Cooled by Jellyfish
You're just starting him without Casey, huh?
Who cares?
He's rebooting.
He said momentarily.
I mean, that was a few minutes ago.
You know how long it takes to reboot.
It takes a while.
Not that long.
Not on my shiny new Mac Pro.
Hi.
Hello.
Sorry.
Rebooting your slow computer?
Why you gotta be like that?
It's faster than John's.
That's probably true.
I didn't have to reboot.
I'm already running.
The only time I reboot is for system updates.
I didn't have to.
I just had this sneaking suspicion that I needed to.
I have empathy for the machine, John.
You've got that reboot feeling?
Mm-hmm.
Oh, my God.
What is it?
It was Top Gun, wasn't it?
That's not where that song is from.
But, yes, that movie did feature that song.
Take me home or lose me forever, John Syracuse.
Mm-hmm.
You know, fun fact, Days of Thunder was the better movie between the two of them because they're the same movie.
I'm pretty sure they're not.
Days of Thunder was the better one.
Why?
Why do you think that?
Because, well, A, everyone is going to tell me I'm wrong and they're probably right, but I don't care because planes are not as fun as cars.
What?
I was waiting for a reason.
I'm like, I figured, you know, you had some reasonable foundation for your opinion, but no, no, that's not.
No, let's talk about vinyl after this.
High-definition vinyl.
Yeah, exactly.
I love that story so much.
They're like, if only there were some other round music medium that was longer than a vinyl record and could allow for more precise audio.
Right, right, right.
So I read it.
I thought it was going to be like high-definition vinyl, but instead it seemed like it was just...
a way to more precisely make vinyl but everything else about it was the same like it wasn't higher definition it was like if we could really carefully carve grooves in vinyl right like more carefully than usual it's like all right i guess i mean sure like it's not oh god i don't understand
like i thought it was gonna be like a higher density or it was gonna do like it was gonna i was kind of imagining that it would make little pits for like ones and zeros like it would be like vinyl but cds on vinyl you know what i mean like there's lots of things you could do to make high actual high definition vinyl but instead they're just more carefully carving grooves in vinyl yeah i've got i've got i've been sent that a couple times already
I just think as somebody who has now seen all the sides of this, the appeal of vinyl has nothing to do with its sound quality or fidelity or dynamic range or any of the things they're proposing to increase.
If you want those things, you shouldn't be using vinyl at all.
You shouldn't be using digital sources.
This is just crazy to me.
Anyway, we should start with follow-up.
iOS 11.3 has a new battery throttling notification, which we were made aware of sometime in the last week.
Stephen Devine was the first that I noticed to send us an image.
It reads as follows.
This iPhone has experienced an unexpected shutdown because the battery was unable to deliver the necessary peak power.
Performance management has been applied to help prevent this from happening again.
Yeah.
Like the passive voice.
Performance management has been applied.
Who applied it?
What happened now?
The iPhone experienced an unexpected shutdown.
It experienced it.
Well, that is kind of true.
The phone did experience.
At least it didn't blame you.
There is actually no actor in that situation.
The phone did experience something.
You shut down your iPhone because of a problem.
Yeah.
No, I'm very happy that they are notifying the user when battery throttling happens.
Big picture wise, that's good.
They should have been doing this all along and that would have made the problem a lot less severe.
I don't think the wording they've chosen here is particularly helpful or even honest.
Performance management has been applied.
I don't think a lot of people are going to correctly know that that means your phone will now be slowed down.
That's a pretty big difference than performance management has been applied.
That is a dark pattern euphemism that is intentionally written to mask the truth, to confuse and kind of hide what's actually going on in this huge paragraph that they know most people are not going to read.
And if they do read it, they're not really going to understand what it's really doing.
i wish they would have been a little more clear in the language but at least they're undefying people i just wish they were to find them in a more honest way they don't offer any remedies like the dialogue should say okay like here's what happened and what is there anything i can do about it actually in this case there is what you can do about is get a new battery for your phone right they should offer something like it's not even as far as i can tell it's not even a place like oh you know tap here for more information like it's
if a user is interested enough in this very confusing vague like it could mean a lot of different things and you say i want to know more because it sounds like something bad might have happened to my phone presumably they knew something bad happened to the phone because they were using it two seconds ago and then the screen went black and i had to wait for it to reboot right uh so if that happened to me and then my phone came back and it said this i would be like well what what can i do about that uh and apple has answers there are easy answers hey go get a new battery uh but they don't offer that in this dialogue anyway
Yeah, like they could be a little more, you know, they can say like your battery cannot can no longer run the phone at full speed like that is more direct.
That is telling them like your phone will be slow.
It's the battery's fault.
It's something that you can therefore, you know, have some control over.
You need to replace the battery like that, you know, using language that is more honest and accountable, I think would do a lot of good here.
The whole point of this notification is to fix the problem they had before, which is they were slowing down people's phones without telling them.
This kind of sort of fixes that.
But if people don't really know what's going on and they later find out, oh, my phone has been slowed down by Apple because of this thing...
I don't think they're going to feel better necessarily than they would if they weren't told at all, because if this is all they saw and they didn't really understand what was going on, then they effectively weren't told at all.
So it doesn't really solve the problem.
I'm glad that they have a notification.
I think you nailed it, Marco, that...
you know it may not be perfect there's certainly you know issues that we can and just have taken with it but i do think that telling the user what the hell is going on is a good first step and i welcome this improvement yeah we need to subtract some of the california from this dialogue and apply a little bit of east coast to it good friggin luck my friend i agree with you but good luck i mean how can how can you expect people who don't live in the real world to communicate with people who live in the real world
worded by apple in california oh well done all right uh moving on uh mac os this is actually breaking news and i mean that genuinely this this is just breaking in the last like hour or two so we're recording this on the evening of uh april 11th on wednesday night
And apparently a few people are reporting all at the same moment that macOS 10.13.4 is now going to warn users about 32-bit apps.
This is a quote from Jason Snell.
Apple's long transition away from 32-bit software takes another step beginning April 12.
When the clock strikes switching hour local time, Mac's running macOS 10.13.4 will display a warning the first time any non-Apple app that isn't 64-bit compliant is opened.
interesting i mean this isn't that surprising they're clearly you know like they have not been that secretive that like 32-bit support is on its way out this is it's just like what they did on ios uh when ios 11 i believe was the one that dropped right i think so
Yeah, and so for iOS 10, like 10.4, whatever the last version of 10 was, they started showing this alert then over iOS apps.
And they added a little section in settings where you could see which of your apps was 32-bit.
So that's nice.
You can do this.
I think it's going to be more disruptive on the Mac like we mentioned briefly last week.
But telling users what's about to happen before it happens in six months to a year, whenever it would be, is certainly a good thing.
This dialogue, I think, is better worded.
This one actually tells you what the problem is.
I don't know.
I've always found these apps, like when the one happened on 10 point whatever, nobody I knew who didn't already know what the dialogue was about guessed correctly from the thing.
And I don't know how they should word it because people don't care about 32 versus 64.
But what it actually says is,
so it's a two-line dialogue it's got the bold line and then the longer non-bold sentence underneath it says whatever the application name is not optimized for your mac now oh yeah this actually is a terrible dialogue now now is not optimized for your mac that's not really true like i i know what they're trying to get at but but it makes it seem like the same app that was running fine yesterday now somehow like because people read optimized and think it means slower or something and it's the same speed
as it was yesterday right and then the other part says this app needs to be updated by its developer to improve compatibility that's that's closer to true because the app what the remedy is developer of the app needs to do something like you user can't do anything about this the developer needs to do it and why does it need to be updated to improve compatibility compatibility with what compatibility with an os that apple is going to release sometime in the semi near future that's what they don't say that that's what it's about so it's tough to word this one i kind of get that that
It's actually really bad.
So you're right.
Not optimized means it might be slow, which is very different from it's going to stop working in six months if you update your Mac OS.
And when the iOS dialogue came out, if I remember correctly, I think it says something along the lines of that it won't work in future versions of iOS or in a future version of iOS.
But this, to improve compatibility, that's pretty euphemistic too.
That's like...
What they should say is this app needs to be updated by its developer to work on a future version of macOS.
Something like that that's even a little more vague about the timeline.
But just to say improved compatibility doesn't mean anything.
Not optimized means it'll run slowly.
The truth here is this is going to stop working completely soon.
And the iOS 11 dialogue said app name needs to be updated, which I think is better than app name.
What does it say?
It's not optimized.
It's not optimized.
It needs to be updated.
It's much more clear.
And then the subtext was the developer of this app needs to update it to work with iOS 11.
So not only was it clear that the reason it needs to be updated is so it will work with like a future OS, but it tells you the name iOS 11.
So yeah, the iOS dialogue was definitely better.
Yeah, that is perfect.
oh wait before we move on so the uh so the dialogue has buttons it has an okay button which is just like okay whatever nothing happens uh your app will launch them by the way like it doesn't stop your app from launching it just shows us the first time you launch it and if you say okay it just launches and it's just like it was the day before this dialogue appeared um and there's a learn more button and learn more button takes you to apple's uh
knowledge base article about this which is pretty good and it explains you know what what's going on in more detail than the dialogue obviously which by the way this is you know the ios thing lacks this it doesn't there's no place to get more information as far as i can tell i don't know i should try i try to get that to come up and tap it or
is when it gets to the point where like it explains to you like you can't do anything about this developer needs updated this is why blah blah blah near the end there's a section that says how do i get in touch with the app developer which i think is a good question so you're telling me you know people see this dialogue and they say the developer needs to update it and they're like developer like i don't do i even know what that is let alone who it is how would i find the developer of this app and
and if i was a i was tasked with writing this i would find myself writing like seven paragraphs about like well so sometimes it's not an individual sometimes it's a company sometimes the company that used to make the application is gone you know like how would you find the person maybe they've moved on maybe they don't have that job anymore maybe no one is maintaining the software
uh you know there's no uh 100 sure way to find the person who wrote this but like but of course they can't do that like they're not going to go on for 20 pages so they have a very short bit of information that like i don't know i can't think of much better but this seems bad to me the easiest way to contact a developer is to look them up on the web
to find the name of the developer of an app open the app click the app name in the menu bar and choose about so they send you to the about it's two sentences right first one it says look them up on the web what if the developer is john smith look them up on the web the about box maybe it will have a link to their website but maybe it'll just have a name or maybe it'll just say my cool software company incorporated uh you know 2010 right
that's really just throwing people into the deep end like i don't know do google search figure it out maybe you'll find somebody this is going to cause people with the same name as 32-bit app developers to get a lot of bad email my favorite part of this entire page is the very first sentence in the body text state-of-the-art technology is what makes a mac a mac
that was written years ago though hasn't been updated this knowledge base article yeah i was gonna say like look at the macs that are for sale today and tell me which of them have state-of-the-art technology all of the macs that are for sale not just the most recent models let's see does the macbook air have state-of-the-art technology how about the mac mini it is still a product in their lineup
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Uh, Sean Harding writes, Hey, I had one of those pro clip mounts that went into a gap in the dash for my Audi S five.
It not only went in the gap, but also had adhesive.
I was hesitant, but gave in and I lost my desktop.
Hello.
Sorry.
Things are happening on my computer.
Where the did that go?
While you were reading, did the window disappear out from under your eyeballs?
Oh,
well because i was opening a new window in before this all before i started reading all this and then it opened and then things disappear wow then your computer is slow oh would you stop god you're so mean to me you're opening a window then you had time to read two sentences then the window finally opened i was opening a vnc window leave me alone now let me reboot this whole thing you're opening a vnc window what are you using vnc for what are you remotely controlling
I'm remotely controlling the laptop that's sitting like two inches away from me because I am trying to look at something for work real quick.
So I don't have to worry about it.
Are you doing air traffic control during this podcast?
Is that what's going on?
Are you trying to land planes at Dallas?
That's exactly what I'm doing.
We aren't talking about the Mac Pro yet.
You can't be paying your bills and stuff yet.
I know.
I know.
I know.
We're getting there.
All right.
So let me just reboot this whole damn thing.
Sean Harding writes, I'm rebooting.
Not literally rebooting.
Oh, the segment.
He's trying to keep that out of the show, but I'm pretty sure it's going in.
No, it's not going in.
Please, no.
Sean Harding writes, I had one of those ProClip mounts that went into a gap in the dash for my Audi S5.
It not only went in the gap, but it also had adhesive.
I was hesitant, but gave in.
And now I have a big gap in the trim and adhesive residue.
Two thumbs down.
So the ProClip mounts that I was talking about last week that go in your car, they're made for each individual car model.
The design of certain dashboards and stuff, certain ones are going to be easier or harder to affix something very securely to than others.
I lucked out in that mine just uses the air vent and just kind of uses a pressure fit inside the air vent top and bottom so that it doesn't leave anything behind and there's no permanent dash damage by it.
But if your car is one where it has to do something a little more aggressive, then, you know, that makes sense to to have that be a problem for you.
You know, I just it isn't a problem for me.
also if it's a lease maybe you don't want to mess with the dash because who knows what they'll say about that when you try to give it back um the thing about the vent ones that uh some people wrote in about is they're like oh isn't it bad to keep your phone there like in the winter with the heat blowing out of the vent on it and i just assume that every car has like that little dial or whatever that lets you turn off the vent and i would suggest that if you
In the winter, if you have your phone in a vent clip, turn the vent behind the phone off so heat isn't constantly blowing in the back of your phone, because that's terrible.
In the summer, air conditioning blowing in the back, that's probably great, because it gets pretty hot in the car with the sun beating down on your phone, so that'll probably even out.
But if you have no dial because your car is a weird, super modern thing where there's no way to control the air vents except for
a tiny dot in the middle of a giant uh field that you drag around as a vague way to suggest to the car where air might come out uh that sounds pretty cool to be honest i haven't seen it yet but it sounds pretty cool but yours doesn't have that i thought that was on all the no it's only the model three um which i haven't seen in real life yet but well it's like if you just want to turn off the vent that your phone is attached to though i'm not sure how you can do that by dragging a puck around a little ice hockey rink
I actually, as far as I know, I don't think I can turn off a vent.
They have a little like slider thing if you can redirect it, but there's no, I don't think I can turn that vent off.
You don't have the little dial?
No, but this isn't a problem in reality because automatic climate control never has the heat blowing out of the center vents.
It's always blowing in the feet vent, the defroster vent, or both, but it's never blowing out the front vents.
That's not how you're supposed to heat a car.
Why wouldn't you want it out of the front vents?
Because you don't need heat blowing in your face.
You need to blow it on your feet.
sometimes my face is cold i'll tell you where i want the air i i would not consider this a big problem in reality for almost anybody because the way you're supposed to be uh climate managing your car you shouldn't really be blowing a lot of hot air through the front vents anyway and also uh if you're using your phone in a dock and running like waves or something it's already running so hot that you know it actually might improve the heat efficiency of your car to be blowing it across your phone on the way to your face okay
Because the phone is, you know, 150 degrees, but the air coming out of the vent is 75, so it's actually cooling it.
Exactly.
All right.
With regard to my beloved blue towel, speaking of car-related things, Ndig5 writes that the surgical rag that I use is called a Huck, H-U-C-K.
It's a sterile towel used to dry hands after a surgical scrub before operating.
And apparently he has a million of them.
And then Eugene Friesen writes in that they're actually available on Amazon.
So I'll put a link in the show notes.
I was not aware of this, which is super good news because I kind of need some.
We also got some feedback about whether or not it's plastic ventilating onto the interior of your windshield.
John, do you have any thoughts on that or do you not care?
Yeah, no, that's true.
Outgassing from, you know, that new car smell and various other things that you smell in cars.
Outgassing from carpets and from plastic.
And a lot of that crap gets all over your windshield and makes it gross.
Fun.
Finally, or almost finally, actually, car subscriptions.
Zach, a friend of mine, asked, why not have like a Lyft subscription?
You know, like insurance, the light users would subsidize the heavy ones.
That sounded like a brilliant idea.
And then fast forward like three days after I heard this feedback from my buddy, Zach, and I somehow saw an article or a headline or something like that about how Lyft actually is or will soon be offering subscriptions, which I didn't know was a thing.
This is the kind of thing that, like, it's nice in a lot of situations.
And it might even prove to be nice in the majority of situations for some people.
But the great flexibility of having your own car parked in your driveway or in your garage or near or in front of your place is that it's always there ready for you.
It's dedicated capacity just for you.
If you're relying on – not public transit, but if you're relying on services like Lyft or Uber or other kind of car share services, there's only a certain number of cars out there at any given time.
And they're only in a certain number of places, and they're a lot less densely available once you get out of the major cities.
When you have your own car, it's always there ready for you no matter when you want to use it with zero weight or close enough to zero weight.
when you're relying on something like this it might work nine times out of ten but then the tenth time you go to use it oh there aren't any for the next 45 minutes or it's a spike because of demand or the nearest one is you know too far away and doesn't want to take your ride or you keep getting the same one over and over again that's some driver that's terrible that you don't want that you know their car smells like smoke and cats and stuff and it's like when it's yours when it's your car it is always there ready to go
And so depending on how important that car and the mobility are to you, and I think for most people in most of America, it's very important because the public infrastructure just isn't there for most of us.
Having that car be dedicated to you, having your own that's always ready to go, that's always right there, that's always yours and you can put your stuff in it and you can know that it's always going to be there and be ready.
that's going to have a pretty big advantage for a lot of people.
So I don't see personal car ownership of some form going away.
Like Lyft and Uber, that's not that.
That's something else.
The subscription is just another way to have cars that are yours.
So that, I think, makes some sense maybe in the future.
But it's never going to be totally replaced in America unless our density radically changes, which I don't see happening.
This is a psychological pricing ploy for city dwellers who are never going to own a car because they can't afford a parking spot for it or whatever, and use Lyft all the time anyway.
You can convince enough of them to subscribe, essentially paying more, like Zach said.
Most people will say, oh, it's just easier to pay that subscription and not have to worry about the hassle of...
you know paying each time and everything and maybe that'll make me feel like oh i'll use it more i have a subscription i'll use it more right and maybe they won't use it more uh you know and so uh lift will end up making more money from the people who thought they were going to really totally use that subscription all the time but actually take the same number of rides as they always did it ends up being a bad deal for them but the few heavy users uh get a really good deal because now they can just ride as much as they want for a flat fee so lift will figure out the economics of it i'm sure and uh try to but that it's the type of pricing psychology that you
can make everybody involved feel like they're getting a good deal even though obviously you know they're not right so lyft would be happy if they make more money and the users would be happy if they perceive the the subscription as a good value regardless of whether it's actually a good value
Finally, somebody and I don't have this email in front of me.
Somebody was very grumpy about the fact that we called San Jose not very big.
And John, did you put this in here?
Would you like to happen?
It happened last year, too.
And we were talking about San Jose and we got so much feedback about it.
I forget we ever even did follow up about it, but we should.
And because I've totally forgot about the fall from last year already.
We're like, oh, San Jose, like nobody's there.
It's empty.
It's not like San Francisco.
It's not a big city like San Francisco.
And we say anything like that.
Someone from San Jose or near San Jose writes in to tell us, well, you know, San Jose is bigger than San Francisco, has a bigger population than San Francisco.
You know, all the things about how San Jose is just massive compared to everything that we, you know, we're saying it's small, but it's not, right?
And to that, I would say Texas has more people than San Jose.
But if I drop a pin anywhere in Texas, chances are good I'm going to look around and not see that much.
It's all about density.
Yes, San Jose is bigger.
San Jose has more people.
But practically speaking, if you are a person, you get dropped down in WWC and you look around, you'd be like...
where are all the people as a tumbleweed tumbleweed goes by right like it is very different experience from the vastly higher density of where moscow is in san francisco so that's what we meant we know it's a big city we know there's lots of people somewhere
also i was interested not a single person refuted my truman show theory about everybody who works there but they're just writing your name down a little book and a little uh you know a picture of you that says do not serve this person or serve this person even more slowly than usual i'm not sure i'd be able to tell the difference like oh here we go oh you wanted to order something i don't know if i can do that i have to check with my boss to see if you can order something
I'm going to laugh when you get to Sopo or whatever it's called and they are like, oh, wait, you're Marco.
Yeah, we're not serving you.
What would you do?
You would have nowhere to go.
You would have no court to rule over.
I'd go to the beer and sausage plates up the street.
Fair enough.
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All right, it's time.
I'm going to go to sleep now.
Guys, there's been some Mac Pro news.
I love that you're bringing this up.
What am I going to do?
You could have just moved on.
You should summarize the Mac Pro news.
That's what you should do.
Yeah, chief summarizer in chief.
I'm going to attempt to.
So, friend of the show, said with no sarcasm, friend of the show, Matthew Panzarino, was invited by himself, which is actually kind of interesting in and of itself.
I don't know if we need to unpack that right now or not, but Matt Panzarino was invited to Apple and was put in front of several different, both executives and engineers and so on, to talk about, hey, what's going on with the Mac Pro?
And my summary, which I'm sure both of you will take issue with, and that's fine, but my summary is...
Apple wanted to give a little more insight into what's going on with the Mac Pro.
We can and surely will pontificate about why that is, but one can assume, and I think they actually said that, hey, we don't want you to make purchasing decisions on the hope that the Mac Pro is coming out later this year.
So they made it plain that it will not be out until 2019.
They said 2019, but we don't know when in 2019.
They said that, and this was what I found most interesting, they've created a workflow group, as I believe what they called it.
And what that basically means is they have contracted and or hired contractors.
creative professionals to sit literally next to the people who work on say final cut pro and work on the mac pro as well in order to better understand what their workflows are and they cited an example and i think it was final cut pro it doesn't really matter but they cited an example of oh these creative professionals there's they they open this one dialogue in final cut pro and
All the time.
And it takes like 10 seconds to open this dialogue.
And nobody at Apple somehow knew this.
And so because they're now sitting next to each other, you know, the creative professionals walked down the hall and said, hey, guys, can we do something about this dialogue?
Because this sucks.
And sure enough, it turned out there was like an error in some driver somewhere or something like that.
And they were able to fix it.
So the point of all this is Apple is trying to engage with the broader professional community, people like us, and say, hey, you know, you need to buy an iMac Pro.
Go buy an iMac Pro.
Don't wait for the Mac Pro because you're not getting it for a while.
Additionally, they're engaging with the broader professional community in the sense that they've asked some of these people to come in-house and help them understand what their workflows are.
Which I think you can argue both that that's great and that's terrible.
And I'm sure we're about to do exactly that.
But one way or another, it is more insight than we've had into the Mac Pro in a long, long time.
And it shows us that it's still a thing, which is exciting.
It tells us roughly, with an emphasis on roughly, when it's going to be released.
And they also said that, no, no, no, it's going to be modular.
And I am happy to report, John Syracuse...
That they are making it plain or perhaps reiterating that they are making a display for it as well.
Reiterating.
Old news, not news.
Still, I know you're very excited and I am happy that you're happy.
That is, I think, my summary.
And as much as I'm snarking about this, this is actually pretty fascinating even for me.
I don't see a Mac Pro in my future yet.
but this is really really really interesting and a very different approach than apple's taken in the past and whether or not i view a mac pro as something i need to buy and honestly i don't think it's something that any of us need to buy but we can argue about that another time i still think that this approach i still think that this approach is really fascinating so with that in mind i will open the floor perhaps we can start with marco what are your thoughts
I mean, to me, this has been positioned and summarized by many, including Chief Summarizer and Chief, in part, as a Mac Pro roundtable successor from last year.
But there's really no new information here about the Mac Pro.
The only thing that we know about the Mac Pro that we didn't know before is that it's definitely not coming out this year.
That's the only thing that's new here.
What this was really about, I think, is setting expectations for that, for WBDC to come and go, and for the rest of the year to come and go, without Pro saying, hey, where the heck's the Mac Pro?
That's really what I think this was about on that side, and then to...
kind of paper over that or to offset that with something that's positive by showing off that they have this new you know kind of like in-house study of pro users in you know in their natural environment and seeing what geometrically speaking this announcement was an open-faced shit sandwich that fell face down on the floor
because you get the bad news there's no there's no good news bad news good news you just get the bad news and then you get the good news so the bad news is no mac pro this year and the good news is i look at the pro workflow team isn't that cool
And, you know, honestly, I mean, this is, you know, heavy on the PR puff, obviously.
And, you know, not from Panzer, but from Apple.
And there's not a lot of new information really here.
But it is interesting that this pro, you know, group thing was created there and is, you know, being observed and being worked with.
That is the more interesting part of this announcement by far.
The actual, like, again, there's no information about the Mac Pro.
We don't know anything about the Mac Pro, except it's not coming this year.
I can speculate on why.
We all can.
Many of us have.
Honestly, I don't think it's that interesting yet because, again, we have no new information except that big hole in the timeline of it's going to be next year, which –
I'm glad they said it's going to be 2019 as opposed to it's not going to be this year because then it could be 2025 or never.
So at least they committed to a year.
You can also speculate, as many people have, why is it taking Apple so long to develop what should probably just be a fairly straightforward like tower or something tower like.
The answer to that that's most likely is that last year, like about a year ago when they had that roundtable,
I think it is very likely that they literally had not even started yet.
That it was decided within a very short time before that, that they were going to do this.
And that means that from 2013 until 2017...
They were probably not doing any work at all on a Mac Pro.
They were probably assuming the iMac Pro was it.
And they were only working on the iMac Pro.
So it's not that they couldn't do a new tower in five years or whatever since the last Mac Pro.
It's that they can't do a new tower in a year and a half.
That's, I think, what we're really seeing here.
Even that is slightly concerning because even that's like, you know, what pros want is new hardware in some kind of expandable box.
We don't need fancy designs.
We don't need a lot of different types of, quote, innovation.
We just need new guts in a box.
And for Apple to be kind of taking their sweet time and trying to work on probably something that's really highly designed, highly custom...
That's nice.
I'm sure that satisfies Apple, but that's not really what pros are asking for for this product.
But I don't think we can talk Apple out of that kind of design anymore.
I think that's kind of just what they do.
And from that point of view, the timescale seems reasonable that they just started last year and they're not just doing something basic, even though many of us want them to do exactly that for this product.
Because they can save the innovation for all of the rest of their products, including the iMac Pro, which is fairly innovative in a few ways.
And it's really nice.
I really like the iMac Pro.
But anyway, they're not doing that.
So, oh well.
I do think it's interesting also to think now, maybe one of the reasons they're taking a little bit of time on this is...
What I expected was the iMac Pro guts in a box with a couple of GPU slots and maybe space for a few M2 drive modules.
I don't think that's what they're doing.
And when the iMac Pro came out and when we saw how awesome it was and how few downsides it had and how few restrictions it had, one of the things that we said at the time was, what the heck is left for the Mac Pro to address?
Like,
how much headroom above this can the Mac Pro really achieve?
You know, are they going to go dual processor maybe?
Have many graphics cards, you know, supported or different types of slots or whatever?
Who knows what, right?
We were trying to figure out like what else, what is left for the Mac Pro to do that the iMac Pro doesn't do.
So maybe in order to create more headroom in that area, maybe that took a bit of special engineering.
Maybe they're doing something they haven't done before.
Like, for instance, if they're working from the roadmap of the old Mac Pro, the 2013 Mac Pro, that one had this rigid GPU arrangement that only supported these two GPUs and this one kind of weird arrangement with this kind of weird integration with the Thunderbolt bus.
and it only supported one CPU and, you know, the whatever it is, four or six RAM slots and one SSD module, maybe they're doing dual socket CPUs.
And that dramatically complicates things and how you have to, you know, lay out the internals, how you have to cool things.
Maybe they're doing a box that can accommodate lots of different components
like the old towers could.
So maybe you could have one or two CPUs, one or four GPUs.
They did all sorts of crazy things back with the old cheese graters and stuff.
The difference now is that the cheese graters were all before Thunderbolt.
there was a lot less internal PCI express bandwidth and things like that, that had to be allocated to external storage and GPUs were lower bandwidth and everything was lower bandwidth back then.
And so to design something now, you have to really consider like how you balance like PCI express allocations and lanes and speeds and
between internal and external stuff, how you route video signals over the Thunderbolt, and do you route the output of the GPU to a Thunderbolt port on the back?
How do you do that?
It's fairly complicated to design a really good Mac Pro tower with modern features and modern bandwidth and everything else that also has interchangeable slots.
That's a hard thing.
So if they're doing something like that,
Taking two years to do it seems reasonable.
I don't know if that's what they're doing, but I hope so.
The people were saying, why don't they just give us a box and slap things together?
I think there's a minimum bar of...
not even innovation, but just quality or attention to detail or thoughtfulness that we expect from Apple.
A lot of people look at the cheese graters and say, oh, it's just a tower case.
Yeah, it's a nice-looking tower case, but whatever.
It's just a tower.
It has a door, but it's just got a bunch of slots and a motherboard and RAM, and it's not much different from PC Tower, as evidenced by all the PC Tower clones that came after it.
But I think the very first one, the Power Mac G5,
I think that probably took them longer to design that plain and boring tower case and everything that goes into it.
Then they're spending, then they're going to end up spending on this macro, Mac pro.
Like it's not because they're, uh, insisting on doing something really weird, like the trash can, right?
Cause the, the, the power Mac G five was not really weird.
It was a tower, like straightforward.
Like there was, it wasn't, it wasn't weird at all.
Um, but yeah,
If you look at it, it's like, well, it's very carefully designed.
The case has a very simple design with a big curved piece of aluminum wrapped around a minimum number of seams.
The door giving you access to the insides, the way the door fits in and that whole mechanism, how they route all the ribbon cables to make it look nice on the inside so the ribbon cables are all tucked behind the motherboard and are just the right length and stuff like that.
um the way the motherboard is laid out i mean uh all the various custom chips that might go into it that aren't in any other mac it's not rocket science and it's not like the thing that people are afraid of like oh they're it's gonna be shaped like a squid and it's gonna have you know thunderbolt 3 connecting everything and like you know like all sorts of uh just make me a box
say apple is doing that we're just making you a box it is literally a tower it is the air comes in the front and out the back it is totally straightforward but doing that the apple way takes longer than people think and i kind of want them to do it the apple way like if you're in a super big hurry i can understand like you're like we need towers yesterday we can't use the iMac pro for whatever reasons and
just you know slap it together like they like people who would be happy with a hackintosh right i don't i don't care what it looks like how nice it is i don't care how nice the seams are or whatever just slap it together but i don't think apple is really capable of doing that like even even its products that we you know it's quote unquote worst products like the products that we complain about like oh you're still selling the macbook air or whatever macbook air is still nice like industrial design wise the screen is gross but like everything else about it you know
It looks expensive and carefully designed.
It's not falling apart and has weird seams and things poking out of it.
It doesn't look slapped together.
It looks old, but it doesn't look slapped together.
Apple generally just is not institutionally capable of making...
hardware that looks like it's been slapped together like on a speedy schedule like we didn't have time to actually really design this so we just use a bunch of stock parts and we screwed them together like the way the bed wrap of you know american cars or any car maker that use like a part spin dashboard where uh we have a bunch of things that we use in all our cars like the window switches or whatever and we're not going to design custom ones for this car because it's too much trouble so just slapping the same switches that we use on all our other cars right american car makers used to do stuff like this all the time these days
there's more custom parts in cars than you would expect.
But that type of thing is just not how Apple does things.
They're not... Aside from trying to share the same stupid keyboard on all their laptops, they... Like, I don't think this thing is going to...
It could be as boring as bread and butter, and it's still going to take them two years to make it because that's just how long the stuff takes.
And like you were saying, Margaret, you were thinking that it would just be the iMac Pro internals.
I still think that.
I thought that from the beginning that...
Look, don't get your hopes up for the insides of this Mac Pro to be anything other than the insides of that in terms of specs.
Like, obviously, things will be rearranged and there'll be a new board and, you know, different slots and stuff like that.
But fully expect it to have a T2 and to have the same class of Xeon and so on and so forth.
now with a delay i still more or less expect it to be rearranged imac pro internals like i don't expect it to have a t3 chip i expect it to have a t2 chip right because they don't have time to make a whole other one of those in this in this timeline right unless they were already making it for the imac pro successor which i think they are not right so i expect
iMac Pro internals, maybe with the newer Xeon if it's a drop-in replacement, right?
More slots for everything, more RAM slots, more storage slots, possibly more room for internal storage, right?
Just like capacity, right?
you know from the design sort of the design brief of this thing should be like more thermal capacity than an iMac pro and every other feature flows from that because if you don't do more thermal capacity than an iMac pro then the only thing you're the only benefit you're getting is well if the screen breaks you don't lose your whole computer right so i feel like this thing is going to have higher thermal ceiling than the iMac pro and then you can do lots of stuff with that thermal ceiling and it's then then it becomes a question of talking to these pro people like or whatever like
what do you want do you want two cpus would you rather have more pci express lots do we have to offer you both if we just made all of them have one cpu would that be okay how much internal storage do you want versus external like but it's all like how you spend your thermal budget but the budget has to be way higher than than the imac pro and anybody capacity
how much storage can you put in it how much ram can you put in it right and then of course how much heat can it dissipate how many gpus can you put it how big can the gpus be and then finally like you said in the imac pro one of the reasons you like it is because it doesn't sound like a hand dryer all the time i and this to make a big tower computer that has high thermal capacity but is also reasonably quiet is tricky
like i think about all the pcs i see and sometimes lust after that have these you know nicely designed pcs that have big cooling capacity and try to be quiet that doesn't happen if you just take a box and slap a bunch of fans in it like you have to be thoughtful in some ways to make sure you don't have any weird hot spots because you didn't think about this component over there like i know people build seats are like oh just get a really big diameter fan and put a whole bunch of them in there and it's like straightforward you just put pieces together but
Hand-assembling a PC like that, unless you have lots of experience and know exactly how everything's going to work with a bunch of custom parts, can lead to weird things where the heat gradients that you didn't expect or a particular component that is not getting adequate cooling because there's just no way to route air to there.
It's hacky and it's not up to Apple's quality.
So I think that even if Apple is making...
the most boring box we could possibly think of that they have to they are going to do a better job than than i think some people would want those those hackintosh type customers and as far as i'm concerned as someone who doesn't need this thing right now although you may disagree when you think to how old my mac is but i i would rather like spend the time spend the time to make even if it's a boring tower spend the time to make a boring tower that's as nice as a cheese grater spend the time to make it look nice
spend the time to make sure that it's super reliable that it's quiet figure out a way to make it quiet and yes spend the time talking to people the various pros and saying what do you what do you want out of this machine like do we have to make two slots for cpus or is that something that nobody wants and we don't have to do that because i don't think they're going to have 17 different configurable versions of this right and i also don't think they're going to make it some
magic modular snap together future technology thunderbolt three powered octopus thing i know lots of people think that you know 2019 this is going to be some crazy trash can but i don't i don't think that i think it's going to be a fairly straightforward machine i just want to be nice i just um i i'm struggling because i i do see both sides of this like on the one side just like you guys had said you know why not just make take the old cheese grater you know form factor slap new bits in it and call it a day
But there's been a lot of changes to the Mac in the last couple of years.
For the purposes of this conversation, what used to be just vanilla Intel motherboards with vanilla Intel chips on them, now we're not quite so simple.
We have the T2 that one of you guys mentioned earlier.
We have all these different coprocessors.
We have a touch bar that we have never seen be external to the device.
We have a secure enclave.
There's so many different things that make this so much more complex than before.
And when you also add modularity into this, because there's basically no Apple computer sold today that is as modular as we are expecting and being told that this will be.
And I can't imagine it's easy to keep up with these extremely stringent security requirements while also doing this modular thing.
So as an example, like this phantom Apple display, this new cinema display, if you will.
presumably that's going to have a camera in it and eyesight camera in it or FaceTime camera, whatever they're calling it now.
Presumably they're going to want that to be controlled by, you know, the T2 or whatever it is that controls them these days.
How do you do that when it's not part of the device itself?
How does that work?
So, yeah, I mean, you could just say, yeah, screw it.
If somebody can hack your camera, well, tough nuggies, you made this bed yourself, but that's not Apple's way.
Yeah.
So I understand all the angst about, oh, we'll just use a cheese grater, put some new bits in it and walk away.
And I could make a pretty good argument that they should do that and then do the real Mac Pro afterwards.
But just like you said, John, that's not Apple's way.
Apple's way is to make this interesting and innovative and smart.
And I think and I hope that's what they're doing.
Well, nice.
It doesn't have to be innovative.
Because as a cheese grater, is it innovative?
What's innovative about the cheese grater?
The only thing that's innovative about it is how nice it is.
It's just a tower case.
The CPUs weren't arranged in an octagon.
It wasn't cooled by jellyfish.
It was just a tower case with fans and had hard drives and RAM and slots.
It was very straightforward.
But it's nice.
The trash can was innovative.
Wow, this tube-shaped thing with a chimney design and a little triangle motherboard and two GPUs.
That was an innovative design.
That's what people are afraid is happening.
I'm assuming, talking to the pros, that pros are not saying, please make it really weird.
They don't care what it looks like.
I'm hoping the influence of talking to these people will...
that cause it to be more we'll push back against any unconventional thinking that apple may bring to the table like what what if we gave you something like this i hope the pros go that might work but i know this will work so why don't you just make me this and by the way this article unless i'm mistaken does not say that this pro workflow team was created for this it just tells you about the pro workflow team i have no idea how long the pro workflow team has been in apple maybe they've been there for a decade advising the final cut pro team and every pro mac that they've ever made right
This is just part of to soften the blow of the of the macro not being this year.
We'll tell you about a thing that previously we had no reason to tell you about, because what do you care what we do internally?
Right.
But to make you feel like we're really paying attention, we'll tell you about this, which I think is fine.
Like if someone snarkily tweeted, congratulations, Apple, you've discovered user acceptance testing, which is.
snarky but probably wrong because apple hasn't discovered it like i said i think this has always existed maybe it's been ramped up maybe they've been given closer access to machines instead of just being given weird you know disguised boxes and saying what do you think of this uh but this this is the type of thing that you would hope any company is doing but that the uh
sort of the legend of apple uh the the face that they present to the world uh doesn't include this like the the legend of apple is we don't need to talk to people to know what to make we don't do focus groups we don't ask you what you want because you don't know what you want we'll tell you what you want we don't like we we just go off to the mountain and we come down with a thing and trust me you'll love it right and that's how we got the touch bar
maybe not i think maybe that's more of the focus group thing or someone has an idea and you tell people do you think this is a good idea and everyone goes yeah that sounds like it might be a good idea but people are dummies like like it's a steve job the steve jobs school of thought of like you know don't ask people like we are smart enough on our own to figure it out if we ask people we'll make mediocre stuff because i mean that's that's true of any product focus groups are death it's like the the you know the homer car from from the simpsons right
Just everyone has ideas about what they think they want, but everyone is not a product designer.
It's your job as a product designer to synthesize their desires and figure out what it is that they really want, so on and so forth.
But the more a company is perceived to be allowing the customer to lead them.
the more it is likely to make mediocre products and to lose sight of true innovation this whole innovator dilemma thing like you know just keep talking to your best customers they'll continually ask for like like what we do on the show essentially if you just listen to your mainframe customers they keep telling you about how they want you to make better and better mainframes and you missed the pc revolution right because you're like because you're just like well our all of our biggest customers say they want this and they want that and
you will never make the pc if you keep talking to your mainframe customers you have to say well actually there's another thing we should be doing and those customers will never tell us to do that there's a million business books about this right uh but apple we don't perceive as saying we're not really sure how to make a pro computer can we get some pros in here to tell us what do you like do you like this do you like that like it's from a position like a weakness and we want them to just know everything automatically and just make beautiful things that everybody loved
Reality, of course, is neither extreme is true.
Steve Jobs' Apple still took customer feedback, and that's always been a part of the process.
And this whole Pro WorkVault team, I'm sure, does have some influence, but in the end, if Johnny Ive doesn't want it, it's not going on there.
So I think this is one of the reasons you don't talk about your process, because once people outside the company start thinking about your process...
it, it loses some of the magic and you start worrying about, is that really the best process to do this?
I'm not on the pro workflow team.
What if they're not talking to me?
In fact, we got some feedback about that from other people saying, yeah, they're talking to pros in film and video and whatever industries, but they're not talking to pros in my industry, whatever that may be, you know, uh, academics, uh, R and D, uh, you know, scientific stuff, uh, uh,
I don't know.
I forget.
But the categories outside of what they have listed that are on the Pro Workflow Team.
For all we know, the Pro Workflow Team does include all those.
They didn't tell us everything about them.
But either way, if you don't feel like your views are being presented...
And you buy into the idea that it's that small group of people that's essentially dictating what this machine will look like.
That doesn't feel good either.
Because now when the machine comes out, you'd be like, oh, great.
I bet this is a great machine for video editors.
But for me, doing medical imaging, it sucks.
They should have had medical imagers in their pro workflow team.
That's the difficulty of making any product.
They're not going to make an entire line of Mac Pros to suit everybody's needs.
They're going to make one that suits...
most people's needs where most is defined as people apple thinks will buy a mac pro and at that with the asterisk we hope it will suit most people's needs we hope yeah maybe they'll be wrong about that maybe you know that's again with the process like uh wouldn't it be for all you know apple if you made this kind of computer a whole new class of people would want to buy it and ignore the pro video people because your real market is you know uh like makers with their 3d printers and they need to do cad on it i don't i don't know like that's kind of apple's job to figure out
uh but if you start if your starting point is a more or less conventional tower with a separate monitor that's really nice and that has the same capabilities and performance profile as the imac pro but with more capacity that's a pretty good starting point for most people now they can ask for things here and there but i don't think that that pro workflow team is going to do anything other than
have minor suggestions uh about a very conventional design and best case scenario that team was able to dissuade apple very early on like last year or sometime to not make uh you know a weird octopus thing right say don't go down that path like we have some sketches uh i hope everyone involved would say
That might be good, it might be bad, but it's an unknown, and you already did that with a trash can, so let's just reel this back in.
Let's start with a box.
I feel like, too, there's different levels at which this kind of user-focused group or work group is useful or needed.
It makes total sense to have people who use, say, the pro apps work with Apple on some level and have Apple ask them what they need and watch what they need and work closely with them to tailor the pro apps to the needs of the people who buy them.
But as you go kind of further down, I guess, the stack of the platforms, the operating systems, and then eventually the hardware, it gets less and less specific.
The whole appeal of personal computing is that these machines are generalists.
They can be used to do anything.
Lots of different tasks can be done on these machines.
And so the hardware and the platforms and the OS...
have to be able to support anything because you never know what people are going to do.
You can pick a few use cases and say, let's make sure that it works well for these use cases because we've heard that a lot of people use it for that or something.
But you can never accommodate everything via user testing that people are going to want these computers and operating systems to do.
So as you go down, have the team that makes Final Cut work with video editors.
That makes total sense.
But even that is kind of hard to describe.
I guarantee you, no one on the Logic team has ever watched somebody edit a podcast in Logic.
And maybe it's a pretty light use case.
I don't know, but I'm telling you, it's never happened.
But anyway, the OS and the hardware...
have to be as versatile as possible so this is why this is kind of like a like i don't think this has a lot to do with the mac pro like this this user i think this is purely like a pr thing to cover up they the information they wanted to communicate was don't expect the mac pro this year and as john said you know they they gave you this pro workflows group thing as like something good to stick on top of that and that's nice but
I don't think they're that related.
And the design of a Mac, any Mac, even a lot of people have been arguing about the definition of pro.
What counts as a pro?
I think this is a totally useless distinction.
It doesn't matter.
Pro is marketing.
That's all it is.
Pro just means the bigger one or the more expensive one.
Any other focusing of what this definition is is not productive.
All of the computers in the lineup should be as versatile as possible.
The OS and the platforms and everything should be as versatile as possible to accommodate any kind of work, any kind of workflow, any kind of workload.
The only reason that you shouldn't be able to do something on a MacBook Air that you can do on a Mac Pro is if the MacBook Air doesn't have hardware support for what you're doing, if it doesn't have enough RAM, or if it's just too damn slow, or if it doesn't have enough Thunderbolt bandwidth.
That should be the only difference between these products.
And when computers are properly designed, which they have been for decades, that is the only distinction.
For most types of applications, unless there's a specific GPU requirement or something, you don't, quote, need a MacBook Pro to edit video.
You can edit video in a MacBook Air.
It'll just be slower.
Stuff like that.
When you buy or if you sell computers, you try to make these distinctions.
You try to say, oh, well...
You need to go to this model if you need to do this, or if you're only doing this, you should only be using this cheapo, crappy model over here.
But these distinctions are all just for sales and marketing, and for the most part, the only thing that matters is, does it have the tech specs to do what you need at all?
And then you can argue about how fast.
To bring in user testing groups like this to influence hardware decisions I think is questionable because for a long time, to the best of our knowledge, these kinds of people being brought in for hardware decisions were not necessary or weren't happening.
And we still don't know that they're being used for hardware today, but assuming that they are because this was kind of weirdly tied to the Mac Pro and this PR thing –
They should just make the kind of computer that has the most you can possibly have in it for this role.
For the Mac Pro, it's a tower.
There's no limitations really on power consumption or price or size.
So give it the most you can get.
When you're making a laptop, you want to have something that's portable, presumably thin and light if you can get it there, has a good battery life.
But other than that, make it as versatile as possible.
This is an argument I always have with people who are like, well, why do you need the SD card slot?
I never used mine, so I'm glad they removed it.
These are versatile, general-purpose machines.
They should accommodate as much as possible.
Removing anything should not be considered a feature.
Except, wait.
That's the only thing that should be considered a feature of removing.
Everything else...
These should accommodate as much as possible.
So to try to pick a few certain narrow use cases or a few certain industries or types of, quote, pro users, which is meaningless, to say, like, we're going to optimize it or we're going to design it to accommodate these things.
it makes like a spiky or peaky design instead of something that is more versatile, that can accommodate a well-rounded group of things people might want to do with these computers.
The way to properly design computers is to cover as much as possible, not as little as possible.
And this has been a design conflict between me and Apple for a long time.
Well, for recent years, especially.
I wish that the products we were getting out of Apple were just more general purpose, more versatile.
The 2013 Mac Pro went in the other direction and flopped miserably.
The 2013 Mac Pro is saying, let's take all the different things people can do with the old Mac Pro towers.
So many different configurations possible for so many different kinds of uses and priorities and budgets and everything else.
And then they made this little trash can thing that was optimized for like one use case and one type of customer.
They replaced this incredibly versatile, broad-reaching product with a very narrow one.
And it flopped.
I can make many parallels to the laptop lineup right now.
I hope that they have learned some lessons from the 2013 Mac Pro and from the negative reactions to the 2016 MacBook Pro.
And I hope they're going to start giving us more broad products.
The iMac Pro is a pretty good start in that direction.
I want to see more from the Mac Pro.
So it really depends on how they're using these people because they don't go into that much detail.
Like I said, I didn't even tell you when they were formed.
They just said, oh, they're right down the hall.
And yes, they're influencing the Mac Pro and so on and so forth.
But I can think of lots of good users of these people.
This gets to my point earlier about it's Apple's job to make a good product.
the people they consult aren't making the product aren't dictating the product design like they are just one input and you have to know what what input do you actually want from these people you don't want them to just go in there with a blank sheet of paper and say here pros what kind of computer would you like us to build and they all draw a picture of their homework car and you go great we'll build that and then you build it and it's terrible no one likes it you can't figure out what you did wrong like
and apple's not doing that i'm sure right right you but there is valuable feedback to be harvested from them to your point marco to make a general purpose computer that that doesn't have doesn't have stupid limits right so to give to give some examples that might sound silly but i think is is hopefully exactly the kind of feedback they're getting from these people for the video editor examples i'm going to make up stuff about video editing because i don't know anything about it right but
say the video editor to say that they they never put their computers on their desk they always have it like underneath they're in like a some standard cabinet or bay or something or whatever right and for it to be there the cords that connect
uh from the monitor to the computer have to be some length and they could say uh the last monitor you made the cords are never long enough so we have to buy extenders and extenders are flaky or the you know the bus doesn't uh doesn't support cords of that length and it's kind of annoying uh and same deal with the input devices because of the distances if you just made all your cords like a foot longer they would be so much less frustrating
that's valuable feedback because it's just saying look this is how people like to arrange their stuff it seems like a minor issue but if we don't do this if we make our codes like our cords the normal length it's going to be annoying to these people in the same way the five second long final cut pro windows is annoying like they can get around it the product is not dead on arrival but it's it's a thing we wouldn't have thought of if we hadn't if we hadn't talked to real people who use them in a
And it's a thing we can do.
It's not dictating the design of the computer.
Just make the cords a little longer.
I have to think that they had a similar type of reason for the ridiculously long charger cord for the Apple Watch.
You know, the cord for that thing is like, well, sometimes the outlet is like...
behind the headboard of the bed in the middle and to reach the nightstand it has to be pretty darn long and yeah people can use an extension cord but that's kind of annoying uh so we're just going to include a really long cord um stuff like that is exactly the kind of hardware feedback that you can get without
saying oh whatever hardware you need for your three specific specialties we're just going to build something that does that and then leave someone out in the cold who wants to do like mri imaging it's like well i don't want what any of those people want i want something else entirely so they should be making a general purpose flexible computer but if they can you know to to the the goal of accommodating more use cases is you have to talk to all sorts of people these people want a foot longer cord these people don't want any lights in the front or you have to be able to disable the lights like stuff like that that you can just do
that it when you look at the whole computer like why are the cords so long and who cares about turning off the lights i certainly don't care about turning off the lights and why does it have like slots in front and in back or why are they why are they on the side instead of over here and it's like you shrug your shoulders and say well whatever it's fine for me but to make a machine that accommodates the most possible use cases
that's worthwhile feedback on a hardware level you still you don't want it to be the homer and have everything that everybody wants because it stops being coherent at some point uh but that kind of feedback and the feedback i mentioned before of like please don't make something that like is cooled by gel and magnetically levitates and
is a bunch of boxes that snap together with magnets.
Nobody wants that.
I know you think it's cool, but I can say, we as professionals talk to everybody.
Talk to the video editors, talk to the audio editors, talk to the scientific people.
Nobody wants that.
And the people who think it's cool
they're not the ones buying macros.
Exactly.
They're the ones who are going to complain that they're too expensive.
Right.
And so, so I think, you know, that feedback is, is good to get sent on the right path.
But after that, it's just a matter of finding out all the little, little things that are easy for Apple to do that can go a long way that, that,
i mean and that's perfect for apple to brag about like in their presentations and we learned that again i'm making up all this stuff because i don't use them as context was like and we learned that in certain studios people don't like to have lights so if you want to turn off all the lights in your on your thing you turn them off and the audience would applaud if they were if they also knew about this whole light thing right that's that's the type of feedback i hope they're getting
is that it for now i i i i i don't know what to do don't worry there'll be more don't worry yeah they didn't actually release that much new information so all we can do is speculate um oh i guess related to this i don't know how i got on this topic but i was wandering youtube looking at fancy pc towers
and there are some cool ones because i you know this is sort of uh i don't know like mac pro methadone right i'm just i i can't i don't have any news about a mac pro so i can just go look at other things and say if the mac pro was like this it would be neat like i saw one recently that was uh a tower like a mini tower pc with no fans like passively cooled but with reasonably modern hardware in it
like no fans that is a certain appeal doesn't it right and you know it obviously outperforms any mac ever sold right because it's a pc uh you know with with the real video card and everything it's not the fastest video card you can get into pc but it was fast i was like no fans really it wasn't even that big it didn't even get that hot i was like wow if apple and this by the way apple don't do this none of your pros are asking for no fans right but if if
if this was like an avenue of weirdness that they made like instead of making the trash can they instead decided uh you know steve job is still alive this is the type of thing i can imagine him getting a bee in his butt about and saying let's try to make it with no fans he's like but steve nobody wants that that i said no fans like essentially the original macintosh the original macintosh by the way had no fans in it right and like that's more difficult and it got a little bit too hot inside there
And they eventually put fans in the Macs.
Eventually, they were like, Steve, we kind of really need to put... I was like, fine.
All right, fine.
Put fans in.
Fine.
Make the RAM a secretly expandable to 512 kilobytes.
I don't think you're ever going to need it.
But anyway, sometimes it's not great to listen to Steve Jobs.
But if they made a Mac Pro type thing where the design goal was for no good reason to make it have no fans...
I think they could still make a good one.
It would be stupid.
It would be less flexible than having fans.
But put it this way, it would be better than a trash can.
You can make actually a pretty good conventional tower-looking fanless thing that has much more flexibility than the trash can, which is more of a condemnation than a trash can than an endorsement for something the Apple could do.
yeah but to do it it would have to be really big and really ugly things that apple would never do not that big you should i'll send you a youtube link it's smaller than a regular it's way smaller than my cheese grater it's pretty amazing the amazing things you can do if you apply large amounts of metal and large amounts of surface area
So tell me, this is going to come across really snarky and I don't mean it to, but I do the same sort of thing that Marco does for a living.
And if you exclude gaming, I do the same sort of thing that John does for a living and,
I can do my job on a MacBook, on a 15-inch MacBook Pro, on an iMac.
And I have done and will continue to do my job on any of those things.
There is no part of me that feels like I need or even really want a Mac Pro.
Because presumably if the iMac Pro is something like $5,000, the Mac Pro is probably going to be one and a half that, twice that, three times that.
I don't really understand why someone who writes code, the kind of code that the three of us write anyway, why does one need a Mac Pro unless you want it to last 40 years?
And for Marco, you go through computers as quickly as you go through underwear, so that's not a concern for you.
And I'll give you a cop out, which which I can't argue with.
And it's that I am the most impatient human alive.
And damn it, I will wait as little time as possible for anything to happen on my computer.
And that is I don't personally think it's worth five or ten or whatever grand to to to be that impatient.
But, you know, if if you do, that's fine.
That's that's your math.
That's your business.
That's fine.
But do you know what I mean?
Like, it seems kind of silly.
Like, why does any of the three of us need a Mac Pro?
Why do you need a fancy BMW to drive yourself to work?
You could take a moped.
Or you could walk.
Well, a walk would be a stretch.
A moped would probably end up with me dead.
The right answer you're looking for is with a Chevy Volt.
Or just like the cheapest.
You could get by with the cheap little two-door Econobox.
Yeah.
why do you have a nice car why you know why do you have a car that is fast as opposed to like you can still you we're driving the same places right like this car analogy definitely has some legs uh it has no legs it has wheels but i'm looking looking at an article right now from 2013 that has the picture of a beautiful matte finish lfa at the top of it oh here we go i know exactly what you're talking about
Case for a True Mac Pro successor.
This is exactly the reason.
Because we're car guys.
That's why.
That's why.
Well, but I don't buy that, though.
I don't buy that.
Well, I mean, it isn't a perfect analogy because, you know, there are certain capabilities that, you know, higher-end computers offer you that, you know, that aren't necessarily always available on lower-end ones.
yeah it's i say it's even more justifiable than right yeah exactly but uh it's you know it's it's almost it's kind of like saying like you know why like why get a pickup truck if you don't usually haul stuff you know but some people just like pickup trucks a lot and they're and that's you know they get pleasure out of that and fine like who cares right and maybe sometimes they do occasionally have to haul stuff and it wouldn't have fit in their civic like buying more than you technically need
is something to consider if you're outfitting a business with 10,000 PCs.
When you're an individual who's a computer enthusiast and you have a little bit of extra money and you can buy yourself a really nice computer, there's nothing wrong with buying more computer than you need.
Yes, we do the same job in a lot of ways.
And by the way, development is a very big and diverse field that many people have many different needs.
And as I was spouting off on Twitter earlier about...
I think the true developer computer is the MacBook Pro.
The MacBook Pro is by far the more commonly used computer for developers than the Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro is much more commonly used by non-developers for things like video farms and stuff like that.
It's really not frequently used by software developers in my knowledge and experience.
The MacBook Pro really is that.
But
I could do my job on a MacBook Pro.
I have done my job on a MacBook Pro.
I spent years doing my job on MacBook Pro.
It's fine.
I'm happier, and I think I'm more productive, and at least certain things are much faster, using my cool new iMac Pro.
Before this, I used an iMac, which is basically a MacBook Pro that's stationary.
That was also really great for years, and that was good enough, but...
I can get a better one, and I really... In the same way that you really value having a nice, fast car, I really get a lot of pleasure out of having a nice, fast Mac to do my work on.
We don't need any of these things in most senses.
We get them because some people really do need the extra horsepower where...
If I was actually encoding video all day and my encodes could be like four times faster than they could on a MacBook Pro or on a regular iMac, then yeah, I think I could justifiably say this is worth it to my job because it's saving a vast amount of time throughout the day.
For me, the gain isn't that big between this and something a little more pedestrian, but there is still a gain.
Every time I build and run in Xcode, I'm doing this a lot throughout the day, and it is faster on this than it was on my old iMac.
Not by hours faster.
It's not hours faster, but it's seconds faster, and I do it a lot, so it's better.
This computer is able to do things, basically anything I ask it to do,
in near silence i have yet to hear the fan spin up i was maxing out all 10 cores the other day importing a big lightroom import and i didn't hear the fans at all the entire time i've encoded video i've encoded 4k video didn't hear the fans at all it's wonderful and so none of us or well few of us actually quote need these machines
But that's not to say there's not a market for them.
Just like nobody needs a car that can go zero to 60 in 2.5 seconds.
But there's a whole lot of people who would sure like one.
I would go even further away from trying to justify it, although there are definitely justifications.
Basically the same justifications as anybody who uses a tool to do a job.
Like Marco was saying, you could edit video on a MacBook Air, but you're going to be miserable compared to if you had a bigger, faster computer if you do it for a living.
So anytime you do anything for a living, you want the best tools for it, even if it's not a straight time is money thing.
So there is that justification.
But I think the more important thing, and the pitch I was trying to make in this old article from before they introduced the trash can, was that
it's important to the company to to reach for this particular star uh you know for to try to make the biggest best fastest most powerful whatever uh they're doing that with the phone every every year they try to make the best most powerful phone like the iphone 10 like it's not kind of like we think this is a pretty good phone
like it's kind of fast like it's the best fastest coolest thing they know how to make with all the best specs it's better than everything you know they're they're always reaching for the stars there and that's that's a consumer product but for the pro stuff it's you know the halo car analogy right you're not gonna make a lot of money from it you're not gonna sell a lot of them uh most people don't need one nobody needs one uh but
having it exist not even buying it like because i'm i'm into cars i buy honda cords right but just people knowing that it exists that that these cars are out there and that this is the company that makes them raises the prestige of that company and is interest interesting from a sort of human achievement perspective yes it's not the same as the space race but it's it's similar like that someone is out that you know ferrari's out there making ferraris even if i never buy one certainly i don't need one
And even if I never buy one, I, you know, spend hours reading about them in magazines and looking at them and get excited when I see one.
And it changes my opinion of what cars can be.
And, you know, like it gives me a different view of Ferrari than if they just made SUVs.
and apple i think should always continue to push up against this envelope regardless of how many people buy it just because for the same reason i use the viper and then the thing was it was a direct quote from a magazine i've been reading where that you know the car guys wanted to make the viper because it's it's cool essentially and they're into cars and the people who deal with the money like why would you ever make that it's a terrible idea it's not going to make you money and it's stupid and no one's going to buy one but that's that's bad decision making so
again i know your question casey was why do you want to get a mac pro but i would take it even farther back and say why do you care if a mac pro exists if you're not going to buy one and i do i care that for our existing though i'm never going to get one and i care that the mac pro exists even if i wasn't going to buy one but i totally am uh probably and i want apple to be
reaching for the stars pushing the limits you know going farther and faster than they've ever gone before and i want them to keep pushing that because i think that an apple that does that is an apple that makes better products overall
Yeah, I don't debate that Apple needs to reach for this.
It's just, again, neither of you has to answer to me, and I'm not the boss of you, and you can do it just because, damn it, I want to.
And that's a perfectly acceptable reason.
But I look at my, what is it, like two-year-old iMac right now, and...
When I write code on this thing, like the screen is beautiful with the exception of a little bit of burn in the screen is beautiful.
It still two years on feels crazy fast.
Like I don't feel like I'm waiting for more than a moment for anything when it comes to development.
And obviously if I'm doing trans codes or something like that, that's a different discussion.
Yeah.
Occasionally the fans spin up, but I'm, I'm okay with that.
I know that makes me a monster, but I'm okay with hearing a fan from time to time.
Um, and, and I look at the iMac pro and then I look at the Mac pro and I feel like there are on paper anyway, deeply diminishing returns for both.
Like I, to me, it's like, yeah, okay.
If you're going to use the car analogy, like, yes, I spent a bit more to have a nicer experience when I drive two miles to and from work each day.
100%.
And on the surface, it's not really that different from what either of you guys are talking about.
But I feel like a more apt analogy is like, well, why did you get the regular Ferrari instead of the hyper lightweight Ferrari?
You know, like, or...
It's such diminishing returns.
Why even bother?
Or maybe a more apt analogy would be, you know, a Hellcat will get you somewhere just as quick as a Ferrari will.
As long as there are no turns.
As long as there are no turns.
But, I mean, I guess this analogy is falling apart as well.
It seems like it's way more money to get you not that much more speed.
That's true of your BMW, too, over my court.
uh over your accord it's considerably more speed over brand new accord no it's not not proportional to the money that's it always it's always diminishing returns when you get up to the top it's always by the way if you're doing parallel tasks it actually is that much more speed yeah don't go back to the practical justifications i want that the total i i think i totally on impractical justification alone it would be worth it but there are in fact actual practical justifications for it
Again, you don't have to answer me and I'll let it go.
It's really hard for me to understand why any human who lives in Xcode needs a Mac Pro.
I can see Final Cut.
I can see Lightroom.
Marco, you brought up Lightroom earlier.
I can make a pretty good argument that Lightroom could justify a Mac Pro.
But for someone who lives and breathes Xcode, or even more, like 90-year-old programming languages like Perl,
I don't get why one would want a Mac Pro.
And I'll let it go.
Don't you program in Swift?
Yeah.
You should be dying for a Mac Pro.
It's not that bad.
It's not that bad.
The gaming angle that you mentioned before, though, actually is one of the more relevant or practical ones.
Because if you really want a Mac, they force you to buy this gigantic Mac.
incredibly expensive thing.
Oh, absolutely.
Just to get the good GPU.
I mean, the Mac Pro is a good GPU, but presumably this one will have a better one.
And so if you really are stuck on a Mac and you really want to play games on it, which...
People say, why would you even do that when I just get a gaming PC, blah, blah, blah.
We are oddballs.
We understand that.
We have to explain the practical reasons why people want them.
That's what all those pros are doing.
If you do it for a living and it will make whatever you're doing twice as fast or twice as reliable at the same speed...
uh then that's that's the reason to get them and it's the reason professionals buy professional stuff period like snap on tools why do they cost so much more than craftsmen are they that much better no they're not that much better but they're better and if you all you do all day is turn a wrench get a good one well but on top of that they also had a ridiculous warranty did they not
Craftsman used to be guaranteed for life, guaranteed forever before Sears went out of business or whatever.
That's true.
I don't know.
I'll let it go.
But it's an odd thing to me.
Again, I am 150% on board with Apple pursuing this.
I completely agree with you.
And again, gaming is a pretty good reason.
because i friggin want to leave me alone casey is a good reason which is what i'm mostly hearing lightroom is a good reason but if you're just living in xcode or terminal or visual studio code or what have you it seems a little weird well i mean this is my home computer though i'm not getting it for work you realize like i would never be able to justify to work why they should get me a mac pro i can't even justify work for them to get me an iMac for crying out loud it's gonna be a stupid laptop right
but for home it's totally like it's a hobby computer like it's the same you know if you if you had a taxi business you're like how can you justify a bmw for your taxis like don't it's going to break down and cost you too much money like get a toyota for your taxi but for your home car i'm gonna bmw because i like cars
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Let's do some Ask ATP.
We have a twofer with regard to evil addicting juice.
Bozy Moncrief writes, Hey Marco, what's your go-to hand grinder?
For those of us who don't want your fancy powered instant coffee tubes for travel.
Hand grinding, hmm.
I've had two.
Both Herio, first like the skinny one, I forget what it's called.
And then I later got the kind of stubbier one, which is called the Skirtin.
I cannot recommend either of them really.
If you insist on hand grinding coffee, the Herio Skirtin is the much better one.
The little skinnier one, it was useless.
It was very hard to get anything out of it.
The Skirtin is bulkier, but substantially faster.
The problem is there's a reason why coffee grinders are all electric because you need to do a lot of hand cranking to really get a meaningful amount of coffee, especially if you're doing something that needs a finer grind like an AeroPress.
This is one of the many reasons why I decided after only like one or two tries that travel coffee setups are not for me.
So the only thing I can say is please try not to do this at all.
But if you're going to do it, the Herio Skirchen is the one to get.
And additionally, Doggo Boy would like to know, what's your coffee setup like?
I just found out that you like coffee.
How did you just find out that Marco likes coffee?
His blood is coffee at this point.
Anyway, I just found out you like coffee and would like to know more about your setup.
Yeah.
All right.
So basically, I'm a crazy coffee enthusiast.
If you think I care a lot about MacBook keyboards, you haven't seen me try to make or brew coffee.
I'm a home roaster.
I roast my own coffee on a hot top roaster.
I get the unroasted beans from Sweet Maria's.
I tend to get Kenya beans the vast majority of the time.
It's my favorite bean.
Sweet Maria's is the best resource I've ever seen for not only getting unroasted beans, but getting roasters and learning how to use them.
So I highly suggest SweetMaria's.com.
They've been doing this for a very long time, and they've been wonderful.
And if you're going to start out on a coffee roaster, you can start with a cheap air popper or the Baymore 1300, I think, or 1600.
Yeah, that's the one I had first.
It's decent.
The hot top is about three times the price, but is three times better.
So it's up to you how you want to deal with that.
But home roasting is something that nobody should really do, but I do it.
Because I care a lot about things that most people don't care a lot about, and I'm very happy with that, and I'm content with that.
So that being said, when I'm out, I mentioned last time, I've been recently trying these cool new Sudden Coffee, instant coffee things, like when I'm traveling or on an airplane or something.
Sudden Coffee is surprisingly good.
I also, in the meantime, have been recommended two other ones.
Voila, spelled like Viola, you know, Voila Coffee, and Swift Cup Coffee, both of which are also like...
Kind of pricey, high-end, instant coffee packets.
Both of them are good.
Swift Cup, I think, might be my favorite of all three so far.
I have to try a little bit more of it.
But I'm very impressed by the Swift Cup flavor.
But Sudden Coffee is actually more practical because you can use the tube as a stirrer, which is nice.
Anyway, at home, when I'm using my home roasted beans, I grind them with a Baratza Virtuoso and I put them in an AeroPress.
And I use a fairly imprecise inverted AeroPress method.
And I use an electric kettle to pour hot water into it.
That's about it.
That's my coffee setup.
I press the coffee into a mug.
And then I drink it.
Usually I'm making coffee for me and TIFF at the same time.
So I use two AeroPresses in parallel, one in each hand.
And it's totally fine.
I've tried pretty much every way I know of to brew coffee.
I've tried French presses, drip pots, good drip pots, bad drip pots.
Butter?
I have tried the butter.
That's terrible.
I have tried the... What's the big expense?
Oh, the clover machine.
I've tried the clover machine both at a real coffee shop and then later at Starbucks.
I've tried lots of different brewers.
I've tried a vacuum brewer.
I have tried so many different ways to brew coffee.
And what it comes down to is...
The best way to brew one cup of coffee or two, if you're willing to operate two in parallel, is the AeroPress.
The best way to brew more than that is the Herio V60 pour-over cone into whatever vessel you feel like.
That's it.
All right.
Bryce Minty would like to know, you know, I'm finally getting around to replacing that awful file set-top box at my house.
Which TiVo are you using, John?
I'm not sure if the $750 for a new Bolt in Lifetime service is really worth it.
Kind of like Apple's laptops, TiVo line is not in a great place right now because all of their newest machines are using this incredibly stupid bent box design.
It looks like a regular set-top box.
I would imagine you bent it, not even in the middle, so it makes this kind of weird inverted V shape.
The bend is stupid, and you can't stack stuff on top of it.
But worse than the bend, much worse, is the fact that
The thing is very small, and so they have a low-diameter fan in it that has to spin very fast and makes a very annoying high-pitched noise.
So all of the bent-box Tevos are noisier than the much larger flat-box Tevos that they replaced, which is a shame because the top-end Tevo, the top-end bent-box Tevo, I have one that, well, actually it's not top-end anymore now that I have that box thing, but I think it's basically the same except for voice control.
uh they are otherwise very good they are fast they're small uh the interface has not been entirely ruined by this new interface that they're trying to roll out i still haven't gotten the new interface but it looks pretty gross but the the old one is good like it is a good product it is a good tivo except for the fact that the box is bent and it makes lots of noise if you can find a romeo pro which i also have one of it is
not quite as fancy as the latest bent box ones but it's still plenty fast it is way bigger ridiculously bigger which is kind of a shame but it is quieter so there is no perfect TiVo to get i would say that if you have like an entertainment center or someplace where you're not going to hear the fan or you don't care about fan noises or whatever then the stupid bent box top of the line TiVos are still pretty good TiVos but if you care about the noise or want to save some money
look into a romeo pro if you can find one because they are much more conventional and straightforward and flat and slightly quieter excellent and finally kg writes what kind of clipboard management apps are you using if any on your macs i use alfred as my both app launcher as well as you know kind of do everything machine and it includes some very basic clipboard uh like history and management and stuff like that
That has been great.
It is exactly what I want and nothing more.
And that has worked really well for me.
I did beta test PasteBot, which is by the same folks that do TweetBot and NetBot, RIP, and
And that was really good, but more powerful than what I personally wanted.
It can do things like, you know, filter or like, you know, modify what you've copied.
And maybe if I spent the time, I would end up deciding, oh, I actually really do like this.
But for my needs, it was overkill for what I'm looking for from it.
Marco, do you have any sort of clipboard management setup?
Yeah, I actually really, really love clipboard management.
I came fairly late to it.
I think I was most of the way through my job at Tumblr before I started using clipboard manager, and I wish I had done it earlier once I got into it because programming and just general computer use, there is a lot of opportunities to stack up a couple things in the clipboard and then paste them down somewhere.
It's the kind of thing...
having multiple clipboards uh or multiple levels to a stacked clipboard is really really nice in so many types of work on computers and it's one of the biggest things that i think it's kind of a shame that ios not only doesn't have it but probably never will have it um when you when you're working on ios it's one of the biggest things i miss but uh
I've tried a lot of them.
I think I've tried almost all of them.
I started out on one called Jump Cut, which was just a clipboard manager.
It was open source back forever ago.
I don't know where it is now.
And then I later moved on to LaunchBar.
And I've also, back in the day, I used Quicksilver as my fast launcher.
Then for a while, I just did Spotlight as the launcher, as an almost fast launcher.
And then...
LaunchBar kind of combines everything into one app for me.
It is a super fast launcher and also my favorite clipboard manager.
And I know Alfred and there's a bunch of other ones out there now.
I'm sure they're all great.
Just LaunchBar happens to be the one that meshed best with me and the way I like it to work and the way I like it to look and behave and everything else.
So I use LaunchBar for that.
And kind of like what you said, Casey, I'm a...
heavy but shallow user of it like yeah yeah yeah i use it constantly very i heavily use i use the crap out of it but i only scrape the surface of the available features i literally only use it to like launch apps uh find emoji to paste into things and which is a fairly recent thing
and use multiple clipboards that's it i don't do anything where you can like you know hit a different key and send it to another workflow or send it to a script or capitalize it in this way like i don't do any of that it's only an app launcher and a clipboard manager for me and that's it's whatever it costs i think it's like 40 or 50 bucks whatever it costs it's totally worth it just for that because it is such an incredible part of
my workflow doing pretty much everything because of that clipboard manager.
It's so good.
That being said, if you don't want to spend that much, there are alternatives, as both of us said.
But I highly suggest whatever clipboard manager you end up with, if you don't use one, try one.
If you do anything on a Mac ever, try a clipboard manager.
Because once you get into the habit, it's like, I mean, so much of modern work is copying and pasting stuff from one place to another.
And it's so nice to be able to, like, copy three things and then go to the other app and paste one, paste two, paste three.
Like, to not have to go back and forth so much, it's such a revolution in how you use your clipboard.
You will wonder how anything ever doesn't use, like, how anyone gets around...
not using a clipboard it's almost as big of a change as having a clipboard versus not having a clipboard like the very first time you were like when you were when we were all learning how to use computers that first time you discovered the clipboard and that you could copy and paste things like it like it's almost that big of a deal once you can have like a little history or a stack john
So I use jump cut for years cause I just wanted basic functionality.
Um, and now I use pay spot, uh, and I, I don't use much of the fancy functionality, but like,
Jumpcut was fine, but Pacebot just has a little bit more polish, you know, like all the bot things.
It's just nicer.
So I gladly paid for it to have a polish and hopefully more well-supported thing of this.
Marco covered most of the benefits of a clipboard manager.
Let me tell you about a couple of the dangers.
One danger, as Marco pointed out, is that
Yeah.
and i will not i will realize way too late that i just thought i was queuing up three things in the clipboard and in reality i was just overwriting things in the clipboard and the all the things except for the most recent one don't exist anywhere else like i will i will like copy something out of a document close the document without saving it go to another document copy something out close without saving it and like and then you know copy another thing and then go to the destination expecting to paste in all three of those things and guess what two of them are gone like gone gone
like as in data loss gone as in i didn't write them down anywhere and they're gone why because my mental model is that copy and paste is like a queue and it's not it's just one place and that makes me sad the other thing is some of these clipboard managers have a way to synchronize your clippings either like through icloud or across other machines or whatever um
and applications also have a way to blacklist something and those two features should make a tickle in your mind because one of the things that i think they put in the blacklist by default is like keychain access or one password yeah if you copy and paste a password and have any kind of cloud synchronization on and don't have that app blacklisted guess what you just spread your unencrypted password
to or possibly encrypted either way you just spread your password to cloud storage and possibly to other computers that you may or may not control so be careful with your clipboard manager they the good ones have tools for you to not have that happen you have to use those tools which is kind of the reason i can imagine why apple doesn't build this in right like why doesn't apple just build in multiple clipboards they put a clock in the menu bar after all
that's a pretty old reference there but they're uh they've done so many things since then there are dangers to this um and i'm not sure which is the worst the these the possible security danger or the fact that you get so used to it that trying to use a computer without it the computer feels broken
yeah those are bad reasons like i'm saying i'm not saying that's the reason you shouldn't use it like i will i will use it forever like i have to use it like i can't go back yeah right exactly but but uh just keep in mind that once you get on board this train which you should get on board and it's good keep those other things in mind when you're using a foreign computer keep in mind that the clipboard is no longer a queue and just disable the synchronization thing if you don't want to use it like that's the easiest solution to that like do you really care that your clipboard is synchronized across whatever if you don't just turn that stuff off
I have never used any kind of syncing like that.
That to me sounds like a recipe for pain.
Apple does that with iOS and the Mac now, right?
The shared clipboard.
Yeah, and it works like 70% of the time.
Yeah, I know.
That's why you don't have to worry about an Apple because their syncing never actually works so your password won't actually sync across it.
Or you hit paste on the other device and it just blocks for like eight seconds while it tries to figure out what the heck it should be pasting.
Delightful.
between that and drag and drop it's like man everything on ios is made slower by progress yeah oh and another thing to configure is that most of these clipboard history apps have a way for you to limit the size of things if you like me occasionally find yourself copying and pasting 500 megabytes of text from your awesome text editor you don't really don't want your clipboard manager to be like oh let me hold on to that 500 megs for you
uh that's so that most of them have a threshold to say look if it's bigger than 50 megs just let that one just let that one slide i'm not going to be i don't want to paste that an hour from now all right thanks to our sponsors this week betterment hello fresh and molecule and we'll see you next week
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-
i was i mean i've been more things i've been looking at youtube i'm looking at youtube videos uh where did i find some video that was talking about straight cut gears and race transmissions and why they're better
I was so frustrated at the video not adequately explaining to me why they're better that I was just Googling for race transmission straight cut gears on YouTube.
I'm like, what does YouTube think of... I don't know how I ended up here.
But then I ended up in this rat hole of technology explainer videos, and I found a lot of them very frustrating.
popular videos that are very poor quality like you start going into the uh the dark corner of youtube is the completely incorrect bogus uh how planes fly videos right it's kind of like i feel like that you know the the conspiracy theories about how the earth is flat and stuff and like kids are finding them like kids don't watch this video that's not how planes fly
And there are videos out there explaining why all the other videos telling you how planes fly are wrong, but they're not as high in the search results as the bogus one.
It's very upsetting.
Anyway, that's like both a fun corner of YouTube technology explainer videos, but also just filled with garbage.
Like, really bad low-res computer animations that they probably didn't make with like a computer voice talking over it.
Like...
like the old fred voice not like siri but like the old fred voice talking over it like they couldn't even get a human i guess these might be machine generated i don't know yeah or or from like yeah i i don't understand it i don't understand who's watching them but they they seem to have like they come up high in the search results i wish i was like to like vote them down and say hide this and never let another human see it because
It's bad, but they're good ones.
So you remember the classic good one is like, you've, I think we've all seen this, that one from the fifties or sixties explaining how like a transmission works or that it was, I forget what it was explained.
It was like from GM or something.
And it's like that black and white, it's kind of like film strip from school in the sixties.
uh but it was the first thing that i ever saw that explained to me how uh like a traditional gear differential works despite having like assembled and used many of them on remote control cars it never quite clicked in my brain it's like yeah but how did this work and this one did it from like first principles with like tinker toys i'm like oh now i get it and it finally all came together like this is how every engineering explainer i gotta go find that one