You’ll Hate What I’m Actually Doing
Marco:
now we're cooking with gas now we're cooking with electricity now that's like electricity is like the cooler fuel form now because we realized it can be fast not for cooking uh induction hello i've never seen induction be any quicker than a gas stove for range but whatever
John:
You haven't seen it boil water.
John:
Electric are faster boiling water than the gas.
John:
Gas is the slowest at boiling water.
Casey:
The f*** are you talking about?
Marco:
Well, it depends on the gas and depends on the pot.
Marco:
It's the truth.
Marco:
I mean, yeah, because the problem is that a whole lot of the heat escapes the sides of gas burners.
Marco:
And a lot of gas burners are very small.
Marco:
But if you have like the big beefy ones, like the high-end stoves do, and if you have a big enough pot and a shallow enough amount of water in it, then it could be faster.
Marco:
But induction, I think, beats them all.
John:
induction is the fastest but the reason electrics goes so fast is they have really good contact patch to use car terminology between like there's not the heat goes directly from the heating element into the pot and not a lot wasted and they can have very large elements that heat across the entire surface so they can be really fast
Casey:
I can't speak for boiling water, but we have gas at our house, and we had electric in a lot of my childhood homes.
John:
That's old electric.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Old crappy electric.
Casey:
And the apartments I had before the house, and they were all straight trash.
Casey:
Now, I've not tried induction, to be fair, so I can't speak one way for or against induction, but just regular electric was awful.
Casey:
It took a frigging calendar year to boil water with those.
John:
yeah induction is like the ultimate electric and that the contact patch is much larger and essentially virtual because it's you know inducing the the heat in the thing through you know electromagnetic waves and all the other stuff so it's not even like you have to have a bunch of it touching that it can you know so it's induction is always going to win but electric electric is pretty amazing of course the reason people don't like electric is because you get carry over heat and you don't have that with gas so gas is still a better chef's stove
Marco:
well i think doesn't doesn't induction also fix that i think i i it depends on the surface i think you you have one of these stuff so you can tell me but like i don't although i'm considering one that's why i'm like yeah i'm asking a bunch of questions because you know next time a stove dies i want to
Marco:
probably replace it with induction but i've never used one so i and i know people say you can just buy one of those like induction like single burner standalone things to experiment with it which i should really do but i haven't uh so uh i kind of want to know like what's the major downside of induction besides that it doesn't work with copper pans which i don't own any anyway
John:
Yeah, the pot limits are a little bit weird.
John:
And the carrier overheat, I think, is still going to be worse than gas because the contact pad, like once you turn off the gas, the only thing that is hot that is touching the pan is like the grating, which has a very small surface area of like how much is it touching the pot, right?
John:
So that's your only remaining heat transfer.
John:
So basically you turn all the heat off except for like this little pattern of stuff that's touching it.
John:
Whereas with induction, it's not like the surface of the stove gets hot, but the pan is hot and the pan is sitting on the stove.
John:
And so it depends on how much heat is absorbed by,
John:
and retained by the surface of the induction thing and if the surface is usually some kind of glass or easy to clean thing that does hold a lot of heat and it's still that will still hold a lot of heat even when you turn off the induction so now your hot pan is sitting on top of a probably equally hot glass surface that is not going to cool off as fast as the
John:
instant off on a gas thing and it depends if you make anything where you need to be able to instantly turn off the heater otherwise you're like a sauce is going to break or something but anyway that's why chefs still prefer gas because your control of the heat is more or less absolute and you're not once you turn off the heat your pan is not sitting next to another hot thing that is continuing to heat it but
John:
Yeah, I've still been a little bit wary of induction just because I don't want to have to worry about what the pans are.
John:
I'm pretty committed to my modern electric lifestyle.
John:
If I had to get a new stove, I would probably get another electric one.
John:
And also, gas ovens are garbage, so if you have a gas top, you want an electric oven anyway.
John:
do you think it's like whatever the the heat capacity of the glass surface on an induction stove do you think that's meaningfully more for carryover heat purposes than the heat in the pan itself uh yeah because you want the what you want is for the pan to start shedding its heat right so if the only thing underneath it is air and like the metal grating that's a great place for it to shed the heat off of like there's no more heat coming into it from below whereas if the metal pan is against that
John:
Even if there was no heat on that surface, it can't shed heat.
John:
It's already been shedding heat into that.
John:
They're at equilibrium probably at this point between the pan and the surface.
John:
The pan is making the surface hot, so it loses that heat shedding there.
John:
Whereas if it's suspended in the air over an off-gas burner, it really depends.
John:
Do you care about that?
John:
Do you make anything where...
John:
You have to have precise control of the heat, otherwise bad things will happen to it.
John:
If you don't, then you probably don't care about carryover heat.
John:
It's just for the chefs, again, making something very delicate like a sauce that you need to have precise control.
John:
When you turn off the heat, you want it to be off-off.
John:
And for restaurants where, again, when you turn off the heat, you don't have to worry about it carrying over, continuing to cook a little bit.
John:
Off means off.
Marco:
Well, I suppose what you really want, then, is if you aren't using literally all of the space in the cooktop, what you really want is that flat surface to move the pan onto for cooling-on purposes, but to just move it onto a cool spot on the stove.
John:
Or they could have, like, induction surfaces that move away from the thing and, you know, disconnect the surface connection.
John:
Like, it would actually, I don't know, they could do something like that, but it's probably silly.
John:
But, yeah, my stovetop is a glass surface, completely continuous glass surface, and that is so great for cleaning that the benefits for regular people...
Marco:
probably far outweighs uh worrying about carryover yeah honestly like you know we i i only have gas i have gas here we have electric at the beach and the beach has one of those flat tops because it's like a relative you know it's made it's probably 10 years old but it's a relatively modern stove that has flat top available and
Marco:
And then here we just have like a giant gas thing that the previous owners bought that has mostly been okay, but it requires a lot of maintenance because it's a fancy brand.
Marco:
And I'm very glad I didn't buy it.
Casey:
Oh, like my BMW.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Actually, it's the Casey's BMW of stoves.
Marco:
It's just as reliable too.
Marco:
Yeah, it is.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It needs like new burners and igniters almost every I think every three or four years so far.
Marco:
But like, you know, it's typical, you know, gas with these big cast iron grates sitting on top of each burner and the burner itself is like four different semi loose parts that are just kind of resting on each other.
Marco:
And it's a pain in the butt to keep clean.
Marco:
There's so many surfaces and you got to wait till it cools totally off and take the grate off and then clean the grate, of course, and then also clean what's under the grate and it gets everywhere and it's a mess.
Marco:
And then like when you have like those wonderful flat surfaces on the electric ones, you just like wait till it's cool and just spray it and wipe it off.
Marco:
It's glorious.
Yeah.
John:
The best thing about the, the, the flat glass cooktops is they sell, they sell like cleaner, like this mildly abrasive toothpaste dish kind of cleaner specifically made for glass cooktops.
John:
And you can like, we've had ours, not since we were married, but for many years, at least like 15 years or whatever, you can get the thing looking like brand new with that cleaner.
John:
Like it doesn't matter how old it is.
John:
I don't know how much have you got caked onto it because it's glass.
Yeah.
John:
no matter how gross it looks like that thing is totally destroyed it's never going to look good again you use that uh glass cooktop cleaner do a little bit of scrubbing and you look at it like that looks like it came from the factory today that's awesome it's like it goes back to brand new it's it's it's pretty amazing unfortunately the rest of the thing doesn't like we have somehow dropped heavy things onto like the edges of the thing and like chipped off the edges of not the surface but like the the metal like the enamel paint
John:
yeah like the whole like the whole rest of the thing you can damage but the glass is basically impenetrable i'm pretty amazed by it
Casey:
Hey, what are you guys doing for data when you're overseas?
Marco:
We do... Are you on AT&T?
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
They have that international day pass thing.
Marco:
We do that.
Casey:
Wait, what?
Casey:
I didn't see... I was just looking at this.
Marco:
They added it a couple of... I think a year ago or two years ago.
Marco:
It's a thing where you can just use your home plan when you're roaming internationally for something... It's either $10 or $20.
Marco:
No, I think it's $10 per day.
Marco:
And it's automatic.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
!
Marco:
It automatically just knows when you're traveling.
Marco:
It just figures that out.
Marco:
So you just literally just use your phone.
Marco:
You change nothing.
Marco:
You just go to another country, and for every day that you're in another country, you get charged $10.
Casey:
Okay, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Zero per month, $10 per device per day.
Marco:
Yeah, I just leave that enabled all the time now.
Marco:
Like, I used to have to, like, add the data pack and then cancel it when I got back.
Marco:
It was a pain in the ass.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, they came out with that, like, maybe a year or two ago, and it's fantastic.
Marco:
This is one of those things, like, Europeans have kicked our butts on this, and they had these plans, like, 50 years ago when they were all using Opera, but we are very new to this as us, like, you know, lowly American cell phone networks with our horrible monopolies and everything.
Marco:
So, yeah, and so people in the chat are saying apparently Verizon has a similar thing.
Marco:
So, yeah, this by far, like, I used to always bring in, like, an unlocked phone and try to buy an international SIM.
Casey:
Yeah, that's what I was looking at is, you know, I was talking to Jason Snell in the relay chat earlier, and he was saying that the 3, which is one of the carriers over there in the UK, 3 offers for about 20 U.S.
Casey:
dollars or thereabouts, 20 to 30 U.S.
Casey:
dollars.
Casey:
You can get something like 10 gigs.
Casey:
It's not exactly right, but it's something along the lines of 10 gigs and 3,000 minutes and 3,000 domestic texts.
Casey:
And that lasts for like a month.
Casey:
And so to your point, Marco, you would have to have an unlocked phone, which we tend to buy our phones outright.
Casey:
So that's not a problem for us.
Casey:
But you need to have an unlocked phone, and you need to switch phone numbers, and this becomes ugly if, say, you have grandparents that are watching your children, and they don't want to have to use Google Allo because they're Android users, or they don't want to have to rely on iMessaging specifically your email address, because I think if you were to iMessage the phone number...
Marco:
then it wouldn't work, you know, because your phone number changes when you put the new SIM in, and it's just... Or, like, they start an iMessage thread unknowingly with your international phone number, and then when you get home, it doesn't work anymore.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
It's, like, I've done all these options before, and...
Marco:
You can do the math, and if you're staying more than five days or something, it probably makes sense to get a local SIM if you're concerned only about that price.
Marco:
But for me, I'm actually willing to pay a little bit extra to A, not have to worry about any kind of cap or transfer or unlocking or anything, and B, to just be able to keep my number and literally have to do nothing to my phone.
Marco:
I don't have to rely on anything weirdly working differently.
Marco:
I don't have to break iMessage for anything.
Marco:
It literally just is my regular number working the regular way and I pay $10 a day for it.
Marco:
That to me is worth a premium price because if I'm saying something like for a month, that might be a different story.
Marco:
I don't do that.
Marco:
So I'm going somewhere for a few days up to a week.
Marco:
No question, I do the day pass because it's so nice to just have your plan.
Marco:
Even if it isn't the absolute cheapest option, it's so nice to just have it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Hi, John.
Casey:
Hello.
John:
Take your time.
John:
I don't get cell plans when I go to the UK.
Marco:
Well, you didn't even have a cell phone until like last month.
John:
I know.
John:
Just use Wi-Fi.
Casey:
Anyway, well, that was super productive for me, and I don't care if anyone else is bored by this, because that was really freaking useful for me.
Casey:
All right, we'll start with Russ Bishop, who writes that the simulator cloning that we had talked about last week, this is where you can do, was it for unit testing or UI testing, I believe?
Marco:
Yeah, it's exactly for UI testing in parallel.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So Xcode will spin up a whole bunch of parallel instances of the iOS simulator to do a whole bunch of different UI tests all simultaneously.
Casey:
And somebody had pontificated, I don't remember if it was a listener or if it was John, I think it was a listener pontificated that, hey, maybe that uses the super fast APFS cloning feature so that it will spin up all these duplicates of the simulator really, really, really quickly.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So Russ Bishop writes that simulator cloning does use APFS cloning.
Casey:
Everything that uses NS File Manager or lib copy file with copy file clone, which is apparently a parameter or some such, will end up using APFS cloning, whether it intended to or not.
Casey:
John, as the resident file system expert in chief, any other thoughts on that?
John:
Nope.
John:
Just good to see confirmation.
John:
I think the person who sent this works at Apple, so I trust what they're saying.
John:
Moving on... I actually have some follow-up about that as well.
Casey:
Oh, I'm sorry, Marco.
Casey:
My apologies.
Casey:
Please continue.
Marco:
Normally, I don't have a lot of file system news, but I actually... So we are cleaning up Tiff's computer.
Marco:
She wants to basically do a clean reinstall for the first time, I think, ever.
Marco:
And she has a whole bunch of photos, and we are pretty sure that a lot of them are actually duplicated in multiple locations and everything.
Marco:
And this is a very hard problem to solve.
Marco:
Honestly, if anybody...
Marco:
knows a really good, very reliable utility.
Marco:
We're going to be very conservative on this, but if you know a very good utility to find duplicate files in a reasonable way and try to manage them in a reasonable way without risking deleting the real copies, please let me know.
Marco:
But anyway, one thing I was hoping that APFS would do, which I think ZFS does, is data deduplication with regular file operations or with files just existing there.
Marco:
So like...
Marco:
Ideally, if we migrate her disk onto an APFS volume, I would like it to kind of automatically detect duplicates as the data is being imported onto the volume and not take up double space.
Marco:
That would be nice.
Marco:
Unfortunately, I did some experimenting and that doesn't happen.
Marco:
And I was also disappointed to find out that even things like the Linux CPE command don't do cloning.
Marco:
They actually just make duplicated data.
Marco:
So I hope they go a little bit further with this feature of APFS because it would totally remove the problem of like, yeah, there are these photos in multiple paths, but if it's an APFS clone, you can have as many paths as you want.
Marco:
It doesn't matter at all.
Marco:
The problem would just disappear if that was the case, but...
Marco:
Hopefully, there will be some easy way for us to deal with this.
Marco:
But until then, I was kind of sad that APFS didn't go a little bit deeper with that cloning thing.
John:
Yeah, it doesn't have deduping built-in, but you can build that feature yourself.
John:
Just brute force it, right?
John:
Just write a little program that goes over all your files.
John:
The tricky part is the stuff that's not the data, but the extended attributes and everything.
John:
You'd have to decide if you're writing that brute forcing utility.
John:
how much you care about the extended attributes so if you find two files where the data is the same but the extended attributes or any other attributes differ do you care or do you want to you know merge them essentially into into one uh thing if you care you have to leave them separate because i don't think there's a way to separate the data and the metadata you can't say well it's like the data is a clone but the metadata is not i think i think you can't do that um but you know you if it was just photos and you didn't care about the metadata or the dates or anything like that you could combine them
John:
um and the deduping stuff as zfs does that lots of other file systems do that but it is uh it's very uh cpu intensive it slows things down tremendously if it was sort of on all the time um i think time machine uh does uh yeah well i don't remember if they did anything related to that i mean it does the hard linking to directories which is essentially the you know
John:
very uh weak version of deduping uh on an entire file level and that's where they're actually connected to each other what you want is for it to take up half the storage but for them to still be two totally independent files and apfs can do that it just won't do it for you i seem to recall there was some feature not just the finder's duplication that they demo with some feature of the new os's that takes advantage of that and as for the cp command
John:
CP command, my recollection is used to be not understand a bunch of Mac specific metadata, but eventually they enhanced it to support the Mac specific metadata and extended attributes, sometimes requiring a flag.
John:
I can imagine them extending it.
John:
If it's not already there, check the man page for CP to support smart cloning.
John:
But I can also understand why they might.
John:
not have that uh be the default just because of the you know you know i'll be one of those over this before how the free space math gets way too complicated for you to hold in your brain when you're like you know i just copied a 20 gig file and my free space is the same you know what is what is going on how do i ever tell how much free space i have it becomes very difficult so i can see some reason to default to the dumb way just to have things make more sense to people
Casey:
Moving on to notarized apps, we talked about this last week where Apple will presume – I think they said they will eventually compel all apps to be notarized.
Casey:
Is that what we concluded?
Casey:
I forget the details now.
Casey:
But one way or another, notarized apps is a next-level thing beyond just developer signing.
Casey:
And a friend of the show, Daniel Jalka, wrote in to say that the developer ID signing, which we had talked about as the current state of the world, is almost 100% independent from Apple once you have the certificate –
Casey:
But it's worth noting that by default, CodeSign still consults Apple's timestamp server to reliably embed a time in the code signature.
Casey:
So if Apple's server is down, the regular developer ID code signing can fail.
Casey:
And so there's apparently an option, dash dash timestamp equals none, that Daniel uses in his debug builds and CI builds to prevent that signing from happening or that confirmation with Apple from happening.
Casey:
And then also front of the show, Gus Mueller writes in that he also turns off the timestamp because of server issues on Apple side years ago.
John:
That doesn't bode well for a notarized thing, the fact that Apple has some very minor server-side component to the current system, and that two random developers we happen to know turn it off to avoid issues with our... Actually, wait, did Jack could say he turns it off?
John:
Yeah.
John:
That server is surely much more simple than the notarized server is, and it's just like... That's what it takes.
John:
It doesn't mean that it's unreliable or it's a problem or whatever.
John:
It just means that...
John:
If you're trying to do something and something interrupts your workflow and it annoys you and you can't figure out what it is and you track it down, it turns out that one of Apple servers is being wonky.
John:
Just turning it off and never thinking about it again is often the reaction, especially if you're frustrated that you spent a while trying to debug it.
John:
And you never check if like, well, that was three years ago.
John:
Maybe the timestamp server is up 100% of the time now.
John:
Maybe it's lightning fast.
John:
I'll never know because it annoyed me that one time and I turned it off.
John:
Obviously, with notarized apps, you won't have that option, I suppose.
John:
But
John:
Hopefully Apple is so much better at doing server-side services these days than they used to be that this won't be a problem with notarized apps.
John:
Right, guys?
Casey:
Something like that.
Marco:
And, you know, all these scripts that they have, like the Mac developers have, you know, like Daniel and Gus, to, like, automate builds and releases, I think these are all going to break with notarization because it's an asynchronous process.
Marco:
Like I mentioned during our first discussion of it,
Marco:
they have to submit the binary to this notarization server.
Marco:
And from my understanding, it's just like the iOS processing step in iTunes, excuse me, in App Store Connect now.
Marco:
You have to submit it, and it'll take maybe a half hour to an hour to actually get done.
Marco:
And then they give it back to you.
Marco:
And I assume they make it available through some kind of download, either manually and or through an API.
Marco:
But
Marco:
Because it's this asynchronous process that you just kind of have to wait for that could take an indeterminate amount of time, that's going to break a lot of automated build scripts and a lot of people's processes.
John:
By the way, a real-time follow-up.
John:
Someone in the chat room threw out cp-c as the flag to throw to the cp command to make it do clones.
John:
I was trying to test it on an APFS volume while we're sitting here.
John:
Wait, hold on.
Marco:
You say minus?
Marco:
for command line arguments is that how you always say that like in your head or out loud yeah sure cp minus c not dash you could say you could say dash or dash minus but yeah minus is definitely one of the things i say because that's the key my god we've been podcasting for over five years how did i not know this about you it's not just me that's a common thing to say is it though i mean it is it is the minus key on the keyboard and like that that is what it's called it's not like i'm making up a funny name for it it's the hyphen key
John:
It's that, too.
John:
You know, unless you want to be typographically correct.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Let's talk about tabs and spaces.
John:
Yeah, might as C. And the thing is, I was trying to determine, does this actually do the cloning?
John:
It says uses clone file, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And what I was searching for is some massive file so that I could tell.
John:
oh well i know it definitely like cloned it there because it would have taken longer to copy it but i could not find a file big enough to convince myself so i'm assuming that's correct have you downloaded the xcode beta you gotta find a single file xcode is a you know it's a giant app package filled with a bunch of crap i need one big single file no i got i got it hold on just dd a big file someone says listen
John:
Are any of you people out there recreationally using DD?
John:
Let me tell you, just don't.
Marco:
I can confirm that is correct.
Marco:
They did not use more space, or at least DF reported the same amount of space.
Marco:
And it copied really fast?
Marco:
Yeah, and it was a 5.6 gig file, so I'm pretty sure that was not faked.
Marco:
I ran these tests with DF before and after doing things like a finder copy, a CP, and a cat into another file.
Marco:
just to see like you know what level of deduplication did apfs have um so i'm pretty sure this methodology is sound and yeah this so cp-c uh or cp-c uh is uh is the correct way to do this with an apfs clone
John:
So now you can write your little brute force shell script or whatever that can find all the duplicate files because you'll take hashes of all of them and it'll be time consuming.
John:
And when you find them, you can compare the metadata and decide how much metadata you care about.
John:
And if you don't care enough about the metadata, you can just make one clone of the other and match up the dates, which is everyone you decide is the primary or so on and so forth.
John:
and then you'll have nonsensical free space on your discs too.
John:
And by the way, you buried the lead on this, which I learned from other podcasts.
John:
Your brazen attempt to get a new iMac Pro for your wife and then convince her to take that iMac Pro to the beach, let that one get infected with sand and salt water and salt spray, and then bring it back just so you can have iMac Pro during the summer.
John:
And that plan was nixed, and so the new plan is iMac Pro at home,
John:
and Tiff's old Mac goes to the beach, which I think is much more appropriate, and I can't believe you tried to pull that.
John:
That is fair, and you're going to hate what I'm actually doing.
John:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Well, it sounds like you're getting your wife's Mac ready to sell.
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, I'm getting it ready for the transfer.
Marco:
In fact, her old Mac is sitting on the office floor behind me right now.
Marco:
We've had a very busy week.
Marco:
So this has all been kind of slammed into tonight.
Marco:
And the new iMac Pro is sitting on her desk.
Marco:
It arrived two days late because...
Marco:
Well, my theory is UPS in New Jersey lost it or tried to steal it because it was just not tracked in New Jersey for like three days.
Marco:
Anyway, I was at the beach today dropping off some stuff and I realized I really just want my computer there.
Marco:
Because for the last couple days, when her computer was in limbo and it was possibly not going to arrive in time, one of the options we talked about, which was going to be what happened if UPS continued to steal it, was to simply have Apple recall it, return it, and just take my iMac Pro out there and reorder hers after the summer.
Marco:
I started thinking about this plan.
Marco:
I even ordered the carrying case, not the hipster one, but like a more heavy duty one that actually has padding and actually includes the stand in the case.
Marco:
And I started thinking, you know, how nice is it to have my entire computer out there?
Marco:
And how nice is it to not have to spend like two days setting up yet another computer or dealing with having three Macs that are all like activated in my name, which causes some problems with certain software licensing and things like that.
Marco:
It's just kind of a pain.
Marco:
So I'm just going to bring my iMac Pro out there and take the risk.
Marco:
The room it's in is not oceanside.
Marco:
It's not going to get any kind of salt spray on it.
Marco:
The door to it is even closed most of the time.
Marco:
The air conditioning is usually on in that room anyway.
Marco:
This is a desktop.
Marco:
This is a pro machine.
Marco:
I'm carrying it there in a very padded case.
Marco:
It's never going to be like out of my hands or out of my control.
Marco:
I have AppleCare.
Marco:
I might regret these words later.
Marco:
sand fleas are not covered under apple care sorry i know but i love this computer so much and i have a lot of very heavy development work to do this summer like when i was when i was initially making my beach computer plans i didn't know what what apple was going to deliver to us at wwdc i didn't know how busy of a summer i would end up having and it turns out i have a very busy summer with lots of development work
Marco:
And so not only did I decide that the 24-inch Dell monitor for my laptop would just be not enough screen space because I have a lot of simulator work to do with multiple simulators and with the watch simulator and things like that.
Marco:
It just, like, sets screen space on fire, basically.
Marco:
Like, whenever you're developing with simulators and having documentation open, it just destroys screen space.
Marco:
And it destroys CPU cores because of all that indexing and processing and building and Swift and all this crap.
Marco:
So I just want my iMac Pro there.
Casey:
Can you put a link to your carrying case in the show notes so that we don't get blown up by a million people asking what it was, please?
John:
People want to take their iMac Pro to Panera.
Casey:
Every time any of us mentions any product on this show, somebody wants to know about it.
Casey:
And so let's just agree that it will be in the show notes.
Marco:
By the way, I should also clarify, I don't have this case yet.
Marco:
It's coming tomorrow.
Marco:
So this is not me vouching for it or saying it's awesome.
Marco:
I think it should be good based on the Amazon page.
Marco:
That's the only endorsement I'm giving here.
John:
I have no idea if it's actually going to be good.
John:
this does look nice i want to say i'm proud of marco for not buying a third imac pro we should all support him that's true support this behavior change because as he began this story and i could tell that the 5k imac was getting ready to depart i was like he bought a third imac pro didn't he but he didn't he didn't buy a third one everybody good job marco it was tempting no i was that was never an option under consideration
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Aftershocks Bone Conduction Headphones and their weightless wireless Trex Air.
Marco:
Go to atp.aftershocks.com and use code ATP30 for $30 off the wonderful Trex Air headphones.
Marco:
See, what's great about bone conduction headphones that no other headphones do is they don't have anything that sits on your ear or goes into your ear or in other ways involves your ear itself.
Marco:
They have little transducers that rest next to your ear, kind of on your cheekbones, and they send little vibrations through your bone, and it goes into the inner ear canal, and that's what picks up the sound.
Marco:
The great thing about this is that not only does it not leave you all sweaty, because there's only these little tiny things touching your skin and nothing actually in your ear, which is awesome for the summertime, awesome for exercising...
Marco:
But also, you get to hear the world around you in addition to, say, the podcast you're listening to or the phone call you're taking on the headphones.
Marco:
And the headphones are so weightless.
Marco:
They basically weigh nothing.
Marco:
You barely even feel them.
Marco:
They're very small, and they're very comfortable.
Marco:
And you can be walking around town listening to podcasts, but you can also hear if a car is coming when you're crossing the street.
Marco:
Or you can be walking around the house doing chores, and you can hear if someone knocks on the door in addition to hearing your podcast through the headphones.
Marco:
Now, if I'm honest, they're not great for loud environments, but they're awesome for places like walking outside or walking around the house or bike riding or jogging.
Marco:
Whatever it is that you like to hear the world around you in addition to your sound, that's when you want Aftershocks.
Marco:
And I've tried both of their models now.
Marco:
The older model, the Trex Titanium, and the new one, the Trex Air, they're both excellent.
Marco:
I recommend the Air if you're buying now.
Marco:
In fact, I like it so much that I just bought myself a second pair of
Marco:
Because I never want to be without them, and I want to keep one in a bag and keep one at the house.
Marco:
They're that good.
Marco:
I use these all the time in the summertime.
Marco:
I highly suggest you check them out.
Marco:
For more information, go to atp.aftershocks.com, and you can see for yourself how awesome the weightless wireless Trex Air is from Aftershocks.
Marco:
And you can get $30 off by using code ATP30.
Marco:
Once again, go to atp.aftershocks.com and use code ATP30 for $30 off the weightless wireless Trexair bone conduction headphones.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Aftershocks for keeping me happy during the summer with podcasts in my ears, although not actually totally in my ears, and for sponsoring this show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So your long national nightmare with regard to computers for the summer is now over.
Casey:
John, however, your long national nightmare about your beloved reload extension, which I still don't understand why it's so important, but it's important that that national nightmare is over as well.
Casey:
Can you tell us about this?
John:
The new version of Safari in Mojave and also if you have Safari Technology Preview, also known as Purple Safari because it's cool.
John:
If you use that and it's rejecting all of your unsigned non-extension app store extensions like my reload button.
John:
Uh, you mentioned how you can use extension builder to load anything you want, as long as you enter your admin password and go through some hoops, but then when you quit Safari and relaunch it, it forgets all about that and you got to reload them.
John:
And it's a pain apparently buried down at the bottom of the develop menu.
John:
I think it's the develop menu, which is a menu you can enable, uh,
John:
uh in safari's preferences way down at the bottom there is a little uh option that says allow unsigned extensions and if you check that option i believe it will just forever allow you to load unsigned extensions in your own safari which is nice i wouldn't say forever well you know until they update safari again
Casey:
You know what else is good news?
Casey:
We apparently were featured in a WWDC session.
Casey:
And I didn't even know it until after the session was already over.
Casey:
Because I was looking at Twitter and I was like, wait, why is everyone freaking out?
Casey:
Oh, hey, check it out.
Casey:
So this is session 501, Introducing Podcast Analytics.
Casey:
And I have only seen the little snippet that we're in.
Casey:
But apparently they were introducing the next version of the podcast app for iOS, and they made mention of how it's going to start supporting chapters.
Casey:
And thanks to the insufferable, I mean, awesome Germans...
Casey:
led by Tim Pritlove.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
They convinced us, which I really mean Marco, to add chapters.
Casey:
And fast forward a year or two, and now we're on a WWDC presentation slide for our chapter support.
Casey:
So thanks, Tim and all the Germans.
Casey:
We appreciate it.
Marco:
It's actually a little more nuanced than that.
Marco:
The Apple Podcast app was the first podcast app to ever support chapters, as far as I know, because Apple invented the original spec.
Marco:
Oh, I didn't realize.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Yeah, the original spec was for AAC files in the wonderful QuickTime MOV file format renamed to M4A.
Marco:
And it was a very poorly documented or I think totally undocumented, really pile of hacks spec that was a pain in the butt to read, write, and play, honestly.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But they added support, I think, back like in the old version of GarageBand where you could make podcasts more easily with GarageBand.
Marco:
I think that's where they added the support to create these.
Marco:
And so the original chapter markers for podcasts for a long time were just those.
Marco:
And Apple's app has always supported those ever since they made the spec.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
What it didn't support was MP3 chapters, which came a little bit later.
Marco:
I don't remember exactly when, but there was an ID.3 spec for MP3 chapters that was basically just published to add this functionality to the MP3 format instead of just having it be locked into AAC in this weird undocumented format.
Marco:
So what Apple added support for was MP3 chapters.
Marco:
They already supported M4A chapters.
Marco:
um what's extra funny about this is that so i really i released this app forecast like what a year ago or something like that and i've been using it for like three years and this app that creates podcast chapters the app only creates mp3 chapters
Marco:
And until this version of the podcast app comes out, which I assume is this fall for everybody, the biggest podcast player didn't support them, which is always a little bit awkward when you're trying to make a tool that says it creates podcast chapters.
Marco:
Meanwhile, Apple's app did not support them.
Marco:
because it wasn't m4a chapters um so this is actually really nice uh you know it's it represents you know not only a win for the wonderfully patent unencumbered now mp3 format um but it also represents apple paying attention to what the podcast community needs and what they're doing and taking part in that and that's really cool do you know if the google podcast app supports them
John:
The newly announced Android Google Podcast app.
Marco:
I mean, we'll see if this one of Google's podcast initiatives takes off, and then we'll figure it out from there.
Marco:
This is not the first Google Podcast initiative.
Marco:
The other ones haven't really gone anywhere.
Marco:
So I wish them well.
Marco:
I hope they bring in more podcast listeners.
Marco:
But I wouldn't assume that this is going to be a big thing until it actually starts becoming a big thing.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
So more from WWDC.
Casey:
The Memoji are ungendered, which is pretty obvious when you start working with it.
Casey:
But I don't think we did a very good job of talking about it.
Casey:
In fact, I'm not sure we brought it up at all.
Casey:
But Madeline Buxton at Refinery29 has a post about this, which is pretty good.
Casey:
And it discusses how some equivalent technologies and other platforms are very clearly gendered.
Casey:
and when you make a Memoji, there is no gender determination ever, ever, ever, ever.
Casey:
You never specify gender, and that's really forward-looking, and I dig that, and I thought that was pretty cool.
John:
I don't think people would actually notice.
John:
You mentioned you'd notice if you use it.
John:
I think if you didn't
John:
draw that bring this to someone's attention they wouldn't notice which shows a how unessential it is to the process and b that like it is a it's a better user interface it's it's not bothering to ask somebody something that is not relevant they just want to start clicking on things and make the face they want to make right that that extra step of by the way bin yourself is
John:
is an unnecessary step, right?
John:
There's no, it doesn't, you know, unless, you know, actually, I was going to say unless like it gives you some defaults or something or change your defaults.
John:
But even then, like you don't know what the default should be.
John:
Like the only thing I can imagine them adding to the Memoji interface, which I still haven't used, by the way, because...
John:
I don't have the beta and you can't use it from an iPad Pro, apparently.
John:
It's only on the 10, apparently, which is kind of annoying because I don't think there's any part of Memoji that requires the depth camera, but whatever, Apple.
John:
Anyway, the only feature I can imagine them adding is the one where it just takes a picture of you and does its best shot at making an emoji that looks like the picture it just took.
John:
And that also doesn't need any gender integration.
John:
It's just like...
John:
you know take a selfie and i'll try to make some kind of emoji that looks like the selfie right um but but yeah i think this that is an important streamlining that basically everything that has you make an avatar should do there is no reason for that step whatsoever if you remove it people won't notice or care and it lets them get to the part that they want to do which is making the face that they want to make faster
Marco:
One of the nice little side effects of our modern age of being a little more aware and a little more flexible on gender identity and gender distinctions is this gradual elimination of pointless gender distinctions that just don't really serve any purpose whatsoever.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
There's no reason why you have to pick a gender for your avatar because you're designing it from scratch with whatever hairstyle you want, stuff like that anyway.
Marco:
It doesn't really matter.
Marco:
And one thing I noticed at WBC, we were in a couple of different places in a row for unrelated companies, like a hotel and a restaurant and stuff like that.
Marco:
And I noticed they all had the same all-genders bathroom signs.
Marco:
And our friend Jason Snell pointed out, because he lives in California, that...
Marco:
there was actually apparently a recent law passed in California that any individual bathroom in a public place, like not like a, not the one that has like 10 toilets, but the one that has like one toilet, one sink, any individual bathroom in a public place has to now be labeled all gender bathrooms.
Marco:
And that's great because it's like, yeah, why were they separated before?
Marco:
They had no reason to be separated before.
Marco:
Why distinguish one as men and one as women when that's an unnecessary distinction that just, at best, it is a misbalanced Q problem or bad scheduling of resources.
Marco:
And at worst, it causes people to face a question that a lot of people really don't like facing or don't feel comfortable facing.
Marco:
And so...
John:
yeah why make that distinction and then the question they're facing like is they say oh well there we have to make gendered ones because we're going to put different things in different bathrooms and that itself is a problem it may cause someone to have to make a difficult choice well do i go to the bathroom that's likely to have a tampon dispenser or do they go to the bathroom that i actually want to go to yeah right and so now you have to make this hard choice and roll the dice now they're just all gender it makes it uniform they all have everything in them uh done and done
Casey:
Awesome.
Casey:
There were some gifts for all of us, but particularly our friends from 1Password.
Casey:
And coincidentally, I think it was in the State of the Union, I was sitting behind a group of individuals, all of whom were wearing 1Password t-shirts, which obviously meant that they were from Agile Bits and they worked on 1Password.
Casey:
And they were talking, the presenter was talking about how, oh, we're doing some really cool stuff where we can generate strong passwords for you, which I think that's old, but there was something new about it and it'll help you autofill and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And I could see the shoulders of all the 1Password employees just kind of sink a little bit.
Casey:
But then, you know, Apple taketh away and giveth because the next thing they said was, and we'll have hooks for other password managers.
Casey:
So you can just, they can automatically autofill right from the keyboard.
Casey:
And you don't have to do that same, like, you know, share sheet, open one password, et cetera, et cetera, dance that you have to do today.
Casey:
And all those shoulders went perked right back up and they were all very excited.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
um so it's quite funny to watch but basically there are going to be uh ways for for the phone to generate strong passwords there are new tools for two-factor auth autofill like if you get a text message which is deeply insecure but be that as it may if you get a text message with a six-digit code it will autofill that for ask to autofill that for you and like i was saying there are even hooks for third-party password managers like our preferred password manager which is one password which is super cool stuff
John:
I'm going to assume that the one password people actually knew about that and were just, you know, maybe I'm assuming they know because I think they will be using hooks.
Marco:
And this is I would not make that assumption.
Marco:
Apple does not often tell people in advance about APIs that affect their apps.
John:
I'm not saying Apple told them.
John:
oh yeah apple telling them and them knowing two different things anyway um i i think this is such a weird instance this is what very often i personally have asked for over the years but apple so rarely does where they have some feature and like they integrate with it with whatever their built-in thing here in this case would be like keychain right so this password thing and you know the keychain is integrated with it and their password generator and if you're in safari it'll all fill by looking things up in your keychain you know that's
John:
Total Apple Synergy integration.
John:
Right.
John:
And in so many of those cases, you're like, OK, that's great.
John:
But what if I don't want to use the Apple whatever the Apple keep password manager, the Apple mail application, you know, the Apple window minimization framework?
John:
Right.
John:
Whatever it is.
John:
What if we want to make this like, can you add clean hooks?
John:
I used to call them clean hooks because there were dirty hooks back in the day.
John:
Clean hooks for third party applications to do the same thing.
John:
Define an interface, make it an officially supported API and say third parties.
John:
If you make an application that conforms to this API and use this library, you too can hook into this part of the system and sell something.
John:
That people buy to customize their Macs to change its behavior, that it isn't some weird in-memory hack, that isn't some sort of, you know, sneaky thing that uses debug hooks to get, you know, a loadable text input bundle into your thing and run wild in the middle of your application, swizzling your methods and blah, blah, blah, like a real API.
John:
Because so many aspects of the Mac operating system historically have been ripe for third parties to sell applications.
John:
Many, many applications back in the classic days were...
John:
very scarily implemented things that enhanced or changed foundational parts of the operating system i used to have a whole bunch of extensions that modified open save dialog boxes in fact i've still been running default folder 10 for for years things that change window minimizations things change the look and feel of the windows uh you know you name it things that put things up into the menu bar before that was officially supported right
John:
So in some cases, Apple has done that, you know, the menu extras, the long slog to get third party icons up there with an official API and then with an official API that is also the same as the one that Apple gets to use.
John:
Right.
John:
Some the appearance manager back in classic Mac OS days, but that went away in 10 and other areas where they've never allowed you to hook.
John:
No, you can't do a custom window minimization thing.
John:
So forget about doing window shade is anything other than a hack.
John:
But for passwords, I'm very relieved to see that Apple is enhancing the password system and also Miracle of Miracles providing clean hooks for third parties.
John:
But they didn't have to do like they could just say, well, sorry, one password.
John:
If people think they don't need your thing anymore, it's just because our building stuff is so darn good.
John:
right and that's i mean that's mostly fair but some people no matter how good you make the built-in stuff some people just want to keep using the thing that they they have uh and in general it's good for apple not to we talked about sherlocking last week there's sherlocking and then there's i'm going to eliminate your entire category of application by essentially duplicating every feature of your application with our unlimited pool of money and that's not so cool how do you really feel
John:
I want clean hooks, Casey.
John:
That's what I want.
John:
I want clean hooks for everything.
Casey:
That's all any of us want, John.
Casey:
That's all any of us want.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Xcode 10 no longer compiles 32-bit apps, question mark?
John:
I think that's true, right, Mark?
John:
Can you confirm?
John:
That is correct.
John:
I mean, I'm not a Mac developer, but that is correct.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So this is a thing that I've heard developers complain about a lot, which is one of the reasons all of them keep around old Macs or Mac VMs of varying degrees of reliability.
John:
because you need to use the old version or they have two multiple versions of xcode on their mac some people are like you know i've i've had multiple versions of xcode on my mac for like years and years because i always have to keep the old one around to keep building my old applications to support the old operating systems apple is very aggressive about uh not just changing the support in the operating system for things like oh the next os won't run 32 bit apps fine
John:
But also saying, and by the way, the current version of Xcode won't even build them anymore.
John:
So if you want to keep building a 32-bit app to do bug fixes or whatever, you've got to use an older version of Xcode.
John:
And if you keep doing that long enough, eventually that version of Xcode won't even run on the current operating system.
John:
So now you need a bunch of VMs.
John:
So what struck me is pushing a lot of the complexity burden onto the developers and making them figure out how to keep their old stuff running.
John:
And it would be nicer of Apple if their new versions of Xcode had a better backward compatibility story.
John:
But I 100% understand why they do it, because they're always trying to, like,
John:
Keep Xcode from crashing and keeping it from being bloated and forcing people into the future.
John:
And this all contributes to them making new versions of Xcode abandoned applications before they're even abandoned by the operating systems that will run them.
Casey:
The Mac App Store is now getting Office 365 in the Mac App Store, which is surprising.
Casey:
Horace Didu writes, Apple now captures a percent of Office subscription revenues on the Mac.
Casey:
That does not mean one percent, just a percentage.
Casey:
Some unspecified percent.
Casey:
A potential 100 million additional subscribers has been added to Apple's overall total of 270 million.
Casey:
And Adobe is going to be there as well.
Casey:
Some of Adobe's stuff is there.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Or is it all of Creative Cloud?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I put these two items there mostly because they have been the two white whales for Apple.
John:
How can we get these two big companies that both have subscription models for selling their software on Macs?
John:
How can we get them into our app store?
John:
Not so much to get a percentage of their revenue, although that's nice, but just because how can you consider the Mac app store...
John:
the best place to get mac software when office and adobe applications are not there right that's those are two very big players perhaps the biggest players in the mac software market and if they're not on the mac app store it makes the mac app store seem like the junior league you know like well the big applications you go directly to microsoft.com or adobe.com and you get them but for dinky things and you know you can go to the mac app store and that's not the way apple wants it to be done so i do wonder what exactly had to happen
John:
for to get microsoft and adobe on here somehow i doubt that microsoft is giving them a 30 cut or that adobe is giving a 30 cut but but who knows some some accommodation has been reached and it's not like apple's going to tell us i'm assuming the effort to get panic and bare bones back in the mac app store did not involve changing 32 cut at all
John:
But for Microsoft and Adobe, I'm willing to imagine that some arrangement may have been reached.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it kind of annoys me that we're just expected not to really wonder about that.
John:
I feel like if you're going to do special treatment, people will understand if it's Microsoft and Adobe.
John:
But...
John:
I think they should be... Transparency would be a little bit better here.
John:
I think people will be more understanding rather than just wondering, especially if there really is a 30% cut for all of them.
John:
Brag about that then.
John:
And by the way, they have the same deals you do.
John:
So the Mac App Store is a level playing field for everybody.
John:
But, you know, not saying anything makes me a little uncomfortable.
Marco:
Man, I wonder if the Adobe being in the Mac apps or whatever form that takes, if that could somehow, I know this is a long shot, if that could somehow allow me to just use the App Store for the licensing of those products and not have the stupid Creative Cloud app that is like the little Adobe app manager.
John:
Oh, God, that would be so amazing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That would have to be part of the negotiation because I'm pretty sure they really can't do that.
John:
They can't be sold to the Mac App Store and also integrated with Creative Cloud.
John:
I don't even know how they would pull that off.
Marco:
And also, that would solve my three iMac Pros problem because if it's truly licensed the way the Mac App Store software is licensed, there is no computer limit.
Marco:
Or at least there isn't one that anybody actually reasonably ever hits.
Marco:
So you could have Photoshop on three computers and that would be amazing.
Marco:
man this is a lot to ask for this is wishful thinking i mean like adobe can't even make their upgrades save preferences from the old one even though there is literally a checkbox that is devoted exclusively to do you want to import your preferences when you're making this upgrade and every single time i check it and zero times have ever actually brought over my preferences
Marco:
just be glad if your update completes successfully okay don't get greedy adobe is adobe is so bad at software like which is funny for a software company they're just so bad at software i wish so much that i i don't necessarily wish that i was not using any of their products because some of their products like i use photoshop and audition mostly and auditions really good photoshop's a mess but auditions really good and
Marco:
And there isn't really any competitor to it that's that good and that versatile at things that it does for me.
Marco:
But man, I wish it was less of a pain to install.
Marco:
So if this is a way to do that, if they actually make their products available in the Mac App Store using App Store in-app purchase subscriptions, that would be awesome.
Marco:
And I would switch to that in a heartbeat.
Marco:
have you looked at adobe xd have you heard of adobe xd at honestly at this point i'm trying to not learn about new adobe products because i don't want to get into more of them if i can help it like right now if i want to dump adobe and and stop paying for creative cloud i have to replace an image editor and a wave editor and there are you know there are a few other things in the world that can do those things like i don't like them as much but you know oh well
Marco:
Uh, but anything else I add to, to this, to my Adobe dependency is just something else that I will want to escape later.
John:
So, uh, Adobe XD was described as according to this Google result as a user experience design software application.
John:
Um, and I saw it demoed at layers or it wasn't demoed.
John:
It was someone who works on that team was giving a presentation at layers and it's the first, they were just using their experience making XD and the team that made XD as examples of like interface design and everything.
Uh,
John:
And it looked really interesting from an interface perspective.
John:
They talked a lot about like really just wanting to start with a clean sheet and not be constrained by like this is how Adobe applications work.
John:
So it has to look like Photoshop or Illustrator.
John:
I have a bunch of dockable palettes and all that other stuff.
John:
And they focused on performance and it was very lightweight and it was all very inspiring and interesting.
John:
Initially, when they were demoing it, they weren't leaning heavily on the user interface design part.
John:
And I was like, what is this?
John:
Is this like Photoshop next gen where they're starting like the seedling of a little thing of an application that will eventually expand to replace Photoshop without all the cruft?
John:
Eventually it became clear that's not what it is.
John:
But I think a lot of the interface ideas and the focus on performance and modern technologies and making it lightweight, I would love to see Adobe make its own Photoshop killer.
John:
And just call it Photoshop, like eventually call it Photoshop, but started as this...
John:
this like skunk works project to make a next generation thing and then just build it up and build it up and just say, guess what?
John:
You know, in 2025, the, you know, it's not XD, but you say the new XD is actually the new Photoshop and Photoshop.
John:
We'll just call it Photoshop classic and sell it for five more years because Photoshop could use a kick in the pants like that.
John:
But, uh, apparently that's, that's not to be, but I was heartened to see that they have software design teams, uh, inside Adobe, uh,
John:
not working within like the adobe constraints just say greenfield make a new thing don't feel constrained by any technology or interface paradigm that any adobe thing does and maybe i don't know how that application installed but for all i know maybe that application isn't installed by creative cloud wouldn't that be something
Casey:
I mean, it is the Apple way of doing things, right?
Casey:
To figure out what is the killer for your cash cow.
Casey:
You know, figure out the iPhone to kill the iPod.
Casey:
And I've never really used Photoshop.
Casey:
I just don't get it.
John:
You've never used Photoshop?
Yeah.
John:
How is that possible?
Casey:
I have for a few minutes, but I've never owned a copy.
Casey:
I don't think I've ever pirated a copy.
Marco:
I've just never had a particular... How is that possible?
Marco:
You were a teenager who knew about computers.
Marco:
How did you not pirate Photoshop?
Marco:
Every teenager pirates Photoshop.
Marco:
They can give it to you free with whatever you're trying to download.
Casey:
but i i don't i don't know what i mean i never really had a need for it well i was never into photography until recently and even then i very rarely do very for any particular edits to the pictures i take so i just never had a need and there's a reason photoshop is a verb now like it was kind of the iconic using computers to manipulate
John:
2d images and still is for that matter and it is very powerful and i actually despite marco uh dumping out before i actually still mostly like using photoshop it may be because so much of it is familiar to me from like photoshop 1.0 which yes i totally pirated back in the day uh you haven't lived until you run photoshop on a black and white mac let me tell you
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by RxBar.
Marco:
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Casey:
Metal is Apple's kind of high-performance graphics and et cetera framework.
Casey:
And Metal is, I guess, supporting the addition of eGPUs, not only to the MacBook Pros, but to the iMac Pro.
Casey:
So if you have an iMac Pro that just isn't fast enough in the graphics department or the things that leverage graphics cards, you can add external GPUs.
Marco:
Which, given that it's a workstation that only is six months old and only has high-end options, that shouldn't be anybody yet, theoretically.
John:
But it is, though.
John:
This is why I took note of this.
John:
So the fact that they support it, fine.
John:
We know about the EGBU support.
John:
They added it, and they advertised it originally.
John:
I forget when it was.
John:
It was six months ago or something.
John:
Like, hey, add EGBUs to your Apple laptops, right?
John:
Because they have crappy GPUs because they're laptops.
John:
If you need a big honking one, buy one of these third-party boxes, connect it through the magic of Thunderbolt.
John:
Look at this great performance.
John:
and bragging about how you can add multiple ones to them and it'll divide up the screen between them and do all this cool stuff.
John:
Definitely cool, right?
John:
So WWDC, they're like, and eGPUs, you can add them to the iMac Pro as well.
John:
And I don't know if that's a new development or they just wanted to advertise it or both, but either way, it emphasizes...
John:
Like, I'm so desperate for Mac Pro content.
John:
OK, so maybe I'm not having this.
John:
But basically, it emphasizes the fact that though the iMac Pro is their super high end best computer you can buy from them right now, it is still a sealed box.
John:
And yes, it has a good GPU in it, but it doesn't have the very best GPU.
John:
And it certainly doesn't have more than one of them.
John:
And lots of very high-end GPU-intensive workloads need more than the iMac Pro can offer and need more than the iMac Pro will ever be able to offer because it's not an upgradable GPU.
John:
So here they are coming to say, well, we have a solution to that.
John:
You can just chain a bunch of eGPUs to your iMac Pro.
John:
And I feel like this is a tacit admission that the iMac Pro in and of itself does not fulfill all the needs that Pro users have.
John:
Now, obviously, we're all waiting for the Mac Pro.
John:
What this made me think about is, okay, does this become an ad for the Mac Pro?
John:
Well, with the iMac Pro, you've got to chain all these eGPUs, and if you have bandwidth limits, they can't be met by Thunderbolt 3.
John:
It's not as high as performance as it could be or whatever.
John:
But the new Mac Pro, you don't have to do any of that.
John:
You can just build it with two or three or four GPUs inside it, or at least two high-end ones, and they're upgradable, so you don't have to, like...
John:
buy an iMac Pro and then watch its internal GPU age and become worthless as you replace the external ones year over year, right?
John:
You could just keep replacing the internal ones in your Mac Pro because that's what makes a Mac Pro different from an iMac Pro.
John:
But seeing their emphasis on eGPUs makes me fear that their Mac Pro will be like a modular box with a separate screen with one GPU inside it that can't be upgraded and then they expect you to chain a bunch of eGPUs.
John:
I really hope that's not true.
John:
So I'm of two minds of this demo.
John:
On the one hand, I see it as potentially highlighting it's, you know, it's the one shoe we're waiting for the other shoe to drop to say, look at this great Mac Pro.
John:
Isn't it better than an iMac Pro than a bunch of eGPUs?
John:
But on the other hand, every time Apple says eGPU, I fear that's what they're going to do to my poor Mac Pro.
John:
And I do not want it.
Marco:
I mean, I honestly, I see your concern on that.
Marco:
And that is one possible outcome of this.
Marco:
And I'm not going to try to candy coat it and say, oh, they definitely won't do that because they might do that.
John:
We have no idea what they'll do with a pro Mac anymore.
John:
That's the problem.
John:
We just anything, anything is possible.
Marco:
yeah basically what all their customers want is something pretty boring and apple seems to just refuse to deliver anything boring anymore in their eyes um so we know they're going to do something weird uh we just don't know what it is and and we're just praying that it's nothing we just hope please don't do anything weird please make a box case color they can do weird case color total license
Marco:
Purple.
Marco:
But, you know, one thing with the eGPUs is, you know, part of it is they have to, you know, they're not going to show off something about a future product now.
Marco:
They're going to show off what their current products can do.
Marco:
So eGPUs are something that their current products can use.
Marco:
Also...
Marco:
I think eGPUs are kind of a recognition of two realities of the Apple hardware lineup.
Marco:
Number one, a whole lot of people do pro work on laptops.
Marco:
And modern laptops that Apple is willing to make can't have amazing GPUs in them because there's not enough thermal capacity, not enough thickness.
Marco:
So, you know, Apple's not going to make a big honking gamer GPU laptop or a big honking 3D Pro, you know, workstation GPU laptop.
Marco:
And even those, they can't hold the biggest GPUs.
Marco:
They just can't.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
So they're not going to make those.
Marco:
So the eGPU boxes are a way for...
Marco:
apple laptop users which is a whole lot of their customers including many quote pro users running many quote pro apps so that's a that's a real need so it's like here's a bridge that that can you can you can be working on a laptop you can be somewhat portable but you can also have big gpu power available when you can plug in somewhere okay and then reality number two is
Marco:
Apple knows, I think by this point, at least somebody inside Apple should know this, and I think maybe this is one of the reasons they're doing this, that their hardware release cycle is simply not compatible with the realities of the high-end GPU market.
Marco:
GPU users want higher-end options than what Apple is ever willing to offer, even when their products are new.
Marco:
And they can't wait 18 months to five years for an update.
Marco:
So the eGPU is kind of like... It's this compromise by Apple to patch over the needs that their own unwillingness to ship certain products or to keep things updated at a certain pace have... They've created these problems for themselves, but they don't seem willing to solve those problems.
Marco:
So the eGPU...
Marco:
capability is a way for their customers to take those matters into their own hands so it's not an amazing uh reason that these things are necessary but it's the reality these things are necessary and so in the world where these things are necessary this is a pretty good solution
John:
And they're trying to realize value from their investment in Thunderbolt 3, which is expensive and complicated, and it has surely made the Macs that implemented more expensive and complicated.
John:
And on the software side, it's complicated things where GPUs are being plugged and unplugged and everything.
John:
And they're doing that to get some benefits.
John:
And one of the benefits is the ability to do this.
John:
So I think it is 100% worth investing what they appear to have invested to enable applications to... The demos they're showing is like,
John:
Look, I can plug a bunch of GPUs of varying capabilities into this Mac laptop and properly written software will intelligently divvy up the work to render this one screen between this heterogeneous pool of differently strength GPUs, including the built in one.
John:
to render the scene in the most efficient way possible.
John:
And that is very impressive, and it's cool technology, and it is reaping the benefits of Thunderbolt 3.
John:
It's a pro feature that many people, maybe they'll never use it, or maybe they'll use it like I do at work to be a one connection for a dock, which is kind of cool if I just wish it was more reliable.
John:
But external GPUs is certainly a feature, and if they didn't support it, it would be incredibly wasteful.
John:
So I think it is...
John:
It's definitely a thumbs up to the support for it, but when Apple itself chooses to talk about it on the iMac Pro, it strikes me as Apple itself highlighting the weaknesses of an entirely sealed, completely unupgradable device.
John:
pro mac i mean maybe it's not highlighting the weakness maybe saying see it's not a weakness because we have this and you can use it to do that it's like yeah you needed that feature for laptops though this is supposed to be your pro mac like it's fine because we know the mac pro is coming but is the mac pro wasn't coming and they did this demo yes it is the mac pro wasn't coming in this demo it would have just made me so angry i would not say the mac pro is coming until it's here first of all i think i coming we've been burned too many times before no they said 2019 it's happening
Marco:
Yeah, when it arrives, I will exhale on that.
John:
It's a 2019 product.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
What does that mean?
Marco:
And the Mac main is an important part of their lineup, right?
Marco:
Yeah, so anyway.
Marco:
But also, if this does pan out this way, if the Mac Pro does come out sometime and only has these eGPU options as the way to have multiple GPUs or to expand your GPU down the road...
Marco:
If you would have asked me two years ago what I thought of that solution, I would have laughed and said it was stupid, like I do with many things.
Marco:
But as the eGPU boxes are coming out, and as we're seeing benchmarks and tests and applications that are using them, it seems like the performance hit by having the reduced bandwidth of using Thunderbolt 3 instead of a big wide internal slot is not that relevant to actual performance and benchmark results for a lot of apps.
John:
Yeah, it totally depends on the apps, right?
John:
Obviously, they're going to show you benchmarks where it doesn't depend.
John:
And for the most cases, games, an important application, it doesn't matter that much because games are tuned not to do that, right?
John:
Not to constantly be shipping things back and forth to the GPU because that's just bad for frame rates and everything.
John:
But there are applications where...
John:
you would take a hit where that is the actual constraint and external ones would kill you.
John:
I don't particularly mind if it has external ones, but if external is the only option for both upgrades and expansions, that is terrible, right?
John:
If it's the only option for expansion, fine.
John:
But if the internal one can be upgraded, that covers so many use cases.
John:
Because new GPUs come out every year.
John:
If every year you can buy a new GPU, that would extend the life of your Mac tremendously.
John:
And if it can only ever hold one and the other ones have to be external, fine.
John:
Like, you know, presumably it would, it would, you'd get the benefit of it being small, like in exchange for that.
John:
Like I can, I can see that kind of trade off.
John:
Which nobody's asking for.
John:
yeah i mean like i am the cheese graders are really really big i wouldn't complain about a smaller computer that can only hold one gpu right um and as you said the external ones in many use cases are great but you you know saddling you with a pretty good at the time of introduction unupgradable gpu inside your supposed pro mac is just not acceptable like that's what the iMac pro is for great you've made that computer make a different one now
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Casey:
Some name writes, and that is actually the name they went by.
Casey:
Do you think iOS 12 will see the smallest or slowest adoption because teens will not like the new parental functionality?
Casey:
So if you recall, screen time, if you're on a family share plan or whatever it's called, a family account, it will let the parents see the screen time reports for the children and even set quotas and things or whatever they're calling them, app limits or whatever it is.
Casey:
So that you can only use YouTube for an hour a day or something along those lines.
Casey:
So do we think that that will slow adoption?
Casey:
I mean, probably a little, but I would be surprised if it does so appreciably.
Casey:
But that's just me, and I don't have kids that would be afflicted by this.
Casey:
So maybe we should turn to John first.
Casey:
John, do you think that your kids are aware of any of this happening?
Casey:
And do you think that if they were aware of it, that they would be reticent to upgrade?
John:
So the question is, do you think it will see the smallest slash slowest adoption?
John:
Implying my read on that is saying it will see slower adoption than iOS 11 or 10 or 9.
John:
It will be the slowest adoption ever.
John:
And I think the answer to that is definitely no.
John:
Mostly because...
John:
Kids who would be affected by this functionality tend not to control when their thing gets upgraded.
John:
I know my kids don't know what iOS is or what an iOS upgrade is, and I manage this aspect of their devices for them.
John:
And if you are a parent who's going to enable this, surely you also have enough control over their devices to upgrade them to get this feature.
John:
I think iOS 12 will see... If trends continue, I think iOS 12 will see amazing adoption because I think the word will get out, hey...
John:
try the new ios for a change it makes your device feel faster right that if that remains true and that word gets out people will be much more uh you know anxious to upgrade than they were with 11 they'll be like well my phone has been crap and they say this upgrade might help it i'll try it right and it's not nothing that apple can say that'll do it it'll have to just be word of mouth from people who do the upgrade and see the beneficial result and 11 really has been laggy
John:
Because of the, you know, the throttling and just general, you know, people being nervous about the upgrade and like sort of the word of mouth not being good at it.
John:
So I'm pretty optimistic about iOS 12 adoption.
John:
I don't think the parental features will hurt it in any measurable way.
Marco:
of amazed if a lot of people even knew about this feature anytime soon you know new ios features you know we we we all who like follow apple this closely and listen to the podcast and talk about apple this closely like we all know about this stuff right after it's announced but how many of us are even going to remember that this stuff is there in september you know let alone like and you know when you're running the beta you see like it's not very well emphasized it's not even on by default i had to just turn it on on my own ipad because i'm like oh i wonder what applications i'm using on my ipad and i went to the screen and the whole feature was off
John:
i was reminded of speaking of the uh the difference between the people who follow apple closely and the people who don't really care that much uh someone at work was complaining that they had got a new laptop they're like these new laptops only have two usbc ports on them and that's it they're just learning now they got a 13 inch right i mentioned this was in slack i mentioned you know apple makes a model with just one they couldn't believe it and all that engineering effort that they're trying to get out of thunderbolt 3 to make those all g all these gpus work
Marco:
And one of those ports is always just being used for power.
John:
Yeah, I didn't want to go into USB-C versus Thunderbolt 3 and being taken up by power.
John:
But like things that we, you know, if you follow Apple closely and we're talking about things that aren't even released that most people find out about things.
John:
When they have occasion to get a new Apple device or when they run the upgrade.
John:
The thing about OS upgrades is, yeah, they probably won't see the features, but Apple pushes those so hard on iOS devices that, you know, it's a war of attrition against the dialogues that keep nagging you.
John:
And that's why I think the word of mouth will be essential to, like...
John:
asking around their friends did you do the upgrade yeah my phone's nagging me too and if you hear from them yeah i did it and either i did it and it's fine or i did it and my phone feels faster that's going to make them press the button way faster than the ios 11 thing of like i did it and it's making my phone weird i do kind of love the idea of like teenagers like hoarding like an iphone 4s so they can keep the os that lets them watch as much youtube as they want yeah that is pretty funny well you know this is
John:
Apple's software tools are not the best or the main avenue for parents setting limits on kids.
John:
It's just another tool in the tool chest, and if you use it, fine.
John:
But you can just take your devices away from your kids.
John:
You're the boss of them.
Marco:
Can you imagine, like, you know, like, you know, when we were growing up, the fear was that your parents would, like, find some, you know, lift up your mattress and find, like, adult magazines or, like, alcohol or pot or something.
Marco:
We're going to, like, lift up our kid's mattress and find an iPhone 5 running YouTube.
John:
Can't hide it.
John:
I can see everything connected to my Wi-Fi network.
John:
That's true.
John:
This is such an inversion because when I was a kid,
John:
I had to help my parents work the computer that they bought for me.
John:
In the house, I was the one who knew the most about that computer forever from the day we got any kind of computer.
John:
It didn't matter.
John:
And now, with my kids, I continue to be the one in the house who knows the most about every computing device that we have because they don't care about computers.
John:
It's like me being super into the analog telephone system when I was a kid.
Yeah.
Casey:
As a quick aside, when I was at WWDC, I don't remember whose it was, but I had held a 13-inch MacBook Pro non-touch bar for the first time.
Casey:
I'd seen them before, but I don't think I'd ever... MacBook Escape.
Casey:
The MacBook Escape.
Casey:
Thank you.
Marco:
They have a name, and it sucks, so it's called the MacBook Escape.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So I'd forgotten that.
Casey:
The Escape really is not that much bigger and not that much heavier than my beloved Adorable.
Casey:
And man, that one more port, that one more port was looking so good.
Casey:
It was looking so good.
Marco:
And that bigger screen.
Casey:
And the bigger screen, eh.
Casey:
For me, anyway.
Casey:
For me.
Casey:
I'm not saying that's true for everyone.
Marco:
But for me... I find it makes a nice difference.
Marco:
I also find that ergonomically, the 13-inch just fits better on my lap without sinking between my legs.
Marco:
And I like the additional proportions for the trackpad spacing.
Marco:
I find the 13 just feels way better for me.
Marco:
And whenever Apple does release laptops that I like again...
Marco:
I'm probably going to get whatever the equivalent is of the MacBook Escape in that lineup because it's such a great size.
Marco:
And especially now that I'm carting a desktop back and forth in the summertime.
Casey:
Yeah, I was surprised by how similar it was to my Adorable.
Casey:
And I would probably still make the same decision today in buying an Adorable over the 13.
Casey:
No, you wouldn't.
Casey:
I think you had said this, Marco.
Casey:
Like, if...
Casey:
ultimate portability is not your number one priority, barring any other priority than the 13-inch MacBook Pro without the touch bar, the MacBook Escape.
Casey:
That is probably the best all-around laptop that I can think of in Apple's lineup right now.
Casey:
And yes, I know you can still buy your beloved 2015 model, Marco, but I'm saying amongst the things that aren't three years old, I think the Escape is officially the best all-arounder in my personal opinion.
Marco:
Yeah, I think I agree.
Marco:
If you exclude the old models, I think I agree.
Marco:
The only thing is only having those two ports really kills me.
Marco:
Like when I did have it, I was very happy with it in most other regards, except...
Marco:
It really did suck to only have two ports.
Casey:
Imagine having only one, Marco.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
And honestly, you said if you were doing it again, you'd probably still buy the 12-inch.
Marco:
I bet you wouldn't for that reason.
Marco:
I bet you would want to double your port capacity going to the 13.
Marco:
But ultimately...
Marco:
if I were forced to go buy a new Apple laptop today that I wanted for general portability, I would probably get the 13-inch touch bar only because, even though I don't like the touch bar, and even though it gets the worst battery life of the whole lineup, only because I really like having those four ports when I travel.
Marco:
And I end up, like, I did travel with a two-port one,
Marco:
It was a pain very frequently, and I really do enjoy having the extra ports.
Marco:
So if they had one that had four ports and no touch bar, I would really prefer that, but that's not an option.
Marco:
So I think I would get the middle 13-inch width touch bar thing just for the ports alone, even though, again, I would rather not have the touch bar.
Marco:
But hopefully, I really hope that whatever update was supposed to happen to the laptops this month and didn't, whenever that comes out,
Marco:
I really hope that they resolve some of these issues and give us better choices.
Marco:
Not necessarily more choices or not giving us everything that we're asking for because we know that's not going to happen.
Marco:
I just want there to be better choices because right now...
Marco:
there are so many like gotchas about the about the laptops and this is like i heard jason's not talking about this on upgrade this is a really bad time to have a not very recommendable laptop lineup because summertime is when a whole bunch of people buy laptops to go off to college like if you ask somebody in the know what laptop should i buy right now from apple like what would you possibly say to them
Casey:
I would definitely say the 13-inch, and then it's your choice whether or not you want the touch bar.
Casey:
But that's what I would recommend.
Casey:
And I love this Adorable so much.
Casey:
And to me, ultimate portability is the number one priority, which is why I think I would stick with it.
Casey:
But I am definitely getting ever more annoyed about only having one port.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
Again, just bringing this back around, I think that we are on...
Marco:
on the upswing for mac hardware i think there was a bad period apple realized that and made some course corrections and that's why we got things like the imac pro that's why we got the mac pro eventually possibly maybe and the display that will possibly maybe go along with it hopefully um that's why we have things you know efforts going on like marzipan and you know trying to get the mac software game you know back back in shape again and
Marco:
I hope they're on the upswing.
Marco:
It does seem like that.
Marco:
You know, Apple's pretty quiet about this kind of stuff.
Marco:
You can't really tell until stuff comes out usually.
Marco:
But it does seem like they're back on the right track.
Marco:
But that's still only a loose theory and loose optimism until we see what happens next with the laptops.
John:
Speaking of the laptops and the ports, do either one of you have USB-C thumb drives?
John:
no no do they exist yes yes they also have some that have like you can like you can pull out either connector like somehow like they have both an a and a c plug on them and you can like rotate them or something yeah that's weird but yeah i would i would i would like one of those i should i should just get one even just taking pictures off my camera i just hate having the dongles even for that simple kind of connection
Casey:
I do have a SD card reader that's USB-C, but I do not have any thumb drives that are USB-C compatible.
Casey:
And I don't remember what it came with.
Casey:
I want to say it was a Google phone charger, a USB-C Google phone charger that was dirt cheap that I think I picked up for the Switch, actually.
Casey:
And it has a itty, itty bitty USB-C to USB-A like converter, if you will.
Casey:
I wouldn't even necessarily call it a dongle because, you know, there's no like little cord and like a little blob at the end of it.
Casey:
It's just the thing.
Casey:
It's almost like those nubbins that those maniacs that use non-Bluetooth mice have.
Casey:
You know what I'm talking about, John?
Casey:
Have you ever seen one of those?
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
um for the listeners i was yelling use non-bluetooth mice my mice plug in with a cord but uh but the advantages of the nubbin that is even worse i i just like john said i was i was giving him a hard time on slack because uh he had shown a picture of his work laptop or that's not my work laptop of somebody else's it was the person who was complaining about having two ports that's who it was
Marco:
there you go so anyway so it had one of those little nubbins for an rf trans transmitter transceiver whatever for a for a mouse and i was i was lamenting that to my eyes i don't understand why anyone would do that and not a bluetooth mouse but be that as it may well for the same reason that my keyboard has one of those little nubbins because this is the keyboard i like and it happens to only come like this so you know when somebody has a mouse that they like it happens to have an rf dongle thing you know that's that's the reality yeah my argument was that the the nubbins
John:
that offer a superior experience to bluetooth in many respects like that it is a target that bluetooth has not yet caught up to because those the nubbins from the good manufacturers right you plug them into your usb port and that's it and they just work there's no drivers and there's nothing to configure there's nothing to pair there's no waiting for it to activate it's like practically you plug it in boom you're ready to go and the mouse starts moving and that is a pretty amazing computer experience that
John:
doesn't exist for most things involving any kind of peripheral but does exist with these stupid nubbins yes they hog your port yes it's dumb yes bluetooth is in many ways superior protocol but they they've just worked they've just worked for years and the battery life on these these you know
John:
mice with the little rf send and receive in their proprietary protocol is amazing i was saying that like the batteries in my my wife's wireless mouse i think we changed it after three years like just non-rechargeable battery three years right you just don't think about it the oven is there it's small you never seen it just works all the time and bluetooth is great and has many advantages but it does it doesn't yet match that kind of experience so i understand why regular people who don't care about bluetooth versus whatever are
John:
are married to their nubbins, both because, like Marco said, maybe they just like that mouse when it comes with a nubbin, but also because of all the things in their computing life, the nubbin always works.
John:
Like, it probably works more reliable than plugging an HDMI cable, which is sometimes flaky.
John:
Like, if you have the nubbin and you have the mouse and you plug the nubbin in, your mouse will work and that's it.
Casey:
Have nubbin, Will Mouse.
Casey:
I don't even know why I brought that up.
Casey:
Doesn't matter.
Casey:
We should get back to Ask ATP.
Casey:
Ashley A. writes, are Kindle still the best way to read e-books?
Casey:
The new Apple Books is getting good reviews.
Casey:
My Kindle is old and I don't have an iPad.
Casey:
Would I be happy to, quote unquote, upgrade to an iPad or do you think owning both is warranted?
Casey:
I probably only read five books a year, if I'm honest.
Casey:
I have Stephen Hackett's hand-me-down Kindle.
Casey:
I couldn't even tell you off the top of my head what flavor it is.
Casey:
I don't use it that terribly often because it is not often I am reading an electronic book.
Casey:
Typically, I'll just get something from the library.
Casey:
Yes, I am aware you can do that on a Kindle as well, but I don't often go that route.
Casey:
Anyway, when I do use the Kindle, it is far and away a much better reading experience in my personal opinion.
Casey:
It's lighter.
Casey:
The text is easier to read.
Casey:
There are buttons on this particular model to turn, I think there are anyway, to go back and forward a page.
Casey:
Even if there aren't, it's just easier to go back and forward a page.
Casey:
That's actually not a given.
Casey:
Yeah, I forget now that I say that.
Marco:
Most of the Kindles either don't have buttons or have really weird buttons.
Marco:
There are very few that have like regular decent buttons.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But the point I'm trying to drive at is it's backlit, this particular one.
Casey:
It really is really, really nice.
Casey:
And the Kindles aren't terribly expensive.
Casey:
So if you are serious about reading books, in my personal opinion, I would either get both or stick with your old Kindle or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
But that being said, if I had to choose only one, since I, too, only probably read about five books a year or something like that, if I had to choose one, I'd probably choose an iPad.
Casey:
But if you can find yourself with a Kindle in your hands, I definitely recommend it.
Casey:
I think we started with John first last time.
Casey:
So, Marco, as the once owner of about 45 Kindles, any thoughts on this?
Marco:
I actually recently discovered I still own one.
Marco:
I found it wedged on my closet shelf.
Marco:
Whoops.
Marco:
It was like holding up a shelf behind some flashes.
Marco:
But yes, I haven't shipped that one to John yet.
Marco:
But no, honestly, I think I mostly agree with you.
Marco:
You can read on an iPad.
Marco:
Many people do.
Marco:
You can read on a Mac, for that matter, or on your phone, for that matter.
Marco:
And many people do those things.
Marco:
Well, not a lot of people read on their Macs, but many people read on their phones.
Marco:
That's a thing.
Marco:
I used to make an app that helped you do that.
Marco:
But ultimately, all of these devices, the phones, the tablets, the Macs, are filled with
Marco:
Outright distractions in the form of notifications and things like that coming in.
Marco:
And also just the temptation of even if you don't have a notification coming in, you kind of always know that like this device, you can just move your finger and you can be in something else.
Marco:
And you can, oh, let me just go check the email.
Marco:
Let me just go check the social feed.
Marco:
Let me just go check this thing.
Marco:
And you just kind of get in this habit of cycling through.
Marco:
It's hard to concentrate on reading a book for a lot of us, myself included, when you're on a device that can do all those other things also.
Marco:
Because the mode your brain is in with that device is just constantly bouncing between different temptations.
Marco:
So while technically an iPad could do this, I would say a Kindle is a much better reading experience...
Marco:
not because of most aspects of the kindle itself you know you could argue and people have argued about things like whether the screen is reflective or transmissive and now all the ebook readers are backlit by default all the time so they're all emitting light anyway so that that arguments and you can turn it off but it's you know very few people do um so that argument is kind of out the window and
Marco:
uh these screens on e-readers are kind of muddy you know e-ink screens are a really cool technology but kind of a a fundamentally slightly flawed technology they're always like a little bit messy it never is like a perfect transition between black and white and stuff like that there's the weird flash on on every so often it has to do that for a page refresh stuff like that but ultimately what makes kindles awesome is
Marco:
is for reading is that they really can't do anything else that's it they are only for reading you are you know just like a book just like a real book like if you're holding a real book you can't uh you know you can't like switch over to twitter in your book or or get notified of of some you know special that some store is running because they're spamming you with push notifications like while you're trying to read
Marco:
So for replicating that part of a book while also having the benefits of electronic book distribution, so things like not having to carry a bunch of paper with you, being able to download new books really fast, saving the environment, etc., the Kindle is really great for all those things.
Marco:
And if the Kindle was $400 like it was originally, I would say, yeah, you know what, if you don't care that much about reading, don't bother.
Marco:
But now, Kindles are so cheap.
Marco:
I just checked.
Marco:
The base model, I believe, is $80.
Marco:
Yeah, $80 for the base model.
Marco:
And they kind of last forever.
Marco:
There are advantages to bigger and better Kindles, but not that major of advantages.
Marco:
And paper doesn't change that often.
Marco:
And these devices that simulate paper, therefore, don't really need to be updated ever, as long as they still work.
Marco:
So not only does the base model start at $80, and there's not much reason to get the higher-end models for most people, but also you can even pick up a used one for probably under $30.
Marco:
They can be so cheap because they've been around forever.
Marco:
They've been really cheap for a long time.
Marco:
They're plentiful.
Marco:
So if you don't even want to spend $80, fine.
Marco:
Don't spend $80.
Marco:
Spend $40 on a used one.
Marco:
It'll be just as good for reading as any of the new ones.
Marco:
I would say if you want to read a book in an electronic format, if you can afford a Kindle, which is easier and easier every year, get a Kindle.
Marco:
If not, if you only really want to have one device to manage and to charge and to sync and everything else, I respect that.
Marco:
If you have really good self-control, you can read on iOS devices.
Marco:
But I find it way nicer and easier to read on dedicated devices, either Kindles or actual books.
John:
i slightly disagree with marco's characterization of that as very good what'd you say very good self-control or really good self-control uh i think you just have average self-control it's probably fine on an ipad but i think you're underselling uh the advantages the particular advantages to reading of a kindle and those are yes the screen technology and it doesn't matter that the backlight's there the key issue is
John:
bright sunlight if you're reading on the beach oh yeah it's a bright sun that's a good one you are screwed with an ipad right your ipad will get too hot it will overheat it's a complicated device you won't be able to see anything the screen technology is the biggest differentiating factor and the one side effect of that screen technology is the second biggest differentiating factor which is crazy battery life if you just want to have it in your bag and just not worry about charging it
John:
the kindle is for you those are the two big advantages and the third one of not being distracting or whatever but those those two are the reason why a lot of people who are very heavy readers are dedicated to the kindle because those advantages cannot be matched by any you know ios device with a with an oled screen at any price you just can't match them right
John:
You're never going to get literal all day, 24-hour battery life out of an iPad, and you will not be able to see that screen in bright sunlight, and it will be annoying to you to not be able to see it.
John:
And it's reflective, and your thing will overheat on the beach, and so it's bad.
John:
On the flip side of that, though, it's like, okay, so if you're a power reader and you read lots of books, you should definitely get a Kindle, right?
John:
Well, the flip side of that is it depends on how...
John:
it depends on how modern your reading habits are so for example if you read a book and you always like to look up words that you don't know the kindle can do that but the experience of interacting in any way with an e-ink screen is gross and annoying and slow and just not nice whereas if you're in an environment where the ipad is an acceptable reading device
John:
is way easier to quickly look up words it will the display and the interaction of doing that will be nicer similarly for following hyperlinks jumping around uh you know zooming in on images that may be in the book the more the book your book experience is richer than just what a printed page would be the more the features of the ipad come into their own so in many ways the ipad is the quote-unquote high-end reading device as long as you're not in bright sunlight and don't have to worry about battery life um
John:
So like Marco said, because the Kindle is so cheap, that's kind of the tiebreaker.
John:
And it's like, well, why are we even talking about this?
John:
An iPad is a bazillion dollars.
John:
Just get a Kindle.
John:
You should just have one anyway just to have it.
John:
Because in the situations where it excels, there is no substitute and they're cheap enough that you should have one.
John:
So I would totally recommend...
John:
you know buying one get a cheap one find one used or whatever just having one is worth it and the other thing that i don't want to mention too much because i don't even remember if this is still a real thing i doubt either you two know either uh the kindles used to come with free cell network access to download books is that still true
Marco:
I think that's an option on some of them.
Marco:
It hasn't been the default for quite some time.
John:
Well, back in the day, that was amazing.
John:
It was basically you'd buy a Kindle and then you never had to pay for a cellular bill or anything.
John:
And if you wanted to buy a book from the beach...
John:
and download it through cell access you could do that and that was a pretty amazing experience to just to not have to worry about it and to always have a net connection that you can't use for anything useful but you can sure download a book with it it is indeed still an option it's not it isn't by default but on everything but the lowest end model it is available
Marco:
um i would also say like when when weighing like kindle versus ipad these are also very different physical form factors especially if you don't consider the ipad mini because it's ancient and seems it would be ridiculous to buy an ipad mini today based on the current pricing and model that's still what it still weighs twice as much as any kindle probably right exactly like the ipad is much is a much bigger and heavier and more fragile and more expensive device and less water resistant yeah
Marco:
The highest end Kindle, the Oasis, which admittedly is expensive, it's $250, it's also really nice, and it's still cheaper than any iPad, is also fully waterproof.
Marco:
You can drop it in water, and it's fine.
Marco:
If you're doing a lot of reading either in the bathtub or at the beach or in a pool or something like that, that could actually be relevant.
Marco:
Kindles are just more comfortable to hold in your hand for long periods.
Marco:
Holding an iPad for a long time to read is kind of uncomfortable, especially now as I keep getting...
Marco:
a little bit bigger, a little bit heavier, and as the iPad mini becomes less and less of a sensible option.
Marco:
So really for reading, I would actually say a Kindle is by far the best option.
Marco:
I would not say the iPad is the high-end reading device.
Marco:
I would say the iPad is the browsing device.
John:
It's the high end device if you're going to use ebook specific features, like the more features of ebooks that your ebooks have and the more of them you want to use, like say taking notes in the margin with your Apple Pencil and stuff like there are many things like as you start using those ebook features, they're just not possible.
John:
You're not taking notes in the margin.
John:
You're not.
John:
uh you know quickly managing highlights and seeing comments on communal highlights and like there's all sorts of things that yes you can do them on the kindle but you just don't you just don't want to touch that screen you don't want to do anything having an involving ui or anything involving navigation because everything is slow and janky and the screen flashes and it looks gross and it's just bad um so if of all conditions are right and you want to use those kind of interactive features there's no substitute for the ipad but i think most people are heavy readers don't do that maybe i'm underestimating how much people highlight
John:
And maybe I'm overestimating how annoying it is to try to do those things on a Kindle.
John:
But my experience is I just stop using those features because I don't want to touch that screen with anything.
Casey:
All righty.
Casey:
Finally, Josh Hunt writes, curious to hear what you think would have happened in the alternate universe where Apple bought Bungie.
Casey:
What would or would not have happened to the Halo franchise?
Casey:
Gaming on the Mac?
Casey:
Destiny with three question marks.
Casey:
John, who is Bungie and what is Josh Hunt talking about?
John:
Who is Bungie?
Casey:
I know, but the listeners may not.
John:
Everybody knows who Bungie is.
John:
Do they, though?
John:
Bungie was a Mac software developer back in the days when Mac software developers were few and far between, and they made pretty amazing games.
John:
that allowed Mac users to brag to everyone else that you don't have this game on your platform and people might actually care.
John:
Maybe not, but they might because the games were unique and very cool and very interesting, uh, and did a lot of things on the Mac that weren't as easily possible, especially in days before the internet, like, uh,
John:
network-connected first-person games with physics-based fun in them.
John:
Mac users were doing that with Marathon over Apple proprietary networking long before the internet existed.
John:
So eventually, you know, Bungie had made a big splash at Macworld Expo.
John:
They were on stage.
John:
Then they were showing their new game called Halo, and they were showing it on a Mac.
John:
And everyone was excited because Halo looked amazing.
John:
And Mac gamers were excited because here was a game coming to the Mac.
John:
They demonstrated on the Mac for the first time, and boy, won't that be great.
John:
And then Microsoft bought them, which at the time was a much bigger blow than you might imagine in today's world.
John:
But back then, Microsoft was very definitely the enemy.
John:
And they went and bought our beloved top-tier Mac game developer.
John:
halo still came out for the mac many years later in a very bad port not done by bungie uh halo went on to become the you know franchise that made the xbox a going concern and you know the rest is history and eventually uh bungie left microsoft and left halo behind and made destiny yada yada so if apple had bought them i'm assuming they mean if apple had bought them at the same time microsoft bought them like instead of going to microsoft they went to apple and
John:
i think apple would have screwed it up because i think the apple then and the apple today do not really understand games and gamers i think they would have had a misguided notion that if we buy this game developer it will help boost whatever product we're pushing at that time like oh buy an iMac and get the cool new bungee game or whatever thing they would have in their mind of how it's supposed to work and
John:
And it wouldn't end up working that way because the iMac would have a crappy GPU or it wouldn't help sell anything because most people don't care about this game.
John:
And they wouldn't understand that this is not a general purpose thing and that there'd be a mismatch between cool bungee game and customers we want to sell our products to and gamers.
John:
And the Venn diagram would not overlap the way they think it would be.
John:
And they would be disappointed and disillusioned.
John:
And they'd be like, well, whatever.
John:
Now we've got this game developer online.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe we can steal some of their employees to work on like the quartz backend for Mac OS 10.
John:
The rest of them can make a new version of the game.
John:
If they want, it would just would have fizzled.
John:
I think there never would have been a destiny.
John:
I think Apple would not have supported them the way Microsoft did through all those generations of Xbox, uh, because they didn't have a reason to, because the app and Microsoft poured tons of money into them and realized this is our meal ticket.
John:
This is what, this is what makes Xbox possible.
John:
It's what makes us possible to make a second Xbox.
John:
Um,
John:
that wouldn't have happened with Apple.
John:
So it actually would have been worse for Bungie if Apple bought them than if Microsoft bought them.
John:
And in general, if you look at the history books, it would have been worse for Bungie if nobody bought them too because they were not in a good financial situation and Microsoft kind of saved their bacon.
John:
But the best of all possible worlds would have been Bungie that remains independent and had a magical pot of gold that someone gave them that allowed them to stay in business and continue to pay their employees while making the Halo game they always wanted to make.
John:
And, you know, not having to leave that IP behind with Microsoft and being able to connect it directly to Destiny instead of connecting it indirectly to Destiny through clever marketing slogans that only really old school Mac gamers get.
Casey:
I didn't even know that that was a thing.
Casey:
The slogans.
Casey:
Are there examples that you can think of?
John:
uh pathways out of darkness was how it was one of the title cards on the first uh reveal of destiny and that is a play on pathways into darkness which was one of their was it their very first or one of the very early games for the mac which was itself connected to marathon which was itself connected to halo and is connected to destiny only in ways the lawyers can't prove all right thanks to our sponsors this week squarespace rxbar and aftershocks and we'll talk to you next week
Marco:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes At atp.fm
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
so casey why is there a jeep wrangler in your garage well about that so i have a jeep
Casey:
Temporarily.
Casey:
I have not done anything with my BMW as yet.
Casey:
It is still broken.
Casey:
It is parked in my driveway.
Casey:
It has been driven a couple of times since the diagnosis before WWDC that it is ailing.
Casey:
And so I asked my dad, or actually dad kind of volunteered, to let me borrow his car on
Casey:
in the interim between now and when we're doing a little bit of traveling.
Casey:
And then subsequent to that traveling, we will be figuring out a permanent car scenario.
Casey:
But he just so happens to have a Corvette Z06, a Prius Prime, and a Jeep Wrangler.
Casey:
unfortunately he didn't let me borrow the corvette which which would have been a lot of fun but difficult for car seats but he did let me borrow the wrangler and i gotta tell you it is very different than the bmw but i do like it quite a lot in fact uh just earlier tonight i took the top down it is a soft top so it is a two-door soft top it is a 2012 model i believe
Casey:
And so I took the top down earlier tonight because it is supposed to be a rain free day tomorrow.
Casey:
It's going to be a game time decision whether or not the doors will come off, which has already happened once in the three or four days I've been borrowing it.
Casey:
I got to tell you, top down motoring, very cool.
Casey:
Doors off motoring, super cool.
Casey:
And I put a picture in my Instagram stories, which I, yeah, that was the only place I posted it.
Casey:
But let me see if I can find it real quick.
Casey:
Where's my phone?
Casey:
But it said it was a warning sticker that was on the headliner of the soft top.
Casey:
Okay, here it is.
Casey:
It said the following.
Casey:
Warning, the top and doors on this vehicle are designed only for protection against the elements.
Casey:
Do not rely on the top and doors to contain occupants within the vehicle or to protect against injury during an accident.
Casey:
Wear seatbelts at all times.
Casey:
which I thought was kind of scary and also awesome all at the same time.
Casey:
Not particularly awesome.
John:
Remember when I told you that side impact, like just look at those doors, you're like, oh, it's fine.
John:
They had to pass the same crash test.
John:
This thing has a warning label telling you the doors do nothing.
Marco:
yeah that is bad you're basically in a motorcycle basically obviously with doors off you know you're not protected but with doors on it's it's pointless honestly like you know as as we get older and we have kids and everything i i think the the natural uh thing for us to do is become more risk averse can you square that with this
Marco:
It's not as dangerous as buying a motorcycle, but it's not that.
Marco:
Oh, it's not even in the ballpark.
Marco:
But it's on the motorcycle spectrum.
Marco:
So is a car.
Marco:
No, not for safety.
John:
If you get hit on the side by another car and you're on a motorcycle, you have big problems.
John:
By another car and you're in a Jeep, you still have some pretty big problems.
John:
By another car and your giant Volvo SUV, you're probably okay as long as the speed is slow.
John:
Like, there's a big gap between your vulnerability.
John:
Motorcycle, Jeep, Volvo.
John:
Yeah.
John:
There's big gaps between those things.
John:
Or a car with doors.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like, the Jeep is not... It's like you have two ends of the spectrum.
Marco:
You have...
Marco:
bulky modern car with you know modern reinforced everything on one side on the other side you have motorcycle slash standing the jeep is not on the car side of that it is somewhere in the middle between those two and it's not even that close to the car side of it yeah where the bumper of the other car can literally touch your body directly because there is nothing there because you took the doors off and even if the doors are there all they do is serve as shrapnel to jam into your body because they perform no protective function whatsoever oh my word
Casey:
So you're not in support of my Jeep idea.
Casey:
Fine.
John:
I see how it is.
John:
Jeep Grand Cherokee probably has pretty good side impact protection.
John:
Oh, that's not really a Jeep.
Casey:
Excuse me.
Casey:
The IIHS safety rating is M, which I'm going to assume is median.
Casey:
Oh, no, it's marginal.
Casey:
Never mind.
John:
M for mature.
John:
M for motorcycle.
Casey:
No, it's for marginal.
Casey:
Apparently, you big jerks.
John:
Marginal.
Casey:
Front was good.
Casey:
Is marginal the worst it gets?
Casey:
Side, no.
Casey:
There's also poor.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
That's motorcycle.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
No, it says this is small overlap front, driver side, good.
Casey:
Passenger side, not rated.
Casey:
Moderate overlap front, good.
Casey:
Side, moderate.
John:
Well, the thing is, those tests are very regimented and only test one specific kind of impact that the manufacturers know that they're going to be subjected to at a particular angle, a particular height, a particular force.
John:
Real accidents are not like that.
John:
Real accidents sometimes is the grill of a Cadillac Escalade coming into your shoulder blades.
John:
Like it's not the world is not as neat and tidy as that.
John:
And so those tests are partially designed to say, look, we understand the door goes across the entire car, but we're only going to hit it at this height here.
John:
And we think that's a good stand in because it's a reasonable place to hit it.
John:
But.
John:
for the jeep understanding that okay there is nothing structurally protecting you in this area and it just so happens that the side impact thing hits on this area where there is structure protecting you you better hope someone hits just right in that area because if they don't they're just going directly into you or you know your occupants or whatever so i'm not i'm not a fan of of that car in terms of safety
Casey:
But anyway, but it's a lot of fun.
Casey:
It is big.
Casey:
It is slow.
Casey:
It is heavy.
Casey:
It is loud.
Casey:
Oh, is it loud?
Casey:
And I've been in a, so again, this is a 2012.
Casey:
The chat room is very concerned about the color of the car.
Casey:
Dad's first Jeep was white.
Casey:
His second Jeep was white.
Casey:
This one is red with a black soft top.
Casey:
In any case, the brand new Jeeps, the JL Wranglers, are considerably quieter on the inside than this one is.
Casey:
This one is a JK Wrangler, which is a model designation, and it is fairly loud.
Casey:
It is luxurious for a Jeep Wrangler, which is to say it is not terribly luxurious at all.
Casey:
But it is a tremendous amount of fun.
Casey:
And it also has what they call the Sunrider soft top, which means...
Casey:
And the hard top has something vaguely similar to this, or maybe it's like T-tops in the hard top.
Casey:
But in the Sunrider soft top, what that means is you can pull to, you can unpop the mounts that are basically in front of the driver and the passenger and just flop the front, I don't know, foot, foot and a half of the top back.
Casey:
And so you've kind of created almost a sunroof or you're almost really a target top for yourself without having to remove any windows or fold the actual soft top down or anything like that.
Casey:
But, yeah, I put the top down, like I said earlier tonight.
Casey:
That took me 10-ish minutes, give or take a little bit.
Casey:
And most of that was spent trying to finish the unzipping process of the rear window, which is plastic.
Casey:
It's just, you know, eight years on or however long we've had this car, seven years on.
Casey:
It's just a little difficult to unzip.
Casey:
I have seen, again, the JL Wrangler soft top is much, much, much nicer, much, much easier to use.
Casey:
And this was about 10 minutes to put it down.
Casey:
It would be roughly the same to put it back up.
Casey:
So I am still sitting here now thinking about getting a, uh, a Wrangler.
Casey:
If, if I end up replacing the BMW, which is the plan.
Casey:
Um, and that being said in mid July, uh,
Casey:
It sounds like I am getting my next press car, which I think I've told you to and I will not share on the show at this time.
Casey:
But in mid-July, I should be getting another press car.
Casey:
And that press car is within the realm of affordable in a way that the Alfa Romeos very much were not.
Casey:
and thus that might change everything in my whole wrangler idea because this press car is something that is small fast and not exceedingly expensive so it has doors and has doors minor detail yeah minor detail so might include some safety it arguably will include at least a little bit of safety features so anyway so uh that is not 100 committed but it is tentatively committed and
Casey:
So that will be my first real act as a unemployed fellow is to do the Casey on cars on that automobile.
Casey:
So look forward to that, hopefully at the end of July, by the time I get the car, film, edit, et cetera.
Casey:
But yeah, but let me tell you, if nothing else is a distraction, it's fun as crap having the Wrangler.
Casey:
I could see myself living with it, especially since I know how much nicer the JLs are over the JKs.
Casey:
But yeah, it is not as safe as some other cars on the road, for sure.
Marco:
Like any of them.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.