondering whether to keep this secret, how long to keep this secret, but at some point the secret is going to fall out, so I figured I might as well come clean with you now.
Marco:
Oh my God, I think he fired you.
Okay.
Marco:
He somehow got you fired from your job.
Marco:
That's his gift.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
I wrote a note as you to your boss, filled with profanity.
Casey:
Oh, that would be for me, so that doesn't make sense.
Marco:
Yeah, actually.
Marco:
Yeah, so my gift to you is revealing the secret.
Casey:
tiff got me a vinyl player for christmas a vinyl player is that what you think you might need to look at the box again a turntable they're definitely not called vinyl players i can tell you that this is the best this is this is this is the best moment of my life right now yeah i i figured you could use a gift after after you're probably sleepless week
John:
Can you give me context for this?
John:
Is she buying it for you as a joke?
John:
Is it something that you mentioned you wanted?
John:
Is it something that she wanted and is passing it off as a gift to you but really she wants it?
Casey:
Is this her bowling ball?
Marco:
So we've had the Hello Internet episode of Vinyl sitting on the floor of my office for like two years or however long it's been since it came out.
John:
Does she know she can make a player out of a cone of paper and a needle?
Marco:
I did not know that, actually.
Marco:
I guess that makes sense.
Marco:
Anyway, so she got me a turntable so that we could play the Hello Internet vinyl.
Casey:
I have a turntable, and I have that particular record.
Casey:
No spoilers.
Casey:
We haven't played it yet.
Casey:
No, I haven't either.
Casey:
I've had it forever, and I still haven't had a chance to play it, so I'm right there with you.
Casey:
But that's awesome.
Casey:
So I need to start sending you actual good music, and thus not fish, post-haste.
Marco:
And she also got me a Phish album.
Marco:
She got me a live one, which is great.
Casey:
Tiff giveth and tiff taketh away.
Marco:
So I actually decided, you know, because also over the holidays, we visited Mike and Adina, and they had a turntable, and they were playing music on it.
Marco:
during our entire meal there, and it was really nice to just kind of be hanging out and to have music playing.
Marco:
You can't do that without vinyl, that's for sure.
Marco:
Right, and so it was nice, though, and so I figured, okay...
Marco:
I'll try this on.
Marco:
It's like trying on a new style of hat or something.
Marco:
It's like, here's something that the hit people are doing.
Marco:
I don't know if this is my thing, but I'll try it on.
Marco:
So I tried it on.
Marco:
So I have a couple of albums.
Marco:
Also, by the way,
Marco:
Boy, do I suck at buying vinyl.
Marco:
There's a lot of albums that are available on vinyl.
Marco:
Like modern albums.
Marco:
Besides the ones that were originally issued on vinyl in the 60s and stuff.
Marco:
But there's a lot of modern albums and reissues from the 90s and stuff that have been reissued now on vinyl now that it's a growth business that you can charge people $25 for the same album they bought 20 years ago.
Marco:
Most of them that I have found... About half of the ones I have found...
Marco:
I have accidentally bought them where it's like they split what was one CD onto two records.
Marco:
And so each side of each record has three or two songs on it, followed by this giant wide strip of black silence in the middle.
John:
like didn't you have a record player as a kid yes so this is like i know how to use them you don't remember that like you don't remember one of the things about cds being its capacity for like how many minutes of audio you can have on it and with the compromises about the inner and outer tracks like that those things were gone like that was one of the innovations of cds
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
I just figured it out.
Marco:
Yeah, because the outer tracks will rotate more, so they'll have more fidelity.
Marco:
Oh, that's why they do it.
Marco:
Vinyl is a shit show.
Marco:
Oh, that's those dicks.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Did you just say vinyl is a shit show?
Marco:
It is.
John:
I was trying to think of a way to say it without cursing, but I just said it's the after show.
Marco:
Whatever.
Marco:
So let me tell you my annoyances first, then I'll get into some things I actually like about it.
Marco:
Yeah, like...
Marco:
so many like i bought albums thinking like oh i love this album it's good because my my criteria is obviously things that that i want to play like out loud with other people around that i wouldn't be embarrassed by the whole album has to be good all the way through because skipping songs is not really an easy thing oh it's not bad i understand your point but it's not bad
Marco:
So anyway, and I had to get a phono preamp.
Marco:
So I got, of course, the one from shit.
Marco:
I forget that.
John:
All right.
John:
This record player is just a way for Marco to buy more amps and other German boxes with vulgar names.
Marco:
One box, a phono preamp, because the turn table did not have a built in preamp.
Marco:
OK, so first of all, I'm like, you know, I connect everything up and there's like just constant, constant low level noise coming out of the speaker.
Marco:
And I'm like, well, something's wrong.
Marco:
Feels warm, doesn't it?
Marco:
Yeah, so it's like, I got a ground loop isolator.
Marco:
I tried that.
Marco:
I tried a power isolating brick.
Marco:
I tried different cables in case the cables were introducing interference.
Marco:
Everything's analog, so everything can introduce interference in an all-analog signal path.
Marco:
Tried lots of things, isolated lots of things, and it turns out, yeah, that's just the noise floor of this cartridge or whatever.
Marco:
It's like there's no... It isn't a ground loop.
Marco:
It isn't electrical interference.
Marco:
It's just like, yeah, just the noise floor isn't that low.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
and and definitely uh the my least favorite thing about playing them is how often you have to flip it over because each side holds i think a maximum of something like 22 minutes or 20 minutes something like that you know these are the number john
Marco:
no i don't remember from my youth but i've sure i surely do remember flipping yeah exactly so you have to flip them you know every like four or five songs basically um unless you have one of these stupid audiophile ones that i accidentally bought where it's like you take one album split onto four and you're gonna flip it every two songs thanks a lot anyway i will say in in this endeavor there are things that i unexpectedly like about it um
Marco:
the best metaphor I've come up with for this is it's kind of like a Kindle is for reading.
Marco:
Like, a Kindle does not look as good as an iPad or a printed page.
Marco:
Like, the resolution of the text is nowhere near it.
Marco:
Even on the new Kindles with the higher resolution screens, it's nowhere close to either print or even retina screens on an iPad Pro.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
A Kindle, by all accounts, looks worse.
Marco:
It also does less and functions worse in a number of ways than other ways to read books.
Marco:
But the appeal of Kindles is that they can do nothing else.
Marco:
So it kind of helps you appreciate the book more that if you're using this device to read books...
Marco:
That's all you're doing.
Marco:
You kind of have to put some effort into it.
Marco:
That's all you're doing.
Marco:
It's not going to ever do anything else.
Marco:
It's very simple, etc.
Marco:
Playing music on vinyl is a pain in the ass, but it's a way to deliberately sit down and choose to enjoy an album.
Marco:
And this works especially for me because I've always been an album listener.
Marco:
Even when I listen to MP3s and everything, I don't listen on shuffle to my whole collection or anything.
Marco:
I don't make playlists.
Marco:
I listen to albums all the way through.
Marco:
That's how I've always listened for the last 20 years.
Marco:
That's just how I listen to music.
Marco:
and i've joked tiff like oh we could have just gotten a cd player or like an ipod i was gonna say there are other devices you can buy that only play music i know i know but i'm saying like you know this is a pain in the ass and it's a novelty and it's you know i don't expect to be playing vinyl forever and it doesn't sound better it sounds worse notes will be worse you know i'm not
Marco:
I'm not... My making fun of Casey in the past on vinyl is that, you know, I don't mind when people say they enjoy it more.
Marco:
I do mind when people say it sounds better because it doesn't.
Marco:
And it can't and it never will.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I do appreciate the activity of playing music on vinyl now in a way I didn't appreciate before.
Marco:
So that is my gift to you, Casey.
John:
You need to get one of those.
John:
I don't know if they make these, but like the best analogy is like one of these things you use for like pets or animals where like it looks like a record player.
John:
and you put a record on it and you put the little needle in and you hear the little crackle but then what actually happens is behind the scenes it plays just you know a digital audio file that is exactly equivalent to whatever record you put on there so you can get the audio quality you want with all the other stuff that you want from it like so you get you get all the ceremony of doing it held make the make the digital audio file stop and make you flip the disc before it plays the next two tracks right
Marco:
I've actually been scheming like, I wonder if I could get a Raspberry Pi or something next to the record player and just put an SD card in it and have cheap SD cards in the pocket of each vinyl cover and just stick it in there.
Marco:
To have the music.
John:
So what you just want to do is put a plastic disc on something and drop a needle on it.
John:
That's what you want to happen.
John:
And then you just want music to play.
John:
But the music doesn't have to come from that thing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Well, so you didn't adequately explain to me.
John:
I guess it was a just...
Marco:
the the hello intern and that's like literally it or just tiff actually was tiff actually convinced by the the moon hipsters from london that this is a thing that you have to do to regain your youth and coolness i think some of both uh certainly and you know it's a cool thing it's it's a really nicely designed object like it's a nice like hipster turntable it's it's like this like you know minimal minimal visual design thing made of wood like it's really nice looking um so i think it's a combination of all those things
Marco:
Well, I'm very disappointed in you, Marco.
John:
Oh, yeah, you should be.
John:
I'm very disappointed in Mike and Adina, but, you know, they're younger.
Marco:
Next year, I'll buy an SACD player, maybe, and I'll tell you how that goes.
John:
No, I would not be.
John:
I would say, there you go.
John:
Now you're on the right track.
John:
You've got to get a Nakamichi stereo and a Super Audio CD player, and what was the other one?
John:
DVD audio?
John:
DVD-A?
Marco:
I think that's dead.
Marco:
I think SACD.
Marco:
I mean, both formats never went.
John:
They still make SACD?
Marco:
Well, if you get a Sony Blu-ray player, they're almost all also SACD players.
Marco:
So I could get a Sony 4K Blu-ray, because I was thinking, maybe I should get a 4K Blu-ray player.
Marco:
There you go, 4K TV now.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
So I could also... Think of the ceremony of the Blu-ray as you wait for Java to load the stupid menus.
John:
That's all part of the ceremony, Marco.
Marco:
I want to be very clear here.
Marco:
I don't give two craps about the ceremony.
Marco:
i i appreciate the idea of sitting down to deliberately and only listen to music like to to just enjoy the music that is playing and not have it be part of a whole separate like computing experience and multimedia device and everything like it's it's hard you could just get a cd player i'm not convinced you don't you don't care about the ceremony
Marco:
i don't care about the ceremony i'm not convinced and and just just give me a few more days of flipping these discs and believe me you know what else you can do with records that you might remember from your youth they shatter real good when you have fights with them well it's also it's kind of cool too like first of all like the the um the services like like like i've been buying most of them on amazon the ones that are still in print at least
Marco:
And it's cool because they include a digital copy.
Marco:
If you buy vinyl on Amazon, it automatically adds that album to your music collection.
John:
That is the most millennial hipster thing I've ever heard in my life.
Marco:
You buy a record and it comes with the... Some of the ones I've bought have the CD in a paper sleeve inside the vinyl.
Marco:
What?
Casey:
I've never seen that.
Marco:
Yeah, I think the Nickel Creek one I bought, I think, has that.
Casey:
Oh, great band.
Casey:
Great, great band.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
If you buy the one with the corn song, the elephant in the corn, the album that has that on it, it comes with that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You know how they make like USB thumb drives out of all sorts of things and they need to come out with a vinyl album that is itself actually an SD card.
John:
Like it's an SD card with a huge circular grooved handle.
John:
That is a record, but really it's just a giant SD card.
Marco:
yeah so anyway um yeah and it's i again it's i know it's ridiculous and it does not sound better and it's a bit of a pain in the ass but it is kind of fun i also i kind of like having the giant album art like this is like the original album art that's what you should be buying you should just be buying record sleeves and putting them on your wall as art
John:
Don't listen to them.
John:
Look at them.
John:
That's actually not a bad idea.
John:
We'll get there.
John:
I used to have long boxes on my wall when CDs came out as a replacement because I was kind of disappointed that the album art went away.
John:
It's like, well, they got these long boxes, so I guess that's all.
John:
And then those went away, too.
Casey:
Well, I, for one, am happy that you've discovered that sometimes I say things that are not completely insane.
Casey:
Turns out, I know it's weird, but it does happen.
Marco:
It wasn't the same when you said it sounded better.
Marco:
That was definitely insane.
Marco:
It does not sound better.
Casey:
Well, I'm excited.
Casey:
I applaud Tiff's purchase for you.
Casey:
I applaud you realizing that's something I've known for most of my life, and people older than us have known for their entire lives, basically, that, hey, it's not so bad.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
In the grand scheme of things, as a man who likes wristwatches based out of 1812, I'm not entirely surprised that you like an audio playback system that is also based out of 1812.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
as time goes on and as you get older so does your techno so do your technical technological preferences and so this is just the next step in the way then you have a beard now i mean you just need that's true i do have a beard i mean you're you're really getting clear you need flannel and skinny jeans and you'll be full hipster yeah i'm not i'm not actually skinny though that's the problem
Casey:
Does that matter?
John:
I was saying, you're trying to recapture your youth.
John:
You're not actually in your youth.
Casey:
Oh, that is a good gift, though.
John:
It's pronounced jift.
Casey:
God damn it, John.