Not Unreliable Enough
Casey:
So yes, it's been a long time since we've talked to each other, which is weird.
Casey:
Not good, not bad, just weird.
Casey:
I miss you.
Marco:
Yeah, it's kind of unusual.
Marco:
Especially, you know, when we were planning all this, we had no idea that there would actually be pretty relevant news.
Marco:
In the meantime.
John:
Whoops.
John:
It worked out perfectly because if we recorded a regular time, we would have just missed it.
John:
But now we're just coming in at the right time.
John:
And not only has it happened, but we've also had the follow up on it already.
John:
So we'll get to it.
John:
And in fact, Casey and I did our homework.
John:
We did.
John:
It's not time for that yet.
John:
But yes, I know you both did very well.
Marco:
Thanks, Dad.
Marco:
Can we get a sticker on the wall?
Casey:
On our charts?
Casey:
I want my gold star, damn it.
Casey:
A friend of the show, Steve Troughton-Smith, made a fun discovery, what feels like forever ago now.
Casey:
He writes, Here's a fun thing that's kind of significant.
Casey:
The UIKit apps in macOS Mojave are the exact same build as in iOS 12.
Casey:
This suggests that Marzipan apps will be updated in lockstep with iOS and are not some weird fork for the desktop on their own delayed schedule, which has huge implications, writes he.
Casey:
So he also has a screenshot where he's doing a little bit of spelunking, trying to figure out what are the build versions of like voice memos and the home app and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And sure enough, they match, which is interesting.
Casey:
So what I'm curious is how if there's a new release for iOS, like how does that make its way on to Mojave?
Casey:
I guess these are not App Store apps, are they?
Casey:
Because like Shortcuts is an App Store app or will be.
Casey:
But these are caked into the OS.
Casey:
So I'm not exactly sure what the mechanism is for this.
Casey:
Caked?
Casey:
Well, I don't know.
Casey:
Built into.
John:
That sounds delicious.
John:
Baked.
John:
Sorry.
John:
My bad.
John:
That sounds kind of gross because, you know.
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, I read this tweet and I had a different take on it.
John:
Like, I don't like the idea of...
John:
individual applications being tied to os releases because we all know what happens then and you don't get updates for a really long time you only get updates when the os gets updates whereas if the apps are independent you can update the apps when it's appropriate to do the apps and the os when it's appropriate to the os it's interesting that these are of course quote unquote mac apps as in they're meant to run on a mac but they're the os whose build number they're tied with is not the os that they run on which is also weird like i i also don't i mean it's i think it's
John:
good to know that you know they're not a weird uh fork and basically when the ios code base gets updated it's not like you have to wait for the the marzipan version to also get updated like there's enough sharing that it's like oh well they fix there's some bug and they fix it it doesn't just get fixed on ios and then you have to wait a month for it to get fixed in the mac version presumably be fixed in both places but the distribution mechanism as case pointed out is the big question so what does it mean that
John:
the stocks application the marzipan stocks application is updated is basically the same shares enough of the code base that is updated at the same time as the ios stocks application how do you get that on your mac does that mean mac os updates are now synced with ios updates does it mean you get an update in the mac app store i don't know these are all good questions it's trippy
Casey:
On a completely different note, Yono writes in to say, I'm an American living in Germany, and we just recently got a HomePod.
Casey:
I like it a lot, but while Siri is available in many languages, she is still monolingual.
Casey:
They go on to explain, my wife is German and likes to listen to German groups.
Casey:
However, we have Siri set up in English.
Casey:
When we pronounce the names of German groups correctly, Siri cannot understand us.
Casey:
We have to pronounce them in a way an English speaker with zero knowledge of German might try.
Casey:
So like the three of us.
Casey:
It happens the other way around too.
Casey:
German Siri mispronounces English songs as if they were written in German.
Casey:
I also speak Hebrew.
Casey:
Some Hebrew songs in Apple Music have their titles transliterated while others are written using the Hebrew alphabet.
Casey:
So English Siri doesn't know how to read Hebrew.
Casey:
And if a song is playing with a Hebrew title and I ask what's playing, she responds, this is, and then there's silence.
Casey:
Bye.
Casey:
More silence.
Casey:
So Yano continues.
Casey:
It also means I can't ask for these songs by name.
Casey:
I plan on opening some radars.
Marco:
Yeah, this was in response to, we were talking about how one of Siri's great advantages over some of the other voice platforms that's often touted by Apple and its executives and a lot of its fans and defenders is that Siri has really good support for multiple languages and for different locales around the world and everything.
Marco:
But we got this feedback and similar feedback from lots of people basically saying that
Marco:
Siri's multiple language support is maybe overstated or that it becomes really a problem when you mix languages between what you're speaking and what you're speaking about, maybe, or the language of your phone versus the language of other things because of issues like this.
Marco:
I mean...
Marco:
As a monolingual person, I found this quite helpful when I was driving in Canada, driving to Montreal a few years ago with Apple Maps, and it pronounced the names of the French-named streets the way I would pronounce it in my head, as someone who knows zero French, which is hilarious.
Marco:
I'm not going to repeat it now because it would be just embarrassing for me, but it did make it easy to read the street signs when I could hear Siri butchering the names the same way I would, but I could see how this is kind of a big problem happening.
John:
if you actually know multiple languages and you mix and match them with what you're asking siri for or about uh and and it apparently has no good support for mixing languages and the hebrew thing is just embarrassing like yeah that's if it can't if it can't read it at all just substituting silence you know that's probably the worst choice second worst choice would be siri explaining to you what it can't do it's just not good
Casey:
Finally, one of my favorite things about ATP, and I mean this genuinely, is that we have an unbelievable breadth of people that listen to the show.
Casey:
And, you know, you think of what you would expect to be the kind of person who would listen to the show and you would assume like a developer probably on the Apple platforms or something like that.
Casey:
But sure enough, we have a lot of other people that listen to the show.
Casey:
And Ralph Middleton writes in, as an air conditioning expert, training the air conditioner water, which is what Marco was talking about doing, to reduce the noise eliminates the efficiency gains.
Marco:
By drilling a hole in the drain pan of my window air conditioner, yes.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
It eliminates the efficiency gains and it will increase the power usage because the unit has to run longer to cool the room and the system runs at a higher pressure and might also shorten the life of the compressor.
Casey:
So in other words, yeah, it's going to be a little quieter, but don't do this.
Casey:
Finally, Ralph adds, as for John's comments, there's a reason why the HVAC industry has a slang term for these units.
Casey:
We call them, quote, window shakers, quote, which I thought was quite amusing as well.
John:
Someone also sent us a tweet that they just bought the same air conditioner that Marco has.
John:
And it comes with a big yellow warning sticker on the outside of the thing that says, do not drill holes in this air conditioner.
John:
They apparently know it's like a popular thing that people do.
John:
It's the first thing you see when you open the box.
John:
Like, let me open up this box.
John:
Aha.
John:
Why is it time you not to drill holes?
John:
And then like, you know, a day later, you drill in a hole in your air conditioner.
John:
You go, I see why that sticker was there.
John:
I'll take the risk.
John:
It worked great.
Casey:
How can I phrase this delicately?
Casey:
There are many, many, many ways I am... I don't know if envious is the word I'm looking for, but I wish I was more like the two of you guys.
Casey:
But one of the ways I am deeply glad, with respect that I am not like you two, is being deeply offended by any noise that is within three miles of my head.
John:
Spoken like someone with central air.
Casey:
Well, yes, that's true.
John:
When's the last time you've dealt with a window unit?
Casey:
Last time I was at my grandparents, which has admittedly been a few years.
John:
And did it make a horrible shaking?
John:
I don't think you could sleep in the room with the air conditioner.
Casey:
Oh, I've done it many times.
John:
No, like with a really loud, you know, body cladding, base thumping car rattling air conditioner running on and off all night long.
Casey:
Let me give you this one and let's assume that's true, even though I don't think it is.
Casey:
How many fans are allowed in your entertainment center right now, John Syracuse?
John:
I've got more fans in my entertainment center than you do, and you know that.
John:
My television has fans.
John:
My PlayStation has fans.
John:
My TiVo has fans.
John:
All my consoles.
John:
But how many of those... Okay, let me... The TiVo is always on, and the television, of course, is always on.
John:
And the number of fans in my TiVo combined with my television is probably more than the total in your entertainment center.
Casey:
I'm going to pull on this thread because I'm a fool until I can get where I want to get.
Casey:
How many of those fans bother you, though?
Casey:
uh i don't think any of them really oh that's lies john the tv ones maybe a little bit when it's hot but you know oh you lie all i'm saying is that both of you are deep are very deeply offended about these things and there are many ways in which i wish i was more like the two of you and i am glad that this is not one of those ways oh man all right let's move on
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Eero.
Marco:
Finally, Wi-Fi that works.
Marco:
We all know by now that no matter how many antennas you put in the top of a router, no matter what kind of range it advertises, one Wi-Fi router just doesn't cover most people's houses or apartments all the way.
Marco:
Every room, full speed, no dead zones.
Marco:
It's pretty much impossible because you have things like walls and building materials and just shapes of rooms that just make it hard for radio signals to cover everywhere when they're just being broadcast from one point.
Marco:
What you need is a distributed Wi-Fi system that broadcasts Wi-Fi from multiple base stations, all simultaneously, all together, blanketing your home in Wi-Fi.
Marco:
Now, businesses and schools figured this out a long time ago, and they have these enterprise-grade systems that are really expensive and really hard to set up and administer.
Marco:
You basically need to be a network administrator to know how to use them.
Marco:
Eero came out with this wonderful system that brings you that enterprise-grade performance and scalability and coverage of your home.
Marco:
but with incredible ease of use and these nice, beautiful, little unobtrusive units.
Marco:
So here's how this works.
Marco:
The Eero comes in these multiple units.
Marco:
They have a regular base station, and this is all top-of-the-line radios, three 5 gigahertz radios, tri-band.
Marco:
It's super fast, and the base station plugs into your network connection just like any other router would.
Marco:
Then they give you the Eero beacons.
Marco:
The beacons are these very small, very compact units that can just plug in flush against an outlet.
Marco:
They even include a little nightlight feature you can use if you want to because they're kind of shaped like nightlights.
Marco:
The beacons help rebroadcast the signal.
Marco:
They communicate with a back-end mesh network back to the base station, and they blanket your entire home in fast, reliable Wi-Fi with really great hardware, amazing performance, and
Marco:
And just honestly, very good looks also.
Marco:
You don't have to worry about these things looking crazy in your house or looking like aliens or anything like that.
Marco:
They're nice, unobtrusive little white units.
Marco:
They're beautiful and they work really well.
Marco:
And the app is super easy to use and set up.
Marco:
This is the easiest router setup I've ever seen.
Marco:
Even among single router setups, it is by far the nicest setup I've ever seen.
Marco:
So check it out today at Eero.com.
Marco:
That's E-E-R-O.com.
Marco:
And if you want overnight shipping for free, pick Overnight Shipping, then enter promo code ATP to the US or Canada.
Marco:
That'll make it free.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Eero for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
There has been some news in the last, what was it, two days, three days?
Casey:
Doesn't really matter.
Casey:
Apple has released some new MacBook Pros.
Casey:
Asterisk, dagger, double dagger, triple dagger.
Marco:
No asterisks.
Marco:
Why do you think you're asterisking?
Marco:
I mean, look, this is a legitimate update.
Casey:
There are new MacBook Pros, but that's it.
Casey:
There's no new MacBook Escape.
Casey:
There's no new MacBook One slash MacBook Adorable.
Marco:
By the way, the MacBook Escape is called MacBook Pro.
Marco:
So what they really did is they updated only the models with touch bars.
Casey:
Yeah, see?
Casey:
There's your asterisk.
Marco:
We're going by our naming scheme here, though.
Casey:
Apparently they are, too.
Casey:
So anyway, so there's new MacBook Pros.
Casey:
On the surface, this doesn't seem like too much.
Casey:
So the really, really obvious things, on the surface anyway, are that for the 15-inch, you can get up to six cores, and I believe four cores was the max before.
Casey:
You can get up to 32 gigs RAM.
Casey:
16 gigs was the max before.
Casey:
You can get up to a 4 terabyte SSD, which is very impressive and extraordinarily expensive.
Casey:
It's something like $3,200 just for the SSD in American dollars.
Casey:
And you can also get a Radeon Pro discrete graphics with up to 4 gigs of video memory.
Casey:
Actually, I guess that's in every configuration.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
That's all.
Casey:
15-inch, 13-inch gets up to a 2-terabyte SSD and gets Intel Iris Plus integrated graphics with 128 megs of ED RAM.
Casey:
And 4-core.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Basically, they both got two more cores, which is nice.
Casey:
You get a core and you get a core.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like, you know, for the 13-inch, that doubles the core count.
Marco:
For the 15-inch, you get 50% more.
Marco:
Like, that's – and that's, you know, it isn't like, you know, Apple invented this.
Marco:
You know, this is Intel's new coffee league generation of processors.
Marco:
It's a really good generation.
Marco:
As Intel, the company, is completely falling apart.
Marco:
They're getting desperate.
Marco:
and trying to eke out more new products out of their existing architecture and process node size because they can't get their new one online.
Marco:
So they got desperate enough to start increasing the core counts on the high-bend parts for the old, what are they on, 14 nanometers still for this line.
Marco:
So we get Coffee Lake, and Intel's like a tick-tock-tock-tock-tock-tock-tock scheme, and it's wonderful.
Casey:
uh well done so that's the that's the obvious oh and uh true tone display which is super cool um and true tone touch bar which is cool even though no one's asking for it but it's cool so that's the obvious stuff what's or the more visible stuff but there's actually a lot more than this under the hood they are all also getting the t2 chip for secure boot and on the fly encrypted storage and also hey uh dingus i almost said the actual trigger word which would have been not good
Casey:
So this T2 thing is actually a pretty big deal.
Casey:
That came out of the iMac Pro, and this is the first mobile device that's using it.
Casey:
And at first glance, like, yeah, okay, whatever.
Casey:
But that's actually really, really important because that dramatically increases the security of these devices.
Casey:
And that had to have been a pretty big deal, trying to get devices that are not constantly plugged in and not always on to basically run iOS in order to boot macOS.
Casey:
So I think there's a lot more here than meets the eye.
Casey:
But nevertheless, this is not necessarily the silver bullet we wanted.
Casey:
Or is it because they tell us, Marco Arment, there is a new keyboard and you have tried it and I have as well.
Casey:
Marco, tell me your thoughts.
Marco:
So the way Apple presented this keyboard update is it is an improved third generation butterfly keyboard for quieter typing.
Marco:
And they keep saying that the only purpose of this was to make it quieter.
Marco:
They even told Dieter Bone at The Verge, the third generation keyboard was not designed to solve the failure issues that have plagued the previous ones.
Marco:
It was designed only to be quieter, according to Apple's statements.
Marco:
And there are probably good reasons to these statements because there are lawsuits against Apple right now against those keyboards, every previous butterfly keyboard before this.
Marco:
What's interesting is that iFixit started tearing down one of these, I believe last night, and found that...
Marco:
the key switches now have basically like a silicone protecting gasket over the key switch, basically, so that it's almost like a whole silicone umbrella over it that... I know, chatroom, I'm trying not to call it a condom.
Marco:
That's what everyone is saying.
Marco:
I know it's basically a key condom, but... It would be a lousy key condom, and a lousy umbrella for that matter, because...
John:
Of course, yeah.
John:
Go ahead.
John:
A, there's a hole right in the middle of it, but B, more importantly... Oh, my God.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
More importantly, if you think about it, it can't entirely enclose the key mechanism because if it entirely enclosed the key mechanism, how would the key cap attach?
John:
Maybe with magnets, but that's not what they do.
John:
So, no, no magnetic key caps.
John:
So, that would be a clever idea, Apple.
John:
Think about that.
John:
Anyway, probably bad inertia on the key caps.
John:
There are holes at all four corners for the little nubbin thingies that the key caps click into.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, so they have fitted this like silicone membrane, a pretty substantial change under the keycaps.
Marco:
And Apple is insisting this was for quiet typing.
Marco:
And it is quieter.
Marco:
And they seem to be insisting that was... The phrasing Apple is giving everybody sounds like...
Marco:
There was no failure problem.
Marco:
What do you mean?
Marco:
That is a very, very, very small percentage of people that there is no failure problem.
Marco:
The problem that most people have with it was that it was too loud, which it was.
Marco:
I don't think that was the biggest problem with it.
Marco:
I also bet that wasn't even the biggest initial complaint about it, but it was loud.
Marco:
It was also made quieter in the 2017 revision.
Marco:
They didn't talk about it then.
Marco:
Anyway, regardless of what Apple says, which might be being constrained for legal reasons for the lawsuits about their keyboard failures, it certainly seems like this was designed not for quietness as the goal, but as iFixit put it, quietness as a side effect.
Marco:
of the actual goal, which was making these keys resist the ingress of dust and crumbs and stuff, which renders them inoperable pretty easily.
Marco:
And that seems to be one of the bigger problems that caused the failure problem, if not the biggest problem that caused the failure.
Marco:
So anyway, it sure seems like, regardless of what Apple is saying, which seems like it's kind of BS-y, the actual story here is that they re-engineered this keyboard to make it fail less.
Marco:
Now, this is the kind of thing that we can't know really yet.
Marco:
Like, time will tell.
Marco:
But it is basically, like, as I fixed you pointed out, they basically did exactly what a patent that they filed, and I believe that granted, says it was for, like, in, I think, last spring.
Marco:
They filed for this patent that basically outlines exactly what they did and why, which is to prevent stuff from getting under the keycaps, not to make them quieter.
Marco:
So it certainly seems like this is the goal.
Marco:
This is what they did.
Marco:
And only time will tell if it actually makes them meaningfully more reliable.
Marco:
So the homework we did was that Casey and I both independently went to Apple stores today because I believe today was the first day that they had them on display, played with the new MacBook Pros, typed in the keyboards, tried them out, and got some impressions.
Marco:
Casey, as the only one of us who uses a butterfly keyboard on a regular basis, what did you think of this?
Casey:
So my initial impression was, and really actually it was my entire impression, but it was immediately obvious, was number one, it is much quieter.
Casey:
Number two, it feels... I'm going to use the word softer, but I'm not sure softer is really the best word for it.
Casey:
I think the only way I can think of to describe it is...
Casey:
The prior Butterfly version, so the one that I have on my MacBook Adorable that I bought almost exactly a year ago, one of the things I do love about it is that it feels very precise.
Casey:
It's like the difference between getting in a luxury car and twisting the temperature dial...
Casey:
And you know how it has those really nice, strong clicks.
Casey:
It's clear that somebody engineered that dial so that it's really nice or like a really, really, really nice gear shift, which is actually relevant this week because I have another press car, which maybe we can talk about that later.
Casey:
Maybe not.
Casey:
But anyways, like a really good shifter is super.
Casey:
It just feels precise and mechanical and just feels like strong and almost angry a lot of the time.
Casey:
And.
Casey:
And that I really, really love about it.
Casey:
And I love that about the MacBook Doorable that's actually sitting next to me right now.
Casey:
The new ones, they still felt very mechanical, but just ever so slightly softer.
Casey:
I almost said mushier, but that implies a negativity that I don't mean.
Casey:
It just felt like it had been...
Casey:
dampened ever so slightly and that was the first thing i noticed and the second thing i noticed is unequivocally quieter and what i ended up doing was you know our apple store is not tremendous here in richmond and so i at one point i felt like i was one of those you know 80s style you know synthesizers play synthesizer players because i was like rotating 180 degrees between one table that had the brand new keyboard another table that had the basically my macbook keyboard and it was
Casey:
I didn't get to the point that I was like, you know, spread armed typing on both at the same time, which was like the synthesizer power move in the 1980s.
Casey:
But anyways, John is rolling his eyes so hard at me right now.
Casey:
But anyway, it definitely felt different.
Casey:
I would not say it was... I did not prefer the new feel, but I wasn't, you know, turned off by it, if that makes sense.
Casey:
I would prefer the feel of my existing keyboard because it was so just...
Casey:
precise it is so precise however if the choice i have to make is my occasionally in need of compressed air keyboard that feels delightfully precise or this thing that feels ever so slightly softer but doesn't need compressed air every month obviously i'm choosing the new keyboard every day that was my two cents now you come from what i would describe as a fairly mushy keyboard which is funny because i didn't think of the
Casey:
of the 2015 era keyboards as mushy until I got used to both the Magic keyboard and then even more so this new Butterfly Switch keyboard.
Casey:
So this, I would assume, still felt to you probably not that different than the keyboards from years past.
Casey:
So what did you think?
Marco:
You know, the original MacBook One keyboard in 2015, the very first butterfly keyboard that we used, all of these keyboards have had the exact same amount of travel.
Marco:
And some of the reviews when the 2016s came out said that the 2016s had improved the keyboard by increasing the travel.
Marco:
And that's not what they did.
Marco:
And Apple was very careful when they worded how they described the 2016 keyboards.
Marco:
What it did was basically improve the way the key kicks back.
Marco:
It improves the amount of feedback that you feel.
Marco:
So the original butterfly keyboard on the 2015 MacBook 1, not only was it low travel, but it also had almost no kickback on the keys.
Marco:
And so it was incredibly unpleasant on a number of fronts to type on.
Marco:
They had this keyboard and they're like, you know, we've had a lot of negative feedback about this keyboard because it's low travel.
Marco:
It feels like crap.
Marco:
A lot of people hate it.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
When presented with the option of putting in their new MacBook Pros across the entire lineup, Apple chose to put it in any way, even though a bunch of people hated it, even though it was very controversial.
Marco:
And to improve the lack of feedback, rather than increasing the travel, they basically just made it kick back harder.
Marco:
And that's one of the big things why it also was so much louder.
Marco:
Like, the original MacBook One keyboard was not as loud as the MacBook Pros were in 2016 and 2017.
Marco:
um the macbook pro mechanism like the way it would kick you back it made that horrible popping noise and that's part of the reason why they were so loud the 2017 models did change the keyboard as i mentioned earlier what was different about it was they added some like little rubber gasket somewhere basically and it made it both a little bit quieter and it also softened that kickback a little bit it made it such that like it would still kick back more than the original macbook one you know mushy flat keyboard
Marco:
but it wasn't as harsh.
Marco:
It felt a little bit more refined, a little bit nicer.
Marco:
Still had horrible low travel, but it was just like a little bit nicer feeling and a little bit nicer sounding.
Marco:
And the 2018 revision is just a continuation of that same path, basically.
Marco:
So when you compare the 2017 to the 2016, you feel like, oh, this is a little bit softer and more damped.
Marco:
2018 is just a little bit more softer and more damped compared to the 2017 revision.
Marco:
It's the exact same path now done with, I think, a little bit more of a stronger change with this big new rubber membrane under it and hopefully with the side effect of keeping crap out of the key.
Marco:
But the way it feels and sounds, I would just say, is a continuation of that same progression, which is it's basically Apple trying to make the best of a keyboard that has a lot of problems.
Marco:
Why they keep including it in the laptops, you know, I think right now is just a matter of inertia and or stubbornness.
Marco:
And we'll see whenever these laptops get like the next actual like external case redesign, we'll see if they stick with it or if they actually meaningfully change this keyboard then.
Marco:
But right now the story appears to be
Marco:
Apple's sticking to their guns, and for all of the many, many problems this keyboard brings, from reliability to feel to noise, there's deploying Band-Aid upon Band-Aid upon Band-Aid.
Marco:
So this is the latest Band-Aid on this keyboard's many problems.
Marco:
I hope it works.
Marco:
In the sense that it doesn't make the keyboard feel any better.
Marco:
It doesn't make it feel like it has any more travel.
Marco:
It doesn't make the keys any nicer to type on.
Marco:
I typed on it and had the exact same opinion I've had of the previous ones, which is I can get used to this.
Marco:
In fact, for a while I did get used to it, but I don't like it and I think it's bad.
Marco:
OK, so the new keyboard, if whatever you thought of the previous ones, you will think the exact same thing of this new one.
Marco:
It doesn't feel meaningfully different.
Marco:
It just feels a little softer and it's quieter.
Marco:
I think my store was a little bit loud, so it's hard to judge noise.
Marco:
I was able to do side by side typing because my there was a MacBook escape right next to one of the new ones.
Marco:
So I could I could judge because that one hasn't been updated yet.
Marco:
You do feel the difference.
Marco:
It is noticeable, but it's not massive.
Marco:
If you didn't like the keyboard before, you still won't like it.
Marco:
Hopefully, though, this will make it not as failure-prone.
Marco:
The question on everyone's mind, which I was all over Twitter about, much to many people's chagrin, is Apple didn't say the one thing we wanted them to say, which is, this keyboard's more reliable.
Marco:
They didn't say that, again, probably for legal reasons, but regardless, we haven't gotten that info from them.
Marco:
Ultimately, we won't know if what appears to be a fix for reliability, we won't know if it actually works
Marco:
For months, we basically have to just see, does this fix the problem or not?
Marco:
Do people seem to be not having this problem?
Marco:
Because the previous ones would break pretty fast.
Marco:
A lot of people would have them fail within the first few weeks or months.
Marco:
So we should know over the next few months...
Marco:
Whether this is making a meaningful difference or not.
Marco:
Also, if anyone's curious, I've heard a number of reports from people saying that they sent in their MacBook Pro for repair recently and got this new keyboard put into it.
Marco:
We'll see if that ends up being true.
Marco:
If you send yours in for keyboard service under the repair program, it might be in this new keyboard, which should be pretty good if that's the case.
John:
how do they know they got the new keyboard uh the green the genius told them apparently but anyway how's it how's the genius now i don't know i just i feel like i it's it's kind of a bad situation like the refrigerator light in the refrigerator like the only way to actually know whether you have the new keyboard is to pull your keycap off but then you probably just broke your keyboard again
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, so keyboard, I do want to talk about the rest of the update, but just to complete the keyboard subject, I am tentatively optimistic.
Marco:
I still think this keyboard is overall a bad design because it needs so many band-aids.
Marco:
just to function as well as any other keyboard ever has with a much simpler and cheaper and more reliable and more universally agreeable design.
Marco:
So I still think this keyboard is just band-aid upon band-aid upon band-aid.
Marco:
That's simply bad engineering.
Marco:
It's throwing good engineering after bad, I guess.
Marco:
It's like, this keyboard should not be used the way it's being used.
Marco:
It should be more dramatically redesigned than what has happened.
Marco:
And I hope that happens when the next physical redesign of these laptops happens.
Marco:
Until then, this probably will fix it to be good enough for people to use it without it breaking, I hope.
Marco:
A good design would have the keyboard not fail so easily when stuff gets into it.
Marco:
This one is just trying over and over and over again to make sure stuff doesn't get in.
Marco:
Because when stuff gets in, it's catastrophic.
Marco:
Give them credit for hopefully fixing this, but this seems like a temporary fix.
Marco:
The real fix is to design a keyboard that isn't so fragile in the first place.
Casey:
Just a quick addendum to that.
Casey:
I by and large agree with everything you said, but I just wanted to say for those of you who maybe don't upgrade your laptops, I don't know, every other month, Marco.
Casey:
uh there's if you haven't tried these these butterfly keyboards i did not like the one on my macbook adorable for the first week or two that i had it and then i really came around to it and now it's actually one of my favorite keyboards ever i still would like a hint more travel but i've gotten used to that and like i said earlier i really really love it so if you go to the store and play with it for a few minutes you
Casey:
be it the louder ones from circa 2017 or the brand new one that's three days old or whatever, you may not care for it in the store, but you may come around to it over time, as I have.
Casey:
But certainly I agree with you, Marco, that this probably needs to be rethought on a more general basis.
Casey:
And if you really and truly didn't care for the ones over the last couple of years—
Casey:
you're probably not going to like this one either.
Casey:
It is a bit softer, but it's otherwise mostly the same.
Casey:
It is a bit softer and I thought a lot quieter, but otherwise it's mostly the same stuff.
Casey:
So John, any thoughts on any of this before we move on to any other new MacBook related things?
John:
So now that we're like a few years into this, this revision of the laptop line and the new case designs, the new keyboards, and we can kind of look back at it.
John:
It's kind of a, a bit of a keyboard tragedy in that the keyboard never was never bad enough for them to do an all hands on deck.
John:
We have an emergency.
John:
We need to redesign this.
John:
So what it looks like instead is that they had a plan, like we're going to redesign our laptops and there's going to be like a three or four year plan.
John:
And here are the ones we're going to release in that plan.
John:
Right.
John:
And as we'll get to it in a bit, I think the guts of this one are actually more substantially revised than you would imagine, given the case.
John:
But they had a whole line that they were going to do.
John:
Here's here's what the case is going to look like.
John:
Here's the size.
John:
Here's how much battery we can probably fit in.
John:
We have a little wiggle room.
John:
Here's the ports we're going to have.
John:
Here's, you know, like and then we're going to do a series.
John:
They do this all the time.
John:
It's like car generations.
John:
You have a certain generation of a car and there's a new model year every year.
John:
But the generational turnover only happens every three or five years or whatever.
John:
And this keyboard was a problem from the very first model.
John:
And they tried to do a lot of things to address it, but it was never a big enough problem for them to say, oh, we have to scrap our plans.
John:
Like, we can't go with the year two, year three, year four plan that we wanted to because it just turns out the keyboard is catastrophically bad in terms of reliability or customers hated or whatever.
John:
So we have to and we can't fit another keyboard in the same space.
John:
So we have to revise.
John:
This keyboard never got to that point.
John:
in general some people didn't like it but some people did like it it was unreliable but not unreliable enough so as marco detailed every single new model year so to speak every single new computer that came out with this keyboard in it they'd make a tweak let's try this let's try that people you know it's too squishy doesn't have asked let's make it bounce back oh now it's too noisy let me make it quieter uh how now we have to address the reliability finally right
John:
and that is uh it's a shame because that is basically a you know a component of your computer shouldn't require this many tiny changes just to reach an acceptable level it's not as if every year they're every year we're just making it better like imagine the screen and it had an anti-glare coding and every year the anti-glare coding got like a little bit better right that's not what they're doing here they're always trying to address problems and
John:
And didn't really get around to addressing the reliability problem until many, many years into it.
John:
And I think now is the time I should point out that one of the other wonderful things about the patent system is you can patent things.
John:
It doesn't mean that they work for their stated purpose.
John:
Right?
John:
So you can patent like a perpetual motion machine.
John:
You could patent wings that you can strap on your arms that let you fly.
John:
You can patent all sorts of stuff, right?
John:
So the patent says this little membrane for preventing crap from getting under the keys to make it better.
John:
As Marco pointed out, patent means nothing.
John:
You don't...
John:
It might work for that purpose.
John:
It might not.
John:
As I said earlier, this little membrane, for practical reasons, has holes in it.
John:
Holes where if a piece of dust or cracker or whatever got under there, it would get under the butterfly mechanism and jam it.
John:
It's better than having completely open, having four little holes at the corner, certainly, but the holes are still there and the holes are still there because this keyboard was never designed to have some kind of wrapper on top of it to stop crumbs from getting in because that's just not how it was made.
John:
If it was made that way, it would have had it from day one and it would have, you know, like these are all like almost literal band-aids, little pieces of plastic.
John:
Like what can we do to the existing keyboard?
John:
that has been a minor, not big, but minor thorn in our side for many, many years.
John:
What else can we do to it?
John:
It's like they do this with model use of car.
John:
It's like, well, we can't redesign the whole engine, but what if we just put an extra piece of duct tape over here and make this wire thicker?
John:
We have a fundamental problem, but it's not big enough for us to invest in a fundamental fix.
John:
We'll just wait for the next generation.
John:
We'll address it then.
John:
In the meantime, what can we do?
John:
Or like Apollo 13.
John:
We've got these parts.
John:
We've got this thing.
John:
There's nothing else.
John:
Can we wrap something around it?
John:
Yeah, but then how will the keycap attach?
John:
Why don't we just leave holes in the corner?
John:
It's good.
John:
Done and done.
John:
It's better enough.
John:
That this is all they can do.
John:
And it's not an elegant solution.
John:
It is a kind of gruddy, you know, slapdash solution.
John:
It's better than no solution at all.
John:
But it's a shame.
John:
You know, it's one of those problems.
John:
And I'm sure people who work at big companies have experienced this.
John:
that it just never got big enough for the big fix, which is good that it never got big enough.
John:
You know, hey, it's only been a minor problem, but bad in that we're all forced to wait and suffer through this long slog with this design.
John:
And the ports and everything are similar, I'm sure.
John:
It's worth noting that the repair extension program that Apple rolled out for all Touch Bar Macintoshes
John:
does not include macintoshes sorry macbook pros i know it's too um does not include these new models so the repair extension as of as of the recording of the show if you go to the repair extension thing on apple's website and you look at the eligible models it does not include the 2018 models right so this could be apple's way of saying we don't need to include the 2018s because they're fine in terms of reliability
John:
Or it could be Apple's way of saying, why would we proactively put the 2018 models on there?
John:
Let's wait a year because no one has one of these things older than a year old.
John:
Wait a year for the warranty to expire.
John:
And if we still have problems, maybe we'll have the 2018s.
John:
That would be a sign that they probably made the wrong choice.
John:
If we come to 2019 and suddenly the 2018 models appear at the bottom of this.
John:
repair extension program that shows they just just could never get this keyboard to work reliably like that every single one of these keyboards that they ever sold despite no matter what they did to it still had enough of a repair issue that they felt like they needed to have a repair extension program and that would be bad um
John:
So, you know, here we are waiting for, I suppose, like... I was going to say the next great keyboard, but how about the next good keyboard from Apple?
John:
And I mean that in terms of reliability only, because like I said, Casey really likes this keyboard.
John:
I've grown to mostly like it all the key layout, which is distinct from the mechanism, still really annoys me.
John:
But it's clear that they just... That this keyboard, it's not...
John:
It's not a loser.
John:
It's not really a winner either.
John:
It's just kind of... It kind of messed up this whole generation of computer and provided just one more thing to be annoyed about.
John:
I mean, the ports and the other issues and battery life and the thinness and everything are one thing, but it's just not a big deal, but just big enough of a deal to just be sitting here for, you know... It's great for ATP.
John:
Three years worth of shows, we get to talk about the same stupid keyboard, but...
John:
But yeah, I don't know what the phrase for it is, but I definitely have experienced things like this at work where if you were like an employee of this company, you almost wish that it had been a bigger problem.
John:
Because if it had been a bigger problem, they would have fixed it thoroughly.
John:
But it's not a big problem.
John:
It's a tiny problem.
John:
And some people really like the keyboard.
John:
And so here's where we are.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so I think that's enough about the keyboards, but one of you, and I don't really care who it is, convinced me, and I actually think this is true, but convinced me that this is not a minor update, and this is actually, to some degree, the real deal.
John:
So this is not really true in terms of what the technology inside this is, but when I squint and look at this, it's kind of like the previous models were...
John:
the first try at putting like a little arm processor to control a touch bar and do all this stuff like inside a Mac.
John:
And we talked a lot about that when the touch bars came out, this kind of, you know, introducing another CPU from the world of iOS, like a little watch OS thing and running that screen.
John:
And we've talked a lot about the touch bar and everything, right?
John:
When I look at this model, it looks like,
John:
let's take an iMac Pro and shrink it down into a laptop.
John:
That's not what it is.
John:
It's not a Xeon in there.
John:
It's not actually an iMac Pro.
John:
But a lot of the attributes and sort of like the overall system design of this thing, right down to the T2 chip and what it's being used for and the performance that they're getting from it with the on-the-fly encryption and everything, it's like...
John:
The iMac Pro represented the newest thinking about how to make a Mac.
John:
And the new MacBook Pro, the top-end new MacBook Pro, is taking that thinking that is revealed in the iMac and saying, we're going to do that to our laptops as well.
John:
Internally, externally, they're the same.
John:
There's no new ports.
John:
There's no anything like that.
John:
But let's take that thinking.
John:
Let's put a very powerful ARM processor in there and let's use it to do things to make the Mac both faster and more capable.
John:
It's not just running that little tiny screen.
John:
It's encrypting all your hardest data on the fly.
John:
It's listening for you to say, hey, dingus, right?
John:
And it's running the touch bar.
John:
And I think I read something somewhere that it might actually be used in like...
John:
video encoding or something who knows what it's doing it's basically an a10 class processor it's no slouch in there right and so i think that is much more significant than you know going from insert something lake to insert something else like right it's not oh there's new cpus and maybe the gpu got better right that's speed bump great we love speed bumps you know oh and then you get a bigger ssd this is a fundamentally more complicated and
John:
different design than the old laptop the t1 is not as integrated into the system as the t2 is the t2 is much more important to this max operation than the t1 ever was so i think this is actually a fairly significant internal revision uh so much so that if this you know if if they had waited until like the you know the new case design and everything to incorporate the t2 i think that would have been appropriate as well so now it's kind of like an iphone 4s uh
John:
where we were getting significantly revised and much more capable and powerful internals, including a larger battery to support all this stuff in the same old case and a keyboard with condoms on it.
Ha ha ha ha!
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
I agree with you 100%.
Casey:
I think that there's a lot more to integrating the T2 with macOS than any of us, including me, would have thought at first glance.
Casey:
And the more I think about it, the more I think this is a really impressive effort.
Casey:
But yeah, I mean, when I first saw this press release and all the reviews thereof of these new machines, I was like, really?
Casey:
That's it?
Casey:
But I think there's more here than meets the eye.
Casey:
Marco, what are your thoughts?
Marco:
So I mentioned earlier, to me, one of the most significant changes of this revision of these computers is the core count increase.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing that does not happen often where you can get a larger number of processor cores
Marco:
without increasing the thermal design, like the maximum wattage of the chip, which therefore usually brings a change in computer size.
Marco:
You could go from two cores to four cores, but you had to get a 15-inch to do it.
Marco:
You had to go up a size in computer to get those additional cores.
Marco:
And this matters a lot because modern CPU architectures, you don't gain that much performance per core
Marco:
per revision of these processors like you know every year they might get at most usually 10% faster per core than the one before it so adding number of cores makes is like one of the only ways you can get meaningful performance increases you know between between computer upgrades
Marco:
And usually you're just kind of locked in to whatever the number of cores is for the size of a computer that you either want or can afford.
Marco:
And so, you know, I did a little bit of research.
Marco:
13-inch MacBooks slash MacBook Pros have been two-core since the Intel transition, which was 2006-2008.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
You have not been able... That was the last time the 13-inch line got more cores was 2006.
Marco:
The last time the 15-inch line got more cores was 2011.
Marco:
This is not the kind of thing that happens often.
Marco:
So the fact that you can now get four cores in the 13-inch size...
Marco:
which basically puts it you can now look the geekbench got all the scores up today for all these new laptops you can see basically it's like you're getting the next size up in cpu performance for free now not other areas gpus are still very different but if cpu performance is what was limiting you which for a lot of developers that's the case like a lot of developers you know especially if you're writing swift or if you're just doing large xcode compilations you are doing a lot of parallel work on those processors and
Marco:
And processor performance is a pretty important thing for Xcode people and stuff.
Marco:
And so basically what this gives you is you can either take a roughly 50% performance gain in your 15-inch line, or if a 15-inch was previously suitable enough for you in CPU performance, you can now optionally go down to the 13-inch size if you want to.
Marco:
So that's pretty awesome.
Marco:
That's a huge deal that does not come very often.
Marco:
From a pure performance genre or performance category perspective, this is pretty awesome.
Marco:
Now, the 13-inch still doesn't have a discrete GPU, which to some people is a pretty big problem.
Marco:
To me, that's actually a feature because it makes it simpler and much better on the battery.
Marco:
But that's a big deal.
Marco:
In a different way also, one of the problems that people have had with these laptops since 2016, since the introduction of the Touch Bar generation, is that the 15-inch could not be had with 32 gigs of RAM.
Marco:
It maxed out and only came in 16-gig configurations.
Marco:
This was a huge complaint from a lot of pros.
Marco:
But Apple's defense of it was basically like, look, we can't give you 32 gigs of RAM yet because...
Marco:
Intel's chipsets don't yet support low-power 32-git configurations using low-power DDR or whatever.
Marco:
Originally it was DDR3, now it's DDR4.
Marco:
Low-power DDR4 I don't think exists yet, or at least is not available in mobile chipsets.
Marco:
And so basically, Apple couldn't deliver 32-git configurations without using higher-powered RAM, which would have a pretty bad impact on battery life, apparently.
Marco:
So what they appear to have done, which I'm hoping to get more details on as soon as these things are more thoroughly taken apart and analyzed, but what they appear to have done is only on the 15-inch actually have included probably an external memory controller on the board.
Marco:
and are using ddr4 ram not low power but just like standard ddr4 ram so there's you know presumably there's a performance gain there from going from ddr3 to ddr4 but also this allows them to offer 32 gig configurations but i think they're actually doing ddr4 even if you don't order 32 gigs even if you stick with 16 and they've even they've even made the battery a little bit bigger to compensate for the additional power draw the battery is something like about 10 bigger um 7.7 watt hours they added
Marco:
They made the battery a little bit bigger and Apple is leaving the battery life estimate the same, even though it's totally meaningless.
Marco:
Basically, they think they have evened it out.
Marco:
By the way, they also increased the battery by about 10% on the 13-inch for no apparent reason, except I wonder maybe the CPUs use more when they're being maxed out because they're a little bit more additional cores.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Anyway, I hope the 13-inch has better battery life.
Marco:
We don't have good battery tests yet, but
Marco:
I really hope it has a good battery life because the previous one with Touch Bar really did not.
Marco:
Anyway, so they've done this pretty significant engineering to add a 32-git configuration option to the 15-inch.
Marco:
And that's great because that really was holding people back.
Marco:
It didn't affect me personally because the kind of work I do fits fine in 16 on a laptop.
Marco:
But a lot of people, if you're running a bunch of VMs or doing large data analysis or things like that, you really needed that.
Marco:
And so it's nice to have that.
Marco:
And also, you know, they increased the max SSD from 2TB to 4TB.
Marco:
I don't know yet whether they're using dual modules in there like they are with the iMac Pro.
Marco:
That's part of the reason the iMac Pro SSDs are so fast.
Marco:
All iMac Pro configurations use dual modules in RAID 0, basically.
John:
I think they do, because one of the other stories that came out today is that someone benchmarking the 13-inch, not the 15-inch, the 13-inch against other 13-inch laptops.
John:
And this is like a laptop review site, so they're benchmarking against the HP Spectre and Dell XPS and a bunch of Asus and Microsoft Surface Books, right?
John:
And so everybody except for the iMac, the average of megabytes per second in a file copy test is like...
John:
200 to 400 is the range and the the apple the new 13 inch macbook pro is 2500 megabytes per second well this is a little bit suspect though because it was a file copy test and on apfs that's optimized away so it's not i don't i've seen enough from this to make me think that it's not an apfs uh file clone thing i'm willing to be proven wrong but my guess because of the t2
John:
and because of the dual module thing that you mentioned, is that they are actually... Because the iMac Pro gets numbers like that now, like you can do, right?
John:
And I'm assuming it's using the T2, unless it's a special T2 that's wimpier, I'm sure it's the same one.
John:
And it does the I.O., and I'm assuming they're using the dual modules.
John:
Certainly they would have to be to get the 4TB one.
John:
makes me think that this is actually just a really, really fast SSD in even the 13-inch model.
John:
And that's another example of what makes these pro machines?
John:
How are they different than the MacBook?
John:
Well, the MacBook doesn't have a T2 and doesn't have these dual modules, doesn't have this copy speed.
John:
If this is an APFS clone thing, I'm going to be sad, but for now, I'm totally willing to believe
John:
that it really is a very, very fast SSD.
John:
And that definitely feels like it is earning the Pro moniker in MacBook Pro, especially when you can get it on the 13-inch model and it's not reserved for the 15.
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
So anyway, when you look at this update, from a performance standpoint, it is significant.
Marco:
It is...
Marco:
adding more CPU cores, which hardly ever happens, increasing the top-end specs, even though if you max it out, you get like a $7,000 laptop, but it is increasing how high you can go on the SSD and the RAM by doubling those,
Marco:
And, you know, the T2 is a great processor, you know, right from the iMac Pro.
Marco:
It is an awesome disk controller, especially like that's what's giving these these kind of SSD performance gains.
Marco:
In addition to just having high grade flash, like Apple making its own controller has paid off pretty well.
Marco:
The T2 is pretty awesome.
John:
And you get the secure boot stuff.
John:
Exactly.
John:
The on the fly encryption, the quote unquote free on the fly encryption, all the sort of the new architecture.
John:
What does a Mac look like?
John:
What does a modern Mac look like?
John:
The iMac Pro and now these new MacBook Pros are the first models to look like what Apple's conception of what a modern Mac looks like until, like, they get around to actually making our Macs or whatever.
John:
And it looks very different that if you go down the line to, like, look, what does the Mac Mini look like, speaking of an old computer?
John:
It looks very different internally in terms of how the machine boots and how it operates while it's running than these new ones do.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So all of that said, this is a major update in performance and in some of that architecture stuff.
Marco:
But my tweet about this, which a lot of people were very mad about, I said when I first saw the specs and I first saw the press release, I said, quote, this is a very minor update.
Marco:
And the only thing I regret about that is the word very.
Marco:
It's not a very minor update.
Marco:
But I think it's still overall a minor update.
Marco:
And the reason I say that, obviously, as I said, performance-wise, it's a major update.
Marco:
I don't know anything about the GPU, so I can't talk about that, but it's probably faster.
Marco:
The CPU and RAM and SSD all got major updates.
Marco:
The keyboard, I didn't know when I wrote that tweet whether it was actually fixed or not because all they said was quieter.
Marco:
If the keyboard is actually fixed from the reliability problems, that is pretty major too.
Marco:
But the reason I still think this is a minor update, I call it a spec bump because it's a big spec bump, but it is still a spec bump because...
Marco:
There are some major factors of this laptop line that made it so polarizing to begin with that are still the same.
Marco:
The keyboard is still a controversial, low-travel keyboard that a lot of people don't like the feel of.
Marco:
The touch bar is still really...
Marco:
polarizing, if I'm being kind, a lot of people want to be able to order these computers without the touch bar.
Marco:
You still can't do that.
John:
I think revolutionary is the word you're looking for.
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
Revolutionary touch bar and touch updates is right here.
Marco:
If you just keep saying it, maybe it'll make it true.
Marco:
So, you know, so the port situation is identical.
Marco:
You still have, you know, well, the escape hasn't been updated yet, so maybe the next escape will have four.
Marco:
God, I hope.
Marco:
But, you know, you still only have the four USB-C ports and the headphone jack, and that's it.
Marco:
And the headphone jack is still on the wrong side.
Marco:
And you still don't have MagSafe or you still don't have a dedicated port just for power so that you can use all four of your ports for useful things.
Marco:
You still don't have any other legacy ports or SD cards or anything like that.
Marco:
And whether or not you think those things are important or not, the fact is all that stuff is unchanged, basically.
Marco:
So when judging how significant of an update this is, whether it is a, you know, quote, major update or a spec bump, which is considered a fairly minor update,
Marco:
This changed almost nothing about the computer if you didn't like what it was before.
Marco:
The pricing is all the same.
Marco:
It's still very expensive for what you're getting.
Marco:
And the upgrades drive it even more up and up and up.
Marco:
And some of that's justified, but most of it isn't.
Marco:
So it's still expensive.
Marco:
The touch bar is still forced upon you for all these high-end configurations.
Marco:
The port situation is the same.
Marco:
The keyboard is basically the same feeling if you didn't like the feeling of it.
Marco:
It's not a major update because for all those reasons why people didn't like it before –
Marco:
The only one of those that is definitively fixed is if you didn't like it before because it couldn't go to 32 gigs of RAM or 4 terabytes of SSD.
Marco:
That's the only thing that was definitively fixed.
Marco:
The keyboard reliability might have been fixed.
Marco:
We all hope so, but we don't know that yet.
Marco:
So that's why I classify this as a minor update because the major factors of what makes somebody like or not like this laptop mostly haven't changed at all.
John:
That's why I compare it to the iPhone 4S, because the iPhone 4S looked just like the 4, and that was the beginning of people being like, it's not even a new phone, right?
John:
But the insides were way better than the 4, like significantly better.
John:
But you couldn't see it.
John:
You look at it, and it's like, well, it looks like the same iPhone.
John:
It's got the same screen, got the same buttons on the outside, same ports.
John:
Like, what's different about it?
John:
It's all on the inside.
John:
Same deal with these.
John:
If you look at them, you're like, unless you notice the True Tone color shifting, you're like, this is the same laptop.
John:
What's different?
John:
Lots of stuff inside are different.
John:
In significant ways, it's important to you.
John:
The difference between this update and the 4S update is that most people liked how the 4 and the 4S looked on the outside.
John:
There weren't... Not how it looked, but like, there weren't a lot of complaints in terms of the...
John:
the feature set we weren't yet at the point where we were screaming about bigger phones and stuff like that so like the the reason these are like the same generation of laptops is they make more or less the same trade-offs in terms of the product number of ports size battery life weight all the things that make up a laptop
John:
It's just that within that house, within that size, that number of ports, the screen, the keyboard, everything, they've done lots of stuff to the insides.
John:
But the fundamental trade-offs of how heavy should a 15-inch be?
John:
How long should the battery last?
John:
How expensive should it be?
John:
Touch bar or no touch bar?
John:
Screen resolution, which we've touched on a bunch of times with it still being down from the old 15 inches unless you go to the scaled fuzzy.
John:
All those trade-offs are the same, which is why this is part of the same generation that...
John:
came in about 2016 the macbook pros right so this is this is still that generation it's just that inside they've changed a lot so everything i was saying before about these being very significant pro update i'm talking only about the inside the outsides
John:
the same trade-offs they had always made if you like those trade-offs great now you've got a computer that you already liked only it's way more capable and more powerful and more impressive on the inside if you didn't like those trade-offs for whatever reason you're still waiting for the next generation of of apple laptops to come along so marco did you buy one yet
Marco:
No, but I'm probably going to.
Casey:
Which one?
Casey:
13 inch.
Marco:
Yeah, I've been playing with them a lot.
Marco:
I've been talking for a while now, ever since I got really the escape.
Marco:
I've been talking about how I want to go with 13 inch for my next laptop.
Marco:
I can get used to the keyboard.
Marco:
I have, as I mentioned.
Marco:
I can avoid the touch bar.
Marco:
When I got the first one in 2016, I remapped escape to caps lock, and I've just kept all my computers that way since then.
Marco:
So now I just don't hit the physical escape key anymore.
Marco:
So I can go back to the touch bar if I want to, and it's not going to be a huge problem for me.
Marco:
Although accidental input is still a problem, but oh well.
Marco:
I'm fine with most of the trade-offs that this makes.
Marco:
The one thing really that drove me nuts was the keyboard reliability problems.
Marco:
So if those are indeed fixed, I will have no problem going back to this.
Marco:
And one other thing worth mentioning, during this update, Apple did finally stop selling the 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro new.
Marco:
They were selling it up until this point, and it disappeared from the store during this update.
Marco:
So that makes me sad.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
There are things about the modern line that I like and that I miss from when I had them.
Marco:
A lot of people insist on MagSafe being a super important thing.
Marco:
I like MagSafe, but I don't need MagSafe.
Marco:
And I really miss not being able to plug in any side I want or whatever, but that's nice but not massive.
Marco:
I miss the ability to use third-party chargers and to use USB-C battery packs to give me a little bit of a boost.
Marco:
That's nice.
Marco:
Like, I actually do miss that.
Marco:
There are more and more things in the world going USB-C, and I would like a computer that has a USB-C port or two or four.
Marco:
So that would be nice.
Marco:
I would like to make a whole migration of all my stuff to USB-C.
Marco:
I would love that because...
Marco:
USB-C has a great potential, and it could be really nice if the USB-C world ever arrives.
Marco:
And we'll get to that in a second.
Marco:
So there are things that I want from the new models.
Marco:
I want the ability to drive external displays at 5K when I need that or if I need that.
Marco:
I like things like True Tone.
Marco:
I love that they now have that.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
And I kind of like the idea of my computer being more secure from things like webcam and microphone hacking.
Marco:
Because that's all that's protected by the T2 and it was also by the T1.
Marco:
I like the idea of the encryption being less costly and things like that.
Marco:
So I do like a lot of what the new ones offer.
Marco:
And so I do plan probably to get a 13 inch because now I can get the performance from the 15s I've been using.
Marco:
In a 13 inch size.
Marco:
And that's pretty cool.
Marco:
I'm going to give it a little bit of time.
Marco:
Only because.
Marco:
I just finished all the traveling.
Marco:
I wanted a new laptop for this summer.
Marco:
It would have been great if it came out two weeks ago.
Marco:
But I just completed my need for it.
Marco:
For the next couple of months.
Marco:
So right now I just don't need.
Marco:
A laptop change for a little while.
Marco:
And hopefully it will give me enough time.
Marco:
To get people's reactions.
Marco:
On whether the keyboard is actually fixed.
Marco:
And also I still have a big question mark.
Marco:
About battery life.
Marco:
uh that's still i think mostly unknown so you're going to get this 13 inch touch bar and then as soon as the 13 inch escape is updated in the fall you'll sell it and buy that that depends on what they put into the escape so the the reason why the escape hasn't been updated seems to be that i don't think intel has actually released those chips yet um like like the whatever like the the 15 watt with gpu like whatever that combination is uh that that is that would be used in the air and the escape uh intel apparently hasn't released those yet
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
I don't know if they're actually going to bring quad core to that and what the performance difference might be and what Apple's going to do about it.
Marco:
Those are all unknowns.
Marco:
There's all these weird rumors about what they might do with the MacBook Air or whatever, but they're all just rumors at this point.
Marco:
So we'll see what happens in the fall.
Marco:
My one remaining major concern about these, assuming the keyboard has been fixed and assuming the battery life is fine, both of the books are significant assumptions, but I still am disappointed by how much the USB-C ecosystem does not let you convert all the way to it.
Marco:
USB-C is only great when
Marco:
when you only need the number of ports you have on the laptop.
Marco:
As soon as you need more USB-C ports, you hit walls.
Marco:
You hit limitations.
Marco:
You look for products that don't exist.
Marco:
Because USB-C should be an easy transition to make.
Marco:
It should be you go to Amazon and you buy a bunch of cables that can replace all your current cables with
Marco:
with USB-C on one end instead of USB-A.
Marco:
So if you have a peripheral that has a micro-USB port on it, fine, just go buy a cable for $5 or whatever that has micro-USB on one side and USB-C on the other.
Marco:
And all of a sudden, you've converted that peripheral to USB-C.
Marco:
You can replace your lightning cables.
Marco:
That's a little bit more costly, but you can still do it.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
So theoretically, it should be easy to go all in on USB-C by just buying new cables for stuff.
Marco:
And cables, you know, you get them on Amazon, they aren't that expensive.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
The problem is there still don't appear to be any USB-C hubs available.
Marco:
that meaningfully multiply one USB-C port into many USB-C ports, with a couple of exceptions.
Marco:
There's a couple of those $300 docking stations that multiply one USB-C port into two or three plus 40 other legacy ports that you don't want.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
If those are your needs, that's fine.
John:
Well, can I talk a bit about those $300 boxes for a second?
John:
Yeah, absolutely.
John:
Because I don't think it's entirely fine.
John:
My box at work is not $300, but I don't know, it was $100 and something or maybe $200 and something.
John:
And those... I can never tell whether I should blame this on the fact that it's a laptop and I hate laptops and they hate me or whether it's that box.
John:
But first of all, they're not made by Apple.
John:
And second...
John:
It's really cool that I can connect one cable to my laptop, just one, and it provides power and gives me a box that connects me to mini DisplayPort, USB-A.
John:
My headphones go into that box, like all sorts.
John:
It's when it works.
John:
It provides more or less the dream of USB-C.
John:
I connect one tiny little cable and I get all these features.
John:
I can use a bunch of legacy peripherals.
John:
Everything works, right?
John:
But pretty often, at least once a week,
John:
it doesn't, doesn't crash my computer.
John:
It doesn't kernel panic, but something doesn't work.
John:
Now audio is not going through my headphones.
John:
I connected my laptop, but it didn't turn on my external monitor.
John:
It's just, you know, my external monitor is totally blank.
John:
Uh, I, I can't, uh, my ethernet thing.
John:
It doesn't see the ethernet adapt.
John:
That's the other thing I plugged in.
John:
It doesn't see the ethernet adapter, uh,
John:
for whatever reason so maybe like sometimes it's just a matter of unplugging it plugging back in and of course i have these rituals to prevent it from freezing so when i disconnect my laptop i have to open the lid first which maybe that's not necessary anymore but i do it all the time anyway it helps i swear to you it helps
John:
Yeah, so I just keep doing it, whether or not it's helping anymore.
John:
But, you know, it's shown that if I do that, then it successfully negotiates the GPU.
John:
But, you know, very often I come back to my desk with my closed laptop and I plug it in, and my monitor just doesn't turn on.
John:
And once every 1.5 weeks, I have to unplug the power to my little $150 box and plug it back in.
John:
And maybe once every two weeks, I have to unplug the mini DisplayPort and plug it back in, even though I power cycled the thing.
John:
Again, it doesn't crash.
John:
It takes me a couple of extra minutes.
John:
And I don't know if it's because it's an OS problem and this is Apple's fault or it's a fault of the box or both.
John:
I like the fact that this box doesn't have drivers.
John:
I enjoy that about it.
John:
I like the fact that for the most part it works.
John:
But it's a little bit wonky.
John:
If this was my computer that I paid all this money for, or if this was a desktop, I wouldn't accept these things.
John:
It's a work computer and it's a laptop, so I just kind of go along with it.
John:
But that dream of having a box that gives you all these other things only works if that box works as reliably, I was going to say as reliably as a USB hub, but we've talked on past shows about how USB hubs have similar reliability problems.
John:
So I think in both cases, we're looking for
John:
Apple, to provide a first-party reliable solution that is known to work with their operating system and their hardware, in cases where third parties can get like 98% of the way there, the last 2% always just bothers me.
Marco:
Yeah, because it's one thing, if you're going to change all the ports on the computer to be this new kind, and you're going to offer dongles or adapters or hubs that can emulate the old ports,
Marco:
It's a much weaker proposition if the old ports that you are creating or adapting to are less reliable than if you would have just built them into the computer in the first place.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
People who defend some of these hubs and issues with USB unreliability, I don't know what kind of work they do.
Marco:
where they can tolerate unreliability without it being either, at minimum, a pretty severe annoyance.
Marco:
But when you have actual work to do on your computers, you can't have your peripherals randomly stop working or be flaky or be anything but 100% reliable.
Marco:
And when you have a built-in port, the vast majority of the time, built-in ports on computers are 100% reliable.
Marco:
And when you have to rely on little hubs and adapters and
Marco:
things like that, usually you're relying on a very small number of chipsets that are actually inside these things, no matter how many brand names are on the outside.
Marco:
Usually it's like they all have the same one or two chips in them from God knows who, and they are usually all sharing the same mediocrity, no matter how much you pay for it or what brand name is on the outside.
Marco:
And this is why...
Marco:
It's nice when Apple makes the adapters because usually they're rock solid.
Marco:
Apple has been in the past pretty good at that.
Marco:
Unfortunately, at about the same time they released the 2016 MacBook Pro with all USB-C ports, they also seem to back away significantly from first-party adapters and dongles and stuff.
Marco:
Now they outsource tons of them to Belkin and other companies, and they seem to have exited a lot of that business.
Marco:
Problem is, no one else has really taken over and made reliable ones en masse.
Marco:
Every time we talk about this, people write in saying, oh, well, I have this one from insert brand here.
Marco:
And it's one of those ones that you see all over Amazon where it's a little thing that sticks onto the side of your new MacBook or MacBook Pro with USB-C on one side.
Marco:
And oftentimes, they're even offered in space gray and whatever else to match the metal colors.
Marco:
And then on the other side, it has...
Marco:
a couple of USB-A ports, an SD card slot, maybe a USB-C power pass-through if you're lucky, and that's usually about it.
Marco:
And these things cost between $20 and $60.
Marco:
There's a ton of those things out there.
Marco:
And all of them, if you look at the reviews, they all have the same problem, which is a lot of people say they work fine, a lot of people say they don't.
Marco:
And they all seem to be based on the same cheapo chipsets, and they're not that great.
Marco:
They're flaky and unreliable, just like most USB hubs, right?
Marco:
So Apple bet big on the USB-C ecosystem, like three years ago, with the first MacBook, and then even bigger with the 2016 MacBook Pro version.
Marco:
And the ecosystem isn't delivering still.
Marco:
It's been two to three years, depending on how you measure, and the ecosystem is still not good enough.
Marco:
I wish Apple would just start making their own things again.
Marco:
And they wouldn't need to make a whole bunch of them, but like...
Marco:
Apple needs to make a USB-C hub.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
They need to make a USB-C hub, period.
Marco:
They already made their little $80 thing that multiplies one USB-C port into one USB-C port, one USB-A port, and HDMI that is pretty limited.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
And it's $80.
Marco:
It's like they did the bare minimum to say they had an adapter.
Marco:
And it's almost insulting how little it does.
Marco:
No one seems to make an adapter that goes from one USB-C port to four USB-C ports.
Marco:
That's like, if you actually want USB-C to take off, you need things like that.
Marco:
And I know it's really hard because the USB-C port on the laptops, except for Casey's, isn't just a USB-C port.
Marco:
It's a Thunderbolt 3 port.
Marco:
And it has all these alternate modes it can do.
Marco:
And it can do things like USB power delivery.
Marco:
So if you multiply something, maybe all of those ports would need to have 100-watt capacity.
Marco:
Or we need to be Thunderbolt 3 compatible, which dramatically increases the cost of complexity.
Marco:
It might not even be possible.
Marco:
I don't even know.
Marco:
You can say you can't do it because you need all these things, but not all of my USB peripherals need Thunderbolt.
Marco:
In fact, I think zero of them support it.
Marco:
Not all of them need 100 watts of power.
Marco:
Not all of them need even USB 3 speeds, let alone 3.1 and all the bandwidth and everything else.
Marco:
And you can also say, well, you shouldn't make one that can't do all those things because then you have fragmentation of what the ports can do.
Marco:
But you already have that.
Marco:
That's already a thing.
Marco:
You already have massive fragmentation of what a USB port and USB cable can and can't do based on whether it supports Thunderbolt and whatever else.
Marco:
Ultimately, this is an ecosystem that for these laptops to be good without a bunch of asterisks on the end of it, for a lot of people to really be able to get into them, we have to be able to transition to the USB-C ecosystem.
Marco:
And we still can't because there are still these gaping holes in that you basically can't go all USB-C because you can't multiply the ports.
Marco:
And if no one else is doing it, maybe Apple can.
Marco:
Somebody has to do it.
Marco:
We need this ecosystem to mature.
Marco:
And it just isn't happening.
John:
And to be clear, as we've discussed many times, another way to address this problem is to put more ports on the actual machines, which we've gone through ad nauseum, but it's not going to happen in this generation.
John:
But in the next generation, they could put more ports.
John:
It's not like there's not room on the side of these computers.
John:
You could put ones that are just plain USB-C, like Casey's thing on the MacBook One.
John:
Maybe you can't add more Thunderbolt 3 ones because of the number of PCI Express lanes.
John:
Or maybe you could on the one that has just two ports on the side.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But anyway, there's room on the side to add essentially
John:
plain old usb ports and then you don't have to worry about hubs in the same way that it is more convenient technologically speaking if not physically speaking to have hdmi and ethernet on the side of your laptop because then you don't have to worry about adapters you don't have to worry about getting just the right expensive fancy hub that it works reliably it's built into your computer and if it doesn't work your whole computer is broken but most of the time it does work
John:
And I can tell you, having used at least three different adapters to get Ethernet and HDMI and USB-A and other things out of my laptop at work, all three of them, none of them are as reliable as the built-in ports were on other laptops that I've used.
Marco:
You know what's 100% reliable?
Marco:
All the ports on my iMac Pro.
Casey:
I'm very happy for you.
Casey:
You know what else is 100% reliable?
Casey:
It's the leather sleeve for the new MacBook Pro.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
They made one of those?
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
$180 for a 13-inch.
John:
$180.
John:
Now, here's the thing.
John:
You know I like my pouches.
John:
I got my phone in a little pouch.
John:
It did not cost $180.
John:
Yep.
John:
Right?
John:
I see the utility of a sleeve like this.
John:
So, we talked about the trade-offs Apple makes with their laptop products.
John:
They they're really pushing to make them thin and light, even if the needs dictate that it could get along, get away with being thicker, but particularly on the 15 inch model where they've added the four terabyte, four gigs of RAM, four gigs of RAM.
John:
What are they up to now?
John:
32 gigs of RAM.
John:
They could have made it thicker.
John:
I mean, it's not going to do it because that's the next generation type thing.
John:
But the tradeoff they made is it being very thin.
John:
They somehow managed to wedge more battery in there, which is great.
John:
Good job.
John:
But they're very thin.
John:
If you have a very thin laptop, one of the advantages you get with that is that you can put it in some kind of protective thing, and it's still actually pretty thin and light.
John:
And if you, like me, don't like the idea of your pretty laptop getting scratched up, if you have one of these sleeves, and if it... I don't know how well it works, but assuming it slides in and out of that sleeve nicely and isn't a pain to get in there because of friction...
John:
It's great to be able to take your laptop, throw it in the sleeve, throw it into a book bag or something, and not worry that other crap in that book bag is going to scratch up your laptop.
John:
So that's why I say the main audience for $180 leather thing is somebody who wants to keep their laptop as pristine looking as my phone.
John:
it's 199 strong for the 15 inch the 15 inch yeah oh okay i guess what the most yeah more leather it's that's clearly yeah oh man 200 i mean they're they're nice they look nice right i don't know how well that leather hold up maybe the brown ones will like look aged or whatever it's it's classy like i saw you reacted to this this tweet i think casey someone mentioned uh someone was all cranky about apple saying that they make
John:
They used to make high-end products.
John:
Now they make luxury products.
John:
I, like you, don't entirely buy that premise.
John:
But they have, in recent years, decade or so, leaned more heavily towards the clearly luxury-oriented market.
John:
Not that the products are made for it, but that like on the watch, you know, they have that gold one and they have the fancy Hermes, you know, leather stuff.
John:
And they make lots of products that are like, you know, you don't need a $200 sleeve for your laptop.
John:
It's just a nice thing.
John:
It's a treat for your laptop.
John:
It's a nice thing.
John:
It's a luxury item, right?
John:
The laptops themselves, I don't think are luxury items.
John:
They do not come gold encrusted.
John:
You can't get a gold, literal gold MacBook Pro.
John:
They are still very expensive, obviously.
John:
But accessories is exactly where you should do luxury things like this.
John:
If someone wants a $200 sleeve for the laptop, Apple should be willing to make it and sell it for them.
John:
And they should buy it and they should be happy because it's a nice thing to have.
John:
But I don't think they'll sell a lot of these.
Marco:
I should actually point out, when we went to the Apple Visitor Center, Tiff and I made a couple of impulse purchases.
Marco:
I bought an orange leather case for my phone because I wanted a leather case because my phone kept sliding out of my shorts pockets in the summertime.
Marco:
And it's so slippery by itself.
Marco:
And I like the orange one.
John:
And Tiff bought...
John:
No, this is the first time.
John:
The previous ones were always black.
John:
So I haven't had them.
John:
My wife has had many cases and different materials and different colors.
John:
And my experience has been ones that are not brown, black, or gray look really nice because Apple's really good at making things in pretty colors, but that the color doesn't hold up.
John:
So we'll see.
John:
We'll see how this goes.
John:
Maybe you're cleaner than more people.
John:
Maybe your pockets are cleaner.
John:
But let's circle back in a year and see what your orange leather phone case looks like.
Casey:
Yeah, we'll put it in the parking lot.
John:
I mean, I probably won't be using it in a year because one of the reasons I decided to take that risk.
Marco:
You have no problem.
Marco:
You're immune to aging because you sell things before they can get dirty.
Marco:
Well, and it already is getting a little bit darker and blackened on the front corner by the status bar because presumably it's rubbing against the inside of my pockets and turning slowly the color of denim or whatever.
Marco:
But I knew this would happen because I've seen this happen to other people.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
I'm okay with that.
Marco:
but yeah so so i bought the my orange case because i liked it and it looked cool tiff bought the ipad version of this leather sleeve for her ipad so like we actually have some experience with this in the family and what color did she get uh the pink one and you know she she had good reasons for buying it and it was you know part of it was like you know just kind of the impulse purchase of of being an apple's you know new visitor center which was awesome and
Marco:
everything else but part of it was also utility and um you know because she basically she likes to keep her ipad in like a backpack or something while traveling uh but without she doesn't like keeping the smart cover on it and stuff like she just takes it out and uses it by itself like you know without a case or cover on it while like you know handling it to actually use it and it also has the slot for the pencil which she always wants to have with her so like it actually works pretty well
Marco:
So, you know, this one, you know, for the laptops, it's a little bit less of a case for it in the sense that it doesn't add a huge practical advantage.
Marco:
But, you know, if you wanted to toss a laptop into a bag that doesn't have a dedicated laptop pocket, if you can still find such a thing, this would help.
Marco:
Other than that, I can't really argue for it.
Marco:
But I agree with your point, though, that like,
Marco:
If Apple wants to make fancy leather stuff and charge a bunch of money for it and sell it only to people who like to make expensive impulse purchases for things that make them happy, that's fine.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
As long as they keep making computers that are good, I don't care what kind of leather stuff they make on the side.
Marco:
I will laugh at it occasionally when it's ridiculous, but I'm not going to argue that they shouldn't do it.
John:
How much would a leather sleeve for iMac Pro cost?
John:
Because apparently they're doing it by square inch because the 13 inch costs, you know, 180 and the 15 inch costs 200.
John:
I guess the 5k iMac slash iMac Pro model, maybe that's a $500 sleeve.
John:
Maybe you just put it on, leave it on all the time.
John:
Like, I don't like a leather vest for your computer.
Yeah.
Marco:
like a bra for your car but for your computer it's got that chin down there you can cover that with leather right yeah or maybe maybe it would only go on the foot yeah right it's a little booty yeah like if you if you put the rest of the iMac pro in leather it might have ventilation issues but maybe you could just put the foot in leather and then it wouldn't like slide around on your desk the iMac pro boot
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So for Ask ATP this week, Alicia writes, I recently had to replace an AirPod due to a weird sound with issues, and that was out of warranty.
Casey:
They charged me $70 plus tax, as promised, but the Genius Bar employee also took my old one.
Casey:
I wondered why, and he didn't seem to have an answer.
Casey:
I realize this is also the case with other replacements by Apple.
Casey:
Can you hazard a guess as to why?
Casey:
I would assume that they want some sort of proof.
Casey:
I guess, never mind, you said out of warranty.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm not sure.
John:
uh i can think of a couple of reasons uh one is that apple has a reason and actually explicitly states it sometimes to as they say capture things hardware that they make that has a problem so yeah they'll give you a new one or sell you a new one or whatever but they also want to see what what happened with the old one what went wrong what's what was the problem with it so they can see if they have some sort of systemic hardware problem or whatever especially for hardware devices that like don't have much software on them to speak of that
John:
is user accessible like an airpod so i can imagine that they'd want your old airpod uh to see what the deal is and the second thing is uh that apple is uh pretty gung-ho on recycling recycling uh old electronics so very often they will offer to take like any old ipod or iphone or anything that you have and i don't know why they'd make it mandatory but uh you know rather than have you throw out this thing with a bunch of heavy metals into your garbage
John:
Apple will take it and let one of its weird robots rip it apart and harvest all of the goodies inside.
Marco:
I think of a third reason, which is that there's probably some way if they didn't take the things back to cheat the system and to get free stuff somehow.
Marco:
And if there is a way to abuse Apple to get free stuff...
Marco:
People are already doing it, and Apple is going to lose money on it or have other problems with that, like market devaluation or fraud, fraud sales and things like that.
Marco:
You have to keep in mind, Apple is a massive, well-known company that sells high-priced goods all over the world, and people are willing to pay top dollar for them.
Marco:
So any way to scam the system, any way to get free Apple stuff or to get it for less than it's worth or whatever –
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But rest assured that these policies are in place.
Marco:
Certainly the capture thing, that's probably usually newer stuff though, like when it's first released.
Marco:
Maybe the recycling angle, but I think it's mostly just to prevent various abuses and scams that would be more possible if they didn't take back the old thing during a repair.
Casey:
Andrew Troop writes, can you suggest how to productively use a 34 inch monitor and not be a complete curmudgeon married to a set of smaller monitors?
Casey:
I'm losing my mind.
Casey:
My background is my jobby job has gifted me a quote developer monitor quote, which is a 34 inch Dell curved monitor, which is, which supposedly has a 3440 by 1440 resolution.
Casey:
I've been using smaller monitors for my entire career, and I'm really struggling to figure out how to be productive with this giant canvas.
Casey:
The applications that I typically use for work include PyCharm, Sublime Text, Outlook, PowerPoint, sigh, says Andrew, Word in our work version of Skype.
Casey:
I tried having all the apps open at one time, with each having a dedicated portion of the monitor.
Casey:
That was distracting.
Casey:
I also tried minimizing ones that are not in use, etc., etc., etc.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
John Syracuse, a king of window management, of weird window management.
Casey:
Why don't you tell us about what you recommend for Andrew?
John:
First of all, I don't like curved monitors, but that's just a personal preference.
John:
Agreed.
John:
Anyway, even though I carefully edited down this thing, you skipped over a couple of important sentences.
John:
One is that Andrew says, my brain thinks that an active application window should be approximately the size of a laptop display with the exception of terminal windows.
John:
And then he says at the end,
John:
about minimizing applications it seems like i'm wasting the capabilities of this big monitor uh if you minimize stuff i think andrew understands where he's going wrong at all points but just isn't able to break old habits the idea that there's a certain size that an application should be and that size is approximately the size of a
John:
be thinking in terms of a laptop display laptops you know they have small displays compared to desktops and very often you want to see as much as you possibly can so you end up maximizing windows and then you just get into this mode where you think like like it's an ipad i can see one thing at a time it takes up my whole screen because why wouldn't it because the screen is so small and i have all sorts of my whole workflow is uh you know is around shuffling these entire screens in and out and so you start thinking of applications as the whole screen but
John:
not all applications and i would say most applications are not best suited to be 15 or 13 inch 16 by 9 landscape rectangles right a messages window for example if you're running messages and sending people text messages 16 by 9 full screen 13 or 15 inches not the appropriate size of your messages window if you make your messages window that big either because you're tiling or because you just think of all windows like that you're not using your space well all right
John:
And I can tell you how I use Windows.
John:
It doesn't mean you're going to use it.
John:
But Andrew recognizes that all these things that he's tried just don't seem like they're right.
John:
Like divvying it up like it's a big grid or keeping them all the same size, although he gives an exception for terminal windows because he considers those different.
John:
And again, it seems wasteful.
John:
16 by 9, 15 inch terminal window is too big.
John:
And you've got the whole 80 column thing.
John:
People are on about it various times.
John:
The breakthrough that you have to make if you're going to make this work
John:
is to stop thinking in grids and tiles and fix things and let each application window be a size that is natural for the content and arrange things in your space.
John:
I always use this analogy and I don't know if it's the worst analogy in the world because most people have zero experience being a painter or anything like that.
John:
arrange your workspace on the monitor like you would arrange a physical workspace when doing a task a task that where you have a bunch of tools and peripherals but are doing kind of like the thing in the middle and i always was painting because you've got your your paints and you've got your solvent and you've got your palette and you've got the canvas and you've got the thing that you're looking at but it could just as easily be
John:
taking apart a clock with a bunch of tools or working on a remote control car with like parts bins and the things you're working on and a vice and a lamp and whatever, just arrange your workspace on the screen like that.
John:
And yes, I know you're doing more than more than one thing, right?
John:
And you have to have some way to move things around.
John:
Maybe think of it as, you know, I sometimes use the analogy of pieces of paper on a desk and pieces of paper, all the same size.
John:
So it's not great.
John:
There really is no perfect analogy because the great thing about computers is, uh,
John:
the limitations and the constraints of the physical world are not present on the computer.
John:
You can make things appear and disappear.
John:
You can move things instantly and make things come to the front from behind in ways that you can't in the physical world.
John:
But to make an efficient use of a large amount of space, you have to
John:
in many ways treat treat it as a spatial workspace arrange your stuff size your stuff position your stuff get a feel for where your things are don't be constrained by the mental model that you have that it's a bunch of uniform blocks or it's a big wheel that you're spinning and shuffling through things or you're just alt tabbing in pc parlance through this series of screens all those patterns do not make efficient use of your space and if you can't do that just go back to having a small monitor and swipe your way left and right forever
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then finally, Brian Sturm writes, I just got married, congratulations, and returned for my honeymoon this past weekend.
Casey:
We took many photos with my iPhone, but didn't have the best service along the coast for much of the trip.
Casey:
I was experiencing some weird quick quirkiness with vibrations while using the phone, and Apple rep recommended that I get an iCloud backup and then do a factory reset.
Casey:
I did this.
Casey:
After the reset, the issue went away, but we realized the following day my iCloud photo library no longer included any of my photos taken on the trip, aside from the ones from our first two days and our last day.
Casey:
I did create a shared album during the trip, and the photos during the lost period are still in the shared album, but not in my regular photos library.
Casey:
I've reached out to Apple support again, but they haven't been much help in getting anything recovered at this point.
Casey:
I'm curious if any of you or your brilliant followers have any ideas for me.
Casey:
I do not other than to say this is why you always quadruplicate your backups.
Casey:
That's not a word.
Casey:
I don't care.
Casey:
You always do your backups many times over just to be absolutely safe, especially if you're doing a factory reset of any kind.
Casey:
I would have definitely done not only a backup, but also image capture.
Casey:
prior to doing that or or even just grabbing it with photos one or the other which is exactly what i did before i did my ios 12 in place up update i did a itunes backup then i did an image capture backup just to be 100 safe because we had all just come back from london and when i did it what is an image capture backup in your problem what i'm saying is grab all the photos on my phone using image capture put them on my computer
John:
Oh, so you're talking about backing your phone.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So the thing, the angle I thought that was interesting about this is the challenge of going on a trip, which we all recently did, where you're going to take a bunch of photos that are important to you
John:
And making sure that you really have them all like, I mean, say, you know, your laptop gets dumped into the ocean or someone loses your luggage or it turns out just something weird with your thing and they need to do a factory reset.
John:
Like the idea of being on the move and and taking a bunch of pictures and then getting to a point where you have to like do something that requires sure knowledge that you have your stuff elsewhere.
John:
Oh, sure.
John:
Go ahead.
John:
Wipe my phone.
John:
Reset it.
John:
I have all that stuff elsewhere.
John:
It's fine.
John:
It's in the cloud.
John:
It's whatever.
John:
Yes, in this case, because you had that, you know, the fact that you did return from the trip and you could have done a better backup, that's probably a better way to do it.
John:
But I always find myself worrying sort of in a transition period before I return.
John:
uh and the strategy i use to deal with photos is whenever i go somewhere and we're taking lots of pictures the first thing i want to do is make sure i have enough memory cards this is not the same for taking pictures with your phone but i have enough memory cards for my real camera that i don't need to take don't need to delete any of the photos off my memory cards so my first line of defense is yeah i take pictures and then i take them quote unquote off my camera
John:
somewhere else but they don't actually delete them off of the memory cards they stay on the memory cards so memory cards are my first backup when i come home from the vacation i should have memory cards filled with photos that are all in theory elsewhere but their original location on the memory cards are still there second thing is i always make sure if i'm on a vacation i have some way to get my photos from those memory cards
John:
to someplace that is physically not with me so if i lose all my luggage or drop everything that i have into a lake photos i took yesterday will be someplace else and for me that because of the way i do things that means memory card to computer computer up to icloud down from icloud down to computer at home up from computer at home to 17 different backup services right
John:
And you can do this at the end of each day.
John:
While you sleep, plug in your computer, let it, I let photos, push all my photos up to iCloud.
John:
And because I have things on at home that pull it down from iCloud and push it back up to backup services, I have this thing flowing, right?
John:
I also have my computer that I have with me on vacation set to keep all, like that option of photos, either optimize storage or don't.
John:
I say don't, do not optimize storage, keep all the originals there and ditto for the other computers in line.
John:
All this is to try to make a change so that
John:
my photos are only briefly in one place and very quickly in multiple places.
John:
And I'm sure that they're in multiple places because this big, you know, this big chain, I can see that I, that I trust that the different pieces are traveling from here to there.
John:
If I really want to confirm, I can pull up backblaze or crash plan or something and look to see, um,
John:
Pick a random photo you took yesterday.
John:
Confirm that it's in your cloud backup service, which means it's also in two Macs in between that it made its way there.
John:
In that type of scenario, you don't have to be quite as paranoid about I'm wiping my iOS device because you're sure that it was only on your iOS device as the sole location for like one day max.
John:
And after that, it's been in seven different locations.
John:
So.
John:
backups at home are one thing but backups on the go you really kind of have to sort of build like a bucket brigade and every of data and every night make sure that bucket brigade runs right uh and then you know if you have real cameras keep everything on the cards as well
Marco:
All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Mack Weldon, Eero, and RX Bar.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, it was accidental, and you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
All right, so the three of us were just overseas for various lengths of time.
Casey:
All over one sea.
Marco:
Are there multiple seas?
Casey:
Yes, we went over one of the many seas.
Casey:
Oversea.
Casey:
We went overseas.
Casey:
And we got to experience the UK.
Casey:
And Marco, you also got to experience continental Europe.
Casey:
And we did this because our dear, dear friends, Mike Hurley and now Adina Hurley, they got married and we were all invited.
Casey:
We all got to go and a lot of our friends got to go.
Casey:
And it was very funny getting to see our mutual audiences kind of
Casey:
realize over time what was happening.
Casey:
And it was great fun.
Casey:
I am really thankful to get to see everyone.
Casey:
I am really thankful I was there to see Mike and Adina get married.
Casey:
And I was thankful that Erin was able to come so that she could meet a lot of the people that she had not met, which of course does not include you guys or your families, but does include people like Jason Snell, for example, or Stephen and Mary Hackett.
Casey:
And so there were a lot of people that Erin got to meet that she had not met, which was really great.
Casey:
But
Casey:
First and foremost, I wanted to, on behalf of all three of us, congratulate the Hurleys.
Casey:
It was a beautiful wedding.
Casey:
I know we are all, three of us, extremely excited for them.
Casey:
And they are currently honeymooning, so they hopefully won't hear this for a very long time.
Casey:
But in any case, we thought...
Casey:
We have opinions, the three of us.
Casey:
Let's talk about the UK.
Casey:
And let's start by saying, let me do my conversion here.
Casey:
And it was an unreasonably and unseasonably hot time for the entire duration I was in the UK.
Casey:
And I think, John, you were there a couple more days than me.
Casey:
And then, Marco, you lingered for like a day or two and then went into continental Europe for a couple of days.
Casey:
But the entire time that I was there, basically from the moment I got on the airplane in Dulles, and the airplane's air conditioning just wasn't quite up to snuff.
Casey:
It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great.
Casey:
From the moment I got on the airplane...
Casey:
to the moment i got on the return airplane i was sweaty for like five days straight it was 85 ish fahren 80 to 85 fahrenheit which is roughly 30 degrees celsius pretty much the entire time and and as an american who lives in
Casey:
what most would call the south 85 is not that hot i mean it's hot but it's not that hot however the difference between the american south and the united kingdom is that we believe in something called air conditioning whereas the whole of the united kingdom seemingly does not and what i always hear when i talk about this is oh no no we only need it for like two weeks a year but apparently the two weeks a year has been going on for like two months for the last 15 20 years and they just haven't admitted it to themselves
Casey:
Nevertheless, I can report back that the two coolest places in the whole of London, or at least based on my experience, was the capsule in the London Eye, which was delightfully cool, which is probably good because otherwise it'd be a greenhouse.
Casey:
And one Waitrose's supermarket that we happened to step in for a brief moment, which had its AC cranked to like 60 degrees Fahrenheit.
Casey:
And it was just like something between 15 and 20 Celsius.
Casey:
And it was amazing.
Casey:
Oh, and our hotel room was also, I think I set the air conditioning at 16-ish.
Yeah.
John:
your hotel room all right all right you need to stop you need to stop talking now what you didn't have a hotel listen listen so i'm somebody who is always cold right when i because we have air conditioning at work and i live in america i wear long sleeves and a fleece at work when i fly on my plane pants you have a plane t-shirt long sleeves and
John:
fleece blanket on my legs i'm always cold in air conditioning because in america the air conditioning is made for people who are always hot i'm not always hot i'm always cold so i am all wrapped up right i was hot all the time and part of the reason is like and it just got worse day after day after day it really ramped up because towards the end i had to wear like a wool suit jacket or whatever the hell i was wearing and pants and everything and that was really hot
John:
But, like, there was no relief.
John:
All right, so I did not stay in a hotel.
John:
I did, like, not an Airbnb, but basically the equivalent, which was really, really nice, and I really enjoyed it, except for the fact that this place had no air conditioning, right?
John:
So there was no escape, and I was desperate for somewhere, anywhere, to have, quote-unquote, American air conditioning.
John:
A gift shop by a tourist trap...
John:
No.
John:
A grocery store.
John:
I actually went into a waitrose.
John:
No.
John:
The cabs, no air conditioning.
Casey:
The trains, no air conditioning.
Casey:
Why wouldn't they turn it on in the cabs?
Casey:
I don't understand.
John:
I don't think it existed.
John:
I was in a black cab.
John:
The only cab I took was a black cab, and as far as I could tell, there was literally no air conditioning.
Casey:
Well, I was in Priuses or Priai or whatever they're called in plural.
John:
Those are probably like Uber or whatever.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Maybe those should have air conditioning, yes.
Casey:
They didn't.
Casey:
They had the frigging windows open like animals.
Marco:
We took one that was one of those Europe-only brands, like Citroen or something.
Casey:
Or Peugeot or something.
Marco:
Yeah, something like that.
Marco:
And it was on our way to the wedding, and we requested because we were wearing our formal stuff.
Marco:
And Tiff's like, can you please turn the air conditioning on as cold as it goes?
Marco:
And the guy was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
Marco:
And he turns it on, and we're just getting so hot, especially whichever side of the car was in the sun at any given moment, where the sun was coming in through the window.
Marco:
And like...
Marco:
And Tiff's like, can you maybe make it a little colder, turn the fan up a little bit?
Marco:
And you could see on the control panel, it was set to the temperature low, like LO, so you know that's as low as the temperature can be set, and the fan was on max.
Marco:
And we could barely feel it.
Marco:
I just think the cars there even are under the impression that it doesn't get hot there.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It was so unbearable.
John:
Or the compressor was just shot or it needed more refrigerant.
John:
But there's something to be said for just never having relief.
John:
So if every night when you go back to your hotel room and cool off, I think that makes a huge difference.
John:
Because as far as I was aware, my internal body temperature just increased over the course of a week.
John:
And it was...
John:
i could not find any place like not a single place that had american air conditioning which by the way i find frigid and terrible but at a certain point i was just like please can i just be cold for five minutes just so i can go in the other direction and then it will be a blessed relief to go outside uh so yeah it was pretty sweaty there and i think the worst was we went out to windsor uh to do touristy things with the kids and we were on the the
John:
Or the National Railway or whatever, not the same as the tube, right?
John:
It's like above ground, big train.
John:
And there was some kind of accident, which they had a nice euphemism for.
John:
Basically, a train killed somebody by hitting them on the tracks.
John:
But the way this was described to us as our train was sitting there on a siding for like an hour was...
John:
trespasses i think i got the pronunciation class right it's not in train parlance the problem is not that someone has been run over and killed they were trespassing because you shouldn't be on the track so trespasses was the problem anyway uh we were in this train packed train packed so we're standing in the aisles seats are filled people are packed into the aisles like you know shoved up against each other and
John:
And I'm pretty sure there was either no air conditioning or the heat was on because it was so hot on that train.
John:
And that train was not moving like dead stop for a long, long time, which they apologize profusely for.
John:
They're very good at apologizing on the rails there.
John:
And I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt like I could, you know, there's not much less I could be wearing.
John:
And I was dying of heat.
Casey:
Yeah, I really mean it.
Casey:
I did get the relief in the hotel room for sure.
Casey:
But pretty much with the exception of then the London Eye and 15 Seconds and Waitrozes, I was sweaty from Wednesday until Monday.
Casey:
It was ridiculous.
Casey:
That being said, they're just there.
Casey:
It wasn't that bad for me.
Marco:
oh my god it was so bad i mean you know my hotel did you have air conditioning at your hotel yeah wherever you stayed yeah we yeah tiff called me like when it became clear about a week beforehand that it was going to be really hot from the forecast tiff called the hotel to just make sure like we really do have air conditioning right so yeah that was fine um and it wasn't that hot outside
John:
no like the saving grace is that it did get cooler at night mostly that was the thing that really killed us was like in the beginning like oh yeah it's hot during the day and we don't have air conditioning but we'll open all the windows and turn on a bunch of fans and at night it actually gets cool not so cool that i was cold because i was still never cold even at night but you're like oh there's a little bit of relief by the end of the week it wasn't getting that much cooler at night and it's like oh we gotta we have to leave this country now
Marco:
I mean, the only time I was really hot was when I was either in cars or in the tube.
Marco:
Like, that was pretty hot.
Marco:
Otherwise, it was fine.
John:
Speaking of trains, though, by the way, I was trying to think of the comparison because, you know, public transport.
John:
We'll just get it out of the way.
John:
The public transportation in London is way better than it is in Boston.
John:
It's a low bar.
John:
I'm not saying anything.
Marco:
Oh, God, it kills New York, too.
Marco:
Like, this is one thing.
Marco:
Like, when I go to London,
Marco:
This is not my second time spending a good amount of time in London.
Marco:
And boy, does it make New York look bad in a number of ways.
Marco:
It's so nice.
Marco:
Everything just kind of works really well.
Marco:
And look, I'm sure London has its problems.
Marco:
Everywhere has its problems.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
One of the biggest things that makes me sad for New York when I'm there is just how awesome the transit system is there.
Marco:
Apple pays.
Marco:
It's all contactless everywhere.
Marco:
And you just beep in and beep out wherever you go.
Marco:
There's no stupid cards to get and recharge and everything like that.
Marco:
The mapping is great.
Marco:
The routing is great.
Marco:
The announcements are very clear.
Marco:
The stations are clean.
Marco:
Everything's well signed.
John:
It's not Japanese level of efficiency and cleanliness.
John:
Not that I've ever been to Japan, but I've certainly seen lots of video from there.
John:
So it kind of reminded me of Boston in that it's an old city and there's big, dirty tunnels filled with rats and pigeons and everything, right?
John:
But the trains are pretty nice.
John:
They're more or less on schedule.
John:
The signage...
John:
Could be a little bit clearer, but it's still pretty good.
John:
The trains come when they say they're going to be coming.
John:
When they screw up in some way, they apologize profusely with a British accent, which makes me feel better.
John:
And it's really easy to get from point A to point B, which is something that definitely cannot be said of most US cities with public transportation.
Casey:
I can't imagine what it would be like to live in a city with public transportation.
Casey:
That sounds amazing.
John:
The thing I wanted to get at with the trains, though, is that in Boston, I commuted for a couple of years into downtown Boston and a couple of years to slightly to the left of downtown Boston, taking multiple trains and everything.
John:
Air conditioning on trains in Boston, it exists.
John:
It works more than in the trains in London.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And exhaust it to the exterior of the train.
John:
And if you're on like Park Street Station, when there's 17 trains in there, all of them are blowing their heat out of the inside of their trains to the outside.
John:
And you are standing on the outside of their train waiting for your train to arrive in an underground station filled with tons and tons of other people.
John:
And I think that's the hottest I've ever been in a U.S.
John:
train station is just waiting around as train after train comes in blowing hot air in your face.
John:
And then they have a bunch of fans because like the train station is on.
John:
They have a bunch of fans trying to cool you off.
John:
But all they're doing is blowing the hot air at you.
John:
So if you ever want to know what it's like to live inside a hair dryer, try Park Street Station in the height of summer in Boston.
Casey:
So to move on from the heat, which I could talk about for hours, one of the coolest things.
Casey:
We have.
Casey:
Marco, I think, mentioned this a minute ago.
Casey:
One of the coolest things about London was that it is assumed that everywhere takes Apple Pay, or at least that's the way I treated things.
Casey:
It is just assumed everywhere takes Apple Pay.
Casey:
And it is extremely unusual to.
Casey:
if that's not the case.
Casey:
Whereas the United States is the exact opposite.
Casey:
It is assumed nowhere takes Apple Pay, and it's extremely unusual and wonderful when somewhere does.
Casey:
And that was extremely cool.
Casey:
I was really happy about that.
John:
So you're listing that as a benefit, like, oh, it's great.
John:
Apple Pay can be taken everywhere.
John:
But my take on it is slightly different.
John:
I was super annoyed by the fact that many people had an Apple Pay price limit,
John:
Oh, you can use Apple Pay anywhere.
John:
You can use contactless unless you spend more than 30 pounds, more than 40 pounds.
John:
Why?
John:
Why?
John:
What happens after I spend?
John:
And pretty much because we're on vacation, every single thing we ever bought was more than 30 pounds or more than 40 pounds.
John:
And so we couldn't use Apple Pay.
John:
It was really annoying.
Casey:
I never ran into that, but I do know what you're speaking of, and that seems completely bananas to me.
Casey:
But I would still, if given the choice between the American setup of almost no Apple Pay, but it's effectively limitless when we have it, or the European setup where it's everywhere, but it has a limit, I would take it being everywhere personally.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
And for whatever it's worth, by the way, I used Apple Pay for as much as I possibly could, which was almost everything I bought, including a lot of like, you know, restaurant tabs and stuff that were more than 30 pounds.
Marco:
I never ran into that limit.
Casey:
I'd heard about it a lot, but I also never saw that limit.
Casey:
Can I just state plainly and for the record that the plugs of the United Kingdom, I am aware of how safe they are.
Casey:
I understand how safe they are.
Casey:
I have seen the YouTube video.
Casey:
about how safe they are.
John:
It really is quite impressive, actually.
Marco:
It's a great design.
John:
It is.
John:
Well, so you mentioned the safety, but when the person, I don't know, whatever, the apartment wrangler was showing us around our place, right?
John:
Like, here's where the laundry is, here's how you work this, that, the other thing.
John:
He made a point, and I think this was like for lawyerly reasons, but I don't even know, to show us how the plugs work.
John:
To assure us that they're very safe, but there is, as he phrased it, lethal voltage.
John:
We do have lethal voltage in this country, so be very careful.
John:
And if you just put them in like this, or like so, he probably said, you'll be fine.
John:
Which, if I didn't know better, would you make me think, wait a second, is he trying to tell me that they have, like, the world's most dangerous plugs and you need to tell everyone who comes here how to work them or we're going to die?
John:
When, actually, it's the opposite.
John:
They're much safer than U.S.
John:
plugs and he didn't need to tell us anything.
Casey:
Well, except that you have to put the ground or, as they would say, earth pin in first.
Casey:
Otherwise, it won't let anything else in.
John:
But again, it's not going to kill us if you don't do it that way, right?
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, I don't think they'll physically let you plug in unless you put the earth.
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
Sure.
John:
But I'm saying like there's not there's no risk of death.
John:
Like this whole thing was phrased as a safety thing of like that.
John:
We do have lethal voltage in this country.
John:
I'm like, oh, so they have some countries that have non-lethal voltage or it's just like, you know, one milliamp that comes over to the wires to your house.
Casey:
either way i just want to make it plain i understand how safe they are i get it you do not need to link me to that youtube video however they're the dumbest hugest friggin plugs in the entire world and i hate them i was i was thinking about that when i was there like we all look at the ridiculous plugs and they're they're comical ha and i thought what does like a a 12 outlet like power strip look like in the uk is it the size of an aircraft carrier do they not even exist because they would take up your whole room like how does that even work
Casey:
I'm pretty sure Underscore's Airbnb had one, and I saw it on the floor, and it was massive.
Casey:
It was hilariously large.
Casey:
But yeah, and I also don't really, I don't have a problem with it, but I don't really understand why every outlet is switched.
Casey:
Like, I guess that's convenient, but it seems weird to me.
Casey:
Oh, also, I forget who it was, but somebody pointed out to me that apparently it is illegal to have the bathroom light switch within the bathroom, which is annoying as hell.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And that's a UK thing.
John:
Well, if you're from New England, you're very used to the light switches being outside rooms.
John:
So that wasn't that bad.
John:
I wasn't used to the light switches being at knee height everywhere.
John:
Apparently my house is made by hobbits.
John:
And by the way, to save us from tons and tons of feedback, yes, we all know that the voltage is different and higher in Europe than here.
John:
So people are saying that's the explanation for we have lethal voltage.
John:
I assure you, 110 is also lethal in the US.
Casey:
There's way, way more smoking in London anyway.
Casey:
And I remember the rest of Europe this way, too.
Casey:
God, you should have seen Paris.
Casey:
Way more smoke.
Casey:
Oh, God, I don't even want to think about it.
Casey:
I think my lungs just clogged just thinking of it.
Marco:
Paris is made of cigarettes and bad traffic patterns.
Casey:
There's so much smoking in London.
Casey:
It's unreal how much smoking there is.
Casey:
And I said this to somebody.
Casey:
I don't remember who it was.
Casey:
I think it was somebody native.
Casey:
And they were like, what are you talking about?
Casey:
You can't smoke inside, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Well, you take a half step out of any doorway anywhere in London, and you're just walking through a cloud of tobacco.
Casey:
It is unbelievable how much –
Casey:
Remember that, like, I forget what brand it is.
Casey:
It's Altria, which is like RJR Reynolds or something like that.
Casey:
They're based in Richmond, Virginia.
Casey:
And I smell considerably less smoke in Richmond, which is the headquarters of one or more tobacco companies than I did in Europe.
Casey:
Like, there's so much more smoke in the UK.
Casey:
It's ridiculous.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
It was getting frustrating and uncomfortable by the end of the trip.
Casey:
I did not like that.
Marco:
Yeah, that's one thing that my overall impression of London was, boy, I like so much about this city.
Casey:
Agreed.
Marco:
Completely agreed.
Marco:
And they seem to be like 10 years or more ahead of us on many, if not most, fronts.
Marco:
But smoking is one thing where it's like, wow, I think we're like 10 years ahead of them on smoking.
John:
You're 10 years ahead of them on smoking in certain places in the U.S.
John:
It really is regional.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, but I think if you took the national average, I think we'd be significantly more progressive than them.
Marco:
Although, man, let me tell you, Paris was another level.
Marco:
From what I've heard from people, this varies by European region and country as well, and Paris does seem to be the peak of smoking culture.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
My goodness.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So as you mentioned, I spent most of the trip in London, but then we spent the last two days of it in Paris.
Marco:
I had never seen it.
Marco:
Tiff had seen it only briefly.
Marco:
And so we went on to check it out.
Marco:
So we went with a couple of friends to Paris just for two days.
Marco:
And so we didn't see that much of it because we honestly didn't have time and it was the end of a trip.
Marco:
We were exhausted.
Marco:
But I think I saw enough of it to get a decent idea of roughly what it's like.
Marco:
First of all, the experience of riding the Eurostar under the tunnel and from London into Paris –
Marco:
is a cool experience.
Marco:
Like, the train stations on both sides, especially the one, the London side, which is St.
Marco:
Pancras.
Marco:
Yeah, it's like Pancras, but almost.
Marco:
Anyway, like, it's a beautiful station, and the one on the Paris side is also very nice.
Marco:
But when you get there...
Marco:
It couldn't be more of a display of the different cultures when you compare the London side of this train, which is orderly and well-managed and has this nice, big, beautiful station.
Marco:
You get there.
Marco:
We took a cab there, and it was nicely managed and easy to get to and everything.
Marco:
You come out the Paris side.
Marco:
I can only describe the way you get a taxi out of that station as chaos.
Marco:
Like you have to meet taxis like weirdly like across the street by this bar.
Marco:
There is nowhere for them to stop.
Marco:
So they just kind of all stop everywhere.
Marco:
And so like this massive intersection in front of this train station.
Marco:
which I assume a lot of people come in on all the time.
Marco:
That's why it's there.
Marco:
Has nowhere good for taxis to pick people up.
Marco:
And there's seemingly no like, you know, police like moving people along like they do in front of, in front of airports in the U S now.
Marco:
Like, so you can't just like sit there forever.
Marco:
No, there's none of that there.
Marco:
So like you step out of this train station and you're just plunged into the most chaotic road situation I've ever seen.
Marco:
And,
Marco:
And the rest of Paris doesn't seem to be that much better in that regard in the sense that the roads are just chaos.
Marco:
And like, I spent a lot of time in New York City.
Marco:
I've seen a lot of other big cities.
Marco:
I've been to Rome.
Marco:
I've never seen worse drivers and worse road layouts than Paris.
Marco:
it's amazing i don't know how anybody drives there or frankly walks there uh but it's really quite something to see it's anybody whose job involves driving in paris every day i salute you because i could not do that um also noteworthy about about paris um
Marco:
huge amounts of motorcycles and motorcycle-like things like scooters and stuff like that.
Marco:
Massive amounts of motorcycles.
Marco:
It seems like everyone there drives a motorcycle, and they are all over the place.
Marco:
Everywhere that you could park motorcycles was a line of motorcycles.
Marco:
I've never seen a place with more motorcycles, and I've never seen a place with more people smoking.
Marco:
It was...
Marco:
Just a ridiculous amount of smoking everywhere.
Marco:
It was like being in Pennsylvania in the 80s.
Marco:
Like it was just like an amazing amount of smoking.
Marco:
And like it was it was really strange.
Marco:
Like, you know, we had this beautiful hotel room that was a couple stories up from ground level.
Marco:
And in this little tiny hotel, like in this like beautiful Parisian street scene, it was it was so picturesque and we could open our windows and.
Marco:
and just have all the air coming in and all the sounds of the Parisian street scene, and it was wonderful.
Marco:
Except that there was a restaurant in the first floor of the hotel, which meant that from the hours of about 4 p.m.
Marco:
to well after we went to bed,
Marco:
There are basically people constantly smoking.
Marco:
Constantly.
Marco:
Endless chain smoking under, you know, from people just sitting at a restaurant.
Marco:
Like, they couldn't stop themselves from endless chain smoking.
Marco:
Ridiculous amounts of cigarette smoke, which we really don't like.
Marco:
And so that kind of, we couldn't leave the windows open at night, which is unfortunate.
Marco:
And then we also flew out of Paris.
Marco:
because we figured that would be efficient.
Marco:
We wanted to see the second city, so we took the train there, and then we flew out of there when it was time to go home, back to New York.
Marco:
I don't know if it's just the airport we went to, which was Orly.
Marco:
There's basically two major airports, Charles de Gaulle and Orly.
Marco:
I have not seen Charles de Gaulle.
Marco:
I don't know if it's better.
Casey:
Off then, it's fine.
Marco:
Orly has one of the most confusing layouts I've ever seen.
Marco:
Like, first of all, it's the first airport I've ever seen anywhere in any country where you walk in and you don't walk into check-in desks.
Marco:
You walk into a shopping mall, basically.
Yeah.
Marco:
And finding the check-in desks is a challenge in itself, right?
Marco:
Then you get there, and they're in all these weird little zones, and the signs are... It's not a language barrier.
Marco:
Most of the signs were also in English, so that wasn't the problem.
Marco:
It was just hard to find stuff.
Marco:
It was hard to understand where anything was.
Marco:
It was hard to understand where you were supposed to go.
Marco:
And it was just the most weirdly laid-out airport I've ever seen.
Marco:
It was very...
Marco:
just like lots of odd design choices and standards that seem to be enforced everywhere else that weren't enforced there and things like that.
Marco:
And then like getting to the gate was amazing.
Marco:
Like it was, you know, there's like one gate with seven different letters.
Marco:
Like there's like, it's like gate 31, but there's actually seven gate 31s and here's you're at 31 D or whatever.
Marco:
And they're all right next to each other.
Marco:
It's very, very strange.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And then, like, boarding.
Marco:
Like, the sign said boarding, but they weren't boarding for forever.
Marco:
And, you know, normally, like, I don't usually indulge, like, you know, people's boring travel delay stories.
Marco:
But this one, just suffice to say, this flight was full of delays.
Marco:
And, like, the plane was a mess.
Marco:
And the crew was, like, rude and curt and everything.
Marco:
It was, like, it couldn't be more different than the London side of the strip, which, like...
Marco:
it was BA but like the London crew on the London plane was like it was a newer nicer plane everything was perfectly clean the London crew was so much nicer so much better of a crew and just so much friendlier and like the French of course were just like angry that you existed and like how
Marco:
I'm sure Paris is really good at a lot of things.
Marco:
The food was pretty good.
Marco:
I'll give them that.
Marco:
But transportation logistics are not something I would give to the French as a strength.
John:
Speaking of British Airways, I want to give a shout out to British Airways again.
John:
I've only flown them twice in my entire life, and both times I've been impressed by their airline food.
John:
Not that it's impressive food, but it's impressive for airline food.
Marco:
Yeah, no, we've flown a few times now and they're great.
Marco:
I like them a lot.
Marco:
I don't plan to ever fly in or out of Paris again, though.
Marco:
That was that was not as much nice or fun or anything positive.
Marco:
But the London part was great.
Marco:
I will give them lots of credit for that.
John:
Oh, and another thing about the British Airways food, not only is it good for airline food, but there's tons of it.
John:
It's a six-hour flight, which I frequently, six-and-a-half-whatever-hour flight that I frequently take to San Francisco.
John:
The difference is, at San Francisco, they give you, like, one bag of potato chips and then your choice of whatever very bad-tasting $12 sandwich you want to buy from them.
John:
On British Airways, they just constantly kept bringing food.
John:
Here's a snack.
John:
Here's a dessert.
John:
Here's a meal.
John:
Here's a dessert.
John:
Here's a snack.
John:
Here's a drink.
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
John:
I couldn't eat anymore.
John:
You are bringing me too much free food.
John:
Not free, obviously, because these tickets were expensive, but you know what I mean.
Casey:
It's funny you say all that about, to go back a half step, Marco, to say all that about Paris, because I have been once as a kid and once with Aaron, and most people I know love Paris.
Casey:
I am glad I have been to Paris.
Casey:
I don't really want to go back.
Casey:
That's kind of how I feel about it, too.
Casey:
I feel like I have had my Parisian experience, and I'm good, thank you.
Casey:
I think I've got all I need.
Marco:
And I'll give them credit, too.
Marco:
I was really worried.
Marco:
I'd always heard very bad things about how incredibly...
Marco:
you know rude parisians in particular are when you are not uh french and you know even if you try to try to speak the language like i've heard that's it's just a really bad scene which is one of the reasons why i was afraid to go to paris or france at all um and that wasn't a problem at all that was totally fine you know the people who we talked to from like the hotel people to taxi drivers to people in stores and restaurants um
Marco:
They all spoke English just fine to us.
Marco:
They didn't seem to have a problem doing it.
Marco:
We would greet people in French as best as we could in all of our minimal broken French.
Marco:
They would quickly identify us as Americans and just start talking to us in English, and it was fine.
Marco:
That was my biggest worry.
Marco:
It turned out not to be a problem at all.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I really did – like the smoking was a big surprise.
Marco:
The transportation logistics being hilariously comically bad was also a big surprise.
Marco:
The big reason to go there to me was like I need to experience French food in France because like it's – French food is great and I figured it would be awesome there.
Marco:
And it was really good, but one thing I noticed that – I apologize to the great nation of France for what I'm about to say, but this is simply the truth.
Marco:
It was really good, but –
Marco:
It wasn't better than French food in New York.
Marco:
In fact, French food has been known to be good for so long that you can get good French food in lots of places.
Marco:
I feel like that actually isn't a great reason to go there anymore, or you shouldn't go there just for that, because you can get great French food in almost any city.
John:
I know you're only there for two days, but I would imagine that the difference is that aside from like, oh, well, you can go to the right high end restaurant or whatever.
John:
I think the difference is probably that the the floor is a lot higher.
John:
Like, you know what I mean?
John:
Like, I bet the same thing with pizza and bagels and the New York metro area that if you live in Paris, you can basically go to whatever stores around the corner and get a good French bread.
John:
That is not true in most of the U.S.
John:
where you can't just go, oh, just go to this thing around the corner and get a baguette and it will be good.
John:
Not definitely not true around the corner.
John:
And the U.S.
John:
is a supermarket with terrible bread.
John:
Right.
John:
So that's kind of the floor of like, how bad does it get for just the boring staples that everybody buys?
John:
I bet in Paris.
John:
They're all pretty good.
John:
It doesn't really get that bad.
John:
In fact, they're all probably better than the best you can get in lots of places.
John:
But if you're just shopping for restaurants, I can imagine, well, if I go to the best French restaurant in New York and I go to an okay French restaurant in Paris, maybe they are comparable.
Casey:
To go back, though, to the thing that we can all share, which was the UK, I really love London.
Casey:
I grew up not too far from New York, further than Marco is, but not terribly far.
Casey:
And I think New York is one of my favorite places in the world.
Casey:
But London...
Casey:
may even be a little bit better to me like i just love london so much and yeah the plugs are weird yeah they really need to learn what air conditioning is but by driving on the wrong side of the street and trying to kill me constantly uh oh and street signs why why does london not believe in street signs why is that not a thing they're on the buildings
John:
not always i know i know well hey look i i mean i complain i complain to mike in person about this on my first visit to london about the stupid street signs in the buildings uh but i have to admit boston is worse because boston just sometimes decides not to label the street that you're driving on it labels the cross streets be like yeah but what road am i on like you don't need to know that at least in london if you can find the signs on the building three stories up they have both streets labeled
Casey:
That's not always true, but I take your point.
Casey:
But I now I'm complaining again and I don't mean to because what I'm trying to do is be complimentary.
Casey:
I love London.
Casey:
The people that I spoke to were super nice.
Casey:
Obviously, their accent is delightful.
Casey:
They dealt with this is both people I knew and people I didn't dealt with me being a stupid American graciously.
Casey:
They were extremely accommodating.
Casey:
I love London and I've been in prior years.
Casey:
I've been to other areas of the UK, mostly the southern area of the UK.
Casey:
And I love it there.
Casey:
I really, really do.
Casey:
Yeah, driving on the wrong side of the road is weird.
Casey:
Driving on the wrong side of the car is weird.
Casey:
Weirdly enough, I actually met a friend of mine who is American but is living in Wales.
Casey:
And he picked us up from Heathrow and we went to a park.
Casey:
And I found it more alarming to be on the wrong side of the road than I did the wrong side of the car because I was hitting shotguns.
Casey:
it was weird to me that I found the road issue more alarming than the car issue.
Casey:
Like you would think I would expect to have a steering wheel in front of me, but no, that was okay.
Casey:
But, um, but yeah, being on the wrong side of the road was deeply troubling.
John:
It's like, if you've ever driven the wrong way, uh, like I'm in the wrong lane in the U S like briefly, if you have to like go down, you know, like just, you're right.
John:
You're driving against traffic, right?
John:
Briefly.
John:
They didn't in movies a lot.
John:
Right.
John:
And you know, American movies like, Oh, the hero is escaping in a car chase and they, they need to go into oncoming traffic.
Um,
John:
Every time I'm driving in the UK, it feels like I'm in one of those chase scenes in oncoming traffic, and I just expect a fleet of cars to be coming at me at any moment and swerve out of the way.
Marco:
For me, I felt the side change thing as...
Marco:
More of like a huge mental burden was placed on me because as people in the world and as you get older, you develop optimizations for how you navigate, how your brain works, things you look out for, things you assume.
Marco:
So one of the things is you might only look one direction when –
Marco:
you're about to cross the street and maybe you only look the other direction right at the last minute, but you're pretty sure you only need to look in one direction, or at least the main risk is only coming from one direction.
Marco:
So you form this kind of optimization in your brain.
Marco:
You can kind of look there first and don't pay too much attention to the other way or whatever.
Marco:
And when everything has slipped around on you like that,
Marco:
you have to defeat the optimization.
Marco:
You have to bypass it, and you have to consciously remember every single time to bypass it and to defeat that optimization and to flip it around and just look everywhere.
Marco:
And that, to me, it made it... My whole feeling while I was there was constantly having this slight baseline of stress that I was doing something wrong or forgetting something or about to get hit by a bus because...
Marco:
I had to consciously, over and over and over again, make myself ignore these optimizations I'd built up for how to walk in a city.
Marco:
And that was, I found, very challenging to maintain.
Marco:
It was just a constant mental burden.
Marco:
And this is probably just because I've hardly been there and spent very little time in places that have right-hand or left-hand drive.
Marco:
So, whatever it is, right-hand drive...
Marco:
Anyway, so that was a big cognitive burden for me.
Marco:
But ultimately, I agree with you, Casey, that London is one of my favorite places.
Marco:
Even though I've only been there twice now, I spent a good amount of time there each time, and I've seen a lot of it.
Marco:
And if things continue to go badly enough in our country, that if things ever get bad enough that I'd want to leave the country, which honestly, that would have to be pretty bad because family and everything.
Marco:
If we ever had to leave the country, that would be very, very high on the list for where we would go.
Marco:
Sorry, they don't want immigrants there anymore either.
Marco:
I'll also say, if I haven't angered the French enough, the food in London was amazing.
Casey:
I agree.
Marco:
English food has a bad reputation because traditional English food wasn't very good.
Marco:
But that's long in the past now.
Marco:
And what you have in London now is possibly the best food city in the world.
Marco:
It is so good.
Marco:
Let's not go crazy here.
Marco:
no because no like honestly because they better food city than new york it's they're up there they're neck and neck in a lot of ways um certain food types are probably better in london certain food is probably better in new york but it the food in london is fantastic and uh and it it really like forget everything you you think you know about british food if you haven't eaten at nice restaurants in london recently because it's amazing um
Marco:
and I would say I had just as much amazing food in London as I did in Paris.
Casey:
Yeah, I think I actually like traditional British foods, the things that everyone kind of snubs their noses at.
Casey:
But I agree.
Casey:
I didn't go into any fancy restaurants while we were there.
Casey:
We didn't have any fancy meals.
Casey:
But I actually think that British food gets a really bad reputation, and I don't think it's deserved.
Casey:
I actually think it's much better.
Casey:
It's fairly simple.
Casey:
The traditional stuff is fairly simple, but it's simple stuff done extremely well.
Casey:
And who doesn't like that?
Casey:
I couldn't agree with you more.
Casey:
I think it's a really bad reputation.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So, yeah, I mean, I really enjoyed our trip.
Casey:
It was way too short, but we were going without kids.
Casey:
So it was, you know, to be expected.
Casey:
And we were very thankful that we had that time just for the two of us.
Casey:
It was great to see the two of you.
Casey:
It was wonderful to see Mike and Adina get married and then all of our friends as well.
Casey:
But I love London and I want to go back tomorrow.
Casey:
I don't want to pay to go back because getting there is expensive.
Casey:
Being there is expensive.
Casey:
But I want to go back tomorrow.
Casey:
So Mike, Dina, why don't you get married to each other again in like a year?
Casey:
Let's just make that happen.
Casey:
You know, we can just go anyway.
Casey:
I know, but you need an excuse, or at least I need an excuse to justify it.
Casey:
And gosh knows that John isn't going to go on a transatlantic flight for nothing.
John:
I've been to London two times in two years.
John:
We need to give it a rest.