A Tarnished Brass Age
Marco:
Also, my throat's burning from all the ginger I put in my lemon ginger honey thing.
Marco:
I put too much.
Marco:
Normally, I just mince the ginger, but this time I decided to put a ginger and hot water solution in my blender and really puree the crap out of it.
Marco:
It's really in there.
Marco:
And wow, it's stronger that way.
John:
You're using chemical weapons on yourself.
Marco:
like next next marco pepper sprays his throat yeah and then of course all the ginger like particles sank to the bottom of the cup so the whole rest of the time i was drinking i was like oh this isn't too bad but now i mean now i'm at the bottom and now it's every sip is like fire you just need to get crystallized ginger so you can slowly eat the crystals
Marco:
Did you know that ginger tea is almost always BS?
Marco:
Like, if you try to get, like, just, like, bad ginger tea so it's all dried, every single one of them I've ever seen includes as one of the ingredients black pepper.
John:
What?
Marco:
Why is that BS?
Marco:
Because you don't like black pepper?
Marco:
Because they're trying to make it feel like fresh ginger with the burn in the back of your throat by making you drink black pepper, basically.
John:
Does ginger, fresh ginger give you...
Marco:
a burn in the back of your i guess i don't need enough fresh ginger to know i mean ginger is spicy it's like there's like a spice to it but when you dry it out and and you know make dry tea bags with it you lose that and so to make you think you're tasting more fresh ginger than you are they add black pepper to ginger tea bags to to remind you of the burn that you get with fresh ginger but it's you know it's it's like engine noises like it's totally fake
John:
When do you eat fresh ginger other than this thing that you're doing to yourself because you're sick?
John:
I'm not sick.
John:
I just enjoy this.
John:
Yes, it's fresh, but then you chop it up and then you cook it.
John:
You make it hot in some kind of pan.
Casey:
What about the ginger that comes with sushi?
Casey:
That's pickled.
John:
Ah, okay.
John:
And I don't eat sushi.
Marco:
Have you tried it?
John:
I don't like fish.
Marco:
Neither do I. So my problem is I don't like fish and I'm allergic to avocado.
Marco:
Try to find anything at a sushi restaurant that contains neither of those things.
Marco:
But anyway, I'm eating fresh ginger right now in this drink.
Marco:
It's really good, but a little Bernie.
Marco:
But a little Bernie.
Marco:
Yeah, because I'm making my own ginger tea because actual ginger tea is bullshit.
John:
Just because it contains pepper.
John:
I'm not convinced that people just don't like the taste of pepper.
John:
You think it's ginger fakery, but maybe it's just positive peppering.
Marco:
If that's the reason they added it, they would put pepper on the label.
Marco:
They would advertise it as ginger pepper tea.
Marco:
Zero of them do this.
Marco:
They don't put salt on the labels?
John:
They're salt in it?
Marco:
No, actually.
Marco:
I don't think so.
Casey:
So let's do a follow-up.
Casey:
Peter Kendall writes that he loves that, Marco, you purchased some walkie-talkies for your road trip, since he is an amateur or ham radio operator, and he is glad that they worked well.
Casey:
Peter continues, while walkie-talkies don't have the best range, once one passes an amateur radio exam...
Casey:
You can get access to much more powerful radios.
Casey:
For example, one can get these mobile radios that pump out 50 watts and are powered by the 12-volt battery in your car and have a detachable head unit to put on your dash.
Casey:
There are other shapes and sizes as well, including smaller ones that are basically glorified walkie-talkies but more powerful.
Casey:
Holy monkey, 50 watts is—I don't know anything, and I know that's significant.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, for reference, the walkie-talkies max out at 2 watts.
Marco:
And you only get the 2 watts if you go – you're only legally supposed to use the 2 watt versions if you go to the FCC's website and register for a GMRS license, which I actually did.
Marco:
And I didn't want to get in trouble for using the 2 watt channels.
Marco:
And I did it because it was really easy and inexpensive to do it.
Marco:
Going all the way for a full ham radio license is considerably more involved.
Marco:
And I didn't think it was necessary to communicate between two vehicles that were usually at most a few hundred feet apart.
Marco:
So it wasn't necessary for this use case.
Marco:
But ham radio is one of those things like that.
Marco:
There's a lot of overlap between ham radio and nerd culture.
Marco:
And I respect a lot of it, but I don't know that much about it.
Marco:
But ultimately, I've never had much of a reason to get into it because the broadcast nature of that hobby for me I've solved with podcasting and the short-range communication nature I've never really had a need until now.
Marco:
And walkie-talkies serve my needs perfectly well.
John:
I put this in here because I feel like it fits well with Marco's vinyl revival and stuff.
John:
Not that he's going to be into it now, but maybe this is like the ghost of Marco future when he wants another tech thing to get into or maybe he finds himself traveling to upstate a lot or maybe he retires to upstate and needs to have walkie talkies.
John:
Seeing Marco take an amateur radio exam to get a license for a more powerful radio is a thing that seems plausible to me.
John:
So just put a marker here.
John:
Come back in 20 years.
John:
There is no way I would ever be allowed to put a giant antenna in my yard.
John:
Once you have your giant compound upstate, you have plenty of land for that.
Casey:
It's true.
Casey:
There's some sort of ham joke here that I just can't put my finger on.
Marco:
I'm more of a brisket person.
Casey:
No, that's not the ham I was going for, but I'll allow it.
Casey:
As long as one of us got one in, I'm good.
Casey:
All right, Eduardo Ponce writes, if anyone's wondering whether the new onboarding screens on iOS 11.3 were all about GDPR, wonder no more.
Casey:
And they include a link to a photograph of their Apple TV.
Casey:
where there are clearly some string... What would you call these?
Casey:
I don't know, like placeholders.
Marco:
They're localization identifiers, basically.
Marco:
So when you're writing an app that's supposed to be localized to different languages, you usually wrap the string calls in some kind of localization layer, like NSLocalizedString or something like that.
Marco:
And so the idea is you don't just hard-code the...
Marco:
language strings are going to be shown to the user in like the source code you have some kind of resource file that is a strings file and then you can localize the strings file that's just like a list of all the strings that would be displayed to a user you can have that localized by translators and then you can have a whole bundle of those things in your app and you can have different ones show for different language and locale settings and your app simply instead of saying like ask the user are you sure the app says give me the string for the are you sure dialogue on this page
Marco:
So it might have some kind of identifier for that, some kind of like, you know, are you sure dot identifier dot setup dot one or something like that.
Marco:
And so what we see here is there was some kind of problem, some kind of bug or something where the string didn't load and instead it just showed the identifier and it has GDPR in the identifier, in the name of the identifiers for the text of this dialogue for these boxes.
Marco:
So clearly Apple considers these GDPR dialogues.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So like a couple of samples, ATV for Apple TV dot videos dot GDPR dot welcome to movies or ATV dot videos dot GDPR dot continue button label.
Casey:
So, yeah, it was funny to me because I was pretty darn confident that this was this boiled down to GDPR.
Casey:
And man, there were not a lot of people who disagreed.
Casey:
But who boy did the people who disagree?
Casey:
They were very confident that we were wrong.
Casey:
And guess what?
Casey:
Told you so.
Casey:
moving on uh oh man i did not think to figure out how to pronounce this uh salian callian mr or mrs babcock writes in i've dealt with technology at the high school and elementary levels uh when it comes to cost and collaboration features google wins since that device is configured and locked down ios doesn't count much as for video editing it sounds cool but it's a huge time sink i didn't add this who did what what are we trying to say here
John:
I just put a little bit of EDU feedback.
John:
We got a lot of people replying.
John:
So I just want to have a few samples to sort of cover the range.
John:
That's what the next few items are about.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Andrew Link writes, creativity is the peak of learning, but 40% of the time I'm dealing with quote unquote classroom management.
Casey:
And 50% is trying to even get students to reach the baseline.
Casey:
There are broad family and cultural issues to address before tech really matters.
Casey:
Andrew's school or whatever is implementing Google Suite over the next two years.
Casey:
It's a mixed bag.
Casey:
The software is okay.
Casey:
The network kit is slowing everything to a crawl.
Casey:
Also, tween memories and Google-level secure passwords are a painful mix.
Casey:
In other words, everyone's always forgetting their passwords.
Casey:
Didn't one of your kids have that happen to them?
Marco:
Not me.
Marco:
No, not me.
Marco:
My kid has good password hygiene.
Casey:
I don't even know if you're serious or not, and I'm a little scared.
John:
The reason I picked these two bits here is that we have a lot of people who are actually in education writing to us, and maybe not all of them.
John:
But no matter what it was these people were using, everyone had complaints, right?
John:
So it's not complaints about the thing they're not using, complaints about the thing they are using.
John:
Complaints about the difficulty of the job, about the difficulty of dealing with technology.
John:
And no matter what it was they were using, if they were all Apple, if they were all Google, if they were a mix.
John:
that everything had a problem and we know this for tech podcasts we complain about technology and we know the frustrations that most people who aren't tech enthusiasts feel about technology like they're just frustrated when it doesn't work especially if it's you're supposed to be using as part of your job um so not not a lot of feedback was like here's what we use and we love it and it's awesome awesome some people liked one thing better than the other and would say i'm so glad i have x it's better than y but they all had complaints about whatever it was they were using so
John:
um no silver bullet for tech in schools and i particularly like the idea of like that creativity is the peak of learning sort of like a pyramid of like you know what was that uh is it maslow's hierarchy of needs somebody has a hierarchy of needs yeah and it's like uh you know safety and blah blah and very at the top is like self-actualization or whatever and so it's like in in the classroom
John:
get the kids to show up get them to be safe uh get you know get them to pay attention get them to absorb something like and creativity is like when you get all that other stuff taken care of and then finally they're allowed to to blossom and that that's the aspirational nature of what apple is pitching that
John:
By buying our products, they will enhance the peak of learning, but you have to get to that peak first.
John:
You have to have the students in the seats paying attention, absorbing the material, and then spreading their wings and being creative with the things that you've successfully taught them.
Casey:
It was interesting to me that I felt like a lot of the feedback we got about education was very contradictory.
Casey:
Somebody would say, oh, of course you would want an iPad.
Casey:
The total cost of ownership is so much better.
Casey:
Oh, you could never get an iPad.
Casey:
The total cost is so much worse.
Casey:
It was very yin and yang, and it made me laugh.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
One more thing.
John:
I didn't put anybody's feedback in.
John:
I should have.
John:
about the idea of apple devices or whatever devices being expensive and then only being available in quote unquote rich schools lots of people were i mean there seems to be like a disconnect between the students that attend the schools and a tax base that potentially feeds into them because a lot of people are like uh you know we have ipads in our school and our we're not in a wealthy area right and so it's like it doesn't mean necessarily that the students who go to the school
John:
are are well to do but it seems in some areas more than others money somehow is getting to these schools that is not directly attributable to the incomes of the individual students who are attending um and i think that's just the nature of tax spaces it depends on where you live it depends on how your taxes are distributed um
John:
It depends on if there's some other program that's feeding money into the school to buy the fancy iPads for the school that otherwise is not awash in cash.
John:
I mean, I can tell you the opposite here.
John:
Where I live, it's filled with rich people.
John:
Uh, and yet a lot of the technology in the schools that my kids attend, especially elementary school is entirely funded directly by the parents as in there is no money in the school budget for technology whatsoever.
John:
And the only reason there's any technology is because all the kids' parents are rich and give directly money to buy.
John:
Like if you want to see any computers in your kid's school, uh,
John:
You're going to have to collect money and give them to us, right?
John:
And is it because the tax base isn't big enough here?
John:
No, that can't possibly be it.
John:
It's just a question of budgeting and how much money goes towards elementary and how much priority they put on putting technology in school versus, you know, tearing down one local elementary school and rebuilding it to be this Taj Mahal multi-million dollar amazing piece of construction, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
That costs a lot more money than iPads, and that was not funded by people's parents with direct contributions, but with good old-fashioned taxes and bonds.
Casey:
Would one of you like to tell me about what happens when you open a new document in Pages?
John:
I think there is a video of it.
John:
This is related to our topic for how do people find help in iOS apps when the screen is so small?
John:
How do you communicate the features of your application so people know when it launches what you can do with it?
John:
began because the screen is so small and there's no omnipresent menu bar with a help menu uh and we were uh we talked about the bad ways you can do this by circling a bunch of stuff on the screen and throwing a bunch of words in people's faces and putting pointing a finger and said this tap this thing to do this tap that thing to do that tap that thing and expecting them to memorize it the one time they see it uh so this is benjamin mayo tweeted a little video
John:
of what happens in, I'm assuming this is the new version of pages on iOS.
John:
So they have, you know, what you do have visible in many iOS applications is a toolbar with some glyphs on it of some kind, icons or glyphs, either whether it's the top or at the bottom.
John:
and in pages this looks like on a phone you launch it and the new collaboration glyph pulses like if it gets a little bigger and smaller i don't know if it ever stops pulsing because in the video he taps it right away right but if you tap it it takes you to this little video that shows you like oh the collaborate feature and it sort of does this wordless animation showing you
John:
how collaboration might work it's pretty good animation that communicates without too much text kind of what collaboration does uh it has a brief explanation but then shows you a bunch of things i don't know i think you kind of already have to know how collaboration works to understand the video frankly uh but that's
John:
I mean, I don't know if I like that better than the overlay, but I guess it's certainly trying to be more subtle.
John:
I just can imagine people launching the app and going, why is that button pulsing?
John:
Especially if it doesn't stop.
John:
Or if it does stop, you might think you're going a little bit mad that like...
John:
I could swear last time I launched this application, part of the toolbar was pulsing.
John:
And I'm pretty sure I wasn't on cold medicine or anything.
John:
Anyway, I just thought it was interesting.
John:
Here's Apple trying alternate solutions to scribbling all over our screen with a bunch of arrows.
John:
So keep trying, Apple.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Apple giveth and Apple taketh away.
Casey:
Good news.
Casey:
200 gigs of free iCloud storage for bad news.
Casey:
Every managed Apple ID account that's involved in education.
Casey:
Womp womp.
John:
I bring that up because we talk about, oh, they need to give more iCloud storage to everybody.
John:
And, you know, they haven't for a really long time.
John:
Someone put it how long it was, like seven years or something since the five gig free.
John:
Yeah, I think it's since iCloud was introduced.
John:
Like it was never less than five gigs.
John:
That's what it started at.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so for education, this is something a lot of people cited and feedback, including one that just came in just before the show, like how much it costs to buy all the third party things you have to buy to fill in the gaps and functionality that Apple doesn't offer, including having cloud storage, which according to an email we just got, I believe a person said that there is no way to pay for more iCloud storage for students.
John:
Like even if you wanted to give them more money for more, you couldn't.
John:
um i'm not you know that that seems that seems very strange to me but anyway apple said hey we're increasing to 200 and got lots of applause but why wouldn't you you know 200 gigabytes free up from five that is a big increase uh but for people who are not students still five gigabytes
Marco:
We've heard from lots of other podcasters and fans and Apple users.
Marco:
I keep hearing that everyone expects that, oh, well, they're just waiting until WWDC in June, and that's when they're going to raise the limits for everybody for free.
Marco:
I honestly would not consider that a safe bet at all.
Marco:
In fact, I might even bet against that.
Marco:
The five gigs is indeed comically stingy and even was seven years ago when I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs introduced it.
Marco:
But it was bad then and it's bad now.
Marco:
But services are Apple's biggest area of potential growth, I think.
Marco:
I don't think they're going to want to give up services revenue that easily.
Marco:
And this is probably not a small portion of it.
Marco:
The people who upgrade to a paid iCloud storage plan for basic functionality of their iOS devices, really, that's probably not a small amount of their services revenue.
Marco:
So I can't imagine them all of a sudden raising it to a level that would cover way more people for free.
Marco:
It'd be nice if this happens.
Marco:
Apple has in the past occasionally intentionally taken a hit on margin to do something really compelling for consumers.
Marco:
And they'll usually even warn analysts of that in like one of the earnings calls beforehand.
Marco:
But honestly, I just don't see that.
Marco:
I mean, that happened a lot more in the past than it does now.
Marco:
And I don't see them giving up a big chunk of services revenue when that is clearly an area where they're focusing a lot on and depending on for growth.
John:
I think the balance that they have to keep looking at is how many people are willing to pay money for extra storage versus how many people are at their storage limits but still unwilling to pay.
John:
Because when you're at your storage limit and are still unwilling to pay...
John:
that becomes apple's problem if it starts to affect their satisfaction like they don't like apple because like they they they want to charge me money i don't want to give them any money and my phone is constantly full because a constantly full phone is a bad user experience it yells at you about having too much storage you can't take pictures you have to choose precious things that you want to delete it's a bad experience right and so
John:
it is in apple's interest to get people somehow to have more storage ideally by paying apple money right that's what they prefer but if it turns out that nothing they do can dislodge this very large percentage of people who refuse to pay money and constantly have full phones that's not a good situation and maybe it's still just a fraction of people maybe like people do in the end they complain but they pay and that an apple may be willing to do that and then you know people feel better but
John:
Whenever I see somebody with a full iOS device who refuses to pay for additional storage, I feel Apple's pain by proxy.
John:
This person is dissatisfied or unsatisfied, whichever those is the correct word, with their product.
John:
And...
John:
There is an obvious solution that doesn't cost that much money, but there's no way you will convince them to pay for, you know, pay for nothing, to pay for air, to pay for whatever.
John:
Storage should be free, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Software should be free.
John:
Like it's it's a tough sell, but it really does affect their opinion of their device.
John:
Maybe not enough to get them onto another device.
John:
Maybe eventually get them on another device, but they are mad about it.
John:
So I think that's that's a problem Apple needs to address in some way.
John:
Maybe they can address it just by reducing the prices or changing the tiers or cleverly arranging the tiers such that people get on board like with the thin end of the wedge, like get on board a cheapo tier and then slowly like ratchet up as they need storage to like to make it feel better for people to pay for storage.
John:
Because I feel like that's the big barrier.
John:
The big barrier is not how much it costs.
John:
It's getting people over the hump from not paying anything to paying something.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, because like, you know, so much of this is psychological.
Marco:
It's more about feeling than about whether you can afford or not afford the, you know, whatever, whatever the cheapest plan, like three bucks a month or something.
Marco:
A lot of it is more like, you know, people are just kind of annoyed on principle that they have to pay for this or they're annoyed on principle that their phone is bugging them about this thing that they haven't even actually really read or looked into.
Marco:
They just know that their phone's bugging them.
Marco:
Or they're annoyed on principle that they only get five gigs for free and that bugs them.
Marco:
Or they look at the prices of additional storage on other services like Dropbox and how it compares and they're like, oh, well, this is a bad deal.
Marco:
And so it's so much more about like I don't want to pay than I can't afford the X dollars a month in a lot of cases.
John:
Or they're putting their money, like you said, towards a different thing.
John:
Like, well, if I'm going to pay for storage, I'm going to get the most bang for my buck.
John:
And that takes people off Apple services.
John:
If you're using Dropbox for all your file storage, you know, it's actually even more viable now that Apple has the, you know, the share sheet integration for Dropbox and stuff.
John:
But, you know, like I think Apple would be.
John:
uh upset if people decided to use google photos instead of apple's photo solution like i think apple wants you to use their photo solution for a variety of reasons well they should be trying a little harder on a variety of fronts then true yeah and i and i think apple would tell you that their photo solution is like you know better on privacy and all those other reasons why you might use it but if you are you know that's the feature that google has hammered apple on if you're constantly running out of storage because you're filling up your phone with videos and photos
John:
and apple wants you to pay more money and google says don't pay us anything we'll keep an unlimited amount of your photos radius quality asterisk uh forever and ever people say oh well then why would i pay for the apple thing i'm just going to use google photos and i'm going to use you know the google photos app instead of the apple photos app and i'm going to use the google website and like apple doesn't want you to go all in on the google ecosystem right so apple should do something uh i don't know if that means increase the five gig tier to 200 for everybody for free but something would be nice
Casey:
You know what it is that bothers me so much about this is that I feel like five gigs is an egregiously, obnoxiously paltry amount.
Casey:
If it was maybe as much as the smallest modern iPhone, so let's say it's 30 or whatever gigs, you know, 32 gigs or thereabouts.
Casey:
That at least feels like, okay, they're giving you something reasonable.
Casey:
If you have one single iPhone attached to your Apple ID, it stands to reason that you should be able to back that up to iCloud for free.
Casey:
That to me would be still more paltry than I would want.
Casey:
Like something along the lines of 200 gigs sounds really great.
Casey:
But let's say, for the sake of argument, 32 gigs is what they're going to bring tomorrow.
Casey:
Tomorrow, you can have 32 gigs of storage.
Casey:
Then I wouldn't be as offended by it.
Casey:
I would be slightly annoyed, but I wouldn't be frigging offended.
Casey:
But five gigs is like, man, screw you.
Casey:
They don't want to give you any storage.
Casey:
But here, fine.
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
We'll give you a little bit.
Casey:
Be happy about that.
Casey:
I just find it obnoxious.
Casey:
It's so little.
Casey:
And that's the thing that bothers me.
Marco:
Yeah, I wonder how much of this is just like inertia.
Marco:
Like if they were launching this service today, I doubt that the number they would pick would be five gigs.
Marco:
But, you know, it's probably hard for them to, you know, first of all, in typical Apple fashion, they probably don't look at this very often.
Marco:
You know, like they set it up.
Marco:
It's going.
Marco:
And it's probably a lot like a lot of their hardware releases where it just gets ignored for years until somebody realizes they should look at it eventually.
Marco:
And so I'm guessing this hasn't actually been reconsidered that often.
Marco:
And then...
Marco:
Because there's the inertia of having it there for so long, the idea of increasing it by a large amount probably does scare them on two fronts.
Marco:
Number one, you know, margin, as I mentioned earlier, they're probably afraid of that services revenue going down or having the growth slow down.
Marco:
And number two...
Marco:
Every iOS device is a lot of iOS devices.
Marco:
And so the scale at which they would have to scale this up, they probably can't offer something like a terabyte for free to everybody because there probably aren't enough hard drives in the world.
Marco:
or something like that like there is probably some kind of major limit on scale in place here i don't know where that limit is it's gotta be way higher than five gigs but they probably couldn't say offer 200 gigs to everybody like that's that might be too high or it might be just impractical or it might be like maybe they can do it in a couple years maybe not yet
Marco:
So there's definitely, I guarantee you there's some kind of scale concerns there.
Marco:
Whether they are impassable or not, I don't know.
Marco:
But if you start doing the math of how many active iOS devices there are out there and how many hard drives and data centers and stuff they would need, it is pretty large numbers.
Marco:
So there is definitely a factor there.
Marco:
But it might not, you know, it's got to be higher than 5 gigs.
John:
Well, there's a new single-region-only variant of S3 for 22% less than the regular price.
John:
Apple can get right on that.
John:
I'm trying to think back to when the 5GB limit was introduced, and I'm pretty sure that 5GB was always positioned as, this is not enough for you to... This is not covering you.
John:
Apple never sold a 5GB device with a 5GB thing.
John:
It was always so clearly...
John:
the starter price you get a little bit for free but if you use and fill whatever device you purchased five you're gonna run out of five gigs so it was always uh with the expectation that if you fill the device you need to buy more five gigs today still is something that uh if you get it and you fill the device you have to buy more so it fulfills the same role like it is it is equally able to cause people to hit the limit right
John:
uh and arguably with with the he can he you know uh h265 stuff you could hit your limits more slowly now than you did last year because your images are half the size and stuff and now you can fit 10 minutes of 4k video yeah but in general things every every photo and every video is so much bigger than it was back when the 5 gig limit was introduced that it you know it feels more punitive now than it did before
Casey:
It's just, it's a bummer.
Casey:
Classrooms for Mac.
Casey:
So there's already a classrooms app for iPad, maybe iPhone.
Casey:
I don't remember.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter for iOS.
Casey:
And they said classrooms for Mac is coming in June as a beta.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Why not now as a beta?
Casey:
Why June?
Casey:
Well, there's one clear, well, I shouldn't say clear answer.
Casey:
There's one clear theory about that.
Marco:
There's one hopeful theory about that.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
And probably a few other explanations that are less interesting.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And one of the less interesting ones is probably the accurate, you know, real answer.
Casey:
But the fun theory that we can pontificate about is Marzipan, which is that supposed cross-platform framework that is maybe but maybe not coming at WWDC.
Casey:
And perhaps that's why we can't talk about it, because there's more things to come in June at WWDC, and then it will all be made clear.
John:
Well, that's why you can't download it.
John:
Like, because if you download it, then everyone just, you know, run glass dump or whatever and look at the frameworks.
John:
But speaking of frameworks, the much more boring explanation is it's UX kit, the same thing that photos and stuff is made out of.
John:
Like when Apple has been in situations in the past where there's an iOS device and they want something more or less like that iOS device on the Mac, they have ways of doing that that don't involve the rumored cross-platform framework thing.
Marco:
And also, it just might not be ready yet.
John:
That's the most boring explanation is they're just not done writing it.
Marco:
And that, I think, is by far the most likely.
Marco:
I love the idea of this Project Marzipan thing.
Marco:
I really hope it's real.
Marco:
And I do think this summer would not be an unreasonable time to launch it into beta.
Marco:
That would be a really fun explanation for this.
Marco:
It's much more likely that it just isn't ready yet because it is not... The fact that Apple said...
Marco:
Here's an event that we're going to announce something, but you can't actually see it or buy it or use it yet for a few months.
Marco:
That's so common now.
Marco:
That's constantly used for all sorts of reasons, for all sorts of products.
Marco:
The most rare thing now is when they have an event and they announce something that's ready right then that you can buy like today or tomorrow.
Marco:
That's the less common case now.
Marco:
So the fact this isn't ready yet, I think it's unlikely that it has any other meaning other than it's not ready yet.
John:
But it probably is using UXKit because I don't see why they would port something from iOS and not use the framework they have that they have used successfully to port a bunch of stuff from iOS.
John:
Right.
John:
That's not the cross flight.
John:
That's not Marzipan.
John:
But it is a way that Apple has done this in the past.
John:
And I'm sure, you know, it saves some time.
Marco:
especially like if marzipan requires support at the os level on the mac side which it probably would i they probably wouldn't have that support in high sierra it would probably be pushed to the next version of mac os or maybe even the one after that if it's going to launch in beta and that's not going to be ready in time for this coming school year it's going to be launched probably in like october or something and no it administrator should be installing it in october so so uh you know it's probably just not ready yet
John:
then setting aside ux kit like uh the way like i i perceive lots of new apple applications to be ios like whether or not they use ux kit under the covers when they just feel like an ios app photos certainly does i think maybe yeah maps uh maybe contacts or notes depending on how you squint at them reminders calendar
John:
Yeah, it could be argued that this is actually not iOS-like, but merely the modern Mac way, like Apple's trying to say this is what modern Mac apps sort of look like.
John:
But if you use iOS a lot, a lot of things look mighty familiar.
John:
And again, I'm not looking at the – I'm not class dumping every single one of these apps to see do they actually use the same framework as Photos or is it – but from a user's perspective, they feel very iOS-y.
John:
In this case, we know it's an application that already existed in iOS.
John:
And so it makes sense that they would use some technique to reuse some of the work that they've already done on iOS, rather than re-involting it from scratch in AppKit.
John:
But I'm sure when this application comes out, someone will tell us definitively.
John:
Probably Steve Troughton-Smith.
Casey:
I have one quickie I just wanted to share.
Casey:
I have finally joined the world of inductive charging.
Casey:
And by and large, my phone for the last couple of weeks now has not had anything plugged into it.
Casey:
And inductive charging is pretty cool, it turns out.
Marco:
Who knew?
Marco:
Oh, that's right.
Marco:
I told you this a long time ago.
Casey:
Well, but the difference between you and me is I didn't crap all over inductive charging.
Casey:
I just said, oh, that sounds neat, sir.
Casey:
Anyway, the point I'm trying to say is the Mophie base that I think you and most of the rest of the world recommended is really great.
Casey:
And I got what is aesthetically a terrible mount for my car, but in functionality is a really great mount for my car.
Casey:
And so what I can do is I can get in my car.
Casey:
I can just kind of drop my phone in this little mount and it starts charging.
Casey:
And when I want to leave my car, I just pick it up out of the mount.
Casey:
And it's super convenient.
Casey:
I'm only ever in my car for like two minutes at a time.
Casey:
So I'm doing this just because I think it's cool, not because it's ever particularly useful.
Casey:
But inductive charging, super cool.
Casey:
And it is super weird after having had an iPhone since the 3GS to have gone for like two weeks without having plugged anything into my phone.
Casey:
So odd, but I love it.
Marco:
yeah it's like i know a lot of people try it and it's not for them that's cool i i find it very much for me as well like i really like now plugging in my phone like when i travel it just feels barbaric it's like wait a minute man like i have to plug this in like this is so weird the one thing i will i do still plug it in in the car i did so in our episode about my seven dollar piece of garbage uh that i was using to mount my phone in my car before
Marco:
A bunch of people wrote in to recommend better phone mounts and by far the most commonly recommended one is the ProClip line of products and you basically you go on ProClip site and you buy like a certain like base that's made to fit exactly your model of car.
Marco:
And then you buy like the second part of it, which is like the phone part that you buy exactly the one for exactly the phone you have.
Marco:
And they interface in some kind of standard way.
Marco:
And so like when you get a new phone, you can just replace the phone part.
Marco:
And you get a new car, you just replace the car part.
Marco:
And it's not cheap.
Marco:
The combination of both sides of this was $90.
Marco:
Holy hell.
Marco:
And you have to mess up your dashboard too, right?
Marco:
Well, no.
Marco:
So it does like a pressure fit inside one of the air vents.
Marco:
So it's like pushing against the top and bottom of the air vent to kind of wedge itself in there with like a little rubber pad under it to keep it in place.
Marco:
And I got to say, it is really, really solid.
Marco:
It is the only thing I've seen that actually keeps the phone totally still.
Marco:
You can run over a bump or anything.
Marco:
The phone does not move.
Marco:
It is attached very firmly to the car.
Marco:
It was very easy to get and install.
Marco:
The cable routing is much easier.
Marco:
I got the adjustable iPhone holder for lightning to USB cable.
Marco:
So what you do is it has a little clamp on the bottom.
Marco:
You actually stick an Apple cable into it.
Marco:
And this is where I used my one black Apple lightning cable from my iMac Pro.
Marco:
I used it here because it looked better in black.
Marco:
And it is basically a dock.
Marco:
And so I just stick my phone into it.
Marco:
And it is getting a wired charge.
Marco:
And it just stays right there.
Marco:
And it's awesome.
Marco:
The only major downside to this is that it's $90 for this combo.
Marco:
It was $30 for the car part and $60 for the iPhone adjustable thing with the cable.
Marco:
So again, not cheap.
Marco:
Way more than my $7 piece of garbage.
Marco:
However, also way nicer than my $7 piece of garbage.
Marco:
And I can see myself keeping this up as long as I continue to use Waze on a semi-regular basis in my car.
Marco:
I think as I get new phones and new cars down the road, I think I will probably stay in the ProClip ecosystem for now because it is surprisingly nice.
Marco:
You can take the phone out with one hand and the mount doesn't move and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's just nice.
Marco:
It's solid and heavy duty and just really nice.
Marco:
The reason I stick with wired charging, which is why I thought of this here,
Marco:
is that chi charging is not fast enough to charge the phone and run ways it can keep the phone at about the same charge level it's already at or maybe very slowly trickle charge it while but like the the charge rate really requires a 10 watt plug like a like what you get from the ipad bricks or from the high powered usb chargers
Marco:
So it really requires that to both run ways constantly and also charge the phone at a meaningful rate.
Marco:
And right now, I don't think any Qi chargers, even the 7.5 watt Mophie one, I don't think any of them can actually do it fast enough.
Marco:
So for Qi charging in cars, I still honestly can't recommend that unless you are very light with your phone's usage in the car.
Marco:
But for wired stuff, I can recommend ProClip if you are willing to spend $90 on a
Marco:
Clip for your phone in your car.
Casey:
This is the difference between you and me in summary.
Casey:
You bought one car charger for $90.
Casey:
You could buy three and a half of the inductive chargers that I just bought, which admittedly are not nearly as nice.
Casey:
I'm quite sure.
Marco:
Three and a half inductive chargers still can't charge my phone for Waze.
Marco:
You know what I'm saying, though.
Marco:
This is you and me in a nutshell.
Marco:
I don't need three and a half chargers.
Marco:
I need one charger.
Casey:
Yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
I'm just saying.
Casey:
Also, before we get a bazillion pieces of email, do we really care about the report that came out recently?
Casey:
I don't remember where I saw it, about how wireless charging destroys your battery because when it's trying to keep your battery topped up, it's like discharging, recharging, discharging, recharging, discharging, recharging.
Casey:
I don't think I really care that much.
Casey:
And maybe I will if...
Casey:
I see that my battery is not doing well, which maybe I could do in this new battery window or a screen in settings.
Casey:
But I don't know, man, like especially as someone who keeps iPhones only for a year, I just don't care.
Casey:
Like Apple wouldn't have made this a thing if they thought it was going to nuke their batteries.
Casey:
So hashtag yellow.
John:
I thought the pitch was that it was heat.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Part of the idea was that because Qi charging generates some heat, like a little more heat than regular charging, that charging your battery in a hot environment is worse for it.
Marco:
Operating your battery in a hot environment is worse for it.
Marco:
So there might be something to that.
Marco:
I can't imagine... Because Apple is doing the management of the charging on the phone end in their firmware.
Marco:
I can't imagine they would...
John:
allow it to abuse the battery like that i think they would control that a little bit better well that's not abused that everything does that laptops and phones uh they they don't they allow it to discharge a little bit and then trickle it up and then discharge a little bit everything every apple device has done that forever that's good i
John:
I don't think inductive does that any more than plugged in because, like Marcus said, Apple's controlling it.
John:
But if all charging things produce more heat for equivalent power transfer to the battery, which makes sense to me for, you know, inductive type thing, then maybe you have a little bit extra heat.
Marco:
Yeah, but regardless, I think just using your phone on a regular basis is probably doing way more wear on the battery than the minor differences in how you charge it.
Marco:
Generally, charging it more slowly is usually better for its long-term health, and in which case Qi chargers should actually be really good for it in theory.
Marco:
But it's the kind of thing like we talked about it before –
Marco:
If you just use your phone normally, you're going to burn through batteries over a year or two.
Marco:
And now that Apple's offering less expensive battery replacements, I think if you care about this kind of thing, it's much more reasonable to just go in after two years and get a new battery for 30 bucks.
Marco:
than to have to micromanage your entire life around not using convenient things or trying to tiptoe around the battery.
Marco:
Because no matter what you do, it's going to wear out in a reasonable amount of time.
Marco:
It's going to wear out probably around the same amount of time as it would have no matter what you did.
Marco:
So you might as well use your phone to its fullest potential.
Marco:
Use whatever's convenient about it.
Marco:
Use it how you want to use it.
Marco:
And if your battery wears out in a year and a half or two years, just get a new battery for $30 and just plan for that ahead of time.
John:
And try to live a healthy life so you can live long enough for some battery technology to come out that has way longer charge cycle failure rates.
John:
Like, I don't think we can expect infinite.
John:
Like, I can charge and recharge and uncharge this a million times and it never degrades, right?
John:
But if you can just change it from whatever these batteries are rated at, like they're rated for like a thousand cycles or something before they're kaput.
John:
If that was, you know, 100,000, it would seem like that you could use a phone basically forever and the battery was as good the day you bought it as the day it went away.
John:
We are not living in the current time with that technology available, but there are lots of research things that are all the...
Marco:
the uh cliched five to ten years away uh so stay alive long enough and you might see one of those happen i will also say uh if you are interested in getting a battery replacement maybe wait on that a little bit because you have no choice the wait times are like four months now right yeah yeah we keep hearing from people that the wait times span from weeks to months uh for getting new batteries uh you know there's so many people going in now after a battery gate scandal and now it's 11.3 actually telling them uh you know whether the battery is degraded or not
Marco:
There's a lot of people going in and apparently the wait for the batteries at the Genius Bar is literally like weeks or months in a lot of places.
Marco:
And so by the time, you know, if you buy a new phone now and you cheat charge it all the time, by the time the battery wears out, you should probably be able to get one.
John:
Might not be $30 anymore.
Casey:
That's probably true.
John:
Oh, and one more thing on this ProClip thing.
John:
I remember when you mentioned your clip and people sent in stuff.
John:
I went to this site because I was looking for similar clips.
John:
I think I had just bought one for my wife, and I was wondering if there were better ones.
John:
And on the ProClipUSA.com website...
John:
the image they have in the background at the top of the page shows a mount that goes into, like, the gap in the dashboard between, like, the top stuff and the thing that has the vents.
John:
It doesn't go inside the vents like you were just describing.
John:
And, like, you know, I have one right now that goes inside the vents.
John:
That's usually a typical way to do it.
John:
You see that on the website?
Marco:
Yeah, I do see what you mean.
Marco:
Mine does not do that.
Marco:
Mine presses against the top and bottom inner edge of the vent.
John:
Right.
John:
And so when I saw this, I was like, well, forget that.
John:
I'm not jamming anything into the cracks in my dashboard.
John:
If it had just gone into the air vent, I probably would have like, oh, well, that's how they all work.
John:
So it would be fine.
John:
So that scared me away.
John:
So I guess it depends on your exact model of car.
John:
But I really don't want anything because once you do that, you know, if you ever take that out, now you have giant gaps where that thing had been wedged in for the past six months or whatever.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
It's remarkable compared to any other tool I've ever seen for making a website.
Marco:
And it's all super easy to use.
Marco:
Everything is drag and drop.
Marco:
Everything has live previewing.
Marco:
It's all what you see is what you get types editing.
Marco:
It's so easy to make your content, get your content in there, move stuff around, alter the way it looks, add your colors, add your logo, tweak the design.
Marco:
It's so easy.
Marco:
It takes almost no time.
Marco:
Then at the end of the day, you have a beautifully designed website regardless of your skill level.
Marco:
There's no coding required.
Marco:
For most people, there's no reason to use any coding here.
Marco:
It's so advanced.
Marco:
The designs are professional.
Marco:
The functionality is all fancy and professional.
Marco:
You have image galleries and blogs and storefronts and everything.
Marco:
You can do so much.
Marco:
You can host podcasts there now if you want to.
Marco:
There's so much you can do at Squarespace.
Marco:
All of it with intuitive, easy-to-use tools.
Marco:
If you sign up for a whole year up front, you even get a free domain name with it.
Marco:
So see what I mean by how great it is.
Marco:
If you need support, they're there for you.
Marco:
They have wonderful support.
Marco:
Start your free trial site today at squarespace.com slash ATP to see how great it is for yourself.
Marco:
When you decide to sign up, and I know you will, so when you decide to sign up, I'm not even saying if, make sure to use the offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Once again, that's squarespace.com slash ATP and promo code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Make your next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace.
Casey:
Bloomberg reports that Apple is planning to use its own chips and Macs starting in just a couple of years and giving Intel the boot.
Casey:
I feel like we on this show have flirted with this topic on and off pretty much since the show started in 2013.
Casey:
So on the one side, I find this fascinating, and I feel like we should talk about it.
Casey:
On the other side, I feel like we've been around this topic so many times, I'm not sure what else there is to say.
Casey:
But yeah, Intel has not had the dramatic improvements that they used to have.
Casey:
Their TikTok cycle has been slowing down, and now they've basically said, yeah, we're not going to do that anymore.
Casey:
So Apple may be taking matters into their own hands when it comes to CPUs, and they may just start putting those in computers rather than just iPhones and fake computers.
Casey:
I mean, iPads.
Casey:
So what are our thoughts?
Casey:
Because what we assume, we don't know, but we assume these would be ARM processors, which is different than the Intel processor in a Mac.
Casey:
It's a different instruction set, which means all your apps and the operating system would have to be compiled again.
Casey:
There are many, many, many things that fall out of this.
Casey:
It would basically be the PowerPC to Intel transition all over again.
Casey:
How do we feel?
Casey:
Are we excited?
Casey:
Are we bummed?
Casey:
I mean, let's start with Marco.
Casey:
What do you think?
Marco:
I don't really know what to think yet.
Marco:
At a high level, it seems inevitable that if Apple wants to keep maintaining the Mac competitively and if they want to push it forward – basically, if they're going to care about the Mac again –
Marco:
this does seem like an obvious direction to take it.
Marco:
And we have seen rumblings that they are caring about the Mac again.
Marco:
I mean, the iMac Pro, I think, is one of the biggest ones.
Marco:
There's a lot of things about the iMac Pro that they didn't have to do, but they did it anyway, and they made a really great product.
Marco:
And so I'm heartened to see they are actually investing non-trivially into Mac hardware,
Marco:
And I hope to see more of that as the year goes on.
Marco:
I hope to see fixed laptops.
Marco:
I hope to see the Mac Pro.
Marco:
We'll see how that all turns out.
Marco:
But clearly, they have had some kind of change of heart or at least change of direction with Mac hardware.
Marco:
If they're going to keep doing stuff like that,
Marco:
This does seem like an obvious place to go because Intel really is holding them back in a few areas.
Marco:
Now, I wouldn't say all areas.
Marco:
You know, as some people have pointed out, we haven't seen what Apple's chip design department can do for competing with, like, the Xeon in the iMac Pro.
Marco:
You know...
Marco:
They could probably do a pretty good job if I had to guess, but we don't know that yet.
Marco:
What we do know is that Apple can definitely compete with Intel with their chip designs at lower ends of the power spectrum.
Marco:
So that would be most important in, frankly, the most commonly sold Macs, small laptops.
Marco:
That's where this makes a huge difference.
Marco:
If you can actually have...
Marco:
say, something like the size of a MacBook 12-inch, or if you can have something like a real computer size, like a 13-inch, you can get serious gains in battery life and maybe even performance at the same time by switching to a modern Apple ARM design and these things, probably.
Marco:
So it does seem like that's a really clear place to go.
Marco:
In addition, Intel has been a pretty crappy supplier to Apple, I think, in recent years and not even that recently over a long time now.
Marco:
You know, Intel has really had a lot of problems itself.
Marco:
A lot of problems, you know, shipping its ships on time, getting its fabs going and whatever it's needing to do.
Marco:
A lot of problems with performance per watt compared to ARM chips.
Marco:
You know, in a lot of ways, Intel is really not delivering very well.
Marco:
on supplying apple with what it actually needs and and this isn't that different from when ibm was not delivering very well on power pc and apple made a switch uh you know in that case to intel because they were doing great then uh but it wouldn't surprise me at all if apple decided to take this kind of move as long as they care enough about the mac to to push this kind of thing through because it's a big job it's a really big job
Marco:
It requires tons of major and long running changes.
Marco:
It's going to be a heck of a transition if it happens.
Marco:
It's going to really need a lot of work, a lot of time.
Marco:
It's going to be a little messy.
Marco:
However, I do think where they would end up could be really nice.
Marco:
even if it doesn't even go to the whole line, even, even if it doesn't do like the high end, like the desktops and the Xeons, even if it just stays in like the smallest laptop line, maybe even like the 15 inch doesn't even have it, but maybe the 12 inch and 13 inch do like it probably started on 12 inch.
Marco:
Honestly,
Marco:
that would be really, really competitive for those products.
Marco:
You could get really good battery life.
Marco:
You could get pretty competitive performance.
Marco:
And many of the apps that people use... First of all, many of the apps that people use are the built-in OS apps that come with the system.
Marco:
And so those would all be ready on day one, probably.
Marco:
And then a lot of apps people use would be simple recompiles or not that much work to get them updated for it or recompiled for it.
Marco:
So I think that could be a really great...
Marco:
direction for the products to take the downside to this where i'm concerned and i did a little quick tweet about this earlier the main reason i'm concerned about this is that if this is true which that's a big if i worry will apple in in the near future or ever
Marco:
place enough priority on mac os to really make this happen well on the software side because ever since ios came out mac os has been really a distant second priority they you know they have made no efforts to hide that and i think it's obvious to everybody
Marco:
And you could argue that that should be how it is because iOS devices sell so much more than Macs and really are the bulk of the company's income and everything.
Marco:
So, like, macOS is really not a priority for them and hasn't been for a long time.
Marco:
And what we see every time they do try to update macOS...
Marco:
they seem to be getting messier and sloppier and introducing more and worse and more embarrassing bugs.
Marco:
Every time they rewrite a subsystem, it comes out buggier than the one before it.
Marco:
And maybe it might eventually catch up, but it usually takes a few releases at least.
Marco:
there's a lot of problems with mac os and it seems like they're incapable of touching it recently without breaking stuff and a lot of times the stuff they break never gets fixed so i i'm concerned if they're going to approach this kind of move to arm like a whole architecture transition
Marco:
If they're going to approach that with the same level of, frankly, I don't know if it's carelessness, but at least they are not giving it the resources that they need to make quality so far.
Marco:
If they're going to attack this problem like that...
Marco:
then they might just break everything and make everything way worse and maybe never fix it or fix it very slowly or never fix certain parts of it.
Marco:
That's where I'm concerned.
Marco:
I really want the Mac platform to be brought forward in big ways.
Marco:
It needs it.
Marco:
However, if it's going to do that with the same amount of starved resources and seeming disregard for quality in exchange for ship dates, that I don't think is beneficial to the platform.
Marco:
So that's my concern.
John:
Getting back to what you kicked us off with, Casey, the fact that we've discussed this many times in the past, this is a bit of...
John:
inside baseball meta concern but i'm always worried about like how much to repeat something that we've said on a past show because you don't you can't assume that everyone listening now has listened to all the dozens of hours we have talked about the same topic but on the other hand if you have listened to them you really want us to hear this hear us say the same things again so on this topic i'm i'm looking for two things i think marco was at least looking for one of these which is one is
John:
Something new to say on the topic, which I think Marco has found with his concern about the care and attention that they've shown to macOS being applied to a hardware transition, right?
John:
Which we haven't really talked about that much in the past, because I think the past few times we talked about this, we weren't collectively as disgruntled about the quality of macOS, right?
John:
And the second one is specifically for the story.
John:
When stuff like this comes out, I'm looking for, is there any new information in this story?
John:
uh like is there is there any information period other than hey guess what apple could could uh transition max to a different processor that it makes itself uh and in this story there isn't really much new information except perhaps some dates uh
John:
uh a whole lot of hedging this this line from the article is great i would call this comprehensive butt covering uh this line says apple could still theoretically abandon or delay the switch theoretically is the icing on the cake there but apple could still abandon or delay it's like you're reading this whole article let me tell you apple's gonna do this thing halfway through the article says and by the way they might not do this
John:
it's like all right we get it you're covering yourself okay you can say well we didn't say they were gonna we just said they they're gonna but they might not uh and then theoretically abandon or delay theoretically they can abandon or delay it there's no theory you don't need to anyway
John:
uh i'm not a big fan of the article but uh as in all these things set aside the article and just take it as a data point as another little pebble to the pile uh you know maybe this pebble you know we'll see like where there's smoke there's fire kind of as you see more and more stories about a topic maybe start to take start taking it more seriously
John:
than just like when we've talked about in the past it has just been sort of idle musing like because it's an obvious thing like apple is really good at making and getting better at making arm processors uh and apple likes to control this stuff and apple is trying to make more and more of the stuff themselves or design more and more of the stuff themselves and have it fab and intel's been falling behind like there's lots of reasons uh to talk about this so
John:
I don't want to rehash all the things we've discussed about in the past, but... I mean... Actually, I kind of do, but I don't... I want everyone who's listening now to know all the hours of discussion we had about this, because I want us all to get credit for having the foresight and wisdom to have discussed these issues well in the past.
John:
But I don't want to have to repeat them for everybody now.
John:
The only one I will repeat explicitly is one of the things that is in tension about this topic is...
John:
the idea of apple spending the money that would be required to make an arm chip that is essentially useless for ios devices right to make an arm chip for the mac pro for instance right 150 watt mac pro caliber chip to make something like that to design it is a lot of work
John:
And you can reuse a lot of the work you did for the lesser chips that are in phones and iPads, like to use the cores and assemble them or whatever.
John:
But a lot of the stuff you do will only be for that Mac Pro.
John:
Like you won't be able to use that chip anywhere else because nothing else has that power envelope.
John:
And in the past when we've talked about this, the question was always,
John:
All right.
John:
Well, so Apple can reuse a lot of the chips directly, like in the MacBooks and stuff.
John:
But when it comes to the Mac Pro, if they're going to transition the whole line, they have to make that chip themselves from scratch.
John:
There is no, you know, and that's a lot of money to invest.
John:
Does Apple really want to invest that amount of money solely in the Mac?
John:
as margot just said and you know in our in our modern imac pro having error we can say hey they actually spent a lot of money money they didn't necessarily have to spend reusing and adapting technology from ios things in in an application that basically is only useful in the imac pro like that t2 chip is probably not going into an ipad anytime soon it's probably not even going into a laptop right
John:
uh because that who knows they've got t1 in there we'll see but they spent a lot of time and money building the imac pro and they made a good product out of it and like the touch bar before it as much as we may or may not like it it shows a willingness to invest in mac hardware that is probably
John:
out of proportion financially to how much money the mac brings in because as we've pointed out and as apple now seems to agree the max importance is also out of proportion to the amount of money it brings in its importance to the overall apple platform and not just because you develop ios apps for it but that's part of it but apple seems to be on the same page with with all of us now about
John:
you know pro mac users are an important constituency they had that roundtable a year or so ago or whatever and apple said they agreed and it's made us all happy for a long time and we're patiently waiting for the fruits of that labor the iMac pro is one of the fruits of that labor and it's good right it came out good right so we're all enthusiastic about that but
John:
that makes it more and more likely that they would be willing to spend the amount of money they would need to spend to make a bunch of arm cpus reusing cores and other technology and stuff from elsewhere but in it but in a big giant high power blob that is not useful anywhere except for max so this story is another pebble in the pile the imac pro and that round table some more pebbles and
John:
Uh, so it's starting to look more and more likely things against it.
John:
I tried to come up with a new angle on this and the new angle that I have not against this theory, but, uh, because it doesn't mean they're not going to do it, but something that if they did do it would be, uh,
John:
A disadvantage to Mac users, it would be a step down from where they are today, is that none of the stories I've seen, rumors or whatever, have suggested that what Apple would actually be doing is making a new line of CPUs that they would use in Macs and that they would also sell to the whole rest of the industry.
John:
I haven't even seen that suggested.
John:
No one even dares speculate about that, let alone say that they think it's the thing that Apple's going to do.
John:
So we always just assume, yeah, Apple would make its own CPUs because they like to make their own whatevers, and they make their own A-series system out of chips, and then they make their own Wi-Fi, not Wi-Fi, whatever, the W1 chip, and they make all sorts of stuff, right?
John:
Not make, but, you know, design and have someone fed for them.
John:
And they don't sell them to the rest of the industry.
John:
Yeah, they license the W1 for the purposes of peripherals and stuff like that, but...
John:
They're not selling the A11 chip to other cell phone makers.
John:
This is not a thing they do.
John:
And we just assume if they were going to make chips for the Macs, they also wouldn't say, oh, this is our new business now, by the way.
John:
We're selling chips to everybody in the industry.
John:
And what that would mean is...
John:
that macs would have cpus that are not the same as the cpus that are running in other things in the industry and what so what is that who cares what does that matter don't we just care if we have a nice cpu in our mac well right now we are in a a i don't know what you would call it a
John:
golden age used to be golden age now it's not quite gold now it's more of like a tarnished brass age anyway where where macs use the same cpus that are also used in the servers for that we run server-side software in which means that if you're writing server-side software and using the mac as your dev environment you can run vms and you can run docker and you can do all sorts of things uh
John:
and run the same software that's running on your server locally on your Mac, because they're both x86-64 CPUs, right?
John:
And to a lesser extent, you can also run Windows stuff, because Windows runs on x86, and you can run Windows and virtualization at high speed, and so on and so forth.
John:
And those are real advantages for certain constituencies of pro Mac users who use the Mac as like a development platform for writing server side software.
John:
And maybe it's just because I'm in that world that I see it a lot, but I have been shocked over the course of my career.
John:
how prevalent Macs have become for people who essentially, you know, not, well, who pejoratively use them as glorified terminals, right?
John:
I don't think that's really true because lots of people do local development.
John:
Like they will, you know, they will run Docker on their Mac.
John:
They will run, you know, a virtual box on their Mac or whatever, and they will...
John:
use software and binaries that run on the server they will run them on their mac right and so they're not just using as glorify terminal they're actually doing local development that is one class of software developer the server-side software developer so if apple makes a cpu transition
John:
Uh, the Mac as a server side software dev platform becomes far less attractive because Apple's not going to sell those CPUs to run on the server.
John:
And now it could be if they just use the same instruction set and somehow arm on the server becomes a thing.
John:
Lots of companies have been trying to make armor on the server thing for a long time.
John:
uh hasn't quite happened but if apple's not going to make it happen and no one else makes it happen and intel continues to or even amd continue to dominate the server space with x86 64 it makes the mac mac less attractive in one particular area and same thing for windows i'm just picking this example but if you rely on the ability to run windows virtualized windows at full speed uh as part of some important business that you do let's use a mac when previously you couldn't because you can also run windows on it
John:
i know windows is ported to arm as well right but it really just depends on do people port all their windows software to arm do they recompile for arm do most pcs sold become arm um ideally whatever transition apple makes the whole rest of the industry would also make pcs servers everything
John:
whether or not Apple helps them make it.
John:
I think Apple will not help them make it.
John:
So the only way we can maintain the golden age where everything runs on the same platform is if the rest of the industry also transitions more or less at the same time without any of Apple's help, which seems unlikely to me.
John:
So that would make me slightly more sad, and I think it would make the Mac slightly less desirable or even viable for certain pro applications.
John:
Everything else that the Mac normally does, no one cares.
John:
You can develop Mac software on it.
John:
You can run all your applications.
John:
You can browse the web.
John:
So it's probably not that big of a deal, but it is the one angle that I have found myself pondering, you know, if I'm able to bring myself to believe that they're really going to do this.
John:
What would that actually be like?
John:
How would it change my experience of Macs?
John:
You know, what would it... And I didn't even get into, you know, playing Windows games or whatever, because who cares?
John:
That's really small.
John:
But I look around my big company full of hundreds of developers and how many Macs I see and everything they're doing with them and think...
John:
what if that Mac was ARM, but all of our servers were still x86?
John:
How would that change how viable the Mac is for you?
John:
And I think it would be worse.
John:
So that's one more thing for me to not look forward to.
John:
On the flip side of that is what Margo was talking about, how awesome it would be on laptops.
John:
And
John:
I frankly, I think how awesome it would be on the Mac Pro.
John:
I would love to see a massive multi-core Apple design ARM processor that outperforms a Xeon with less power.
John:
I would love that.
John:
And I think it's 100% possible maybe on Apple's second or third try and maybe on their first try.
John:
Those people are really smart.
John:
But there are some things I would miss.
Marco:
One other thing to think about is like, you know, we're assuming that, you know, if Apple does this transition, that the processors being in their hands would be a good thing and that they would outperform or they would match or outperform what Intel is doing.
Marco:
And the assumption in that is that they will always, or at least for a long time, outperform what the rest of the PC industry is doing.
Marco:
But that might not hold.
Marco:
It might be.
Marco:
What if they complete this transition and then they find themselves actually not doing as well as the PC industry or not caring as much about the processors they're developing for the Mac?
Marco:
And therefore, today we have the issue of...
Marco:
You know, it doesn't seem like they care as much about the Mac as they do about iOS.
Marco:
So, you know, they have like these product lines that just sit around forever.
Marco:
When Intel does make a new generation of processor, it's not that much work to create, to update these product lines to use that new component.
Marco:
It's way less engineering resources to take Intel's newest chip and stick it in the Mac you already have designed than it is to design the next version of the, you know, A10, you know, quadruple X, whatever it is that would be like, you know, the high performance version of this year's A series processor.
Marco:
It's very possible that could backfire on us.
Marco:
Like, it could be that...
Marco:
Apple takes it over, then down the road decides the Mac is not that important to them, which wouldn't be unheard of because that's already how it's been.
Marco:
And then they just never update those chips for the Mac.
Marco:
And because, as John said, because they're not selling these chips outside of Apple, which I can never see them doing, there would be no other pressure for them to keep those chips updated.
Marco:
So it actually might make them... It would basically raise the cost.
Marco:
of updating the Mac line to keep pace with the latest and greatest hardware.
Marco:
And I think the last thing Apple needs is for that cost to be raised.
Marco:
Because right now they already seem to have a lot of trouble justifying investment in the Mac.
Marco:
So if it's more expensive to update the Mac, to update Mac hardware to the latest generation of whatever...
Marco:
That actually could really backfire quite badly on us, and that could result in even less attention, even fewer updates, even less competitive performance to what the rest of the industry is doing.
John:
It's like the trash can Mac Pro.
John:
We were like, oh, why isn't Apple updated to use the latest Xeons?
John:
Well, imagine there were no latest Xeons, and Apple could say, we're using the highest performance whatever processor available.
John:
It's like, yeah, but...
Marco:
well you got me there i mean they are like they just haven't made another one so technically it is still using the fastest one yeah right like you get the good and the bad with like bringing this stuff in-house to apple you get probably pretty good performance and power efficiency gains uh but at the cost of now you're at the whims of apple and apple is you know fickle and in in many areas unreliable and you know this you would be at the whims of whatever they felt
John:
worth doing even more than you are now because the cost of keeping things updated would be higher to them it's worth mentioning the other uh angle that a lot of people are talking about mostly because this bloomberg article is so careful not to say anything definitive about anything they're like well you know that bloomberg doesn't actually say arm anywhere they just say apple would make its own chips what if they make their own x86 chips um
John:
And they could do that.
John:
You know, money solves a lot of problems.
John:
Patents, licensing, instruction set, whatever, you know, dealing with Intel, like assuming you threw enough money at the people you need to throw money at to be allowed to do that.
John:
Apple could probably make a pretty good x86 chip.
John:
I have a hard time believing Apple could make a substantially better x86 chip than Intel, because Apple's expertise thus far has been in making ARM CPUs, and x86, even just plain old x86-64, is a...
John:
much more let's say warty uh instruction set than arm and it's got a lot of history behind it it's weird in lots of interesting ways and intel has a lot of experience in you know instruction decode hardware and all sorts of uh you know chip within a chip uh ways to crack apart those big variable with instructions and
John:
feed it into a machine that works more like a modern processor on the inside.
John:
I mean, it's not as big a difference as people think because modern, you know, ARM risk style processors also have to do lots of weird stuff internally as well.
John:
But there's a lot of institutional expertise that both AMD and Intel have that Apple does not have when it comes to figuring out how to make the x86 instruction set faster, even just the x86 64 on, which is much nicer than the 32 bit, let alone the 16 bit or whatever variants.
John:
so i it that seems much less likely to me like it really hammers on what marco was getting at which is like okay apple now you're on now you have something to keep up with you're making your own x86 chips and so we can still ask the question hey apple you have an update the whatever chip in your whatever mac for a long time meanwhile intel has released three new chips that are faster what's the deal you could just use those intel chips why did you go on your own or at least if they do arm we can't tell them you know unless someone else decides to make like
John:
17 core ARM chips that they're stubbornly refusing to use in their new ARM Mac Pro or whatever.
John:
So I think this realization and everything we're talking about is leading people to talk more around this Bloomberg story about... I think for the first time I'm hearing people speculate more seriously about the idea of them having...
John:
uh x86 at the high end and arm at the low end like for some sustained period of time rather than having a transition where you just say all the x86 macs are gone and all the macs are a whatever arm chips but rather instead saying we're never going to to make the investment to compete with zeons those are always going to be zeons in the mac pro and the imac pro and we will keep up with intel's line as much as we always have and
John:
uh we're just not going to do stuff there but for all of for all of the macs that can essentially take drop-in chips from our ipad and phone line maybe with some minor tweaks in terms of adding more cash or maybe some more cores and you know a beefier gpu and stuff like that uh those will get arm and as marco said those are the majority of macs sold and uh
John:
The x86 Macs will just be this technical curiosity that nerds and developers use, but the Macs that most people buy to do basic computing stuff and word processing and run Office and web browsing and run spreadsheets and watch Netflix and whatever else people want to do, those will all be ARM.
John:
And that would be an unprecedented move because Apple has never had a sustained dual CPU strategy on the Mac.
John:
It has always been a transition.
John:
Old chip goes out, new chip comes in.
John:
New chip has lots of advantages.
John:
Everyone loves the new chip.
John:
Look how fast it is.
John:
Look how fast graphing calculator runs on the PowerPC.
John:
look how fast everything runs on x86 versus these ancient power pcs that ibm doesn't update anymore um i am not enthusiastic about that future even though it makes sense from a technical perspective in terms of like what you want to spend money on and what you don't because to marco's earlier point dealing with an os that runs on two different platforms
John:
Uh, is a, who was it?
John:
So I think ATP tipster said it on Twitter is a bug multiplier.
John:
Like, uh, potentially there are new bugs that might only exist on one platform or another throwing another very, it's not double the bugs, right?
John:
Because not every bug is architecture specific, but, uh,
John:
throwing another variable into the mix especially as variable as significant as the instruction set uh is not the best way to drive down uh bugs and cost and it could be that the software maintaining the software and dealing with the bugs and the changes there is actually more expensive than dealing with the hardware i don't know
John:
how that shakes out in the grand scheme of things exactly how many millions of dollars it would cost to build a xeon competitor yourself versus how many millions of dollars it would cost to maintain in perpetuity or at least for a decade or so two architectures that you make an os the same os for with the same apps compiled to stat binaries and two tool chains and all this other stuff so that also strikes me as non-ideal like the the simplest solutions are that apple note doesn't do this transition or that they transition everything to the same architecture on all their devices and
John:
Any sort of hybrid thing, though it might make sense from a nickel and dime perspective, I bet if you had to pitch it to the board of directors, it would seem too much like a half measure.
John:
And they would say, why don't we just all go, if you had to pitch them and say, we're going to go all arm and it's unified and we have a unified framework and a unified architecture and we own all this stuff, that is way easier to sell to a board of directors than any of the more technical solutions where you leave the Pro Max's x86 and you support both of them and have two toolchains, two compilers, in fact, binaries, and you don't transition.
John:
I don't think that's a winner.
Casey:
It's funny because I'm of two minds about this whole thing.
Casey:
The Casey from a couple of years ago that lived in VMware Fusion in Windows but on a Mac would most likely really hate this.
Casey:
And this is exactly what you were talking about earlier, John, that...
Casey:
You know, one of the advantages of being able to virtualize an OS or a platform that's based on the same platform you're running is that it happens really, really fast, right?
Casey:
This is in contrast to this hypothetical future when you're trying to emulate x86 on top of ARM.
Casey:
And who knows?
Casey:
Maybe this phantom Apple processor would be so damn fast that you could get away with it.
Casey:
But the likelihood of that is not good.
Casey:
And so, you know, past Casey, who was doing Windows development on his Mac...
Casey:
does not want this at all.
Casey:
And I think the last time we really spoke about this seriously, I was still that Casey that does not want this at all.
Casey:
But the current me that only works on Xcode and other things that are native to the Mac, and I haven't run Windows in at least a year, if not more...
Casey:
I don't feel like I have a problem with this.
Casey:
And the thought of my beloved 12-inch MacBook being faster with a battery that lasts even longer, which to be fair, I don't have any particular complaints about the battery on this thing.
Casey:
But that being said, you can always have more.
Casey:
More is always better.
Casey:
So having a 12-inch MacBook that is considerably faster and yet has much better battery life, that sounds frigging awesome.
Casey:
I totally want that.
Casey:
But what I'm not
Casey:
really doing is considering what am i losing out on because maybe there's some there's some app that's vital to my workflow that i won't be able to use anymore like you know ffmpeg i believe is open source so presumably i could compile from source if i needed to but just let's suppose for the sake of discussion that ffmpeg was never built for arm could not be built for arm like that would stink i use ffmpeg all the time for stupid stuff that doesn't matter but it but you know whether or not it matters it's important to me it matters to me
Marco:
Wait, to be clear, you use it on the 12-inch?
Casey:
Every great once in a while, not usually.
Casey:
I was going to say, like, that's... Yeah, this is perhaps not my best choice of analogies or examples.
Casey:
But you get my point, right, is that maybe it's something else.
Casey:
Maybe it's the app Rocket, which lets you, you know, easily insert emoji pretty much anywhere on the system.
Casey:
You know, Rocket is a modern app.
Casey:
I would assume if this X80... Excuse me, if this ARM thing happened, that Rocket would get updated...
Casey:
But what if, for the sake of discussion, Rocket isn't updated?
Casey:
I use Rocket constantly, probably hundreds of times a day.
Casey:
And if it didn't get updated, that would really bum me out.
Casey:
And so there are probably trade-offs that I'm not considering.
Casey:
But on the surface, and going on the assumption that this phantom new Apple processor that goes in the 12-inch MacBook is, you know,
Casey:
five times faster and uses half as much power or whatever the case may be like that sounds freaking great and apple being in control of its own pipeline sounds freaking great but who knows i mean like you guys were saying maybe it would be that apple makes crummy desktop level cpus maybe it would be that they're even slower than intel like we don't know how it would turn out but on the surface they're faster and then they don't make a new one for three years
Casey:
Like, you never know how it's going to turn out.
Casey:
But the optimist in me thinks, hell yeah, like, even if even if it's painful at first, because some of the things I really love don't get, you know, don't get moved to like fat binaries or whatever they end up doing.
Casey:
In principle, this sounds great.
Casey:
I'm all in on it.
Casey:
I think I'd really like to see how this plays out.
Casey:
But it sounds like we're waiting until at least 2020, if not after that.
Casey:
So we'll see.
John:
I don't know how much stake you want to put in dates in this article.
John:
Thinking of your Windows VM thing, I think that's definitely a pretty rare case because you really, really wanted to use a Mac, but we're kind of doing Windows development and you can get away with it because of VMware.
John:
But honestly, I'm surprised you were able to tolerate that because that's no way to live on a Mac, constantly be using VMware to do Windows stuff.
John:
what's my alternative use a dell i'm not a monster yeah i know well at some point maybe that's better but like the reason i brought up service side is that yeah the reason i brought up service side of stuff is not just because it's what i do for a living but because uh they're they're you know think of the big the big tech companies you know uh you've got uh apple what is it apple google amazon maybe microsoft facebook right
John:
Facebook, Amazon, increasingly Microsoft, and Google write a lot of or mostly server-side software.
John:
And when you picture the stereotypical developer who works at any of those companies and you picture them using a Mac and being a cool tech nerd hipster person, they're writing server-side software on the Mac.
John:
And I have to think that there is some aspect of having the same CPU architecture as all of their servers.
John:
makes that a more desirable development platform and there are a lot of those people right i don't know how many people are using a mac to do windows development because they hate windows so much but there are a lot of people writing server-side software and my impression is that macs are very prevalent at those companies and that's why i think it's a use case that actually may raise to the level of being a factor in apple's decision that they will at least consider it right because
John:
you know like just think of the apple says well we considered it but it's not important enough use case it's too small like we care about consumers right so fine 10 years from now uh if you went into facebook or google or microsoft or amazon and looked at all the developers who are doing server-side development what would it look like would it still be filled with max or would they be mostly gone now and people switch to what to
John:
to windows to linux i don't know something that's still on x86 or it could be that by initiating this thing that apple finally kickstarts all other companies to start pushing arm on the server more and amazon rolls out arm on the server for all your ec2 instances and everything and
John:
Microsoft ARM on Windows really starts to take off, and Intel just really has a bad decade and really just fades from prominence, and we're all happy because we're all using ARM everywhere.
John:
That's a possibility, I suppose, but
John:
The big tech companies these days aren't the big tech companies because they make native applications and hardware.
John:
Most of the big tech companies are big because they run server-side software on cloud infrastructure on x86 CPUs, and their developers all use Macs and run Docker and stuff.
Yeah.
Casey:
Just to clarify what I was saying earlier about FFmpeg, that was really a crummy example because FFmpeg is open source.
Casey:
So presumably, like I think I said it earlier, but that could be rebuilt from source.
Casey:
But there's got to be some closed source thing.
Casey:
Maybe it's an Adobe product, which doesn't typically get updated very well.
Casey:
Maybe it's some other thing.
Casey:
Maybe it's make MKV.
Casey:
Maybe it's any number of other apps that maybe you wouldn't be able to recompile yourself from source and maybe won't ever get upgraded or updated, I should say, for this new platform.
Casey:
And then you would never be able to run that app again.
Casey:
And that would really stink.
Casey:
Or you would have to be used some sort of, what was the virtual, not virtualization, but the thing that, thank you, that you would have some sort of Rosetta style situation where, yes, you can still run it, but it's at, you know, a compromised performance and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
So,
Casey:
That's the thing that worries me is that sitting here now, I'm all enthusiastic and it sounds great.
Casey:
Yeah, give me my ARM MacBook Adorable.
Casey:
Give it to me tomorrow.
Casey:
But maybe I'd get that ARM MacBook Adorable and realize, oh, this grass isn't quite as green as I thought.
Casey:
Marco, any other thoughts on this?
Marco:
Yeah, I think the software argument is a good one.
Marco:
I think in any transition like this, one of the big risks and problems is that you do lose some apps.
Marco:
You lose software.
Marco:
When we went from PowerPC to Intel, not everything made it along that transition.
Marco:
And now the Mac is in a very different place than where it was in 2006 when that transition really happened.
Marco:
Now...
Marco:
A whole lot more Mac software is really in maintenance mode or being totally unmaintained.
Marco:
And the software that people still use.
Marco:
A lot of developer attention moved to mobile.
Marco:
And a lot of Mac developers no longer work on their apps.
Marco:
Or rather, the developers of a lot of Mac apps are no longer working on them.
Marco:
So the Mac is in kind of a bad spot to go through an architecture transition with no other modifications.
Marco:
I think this is possibly one of the reasons why I'm so excited about this idea of Project Marzipan, of having iOS and Mac kind of cross-compatibility between the apps, is that I think that could really revive a lot of the Mac software market.
Marco:
That would dramatically, I think, increase...
Marco:
the developer interest in the Mac and developer support of the Mac because it would lower that barrier, allow more skills to be shared, allow more code to be shared, etc.
Marco:
So we talked about that before.
Marco:
So anything to revive software interest in the Mac among developers...
Marco:
would be very well-timed to go before or during a partial or full architecture transition.
Marco:
Because that's when you need the developers to be active on the Mac.
Marco:
Because right now, if you look around, we're about to lose 32-bit probably this fall.
Marco:
Almost everyone probably has something that will break.
Marco:
We saw this on iOS, too.
Marco:
When iOS dropped 32-bit, almost everyone lost something.
Marco:
And you might not have been using it anymore, but...
Marco:
not everything made it.
Marco:
And that's how this is going to be too.
Marco:
If Macs transition away from Intel, not everything is going to make it.
Marco:
We're already losing a lot of things with 32-bit.
Marco:
And so to do that without significant destruction and problems for your users, you need a healthy and well-maintained software ecosystem.
Marco:
The Mac had that in 2006, and that's why PowerPC to Intel went so well.
Marco:
It's hard to say the Mac has that now.
Marco:
So this kind of transition, I think, would be a very bad idea unless and until the Mac has more active development from third parties on it.
Marco:
And right now, I don't see that happening without some kind of major intervention.
Marco:
And Project Marzipan could be that.
Marco:
So that's one of the reasons, again, I really hope that happens.
John:
yeah i think the good news is that if either one of these things happen i don't think anyone can imagine a sequence in which the marzipany thing doesn't come either before or simultaneous with the cpu transition just because it takes so long to make cpus and apple has already dabbled in what it takes to reuse stuff that you wrote on ios on the mac and so like that just seems so much closer to being a reality to me than a cpu transition so
John:
I think we will get something to address the GUI API parity between iOS and the Mac before any CPU transition or at exactly the same time as the CPU transition.
John:
For the reasons you just said, because Apple, I think, recognizes the same thing, that going through a transition with the Mac market the way it is is just going to make more people say, well, that's the last straw.
John:
Screw it.
John:
I'm just going to be an iOS developer or do something else.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
It's exciting times ahead, maybe, possibly.
Casey:
You never know.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Oh, please, writes, hey, will Lyft be generally available during WWDC, as in not swamped with users, or should I rent a car if I want to see the things around San Jose, like the Computer History Museum?
Casey:
Um, in my experience from only one year of WWDC and San Jose, it was fine.
Casey:
Like, I can't remember ever waiting on a lift for any particular reason or for any particular amount of time.
Casey:
I didn't have any troubles.
Casey:
I don't know about you guys.
John:
Compared to San Francisco, San Jose is like a neutron bomb went off.
John:
Like, there's nobody there.
Yeah.
Marco:
There is a weird side effect, though.
Marco:
You're right, first of all.
Marco:
San Jose is empty, relatively speaking.
Marco:
The problem with San Jose, so it's kind of like the inverse plot of the Truman Show, where it seems like you walking around are the only human being there, and everyone who works at every establishment in San Jose seems like they're an actor, and for the very first time ever, you're asking them to do their job.
Casey:
That is a bit much, but you are closer to the truth than I really want to admit.
Marco:
Welcome to California.
Marco:
It really does seem like you are the first customer everyone's ever had.
Marco:
Everyone, it's their first day on the job.
Marco:
We found this to be the case last year almost everywhere we went, almost every day.
Marco:
it like and in various different contexts like it just seems like the city it seems like this is the first time people have ever come here and i know it's i know that's not the case like i know you know this is a big city like obviously people are here all the time but it's not that big that's the thing it's not a big city so anyway hiring like lifts and stuff you know for for your time there you might have to tell the person how to drive
Marco:
you are the first person to ever ask them to do their job in all likelihood or at least that's how it will seem so i don't know what happened in san jose to make everybody behave this way but that's how it felt the entire time san jose from the perspective of an adopted new yorker
Casey:
You ain't wrong.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Bart Hoffs writes, hey, should I use the new Cloudflare DNS thing or should I stay with Google's DNS thing?
Casey:
So to recap, Google has a free and not open, but a free DNS.
Casey:
The DNS server is actually the IP address 8.8.8.8.
Casey:
And what you can do is you can use Google's DNS, which is supposed to provide perks, although honestly, I'm not even sure what they are anymore.
Casey:
The last time I used it, the only thing it really provided for me was making things like YouTube slower because I was hitting servers that were very far away from where I was sitting.
Casey:
I guess one of the advantages is it prevents your ISP from knowing as easily what web addresses you're going to and things of that nature.
Casey:
Instead, you're giving it to Google because that's a better choice, I guess.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
but nevertheless um but yeah so that that was a thing it is useful if your isps dns uh craps the bed which i know is a comcastic thing to happen but uh i don't know i've never really had that trouble on on files or if your isp does stupid redirects where they they take over the dns when you when you typo something and throw you to some stupid page that has a bunch of corporate that is terrible that's the main reason not to reuse isp dns because they do that
Marco:
Well, also like, you know, I really don't trust ISPs to be ethical at all because they have shown in the US that they're not like they're just not.
Marco:
They will do anything and everything to be as sleazy as possible because what are you going to do about it?
Marco:
There's no competition and now there's no FCC to regulate them.
Marco:
So they can do whatever they want and they know it and they do.
Marco:
I would actually trust Google more than I would trust Verizon, which is my ISP, or any major ISP in this country.
Marco:
Because at least Google, there's a lot riding on that if they mess up, if they do something creepy.
Marco:
So I think they're less likely to try creepy stuff.
Marco:
And if they do creepy stuff, they're less likely to get hacked and have my information legal over the place.
Marco:
So there's a few reasons why I think I would trust Google over any ISP.
Marco:
That being said, I think I trust Cloudflare more than any of them because A, they're not an advertising company and B, they've spelled out in their post announcing this like why they're doing this for free.
Marco:
What's in it for them?
Marco:
Like what is their business plan here?
Marco:
And their business plan is in part because they seem to honestly care about making the internet a better place, and in part because they offer enterprise DNS services that would be better and are faster if more people who access the enterprise's sites are using their DNS on the client side.
Marco:
So there is a clear business reason why this benefits Cloudflare to do that does not depend on creepy stuff that I don't want them to be doing.
Casey:
Yeah, this sounds good.
Casey:
I'm not using it personally, but I will say that I would be far more likely to use this than Google's thing.
Casey:
I do use my ISPs DNS because I don't often fat finger URLs.
Casey:
So I don't see that god awful Verizon search page that I hate that it hijacks when you enter a bogus URL.
John:
They used to have a way for you to turn that off, by the way.
John:
You could go to Verizon's preferences and find it somewhere and say, please don't do that.
John:
There still is.
Marco:
It's poorly documented, but if you change the last digit of your DNS servers in a certain way, you get alternate ones.
John:
Yeah, that used to be the way, but there's a lot of outdated documentation in that, and sometimes what used to work stops working, and it's annoying.
John:
So anyway, I dig it.
John:
And on your concern, Casey, about 888 and 8844, the other one, that was my concern and my experience with them as well.
John:
It's like a lot of the ISP DNS, like the sort of local DNS, use the fact that that DNS is local to give you different names for common services, so you hit the closer list.
John:
incarnation of it and if you use the google one so the theory went that it didn't know where you were to as much you know like and it would just send you to a server far away or that has a worse route to you i'm pretty sure google with its 888 thing does a bunch of stuff to try to make that less severe in other words you're not going to some central dns server in the
John:
It's not local enough.
John:
and still occasionally I will get poor performance.
John:
On the flip side, sometimes you'll get better performance, because if you try using your ISP's DNS, I found ISP DNS to be unreliable, as in no name resolves, or crappy, as in it gives me the same IP for that name as everyone else was on the same ISP as me, and it's crowded, and if I switch to 888, I get better traffic.
John:
But either way, I think Cloudflare is probably doing the same thing as Google in that regard.
John:
I didn't read their full blog post, but that concern is real and does sometimes have ramifications.
John:
And that's why I hesitate to suggest to non-technical friends and family, oh, you shouldn't use the ISP DNS, just always use 8888 or 1111 or whatever.
John:
Because if they do find themselves in a situation where they're being sent to a server far away and they get terrible performance, they're going to have no idea how to debug that and...
John:
Yeah.
John:
they're at the mercy of their isp in more ways than one um but even for me i think maybe half of the devices in my house use the google dns but the other half use the native ones and i choose based on how important it is for that device to get good video streaming from like netflix or whatever
John:
Not an ideal situation.
John:
An ideal situation would be if the kind of technical expertise, general morality, and aligned business incentives demonstrated by Cloudflare actually existed in ISPs, but we do not live in that country.
Casey:
No, not even close, which is too bad.
Casey:
All right, so Josh Rapoport asks, Hey, John, with the release of macOS 10.3.4, have you considered getting an external GPU enclosure and a fancy graphics card to do more gaming on your Mac?
Casey:
Can your Mac even support this?
Casey:
Isn't it way too old for this?
Casey:
It doesn't even have Thunderbolt.
John:
Yeah, I'm running El Capitan.
John:
I can't even run Sierra, let alone the latest version of High Sierra.
Marco:
John's Mac doesn't even have USB 3.
John:
Nope.
John:
But more generally, to the question about external GPUs,
John:
I think those are a good solution for people who need to use GPU-intensive things on a computer that can't fit an internal GPU, so laptops, right?
John:
And my main concern in the laptop realm is, based on my experience using my 2017 15-inch MacBook Pro at work, constantly connecting it and disconnecting it to my monitor and a hub thing that gives me...
John:
usb a connections and uh you know what else comes off of that the mini display port for my old monitor or whatever anyway i plug it into a thing that periodically makes it uh forces it to turn on the discrete gpu and uh connect up to uh an external monitor and the reliability of that is terrible
John:
I have to do all sorts of weird dances and do things to make sure the machine doesn't feel too rushed or too hassled by me plugging and unplugging things.
John:
Very often I plug it in and it just ignores me.
John:
Then I'll unplug it and plug it in again.
John:
Oh, maybe now it'll pay attention.
John:
Sometimes, no matter how many times I plug it in and unplug it, I have to pull the power cord out of my hub thing that it's connected to and basically reboot the hub thingy.
John:
uh sometimes it freezes with a black screen and so like all this is making me think do i really want to be plugging and unplugging a gpu and thinking this operating system is going to handle that gracefully because it can't even handle plugging it into an external monitor in a consistent manner so i am not optimistic about
John:
how good an experience it will be to use an external GPU but especially to connect an external GPU to a system that didn't previously have it and disconnect it without doing all sorts of dances and jumping through hoops and bending over backwards to make sure the machine isn't too rushed or isn't too upset by me plugging in the second GPU and
John:
So my faith in the reliability of the Mac operating system to handle this is shaken.
John:
Despite the fact that I realize this is a revolutionary feature for people who are on the go previously had no way to...
John:
increase the gpu power of their portable machine like you there's only so much you can fit in that case and it would just the fans would be spinning you get the hottest one you could and it would still be terrible and now all of a sudden you're telling me i can get this little external enclosure and have massively more powerful gpu maybe they'll just deal with the bugs and it'll just be worth it for them to be able to do like live video previews of 4k video or whatever they're doing with their gpu rendering stuff like that but
John:
For me personally, my choice of a gaming rig would not be a Mac laptop with an external GPU.
John:
There's a reason I'm waiting for the Mac Pro, so I'm not personally interested in this.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Casper, Squarespace, and Rover.
Marco:
And we'll see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin 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-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C
Casey:
So Casey, I think I have a solution to your BMW problem.
Casey:
If I'm trying to solve my BMW problem with more BMWs and a shed load of money, then yes, you have definitely found a solution for me.
Casey:
uh bmw has come up with a subscription service uh you heard that right that is not a joke it it is now offering a subscription service only in nashville or i'm sorry it will be offering a subscription service only in nashville for two thousand dollars a month and two thousand dollars a month
Casey:
You can choose between X5s, 4 Serieses, 5 Serieses, plug-in hybrids, etc.
Casey:
And they will deliver with white glove service.
Casey:
They will deliver the car you want to your door.
Casey:
They will take away the car you already have.
Casey:
And you can be assured that the car you are given is freshly detailed, etc., etc.
Casey:
For $3,700 a month...
Casey:
you can alternatively get access to m4 m5 m6 uh convertibles as well as x5m x6m etc none of these apparently offer the 7 series but you know whatever but what's interesting about this is it includes not only access to the car but insurance maintenance roadside assistance etc etc etc so if you're willing to trade an asinine amount of money for a fair bit of convenience you can get a suite or a fleet i should say of bmws at your disposal and
Casey:
And I think in general, this is a pretty cool idea.
Casey:
As long as you don't have kids where you have to plug in a car seat, as long as you're not the kind of person that likes to have a whole bunch of things sitting around in your car, be that a rag or a charger, perhaps a obscenely overpriced car charger to go with your obscenely overpriced BMW subscription.
John:
Wait, wait, wait.
John:
Do you have a rag in your car?
Casey:
Yes, I have a rag in my car.
Casey:
Why wouldn't you have a rag in your car?
John:
What kind of rag do you have and where is it?
Casey:
I believe.
Casey:
So generally speaking, it is a blue surgical rag that was never used for surgery.
Casey:
But my uncle was a eye surgeon for the longest time.
Casey:
And he would either purchase or snag a series of these blue rags that are probably about a foot square.
Casey:
And they are the best rags for general purpose use.
Casey:
And they're intended to be used in like surgeries and things.
Casey:
But he would just grab them and then give a batch to my dad or me.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, but then you're smearing spiders all over the windshield after the next time you clean it.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
Well, so the reason I asked about it is because it brought back memories of my grandfather who also had a rag in his car, but it was a filthy rag and it was in the trunk and it was used to clean off the dipstick when you're checking the oil.
Marco:
Yeah, that's the only one I've ever seen.
Marco:
I'm more curious, what are these rags used for in the surgery?
Casey:
I think to mop up blood and things like that.
Casey:
For an eye surgeon, that's not terribly useful, right?
Casey:
Or one would hope not anyway.
Casey:
But for general purpose surgeries, I'm assuming that's what they're for.
John:
Speaking of surgery and surgical cleanliness, the reason I was moaning about your use of this rag that you keep in the door pocket to clean the inside of your windshield is because...
John:
first of all the inside of your windshield is a hard spot to clean it's inconvenient it's hard to reach right you know like just arm angle wise um and stuff does all sorts of film of your human grossness like collects on there and everything but the other problem especially i imagine in casey's car although you can correct me if i'm wrong is that potentially you may use something to clean the dashboard that is right below the windshield and
John:
some kind of product to to keep that clean or maintain it or protect it from uv or whatever you're thinking like armor all or equivalent or anything like that right something something other than just a completely dry rag to clean that part of your dashboard to make it look nice
John:
if you touch the rag that you're using to clean the inside of your dashboard any part of it to the the inside of your windshield if you touch that to the dashboard and then bring that to your windshield you are in for a world of hurt because the last thing you want to do is have even a corner of that thing touch your armor all covered dashboard and then smear that all over your window because you will spend the rest of your life with your arm at a weird angle trying to get that stuff off the inside of your windshield and it is not easy so
John:
to try there's some good youtube videos about this but the like the correct and only sane way to clean the inside of your windshield involves basically surgical cleanliness it's like you're you're like you're in a you know a silicon chip fab clean room you must use a rag perfectly clean freshly clean has not touched anything else use it to wipe off the gross film then maybe you can use the other side of that rag and then it's done then you have to get your next rag and you can't touch it to any part of the trim or anything else that might have arm roll on it
John:
It's a disaster.
John:
All right.
Marco:
I have an alternate policy.
Marco:
No armor all ever goes in my car.
Marco:
I hate armor all.
Marco:
I hate the idea that I touch any surface and it's greasy.
Marco:
That is awful.
Marco:
There was one time where like a detailer used it without asking.
John:
and it drove me nuts i was like taking like a beach towel like wiping it like trying to wipe it all off it was horrible probably smearing it all over the inside of your windshield yeah armor all is the worst but there are lots of things that you can use to clean the inside of your car all of them have in various ways are you do not want them touching your windshield
John:
no they don't vacuum cleaner and cloth that's all you need to clean a car you don't need like to like coat your your dashboard with grease unfortunately even water even like dampness the problem is the grease comes from you the grease comes from your body right that's what what's collecting on the inside of your windshield is human scum right it's like that's it's coming from inside the car that also settles on your dashboard and
John:
So even just rubbing it with a dry cloth, you're picking up some grease.
John:
And if you would like to rub the top of your dashboard with a dry cloth and then take that same dry cloth and rub your windshield, you are adding to the mess on your windshield.
John:
Cleaning the inside of your windshield is really hard to do.
John:
And I'm terrible at it, by the way.
John:
Don't think just because I reference those YouTube videos that show you how to do it right.
John:
I am terrible at it, which is why I know how difficult it actually is to do.
Marco:
I mean, maybe I'm just not as... As greasy?
Marco:
Greasy as you guys?
Marco:
I am Italian.
Marco:
I don't...
Marco:
I hardly ever have to clean the inside of my windshield.
Marco:
I just don't touch it.
Marco:
And by not touching it, I almost never have to clean it.
John:
That is a reasonable policy because a lot of people make the mistake of getting something on their windshield and then they try to rub it with their hand or something and everybody's hand has grease on it.
John:
And now you've just started the cycle of grease grossness.
John:
but casey's rag that thing i would never touch that to the inside of my windshield because i think you're just making it worse like you i casey you need to come on you're you're you are fancy enough of a car person you need to come on board the like time to crack out the completely sealed completely sterile never seen the light of day rag which i will carefully handle with my perfectly clean hands and wipe down the inside of my windshield maybe not even the whole windshield but just half of it and then throw that thing away
Marco:
and then your rag just keep in the keep in the trunk for for dipstick checking or you can just have lower standards can we get back to the point um so bmw has a subscription service so do you think the bmw concierge would do this for you what if you have a car seat what if you have a rag i mean because they they say they would they will personally deliver the vehicle uh they arrive fully fueled and freshly detailed with personal preferences already preset he's like
Marco:
can i get a filthy rag in the door pocket yeah what what do you mean by personal preferences is it just like where the seat is or can it be like can you also install this particular brand of car seat in this spot load the pocket below it with these three toys my kid likes and wants to play with in the car today put my brand of sunglasses in the sunglass holder that is probably not there because bmw doesn't put sunglass holders anywhere uh how far will this go could you get them to you can pick your scent in the seven series i think yeah
Marco:
Like, could you get them to include one of these surgical rags that mops up Casey's uncle's eye blood in the door pocket so you can reach it?
Marco:
And can they pre-clean the windshield for you so that you don't get anyone else's ambient grease on your windshield?
John:
Well, they say it is detailed, so you shouldn't have to do anything.
John:
The windshield should be sparkling clean when you get it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I just think this is an interesting thing.
Casey:
The first I'd heard of this was actually with Volvo with the new XC40, where you get your own XC40.
Casey:
And the interesting thing about this, actually, is I could swear I'd read that you can do this all via an app on your phone.
Casey:
Which, how does that make sense when there's payment involved?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
It's like Netflix for cars.
John:
You just constantly get a bill for $3,700 every month, and that covers all the cost of you picking whatever vehicle you want.
John:
It more than covers the cost.
John:
They just charge you too much.
Casey:
But in the case of Volvo, they're saying, what makes Care by Volvo unique, which is what they're calling their subscription service?
Casey:
No down payment, no price negotiation, one flat monthly fee with no surprises, includes premium insurance no matter where you live, maintenance and excess wear coverage, upgrade to a new Volvo in as little as 12 months, subscribe easily online or via the app, and a 15,000-mile allowance per year.
Casey:
If I was interested in an XC40, which that's not the kind of car that I particularly want—
Casey:
This is a really, really cool idea.
Casey:
I don't know how much the Volvo setup costs.
Casey:
And, oh, there you go.
Casey:
Starting $600 a month for the base model, $700 a month for their equivalent of the M Sport, which they call R-Drive.
Casey:
Or, excuse me, R-Design.
Casey:
But the BMW version is, you know...
Casey:
many times that and yes i think it's a cool idea and i kind of like where this is going the thought of just paying one monthly fee to have everything taken care of is really cool yeah but but they're but believe me they're charging you for like this is not a good deal financially speaking none of these things are good deals financially speaking peace of mind wise it may be appealing to you to say oh and i just don't have to worry about it but you are paying not to worry
Marco:
and you're paying a lot like like for the the uh 3700 a month one for the high one to get like the m cards like you can lease an m5 for like a thousand dollars a month and insurance on it is going to be less than that more it's not going to be another thousand a month at least three m5s and you could just rotate them each day yeah and and the funny thing is like you said like oh it wouldn't it be great if you could just pay a monthly fee and have everything taken care of
Marco:
you can do that already it's called leasing that's it already takes care of almost all well but it doesn't do insurance like not to say that paying an insurance bill but it does include maintenance and roadside assistance and you get a concierge to your house i never tell you about that and it's the same car all the time i mean this is totally for rich people who are like oh
John:
today i want to try this car oh today i want to oh bmw came out with a new car is that included in my netflix for cars sure it is i'll trade this you know like you really i feel like you really have to have a lot of time and also to casey's point not a lot of junk in your car to do this kind of rotation although like i was trying to think of things in my life that have been like this that actually have been ridiculously good deals and i thought of one which i'm sure this doesn't exist anymore but someone can write and tell me when i was a kid i went skiing almost every year
John:
And when I was a teen, I wanted to buy fancy new skis for myself for a huge amount of money.
John:
And the only way to know which skis you want to buy is to try a bunch of skis, kind of like test driving.
John:
And at the mountain, they would have demos.
John:
You could go to the ski shop and say, I want to demo skis, and you'd give them some paltry amount of money.
John:
I don't remember what it was.
John:
Maybe it was $15, $10, $20.
John:
How much could a banana cost?
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
But it was a really... I remember it seeming small to me then, right?
John:
And in exchange for that, all day, you can go to the ski shop and point to the...
John:
$700 in 1990 money ski behind the counter that you wanted to try and say, I want to try that one.
John:
And you'd give them your ski boot and they would adjust the bindings and say, here you go.
John:
And you'd go up and take a run.
John:
You come back down and you say, all right, let me try that one.
John:
And you'd point to the $800 in 1990s money ski over there.
John:
And they would take your boot and adjust the bindings and give it to you.
John:
And you'd go up and come back down.
John:
You can do that all day.
John:
Exchange skis as many times as you want.
John:
No additional fee each time.
John:
Every time they would adjust the bindings for your ski boots and your weight, and you would get to try hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars of skis in one day for one flat fee of like $10 or $15.
John:
Now, granted, the lift tickets were $100 in 1990 money, but my parents were paying for those, so I don't have to worry about it.
John:
what a good deal it was like there was no equivalent of that it's as if you could for a fee of like 80 uh try as many bmw's as you wanted for a week and just every time you wanted to go back to the dealer i'm gonna try that one now and you don't have to buy anything at the end of it and i didn't buy anything at the end of it i tried all these skis on real ski mountains which is why i found how i found my beloved rosinal 7s to be the ideal ski for me which i still own to this day
Marco:
Well, and like that actually is, you know, one possible reason why somebody could reasonably want to plan like this is like, I mean, I don't know if they have like minimum terms, but if you could just sign up for it for one month and like if you if you wanted to buy one of these cars, but you couldn't decide which one and you didn't want to make like an expensive mistake.
Marco:
you kiss $2,000 goodbye or whatever and just try basically having a one-month test drive of all these different models and you could make your decision that way.
Marco:
Or say if you were trying to get a car review channel off the ground on YouTube and you needed access to a bunch of cars to review and you could schedule it so you had all of them.
Marco:
You could do them all in one month.
Marco:
Imagine being able to review seven different cars in one month because you'd have access to them.
John:
they have to pay casey for that so we can have his little demuro ad in the front and say i got this car courtesy of you know whatever toyota the blah blah like you do a little ad for them like they pay you oh this is why i'm not a youtube car journalist yeah well neither am i these days apparently porsche also has one called porsche passport which is so good so you could try all two of their cars they have so many suvs and plus up some other cars
Casey:
In any case, I just think it's a very cool idea.
Casey:
I don't know that it's going to work for most people, not the least of which because it's an obscene amount of money.
Casey:
But like you guys were saying, this is trading money in favor of convenience.
Casey:
And to your point, Marco, if you're going to go this route, there's an argument that leasing would be just as good or almost as good.
Casey:
You don't get a guaranteed one-year upgrade in a lease, or most leases anyway, like you would in the case of the Volvo one.
Casey:
And you don't get access to many cars in a lease like you can in the BMW or Porsche ones.
Casey:
But I do think it's a cool idea.
Marco:
And if you have more money than cents... I mean, the good thing is, like, this makes leasing look pretty reasonable by comparison.
Yeah.
Marco:
And leasing, you don't get every year's new model.
Marco:
But most cars, every year is a really minor update.
Marco:
Most cars, they only change in substantial ways every three to five years.
Marco:
So you don't need to get every single year.
Marco:
And while I would miss the... Or while you would miss the concierge with your blood cloth, I think there's a pretty good argument to be made that...
Marco:
the parts of this that are appealing to you right now in theory are really directly saying like, you're ready for a lease.
Marco:
That's what this means.
Marco:
Like you are so ready for a lease because you're like, Oh, I can just pay a flat monthly fee.
Marco:
And then like maintenance is included.
Marco:
Yes, there are ways to do that.
Marco:
And you don't have to worry about upgrades down the road.
Marco:
Yes, yes, exactly.
Marco:
you can do it now i can offer you a wonderful deal where i will offer you most of this service for a quarter of the price and you don't even have to be in nashville oh that sounds great the main reason i think leasing is not for casey is because it will force him to make a new car buying decision every three months and i don't think the show can handle that every three years yeah even every three years that's true
Casey:
If people just made cars I wanted to buy, it would be so much easier.
Casey:
Like, just make the Model 3 have an actual dashboard.
Casey:
Make the Model S not a bazillion dollars.
Casey:
Make BMWs that don't break.
Casey:
Any of these would be reasonable options.
Casey:
Make a Golf R with a sunroof.
Marco:
But here's the thing.
Marco:
If you start a three-year lease today, what you're doing is just kicking that can down the road for three years.
Marco:
Sounds great.
Marco:
No, but you can say, you know what?
Marco:
I would rather not think about this for the next three years.
Marco:
I'll get back to it then.
Marco:
It's like snoozing your car angst.
Marco:
You just snooze it for three years and remind me in three years to revisit my car craziness.
Marco:
In the meantime, I will happily drive this thing that's being taken care of by the lease plan and I don't have to worry about its maintenance costs.
Marco:
And that thing could be like an M3 or something.
John:
Casey's just waiting for BMW to have a round table about manual transmission reliable cars.
John:
But I don't think that's in your future.
John:
No, I don't think so.