Just Lower Your Standards
Casey:
I am so freaking stressed right now.
Casey:
I don't think I've really come to grips with this whole filming car videos thing quite yet, because all I can think about is all the ways that the footage I have is not enough and will never work and is all wrong.
Casey:
And the car goes back in on Friday morning.
Casey:
And this is roughly the same feeling I've had every time I've had a car video, but it's getting worse and worse because I'm now no longer just doing this for grins and giggles.
Casey:
I'm doing it for like sort of my job.
Casey:
So I am just a ball of stress right now.
Casey:
I like I should not be recording right now.
Casey:
I should be fiddling around in Final Cut right now.
Casey:
In fact, if you just find me dropping off the call, just just roll on.
Casey:
It's fine.
Marco:
So, I mean, I think an interesting thought exercise might be, assume you had more time with the car.
Marco:
Do you think you would ever reach the point where you wouldn't feel all panicked and insecure about the video clips that you have so far?
Marco:
Don't use your logic on me.
Marco:
Of all the video I have made, I had that feeling for all of it.
Marco:
And it was true.
Marco:
I didn't have all the right footage.
Marco:
In fact, I had way too little footage for what I actually needed.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I managed to get a video out of it anyway.
Marco:
And I think that's probably true of most people who make videos on a deadline.
Marco:
You're never going to have enough time or enough people or enough gear to get all of the shots you want exactly the way you want them.
Marco:
And you're always going to have to make up for something that you didn't get or that's wrong or that doesn't fit in during editing, after the car's gone.
Marco:
That's always going to happen.
Marco:
That's going to happen to every single video you make.
Marco:
I think that's just part of making videos.
Marco:
So while I sympathize with this feeling that you have, I think it's also possibly reassuring to think of it as just this kind of inevitability that will probably happen to every video and you'll find a way around it and it'll be fine.
John:
Just lower your standards like Demuro.
John:
Don't have some footage?
John:
Sit in front of a room and shoot yourself.
John:
Yeah, I had footage of me driving, but I lost it.
John:
So here's me not driving.
John:
Let me tell you what it was like.
John:
It was pretty good.
John:
Anyway, Doug score.
Casey:
Anyway, Doug's car.
Casey:
Oh, title.
Casey:
No, I hear you.
Casey:
And I think in a serious answer to your actually very interesting thought exercise, I think in a perfect world where I had absolutely no deadline...
Casey:
What I would be doing is I would be filming and then putting that into my final cut project and figuring out, was that good?
Casey:
Was it perfect?
Casey:
Was it good enough?
Casey:
Where does it fit?
Casey:
What is the story arc, et cetera?
Casey:
And you know what I mean?
Casey:
So I could see it.
Casey:
I would be processing it.
Casey:
quote unquote live not literally live but you know i'd be processing it like nightly or something in order to figure out if what i had just recorded was good enough and and as it stands right now i'm just like glancing at the footage to make sure it isn't an utter disaster and then going on faith that i can somehow piece together something out of it which is what you were talking about marco
Casey:
And it's fine.
Casey:
Like, it's all fine.
Casey:
But I am deeply, woefully, incredibly stressed right now because I feel like I have a bunch of mediocre video and no good video.
Casey:
And at some point, I'm just going to have to get over it and deal with it, which is what has happened the last couple of times.
Casey:
But I think the difference, like I said, is that this time I'm doing the reverse of what John recommended.
Casey:
I'm holding myself to an even higher standard level.
Casey:
Because now, in theory, I have more time to make this better, when in reality, I do have more time, but I have no more skill than I had, or only marginally more skill than I had before.
Casey:
And it's stressed me out some fears.
John:
You need to mentally sever the connection between production values.
John:
and uh popularity of the video and success of the video if you consider popularity to be success because there is not as much connection as you think there is like i mean i used demir as example casey did you see the video i'm referring to where he literally lost all the driving footage and he just said well whatever i didn't i lost it i deleted it accidentally uh here's what it was like to drive
John:
Like just, you know, the audio quality in his videos, the number of shots, the, you know, the quality of the shots doesn't matter.
John:
Like it doesn't matter as much as you think it does.
John:
Like just, you know, I think, I think you're stressing about the wrong things.
John:
Much better things for you to stress about.
Casey:
Well, and again, I think you're right, but man, it's hard not to.
Casey:
Plus, I still haven't licked the audio thing.
Casey:
I need to find a lavalier mic or however you pronounce it.
John:
Don't lick your microphone.
Casey:
Oh, is that the tip?
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
No, I mean, audio, it's hard to get it really good.
Marco:
I would say audio... I mean, I'm kind of biased because I like audio better than everything else, but I think audio is more important to get technically good than video, even in a video, because the audio...
Marco:
Bad audio makes the video really hard to watch, whereas bad video is pretty acceptable in a lot of ways and doesn't actually interfere that much with the viewing experience.
Marco:
But anyway, I would just go to say, John's right.
Marco:
When you're making video,
Marco:
you first of all you're looking at people who are like you know big youtube channels and big tv producers and what they produce and you're comparing yourself as a complete newbie relatively speaking oh yeah oh yeah also you're working alone you know most big channels and producers have staffs that produce video like it's as you know there's a lot about making video that's pretty hard to do by yourself
Marco:
um and you know you make it work you figure out a way or you or you have some somebody help you as much as possible but um you know with video there is an infinite there is no ceiling on production values like no matter like you're never gonna reach a point where you think my production values are right where they need to be no that's never gonna happen like you're always gonna want to get more and more and more and more
Marco:
And because you aren't the entire BBC with an infinite budget, you're never going to reach that level of technical perfection.
Marco:
So instead, you have to aim for basically best bang for the buck.
Marco:
And I mean that both in money and also in time and complexity.
Marco:
And, you know, that's why, like, I made this mistake for my video when, you know, I basically bought a whole bunch of gear that I ended up using between zero and one times.
Marco:
And you're never going to, you know, reach perfection technically, but you just have to reach the point where you can say this is good enough.
Marco:
And it's going to be really hard to decide.
Marco:
And it's going to be really hard to finally make that call.
Marco:
And whether you're there or not, you might already be there.
Marco:
But the reality is what people care about is what you're saying and how it sounds and a little bit of the video.
Marco:
But if there's flaws in the video, who cares?
Marco:
Welcome to YouTube.
Marco:
Everything on YouTube is like, you know, like only the only the very top, top, top tier are producing things that look like TV.
Marco:
Everyone else is making do with like their iPhone as the camera and long shots of themselves talking and everything.
Marco:
And it's fine.
John:
it's totally fine even the high-end channels are doing that i just watched that uh the mkbhd i justine uh opening of the old that was so good i forget which channel it was on but i'm i don't i don't know this for sure but looking at the video my thinking is that they shot the thing in 8k and then they're just crop zooming to the interesting parts like because they could they didn't have a camera person they basically had a camera on a tripod
John:
tripod getting both of them and every time there was a point of interest because they shot at 8k they had the resolution to be able to zoom in on peeling the sticker off or zoom in on a person's reaction and it didn't look gross because you know they had a ridiculously expensive camera but that's not how you shoot tv like they do that in movies sometimes but like really what you want as a camera person and get the close-up and like do inserts and all like but they didn't because it's like well
John:
We don't have time for that.
John:
We don't have the staff.
John:
Even though we're bazillionaires and have these amazing big channels, we just want to get this video out.
John:
And all the way down to Doug DeMiro, who's putting an iPhone on a tripod, pointing it at himself with no staff, and he just crawls around in the car for half an hour and he's done.
John:
And that's what I'm saying.
John:
He should be your inspiration because it's not like he doesn't care, but the quality that he's putting out by just using his iPhone and a cruddy microphone, it's not great, but it's fine.
John:
That's not the problem with his videos, right?
John:
No one's watching his videos and saying, your video was good, but I wish there was more dramatic lighting.
It's like...
John:
Can you see what he's talking about?
John:
Can you hear him?
John:
Does it sound not awful?
John:
Good.
John:
Thumbs up.
Marco:
And even on the sound gear front, too.
Marco:
In my video, my sound wasn't that good.
Marco:
I have all the gear in the world.
Marco:
I could have had perfect sound, but you know what I didn't have?
Marco:
A boom operator.
Marco:
Or even the right kind of big long stand to hover it over my head in the shot.
Marco:
Or a camera person to skillfully avoid having the boom in the shot if I tried that.
Marco:
The right way to get really good audio, to the best of my knowledge, is to have somebody holding a hypercardioid short-range mic right above your head pointed at your mouth the whole time.
Marco:
You will get the best audio that way.
Marco:
Sure, sure.
Marco:
You need you know, you need more equipment and especially generally you need some you need a person to be doing that.
Marco:
There's a lot of things about about video production where like what it comes down to really is you need a person to be holding something or looking at something or operating something for you.
Marco:
And that's hard to do when you're an indie in your house.
Marco:
You can try to rope your family into it, but even that has its limits of how much they're willing to tolerate for you.
John:
Daddy, this boomer's heavy.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Just keep holding a kid.
Marco:
So yeah, that's of limited value generally.
Marco:
So you've got to figure out good enough hacks.
Marco:
Even I, who cares so much about audio quality,
Marco:
ended up just having a microphone on my podcast boom arm pointing near me at too far of a distance.
Marco:
And it was... Oh, wait, no.
Marco:
No, I forgot.
Marco:
I tried that.
Marco:
It wasn't as good.
John:
You did the lav mic thing.
Marco:
Yeah, what I have there is my really crappy, yet not cheap, Rode wireless lavalier mic, which is not a good idea.
Marco:
Those things are not very good for their price.
Casey:
See, this is the problem.
Casey:
I need you to do a podcasting microphone mega review, but for lavalier mics, because I've solicited recommendations more than once, and nobody really seems to have experience, surprisingly enough, who knew, with lavalier mics in a loud, moving automobile.
Casey:
Now, granted, I would turn the AC either off or nearly off, but nobody has really experienced one of these mics in this extremely boomy, loud environment, and I'm reluctant to spend...
Casey:
Like I'll spend decent money on a mic if I am fairly confident that it will fit the bill.
Casey:
And I'm not the kind of person that likes to do the like, oh, try this, return it, oh, try this, return it dance.
Casey:
So I need someone like you, Marco, to try all these out.
Casey:
Not in your electric car, mind you.
Casey:
I need it in your Dino Juice mobile in order to tell me which one is the one to buy.
Casey:
So I can just buy that and be done with it.
Casey:
Because the best audio I've found so far is by having a brand new GoPro within like six inches of my mouth, which I'm sure is making everyone's skin crawl.
Casey:
But it actually is the best audio I've found in car anyway.
Casey:
Outside the car, I have a crummy lavalier mic that works enough.
Casey:
But I feel like it clips over everything.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
So I just need to get a better lavalier mic.
Casey:
I just don't know what to buy.
Marco:
Well, if you're clipping, the problem isn't the mic.
Casey:
But I'm not even talking loudly.
Marco:
But the problem is what's driving the mic or what's receiving the mic signal.
Marco:
You're clipping because something is exceeding a limit on when it converts with the gain back to digital.
Marco:
You're exceeding the range of what's receiving that signal.
Marco:
So the way to fix clipping is to lower the input signal or to use an analog limiter.
Marco:
And I, and actually if you use your USB pre too, that does have analog limiters.
Marco:
Um, I believe only when the mic mode is being used.
Marco:
So you might need to do some, some wiring conversion to make that work.
Marco:
But, uh, anyway, that, that is not a problem with the mic.
Marco:
That is a problem with something, you know, down the, down the chain there.
Marco:
Um, but,
Marco:
But generally, though, your instinct to put a GoPro right next to your face, proximity is your friend.
Marco:
When it comes to having good sound in a loud environment, then trying to separate you from the background, there's no magic to it.
Marco:
It's just signal-to-noise ratio.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You are the signal.
Marco:
The background is the noise.
Marco:
So you need to be as loud as possible in that mic while being as well.
Marco:
The mic is as far away from the noise as possible.
Marco:
Like that's that's it.
Marco:
And so sometimes, you know, when you're in a car, it's kind of hard to get away from the noise.
Marco:
So just get really close to the mic.
Marco:
Adjust your gain on whatever this is going into so that it's not clipping.
Marco:
That solves your problem right there.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And to go back a little bit, you know, one of you said it might have been John, you know, this takes a whole team of people to do.
Casey:
Actually, Marco, you said this as well.
Casey:
This reminds me of a video that Casey Neistat put out, I don't know, like a month or two ago, May 31st, where he ended up rendezvousing with MKBHD as MKBHD was reviewing a Lamborghini.
Casey:
And sure enough, there were like five people there helping him do this.
Casey:
And that did make me feel both deeply miserable because I know I will never get to that point.
Casey:
And also really, really happy because it made me feel like, okay, if it takes five people to come up with something that good, then maybe one person can come up with something that's passable, which is what you guys have been saying.
John:
In the iBook video, they were using their iPhone to shoot the front of the thing because, again, they didn't have time to have multi-camera setups.
John:
And it's just like, well, whatever.
John:
We got the one thing on the tripod.
John:
And then if we need a shot at the front of it, we'll keep awkwardly turning it towards the camera.
John:
But then eventually just use our iPhone or whatever.
John:
And then the iPhone shots, because they're shooting the opposite direction, you could see the camera on the tripod.
John:
And you could also see this bored person off to the right, not paying attention to them making the video, just fiddling around on the computer with no interest in whatever they're doing.
John:
uh you know this just i don't think anyone cares like it's fine they just want to see the computer like i mean maybe i feel like that could have told that guy to move but it's not like they're going to reshoot it like it's just this is the one and done that's just this is the thing we're opening the box we're excited about it and we're done and then i didn't look at the view count on the video but i bet it's pretty high so don't worry about it 1.2 million yeah so you're fine you're just fine
John:
What's the view count on the DeMiro video where he lost the driving footage?
Casey:
I don't remember which one it was.
Casey:
I know exactly what you're thinking of, but I don't remember what the video was.
John:
I'll look at a pant.
Casey:
I really needed a pep talk, and I appreciate it, because I feel like it's that typical thing where
Casey:
My vision is far beyond the means of my ability, which is probably in the grand scheme of things a healthy thing.
Casey:
But when you're in the midst of it and when you have this ticking, not time bomb, but this ticking clock because this car is going to go back as I record in basically a day, you know, I have all day tomorrow to record with it.
Casey:
And that's basically it.
Casey:
And so there's this deadline that just won't go away.
Casey:
And it's just stressing me out.
Casey:
And the moral of the story is, I just got to keep doing it.
Casey:
I got to keep trying it.
Casey:
I got to keep just putting the pieces together with the utter crap that I've filmed and try to make something out of it.
Casey:
But golly, it's tough.
Casey:
And I feel like the only way I'm going to really get better at this is to do more and more and more of it.
Casey:
But that's hard when I only have access to but so many cars, especially for the duration of time.
Casey:
I don't get access to a lot of cars for a whole week.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
I could potentially get access to cars for a few hours like DeMiro does, but I am nowhere near that point.
John:
He does what he does in a few hours.
John:
That should be your inspiration.
John:
His video, by the way, has 900,000 views, the one where he deleted all the driving footage.
John:
Which car was it?
Marco:
RCF, Lexus.
Marco:
So keep in mind also, Casey, you're saying because this is the first video that you're doing after you've gotten independent, you've placed this additional standard or burden on it of how good it has to be.
Marco:
But it's still only your third one of these.
Marco:
So don't worry about that.
Marco:
You just became self-employed like that.
Marco:
Actually, like you're self-employed as a podcaster.
Marco:
The video stuff is currently your hobby.
Casey:
Yeah, that's fair.
Casey:
That's fair.
Marco:
And so it doesn't need to be amazing this time compared to how it was last time, which is already pretty decent because it's still just your third one of these.
Marco:
And by the way, let me point out, you do have access to lots of cars for more than a week.
Marco:
The ones that you own or have owned or, you know, cars you can borrow from your dad or whatever.
Marco:
So like, you know, you have you have access to more cars than than you think.
Marco:
And you might think it's not worth reviewing like, you know, an old, you know, before it went away, like Aaron's old Mazda or your old BMW, if that still exists.
Marco:
You totally should have got footage of Aaron's Mazda.
Marco:
First of all, I think it actually is kind of fun to have modern reviews of old cars.
Marco:
I think that's kind of cool.
Marco:
And I'm sure I'm not the only one.
Marco:
People watch all sorts of total bullshit on YouTube.
Marco:
So they've got to watch stuff like that because it's actually pretty fun.
Marco:
And also, doing that will be practice for you to get better and more confident for when you get press cars or when you get limited time access to cars.
Marco:
So you should be doing that now anyway.
Marco:
But again, just keep in mind that all the burden you've placed on this, it's still only your third video.
Marco:
Cut yourself some slack and realize it's not going to be perfect because it's your third one.
Marco:
Listen to the third episode of any podcast anybody has ever done, like the very first time they started podcasting.
Marco:
it's not very good.
Marco:
And like, you know, everyone learns, you get better, but it takes time, it takes practice, and that's what you're doing, but you're at the very beginning stage of that, really.
Marco:
So cut yourself a break, deal with what you got, and you'll get better over time.
Marco:
I appreciate it.
Casey:
I mean, I'll get there.
Casey:
And for the record, I am not at all above doing old car reviews.
Casey:
I am totally into that.
Casey:
And had this been something I was really considering doing when we got rid of Aaron's car, which was, I think, almost to the day a year ago now.
Casey:
I absolutely would have reviewed the crap out of that Mazda 6, which was probably the best car that our family will ever own.
Casey:
I mean, that thing was bulletproof for 10 years and we put almost no money into it.
Casey:
And it was a great car from the moment we bought it till the moment we sold it.
Casey:
So I wish I had done it.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
But no, it was a great car and I miss it.
Casey:
Unlike my BMW, which has just been sitting rotting because I still haven't done anything with it.
Casey:
But I think I might know what I might be buying, except maybe not.
Casey:
And that's kind of the arc of this forthcoming video.
Casey:
We'll talk about that after the video is out.
Casey:
This video is both answering all of my questions and raising all new ones, which is the best and the worst.
Casey:
But, you know, it is what it is.
Casey:
Stephen Hart writes us to say that the patent office has a policy to reject any patent of a perpetual motion machine unless there is a fully built working model.
Casey:
This was like a one-off comment that John made, if I'm not mistaken, on the last episode.
John:
Yeah, I was pointing out that Apple's patent on their little keyboard condoms.
John:
Like, you can patent stuff.
John:
It doesn't mean that it actually...
John:
works the to do the thing that you say it's supposed to do so apple patented this thing to keep crap out of your keyboard right but does it keep crap out of your keyboard doesn't matter you can get a patent on it anyway and i was saying you can patent anything even perpetual motion machines which i'm sure i had in my mind for this specific reason uh because perpetual motion machine is such a you know it didn't say this in the wikipedia article but because it's such a popular thing in like in the history of humanity like everyone thinks they're always
John:
I bet tons of people tried to patent perpetual motion machines and it's probably just an annoyance.
John:
So the patent office in the US has a specific rule that says, if you get something that basically is a perpetual motion machine, just flat out refuse.
John:
Like special case rule, we're annoyed with your stupid perpetual motion machines.
John:
uh just know you have to show us a working you have to actually show us a working thing that actually works the way you say it does which is not true of other patents and so this is the wikipedia thing goes on um even if a patent is granted this is what i was getting at does not it does not mean that the invention actually works it just means the examiner believes that it works or was unable to figure out why it would not work another dumb thing about the patent system
John:
patent examiners who are just these people are expected to make a determination to say do you believe this works or can you not figure out why it wouldn't work give him a patent i guess i'm the expert in everything so what i was getting at is still holds despite my perpetual motion machine not being a valid one just because they've been so inundated and annoyed by that in the hundreds of years of the patent office
Marco:
you can get a patent on all sorts of things does not mean it does what you say it does my favorite thing too so like remember last episode we had been written into by an air conditioning expert of like you know like window air conditioner expert and this time somebody wrote in who claims to be a former patent examiner to tell us this we actually we heard this information from a number of people I forget whether it was Stephen Hart here the same guy though same guy same air conditioning guy works in the patent office oh yeah
Casey:
Are you being serious?
John:
I can't tell if you're being serious.
John:
It might be.
John:
I mean, that's the magic of email.
John:
You can make up anything and email it to anybody.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
We're so gullible.
John:
Write us anything.
John:
We'll just believe it and say it in a podcast.
Casey:
Put it in the show.
Casey:
Please don't encourage them.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
2018 keyboards will not be used to repair the 2016 and 2017 MacBook Pros, according to Joe Rossignol at MacRumors.
Casey:
This is a quote.
Casey:
When asked if Apple stores and Apple authorized service providers will be permitted to replace the second gen keyboards in 2016-2017 MacBook Pro models with the new third gen keyboards, if necessary, Apple said no.
Casey:
The third generation keyboards are exclusive to the 2018 MacBook Pro.
Casey:
Then they quietly added under their breath, please give us more money.
Casey:
No, that's not true.
Marco:
This actually kind of makes sense.
Marco:
As we're learning more about these machines, as people are getting them and taking them apart, one of the major changes to these machines is that the battery size is pretty different.
Marco:
The new ones have a bigger battery.
Marco:
There's been a few parts inside that have had to be redesigned or moved slightly to fit that bigger battery.
Marco:
Well, the battery is part of the top case.
Marco:
The keyboard is also part of the top case.
Marco:
And in fact, there's some speculation at iFixit because the one they took apart
Marco:
weighs the exact same as last year's model, even though it has like a 10% bigger battery.
Marco:
So they speculate that they made up the weight difference by reducing some of the metal mass in the top case.
Marco:
So whatever the case may be, it does seem like the top case is different enough with these 2018 models that...
Marco:
it probably is not a trivial job to fit one onto the previous generation MacBook Pros.
Marco:
And since the keyboard is part of the top case, that's probably why they can't fit this particular new keyboard in the top case it comes with on the old computers.
Marco:
Now, this isn't the only option they have.
Marco:
they could re-engineer the 2017 and 2016 top cases to have these silicone membrane things that protect the keys from dust.
Marco:
They are choosing not to take that option.
Marco:
And I'm not that surprised.
Marco:
When Apple does these kind of extended repair programs or when they have a flaw like this,
Marco:
their solution usually isn't we will fix it in a way that is permanently fixed for you their solution usually is we will repair it for free up to x years and then you just have to buy a new laptop if you don't want this problem anymore that's what they did with the gpu failures before that repair program that's what they did with like the cracking plastic on on the plastic macbooks and that's what they're going to do on the on this too like
Marco:
If you have a 2016 or 2017, your keyboard will probably never be fully 100% immune to these problems.
Marco:
We actually don't even know if the 2018s will be yet.
Marco:
It's a little early to say.
Marco:
But if the 2018 rubber gasket thing or rubber membrane thing does fix the problem, that's not coming to the older ones.
Marco:
I understand why with the likely difference in top case.
Marco:
but it doesn't make it suck any less for the owners of those two generations of laptops.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
That's why you don't want to end up, you know, getting a, you know, a quote unquote bad model or whatever, because like you're just, even with the repair program, which you have to wait patiently for to come into existence, maybe you have to bring it back one or two more times.
John:
And that's just annoying to have to bring it back and be without your laptop.
John:
And then, you know, it's just, you feel like I wish I had a laptop that I just bought and then used for a while and it was fine.
John:
And now you're,
John:
you know that the likelihood of you having to bring it back in is exactly the same as the likelihood was from the time that you bought it because they're putting the same exact part in it.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Northwestern University and their master's program in information systems.
Marco:
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Marco:
Are you interested in building the technical skills, management expertise, and professional network needed for a successful career in IT management?
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:
Find out more about Northwestern University's master's program in information systems.
Marco:
Visit sps.northwestern.edu slash is.
Marco:
Once again, it's sps.northwestern.edu slash is.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Northwestern University and the master's program in information systems for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
There's been a kerfuffle because apparently we can't just have nice things and be excited about them.
Casey:
Instead, we all need to get grumpy about something.
Casey:
And this week we're all electing to get grumpy about the 2018 MacBook Pro with the i9 processor.
Casey:
So Dave Lee, who I'm not personally familiar with, but seems like he is no schmuck by any stretch of the imagination, has a YouTube channel where he reviewed or maybe not even reviewed, but made a video about the Core i9 MacBook Pro.
Casey:
And the TLDR of this is that it apparently runs real hot.
Casey:
And because of that...
Casey:
it will throttle itself and not use the full potential of the i9 processor because it gets too hot too quickly.
Casey:
And what he was seeing was that it only runs for a few seconds, I don't remember exactly how many, but not very long before it throttles itself.
Casey:
And justifiably, he's pretty grumpy about that because the whole idea behind getting this maxed out MacBook Pro is to be able to do the sorts of things that he does, in this case video editing,
Casey:
Anywhere.
Casey:
And as someone who is dabbling with video editing myself, I can sympathize with this.
Casey:
So he actually tested the i9 MacBook Pro, the brand new one, and just sitting there, and then he literally put the thing in a freezer.
Casey:
which you should not do no which you should not do but for lots of reasons he put it in a freezer and ran the same test i believe he was like exporting a rendering or something in final cut pro 10 or whatever the case maybe it doesn't really matter the specific specifics of the test but he tried it again and it turned out it was like 30 or something like that better when it was in the freezer thus implying that throttling was the problem
Casey:
Now, I have a couple of problems with this test in that, of course, any processor is going to run a lot quicker when it's cold.
Casey:
Just like a motor runs a lot quicker when it gets cold.
John:
No.
John:
He's stopping it from throttling.
John:
First of all, the timescales on his test, it was like a 30-minute thing.
John:
So just based on his video, it was like, I'm going to max out all the cores.
John:
presumably for like 30 minutes uh and then and that's why he was running it against like the old uh the previous generation that had two fewer cores and the one with two fewer cores won presumably because the new one with six core was was throttling itself down to a lower clock speed and the other one was not throttling itself as much and then when you put in the freezer the new one won handily over the old one
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So everyone is really, really, really perturbed about this.
Casey:
So I'm not sure what to think of this because I certainly wouldn't be happy if I spent a whole pile of money on this machine that quickly throttles itself because of thermal issues.
Casey:
But to some degree, I feel like, uh, some amounts of this should be expected, but perhaps not as much as we're seeing.
Casey:
And I can't decide if I'm actually upset about this or not.
Casey:
So I don't know.
John:
You should go through the, the Reddit ones too, because they have some, uh, again, this is just anecdotal testing, but there's more numbers for more people.
John:
I think the Reddit, the Reddit ones got, uh, got, uh, more specific.
John:
So, uh,
John:
That was a 30 minute test.
John:
And it's like, all right, well, the Geekbench numbers all look good, but Geekbench doesn't take 30 minutes to run.
John:
So at what point does the throttling kick in?
John:
Does it just kick in if you max all six scores with, you know, for a half an hour or does it kick in after 30 seconds?
John:
So this is one person did a test where it was throttling down to 800 megahertz, which is bad after less than five minutes running this prime number benchmark.
John:
uh it was throttled down to 2.5 gigahertz after less than one minute with maximum fan speed on so this is this goes to something that marco mentioned earlier today on twitter that a possible fix is apple to tweak the uh the fan control to say i'll just blow the fans faster so this was a test in which they artificially made the fans blow at max speed the entire time just crank them to max and did a test and it still throttled down to 2.5 gigahertz after less than a minute on this prime thing
John:
uh and it was throttling down 2.5 gigahertz with automatic fan on uh you know the fan doing what it wants to do as well so the 800 megahertz thing after five minutes is bad but anytime you look like a prime number generator or some other kind of like hot spot producing thing it's probably not representative of real loads but i think the final cut export probably is representative of real loads uh so
John:
this is just two data points here two people dave lee on on youtube and aea on reddit and there's a bunch of other people in the thread giving their experience as well um but it certainly looks like this laptop is doesn't quite have enough cooling to realize the full performance of all six cores under
John:
On harsh conditions, admittedly, but I think potentially realistic conditions.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, if it was just Dave Lee's video, then I would have assumed he got a bad one.
Marco:
But the fact that a lot of other people are now chiming in with similar reports, it does sound like this is not just a fluke with his laptop.
Marco:
It seems like this is just this model of laptop with this processor.
Marco:
I would like to know, has anybody posted whether the base 15-inch CPU has this kind of throttling?
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
I mean, I have to imagine it's related to the cores.
John:
I was discussing this on Twitter a lot, and as many people pointed out, I think even Marco as well, like this is not a process shrink.
John:
Like this six core is made on the same process as the previous four core, right?
John:
So you're not getting, well, we could fit more cores in because everything is smaller.
John:
And that's how we can, you know, get it into the same thermal envelope.
John:
Like I have to imagine, I don't know what the actual numbers, but I have to imagine the six core processor is
John:
puts out more heat than than the four core does because it's it's made on the same process you can't get blood from a stone right so and i don't think they removed a whole bunch of cash and made the gpu smaller to wedge in the other cores or anything like that or even if they did it's obviously not making up for it um and the cooling capacity is determined mostly by you know how fast can the fans move air and how many heat pipes can you snake from the little contact patch and you mean this is this is what was getting at last show about the
John:
the inherent design trade-offs, like what trade-offs are made for the 15-inch.
John:
There's a certain envelope of size, weight, power, you know, all that other stuff.
John:
The trade-offs made for this chassis may not have been made with the expectation that they are going to have to cool, what is it now, a 14-nanometer six-core processor.
John:
The expectation may have been that surely by 2018, there'll be 10-nanometer six-core processors, and that'll fit in this chassis, no problem.
John:
And so let's design everything around that.
John:
But Intel, as we have later in the topics, if we ever get to it, Intel has been very late on its smaller process size.
John:
And so we have many, many generations, talk, talk, talk, talk, as Marco said last show, of these 14 nanometer processors.
John:
And it's entirely conceivable that just...
John:
it can handle the heat most of the time but if you really max out all six cores and maybe the gpu as well that even at maximum fan speed in a fairly hot room it's gonna throttle like that's why laptops suck everybody let's get a mac pro and be happy oh god
Marco:
Yeah, and to understand this problem, it helps to, I'll go over briefly some of the factors here.
Marco:
CPUs are, you know, modern CPUs, they're rated by their TDP, which I believe stands for thermal design power.
Marco:
And this is basically like the maximum amount of heat expressed in watts that the processor is allowed to emit under load.
Marco:
And if it's hitting the TDP limit, it will usually clock itself down.
Marco:
Now, they realized as an optimization, like,
Marco:
you can use you can use dynamic clock speeds to be able to like boost one core super high for a little while as long as it doesn't hit thermal limits if the other cores aren't doing that much and if all the cores are super busy like they are in like you know multi-core exports from final cut multi-core benchmarks things like that then you can't go quite as high but you can still usually boost the speed a little bit until it gets too hot and then you got to slow it back down but
Marco:
And that's what Turbo Boost does.
Marco:
Turbo Boost is what manages that.
Marco:
It's what offers these higher speeds sometimes, but not all the time.
Marco:
Higher speeds of certain workloads, like single-threaded ones, but not all workloads.
Marco:
But with all that, what is expected from every processor?
Marco:
Every processor advertises its base clock speed.
Marco:
This is the speed, like in this one, I believe it's 2.9 gigahertz, right?
Marco:
The speed that is advertised on the box.
Marco:
And then usually it'll say, you know, it can turbo boost up to whatever.
Marco:
Usually it's like another 500 megahertz or 800 megahertz above that.
John:
Does this one go to 4.5?
John:
I thought it was a turbo boost number of 4.5 or something crazy like that.
Marco:
I think it's 4.8.
Marco:
It's ridiculous.
Marco:
It's very, very high.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
So with a properly engineered computer and a properly engineered processor and a properly working cooling system, the base clock should be sustainable no matter what.
Marco:
Even if it's a hot day, even if you're maxing out all the cores for eight hours, the base clock should be fixed.
Marco:
The processor should never have to dip below the base clock.
Marco:
If it ever dip below the base clock, something is wrong with that design or with that hardware.
Marco:
Simple as that.
Marco:
So there was also an article posted today about the 13-inch on notebookcheck.net.
Marco:
It's testing the 13-inch base model, so I believe the i5 13-inch base model.
Marco:
And they're claiming throttling on this, but if you look at the Intel Power Gadget graph, which Intel Power Gadget is this little app that you can run from Intel that shows you...
Marco:
the frequency and wattage and temperature of your processor in a little graph as you run benchmarks to do things.
Marco:
So you can see whether it's throttling or not.
Marco:
You can see how much wattage it's drawing.
Marco:
You can see how hot it's getting.
Marco:
But what they're showing with Intel Power Gadget, the 13-inch is maintaining at or above its base clock speed.
Marco:
It dips below it for like a second, but that's it.
Marco:
The whole rest of their benchmark, it is hovering above.
Marco:
You can see there's a gray line that shows where it is.
Marco:
It's hovering above that.
Marco:
So the 13-inch doesn't appear to have this problem in this base model configuration.
Marco:
Unfortunately, we don't have more tests yet of the higher configuration of the 13 or the lower configuration of the 15.
Marco:
So it's kind of hard to know if this is a problem with all of these or some of these or none of these.
Marco:
Hopefully by next week we'll have more information.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
When properly working, these processors should be able to maintain at least their base clock, no matter what.
Marco:
And then, as thermals allow, be able to go between the base clock and the turbo boost max speed as they kind of sit at or near that thermal ceiling during load.
Marco:
And the problem with this 15-inch is that...
Marco:
it can't even sustain its base clock.
Marco:
Like the 15 inch I-9, according to these reports from these multiple people now, is that it can't even sustain the base clock after a very short time.
Marco:
And that means something is really wrong.
Marco:
That is not normal.
Marco:
That is a major problem.
John:
Well, wasn't that true also of the previous 15 when you plugged in an external monitor?
John:
Its base clock went down, right?
John:
So it's not as if this is unprecedented.
Marco:
Yeah, so I ran into that problem last summer where, yeah, this was not talked about that much, but I believe the base clock was like 2.4 or something, and it would clock itself down to 2.0, something like that.
Marco:
Yeah, when an external monitor was connected,
Marco:
the base clock would just get reduced automatically.
Marco:
I heard from a couple people on Twitter about it.
Marco:
I checked mine.
Marco:
It did it too.
Marco:
I had the maxed out 15 inch from last year, from 2017.
Marco:
It did it, and it sucked.
Marco:
I wouldn't have probably noticed
Marco:
If people didn't point it out to me, so sorry for everybody who I just ruined your CPU.
John:
People don't expect that, though.
John:
People expect when I'm plugged into power at my desk, that's when I'll get the maximum power out of my laptop because, hey, everything's plugged in.
John:
You don't have to worry about draining your battery.
John:
Everything should be fine, but it's not true because heat is your other enemy.
John:
It doesn't matter that you're plugged in.
John:
Actually, you're getting worse performance than if you weren't connected to your big monitor.
Marco:
Yeah, and that, to me, like...
Marco:
So laptops, in some ways, they make better desktops than ever.
Marco:
Connectivity is better than ever.
Marco:
External bandwidth, external monitor support is better than ever.
Marco:
But it seems like the thermal situation is just getting worse over time.
Marco:
They're even more annoying thermally because they keep getting thinner and thinner and thinner and smaller and smaller.
Marco:
But the processor, the max GDP in these processors is not going down.
Marco:
There is one difference that I noticed looking through the Intel spec sheets between the two years.
Marco:
The 15-inch GPUs, they have a TDP of 45 watts, and that's unchanged between the years.
Marco:
But there's something on Intel spec sheets called configurable TDP down, and they explain this as basically...
Marco:
laptop manufacturers are able to set the processor to actually have a lower TDP than 45 watts if they want to.
Marco:
And last year's CPU could be set as low as 35 watts.
Marco:
The 2018 doesn't have that option.
Marco:
It doesn't list configurable TDP down as available anymore.
Marco:
So maybe Apple was configuring it down last year.
Marco:
This year they can't because Intel doesn't offer it anymore.
Marco:
So they just let it fly and are seeing what happens, which is not a good thing if that's what's going on here.
Marco:
And this probably won't affect the 13-inch because a 13-inch CPU is a 28-watt TDP.
Marco:
Same for last year and this year.
Marco:
They both have configurable TDP down, and this year the TDP down is actually lower.
Marco:
Last year it was 23 watts.
Marco:
This year it's 20 watts.
Marco:
So this is probably not affecting the 13, but again, we don't have enough data to tell yet.
Casey:
So are we getting angry about this?
John:
Well, I mean, like I said, last year's did the same thing that you could decide to be angry about or not.
Marco:
Well, there's a huge difference in degree, though.
John:
But it depends on what you're doing, though.
Marco:
No, going from like 2.4 to 2.0 or whatever it was is very different than going from 2.9 to 800 megahertz.
John:
But yeah, but the 800 megahertz one, like it's really mostly going from 2.9 to 2.5 with the base thing on this.
John:
It depends on what they're doing.
John:
Like this is a prime 95 benchmark.
John:
Like I don't know if what anyone is ever going to do is going to get you down to 800 megahertz.
John:
I think as low as the thing could possibly go.
John:
That sounds like a situation.
Marco:
where you're really maxing everything out and maybe it's also hot and maybe you also have a bad uh you know thermal solution in your thing but the thing is with all laptops that actually great if you remember the original macbook air it had these thermal problems as well and uh and 800 megahertz was as low as it could go that was back when i believe it was still called speed step the frequency adjusting technology back then yeah the max was 1.2 or something so it was one point i think it was 1.6
John:
but it was going down to 800 megahertz yeah so anyway like laptops are always potentially thermally compromised they all come with the ability to slow themselves down when they get hot and to some degree when you sell a laptop you can't control exactly how hot it's going to get people use them on their laps on top of a puffy comforter on top of a pillow and it blocks all the vents and the things get super hot and basically the machines have to protect themselves right if people don't know or don't care about that then their computer is running at half speed and tough luck right
John:
But in reasonable conditions, on top of a desk at like a room temperature room, you know, like Marco said, they should be able to
John:
Maybe not max out everything, because I think it's a high demand to say max out everything on the GPU and all the cores and every special unit.
John:
I feel like if you do some sort of... There's a name for those kind of tests, but try to melt my CPU type tests where everything is super hot, you're probably just going to throttle.
John:
But just using all the cores, in a laptop...
John:
you know and a laptop of the size and shape of apple's ones you're just using all the cores it should be able to sustain that because it can with four cores as you noted in that little graph showing the four core thing staying above its base frequency and ping-ponging back and forth but never going below base that's possible with six why buy a six core machine if like that's what they're showing was literally slower than the four car ones because it was throttling lower the the four car one could maintain its base and this one was going well below its base and taking longer so why are you paying six cores
John:
Like, oh, I have a lot of multithreaded work.
John:
Well, is it actually going to complete your multithreaded work faster?
John:
Do you keep the thermostat at like, you know, 52 degrees?
John:
Then maybe it'll do it.
John:
So this seems like not a great situation, but it really depends on what you're doing.
John:
Are you using all six cores in bursts of 25 seconds?
John:
then you're probably fine and it probably will never throttle right are you running three-hour render jobs maybe consider a different solution because it seems like unless you work in a freezer uh which again you shouldn't do uh it's it might run slower than the four core um what is what is apple's like uh return thing like if you just don't like it for any reason it's like 14 days or something yeah 14 yeah so this would be good if anyone's buying one of these like again this is why laptops are not the ideal pro machines
John:
in many situations for a variety of reasons and also why uh apple's particular trade-offs especially for the 15 inch are perhaps not ideal because they could have made a much thicker computer with better cooling and yada yada and intel's behind there's lots of reasons but anyway bottom line is if you're wondering should i buy one of the machines or not well is are all six cores going to be useful to me buy one try your typical workload see how long it takes and if it's slower than a four core return it and get a four core
Marco:
I would also... I mean, I disagree with you a little bit in the sense that I don't think we should just blindly accept these limitations of like, well, it advertises these high specs and you're paying for these high specs.
Marco:
In fact, you're paying quite a lot for these high specs and you're buying it expecting these high specs and then, oh, you actually can't use... You're not going to get this performance if you actually try to use it all at once.
Marco:
Like, that to me...
Marco:
maybe at best is acceptable in a consumer line.
Marco:
But when you're talking about the highest end models that are specifically advertised at doing sustained pro kind of work, I don't think we should settle for the resources that you buy and that are advertised and the performance that's advertised not actually being available all the time.
Marco:
Turbo Boost, as I mentioned, Turbo Boost is optional.
Marco:
And I understand that.
Marco:
It makes sense that maybe under certain situations, you can't use the Turbo Boost speed because that's what Turbo Boost is.
Marco:
If you could always use the speed, they would just raise the base clock.
Marco:
So understood.
Marco:
Turbo Boost is an optional bonus when you can get it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
If you can't maintain the base clock, that to me, it's basically it's false advertising.
Marco:
It's like you design this machine, you sold me this machine that says it can do X, Y, Z, but it can't actually do X and Y and Z at the same time.
Marco:
Or it can't do X and Y at full speed if I plug it into a monitor, which is a configuration you specifically advertise and promote.
Marco:
So like...
Marco:
That, to me, is not good enough for a pro machine.
Marco:
Again, at best, if it's acceptable anywhere, which is a big if, it should be acceptable only in consumer and low-end machines, not in something advertised, marketed, and priced as a pro machine, desktop or laptop.
John:
My exception was only if you were using literally all the hardware.
John:
So not just all six cores, but also the H.264 decoder and also every single execution unit on the GPU at the same time.
John:
And the reason I say that is because
John:
there's not enough cooling in certainly an Apple laptop size case to be able to sustain a powerful GPU and all the cores and all the ancillary execution units and massive IO and like just light up everything.
John:
Like, have you ever seen those things where they try to say, you know, can you use, can you keep all the pipelines fed?
John:
Can you do run all the SIMD units, all the energy units, all the floating point units, all the GPU execution cores?
John:
Like, can you actually run anything?
John:
you know everything it wants to see like basically can you melt this thing can you a completely artificial no real world type scenario custom designed heat generating thing on all components because it's not representative of most real workloads probably any real real work it's more of a torture test to make sure to test your cooling solution right and i think
John:
There is no laptop available with a powerful discrete GPU and a six core CPU that has sufficient cooling that isn't like the size of, you know, a giant brick because it's just too much power output.
John:
Right.
John:
These machines are designed like they're over provision.
John:
Right.
John:
There's no way that they can cool all that stuff in that case with those fans.
John:
So they're relying on the fact that you're never going to be running all of it at once.
John:
And that's the only place I'm giving you the exception.
John:
If you light up everything, I could say even on a pro machine with this size and weight trade-off, it's just not going to happen.
John:
But if you're just using the CPU and not really using the GPU, yes, it should be able to sustain that.
John:
And if you plug in a monitor and it auto throttles down from 2.4 to 2, that's bogus too, right?
John:
The only exception I was allowing for is that like...
John:
There is a certain point of a trip, like I said, using it on your lap and a pillow or something like that, like or in just a very hot room.
John:
You don't have air conditioning.
John:
This room that I'm in right now is probably 85, right?
John:
This you can't control the entire environment.
John:
So if you're in an 85 degree room and you think thermal throttles and you're super angry about it.
John:
Try it in a 68 degree room and it doesn't thermal throttle.
John:
Are you okay with it then?
John:
Like the bottom line is the laptops are a compromise.
John:
And part of the way they get to this compromise, we talked about with battery life too, is they're over-provisioned on battery life.
John:
They assume you're not going to be doing big expensive stuff with CPU and GPU all the time.
John:
The battery life is like most of the time you just be...
John:
tooling around and cores are blipping here and there right and you get the advertised battery life but if you do any serious work for a certain period of time you don't that's how they get that's that's how laptops are made these days that's what the trade-offs are which again argues for if you really want to have a laptop and you really need to do all that stuff apple needs to make different trade-offs uh for a laptop for you or you should just get a desktop but i i mean i guess maybe that's just repeating what you said in terms of like the the pro thing or whatever but apple's version of pro is super thin and light
John:
uh and you just can't have super thin and light with that cpu with that gpu without throttling in some scenario um i think the and again i'm saying if you light up everything just the six cores like a final cut pro export that uses all six cores or an xcode compile or something
John:
That needs to be run at base clock speed.
John:
And I wouldn't be surprised to see some kind of related class action lawsuit about this eventually, because this seems more class action lawsuit friendly than the external monitor thing.
John:
But we have to see more data, because if you can get them to go in less than five minutes, if you can get them to go down to 800 megahertz, that's class action lawsuit territory.
John:
But then again, maybe it's just this one guy got a dud.
John:
So we'll have to wait and see.
Marco:
I wouldn't expect a lawsuit, honestly.
Marco:
You can get a lawsuit over iPhone batteries because everyone buys iPhones.
Marco:
And it's so much more headline-grabbing to do a lawsuit about that.
Marco:
The lawsuit about the broken keyboards only just barely started because it affected all of the laptops.
Marco:
This looks like it's probably only going to be affecting the highest-end configuration of their highest-end laptop.
Marco:
That's brand new right now.
Marco:
So I'm guessing...
Marco:
either it will never have a lawsuit or it will be like three years from now, but that's very unlikely for this.
Marco:
Um, but you know, I think I see your point about like tests that are designed to max out everything and to heat things up.
Marco:
Although I don't necessarily, I don't think I necessarily agree that that's, that those should be permitted to fail.
Marco:
Um, but yeah,
Marco:
These tests are not throttling only under Prime95.
Marco:
These are throttling under Final Cut Pro, as you mentioned.
Marco:
That is not only a legitimate workload, but it's literally one of the workloads they promote this machine and market this machine to do.
Marco:
The fact that this machine can't handle its flagship marketing workload without having thermal issues is a pretty serious problem.
Marco:
Now, whether it affects you as a customer of these, I don't – you know, it's up to you.
Marco:
But this is a problem that needs to be addressed.
Marco:
Like it's not – this isn't just going to – we can't just hand wave this away and say, well, this is an inherent problem with laptops.
Marco:
They all do this.
Marco:
You're holding it wrong.
Marco:
Like that's not going to be the solution here.
Marco:
The solution here is going to be like –
Marco:
This configuration, this machine at least, has a serious design problem.
Marco:
And whether they address it with faster fans, which by the way, congratulations, then your machine just got louder.
Marco:
Is that really better?
John:
Well, the faster fans don't seem to help.
John:
That's what they were maxing the fans.
John:
Artificially making the fans run at max the whole time just to see, does that solve the problem?
John:
The answer is no.
John:
Well, it helped the problem.
John:
It didn't make the problem go away.
John:
It helped, but didn't solve, right?
John:
I mean, so it...
John:
nerds tend to be annoyed by like number on box not equal number in in real life but the real the real test is is it faster than the four core because if it's not faster than the four core then what is the point of this machine again for your workload so like that that's all that really matters if it was faster than the four core but not but it still didn't match the numbers in the box people would be angry because like oh it's supposed to do what it says in the box and you could probably sue them over and everything right but
John:
Practically speaking, ignore all the nerd stuff.
John:
If the 6-core doesn't do your work thing faster than the 4-core, why would anyone ever buy the 6-core?
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Marco:
moving away from the thermal thing for at least a moment, now that we have all the benchmarks of all the different CPU configurations, I honestly am kind of disappointed by how much faster the 6-core isn't than the 4-core and the 13-inch.
Marco:
It is faster, and it's faster by a decent amount, but it isn't as much faster as I would have expected before I saw all the actual benchmarks of these different options.
Marco:
To me,
Marco:
the 13 inch in this generation looks like the one to get, if you don't need a GPU, like, or this, or the screen space of the 15, like, cause it's the 13 inch.
Marco:
Again, we still are missing most good, like long-term benchmarks.
Marco:
I still have no clue on battery life of either of these machines.
Marco:
Um, but like they both got the bigger battery, um,
Marco:
But only the 15 got the DDR4 RAM to eat some of that power.
Marco:
So the bigger battery, presumably, is also to address the fact that these CPUs have more cores than they probably should at their process size.
Marco:
But it's still the same TDP, so that might not matter.
Marco:
So basically...
John:
battery life is still a big question mark but it sure looks like the 13 is the one to get if your needs can be solved by it yeah but sometimes people want 15 inches i wonder if there'll be a market for people to manually disable two cores on their 15 inch to get better performance out of them
Marco:
One thing I thought of, too, like, so I for on my 2015, actually, I wrote a blog post about this forever ago.
Marco:
There is a utility called Turbo Boost Switcher Pro that actually quotes my blog post on its product page, I guess.
Marco:
But I ran tests and basically disabling Turbo Boost with a utility on my 2015 MacBook Pro and to see, like, what kind of effect does it have on performance and battery life?
Marco:
It's actually, it's a pretty interesting and useful test.
Marco:
And the utility is such that if you get the pro version, it can automatically switch for you.
Marco:
So you can do things like run without turbo boost whenever you're on battery.
Marco:
And then when you're plugged in, enable it again.
Marco:
And the difference is pretty striking.
Marco:
You do lose noticeable performance.
Marco:
Like in Geekbench, I lost something like 20 or 30% of my performance.
Marco:
But I also gained like 20 or 30 percent more battery life and the laptop became way cooler under load.
Marco:
Like it's a pretty big difference because not having turbo boost makes it when it's properly engineered in its thermal system makes it stay way below the TDP.
Marco:
even under load so it's actually a really nice option to have if you're trying to max things out or if you don't always need the massive amount of power you bought but you want to be able to turn it on selectively um the at the time when i when i had the 2016 and 2017s this utility i don't think worked with them and i'm i'm curious to revisit that and see like if it works with them now if it works with the new ones because
Marco:
Being able to manage that could be really useful.
Marco:
Also, it's long since overdue for Apple to add low power mode to a new version of Mac OS.
Marco:
And an easy way to implement that, in addition to things like background service stuff and time machine slowing down and everything else...
Marco:
easy win number one is like on the 15 inch force the integrated gpu to be used as much as possible and turn off turbo boost like that if you're going to do a low power mode like it actually is pretty compelling to have that option i i wish it was available to users on all the machines in some way even even if it's just exposed to some api and apps have to do it like
Marco:
It is kind of nice running without turbo boost sometimes.
Marco:
But anyway, the other thing I'm a little worried about with the thermal situation here is these machines are brand new.
Marco:
Now, over time, the thermal paste is going to start cracking and become less effective.
Marco:
The fans and vents and heat sinks are going to fill with dust.
Marco:
things are going to start getting a little bit out of whack, a little bit out of alignment.
Marco:
Over time, the cooling system of most computers, especially laptops, becomes less efficient.
Marco:
So what's going to happen if these are barely holding on today when they're brand new?
Marco:
What's going to happen when they're like two years old?
Marco:
And normally you'd expect at that point you'd start maybe hearing the fan a little bit more on your laptop.
Marco:
And maybe it runs a little bit hotter and you don't really know why.
Marco:
There's no headroom here for that.
Marco:
And that, I think, worries me also long-term for these machines.
John:
I think you remember also you mentioned it a few times is the extra power for the RAM and the bigger battery.
John:
Extra power means more heat from the RAM, right?
John:
There's a lot.
John:
You've got two more cores.
John:
You've got a big GPU and that extra power going to that RAM and also possibly the four terabyte SSD.
John:
If you get that option, that's more heat in a case that really has basically the same cooling solution as before.
John:
Those two little fans and the heat pipes.
John:
There's not really a lot of wiggle room for what you can do in there.
Casey:
If only they could make a case which was a little bit thicker or maybe had, I don't know, more cooling.
John:
Don't have a millimeter to spare.
Casey:
Wouldn't that be amazing?
John:
The next round of laptops, the next generation, in addition to potentially having more ports and, you know...
John:
you know bring back mag safe all of our wonderful dreams of what they could potentially do to make everybody happy right anyway fantasies whatever uh but one thing they can actually definitely do and they totally should is have an option at the top end for a thicker laptop thicker not that much thicker it will be thicker it will be heavier you don't want it if you want lightweight and thin but make one make one thick heavy and powerful option
John:
right because if that laptop you could put a cooling solution maybe that wouldn't throttle with a six core right and it would automatically be faster than this one even with the exact same hardware in it you can put bigger batteries in and get more battery life you'd have room on the side for a 10 gig ethernet adapter or whatever you know like
John:
That's a product that they don't make anymore.
John:
The 17-inch used to fill that role.
John:
It had a PC card slot, for crying out loud.
John:
But it's gone.
John:
It doesn't have to be a 17-inch laptop, but it could.
John:
People buy 17-inch laptops.
John:
It's a small market, but it's there, right?
John:
And I didn't expect them to come up with that now, but for the next generation, it's something they should definitely consider.
John:
They've kind of done that on the phone's
John:
accidentally like by making all the screens so much bigger and it's like wow we have so much more room for battery now and an oled screen takes less power and voila the iphone 10 has pretty good battery life like they backed into it somehow uh maybe they we need to find some sort of similar trend for them to follow in the laptop market to somehow make a thicker laptop
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We'll see how this all plays out.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It's disappointing.
Casey:
It's disappointing that, you know, after all this time of not really getting, I guess it wasn't that long, but it feels like it's been a long time without updates.
Casey:
That, you know, we're finally given this golden apple to consume, this wonderful golden egg to use.
Casey:
And it's still got problems.
Casey:
It's still not as gold as we thought.
Casey:
It's gold-plated, perhaps.
Casey:
It's rose gold.
Casey:
Yeah, it's rose gold.
Marco:
Honestly, like, this...
Marco:
What they're doing with the laptops now, I don't love this generation, which I've made very clear.
Marco:
But they have updated it every year.
Marco:
They have not skipped a generation of CPU that's available.
Marco:
They are updating these machines...
Marco:
On the schedule that we want them to be updating the machines on they've and the schedule they used to always update their machines on like we've been saying we've been complaining for years that lines were getting neglected entire CPU generations were being skipped.
Marco:
And with the laptops, they're hitting the wall now.
Marco:
They are hitting every generation.
Marco:
They have updates.
Marco:
They released this dumb generation in 2016.
Marco:
They made another one that's exactly as dumb in 2017.
Marco:
And here's one that's a little bit less dumb in some ways and more dumb in others in 2018.
Marco:
Like, they are doing exactly what we wanted them to do in the sense that they are updating these laptops every year.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
The only problem is that they're continuing to use a series of hardware generation, like in its physical design and other choices, that has a lot of problems and a lot of downsides.
Marco:
I was hoping that this year's revision would be the one where they change the body design again.
Marco:
Even though that would be premature relative to their previous durations of how long they used these things, I was hoping they would move one up
Marco:
if they could, you know, for, you know, for all the complaints with the current one.
Marco:
And instead, they address the complaints in different ways.
Marco:
And that's fine.
Marco:
But I really hope the next generation that actually changes the body style really takes into account customer feedback from this generation.
Marco:
Because, you know, there's this romantic idea that Apple just dictates what it knows we actually want and never actually takes customer feedback and doesn't really care what we think because they know best.
Marco:
And I think some people at Apple actually do work that way.
Marco:
But I think that's mostly in the past.
Marco:
It seems like the last couple of years, since the Mac Pro Roundtable and the Pro Workflows Group and the iMac Pro and things like that, I think they seem to have a different mindset now, a much more healthy mindset of, oh crap, we were in space and designing things with immense hubris that were getting increasingly distant from what our customers actually wanted and needed.
Marco:
And it seems like they have course-corrected.
Marco:
But when you course correct, it takes a while for the new products and new changes and stuff to actually get out into the world.
Marco:
They decided to make a new Mac Pro a year and a half ago now, and it's probably not going to be out for another year.
Marco:
And that's a pretty big thing.
Marco:
It took them probably two or three years for the iMac Pro to come out.
Marco:
They were probably developing this horrible generational laptop for two or three years before it came out in 2016.
Marco:
I think this course correction has happened.
Marco:
I think we have enough evidence to suggest, as we mentioned, you know, as I mentioned on Twitter, as John mentioned a couple weeks ago, like the Mac Renaissance, it does seem to be happening.
Marco:
It does seem like they have turned the ship.
Marco:
They are on the right track.
Marco:
We think it sure does look that way.
Marco:
But we haven't seen the result of that in the laptop line yet.
Marco:
And so it kind of remains a big mystery as to whether they have crashed the course in the laptops or not.
Marco:
I was hoping to see it this year.
Marco:
We didn't.
Marco:
I sure hope we see it next year.
John:
By the way, related to getting...
John:
getting what's printed on the box or whatever, consumer expectations.
John:
I think someone earlier in the chat had mentioned that, you know, that's just not how the world works.
John:
If I buy a car with 300 horsepower, it always has 300 horsepower.
John:
I have some bad news to you about how cars work.
John:
Although I have some good news.
John:
Sometimes after you use a car for a while, it has more horsepower than when you bought it.
John:
But anyway, no one dynos their cars.
John:
And then certainly they're not measuring the horsepower at the wheels.
John:
And there's all sorts of other things you don't want to know about.
John:
So just continue to think that your car gets exactly 300 horsepower as advertised the day you drive it off the lot, and you'll be fine.
John:
At every speed, too.
Casey:
It's also unsafe at every speed, am I right?
Casey:
Anyway, let's talk about something that's really going to cheer us up since we've been a little sad lately.
Casey:
John, what's going on with your photo books these days?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I found out about this on Twitter, I think, uh, which is part of the reason I wanted to put it on the show as a, as a public service announcement to other people.
John:
Um, Apple, if you didn't know, has a thing in their photos application where you can take your photos and you can order a book, like a bound, like hardcover book with your photos printed inside them, which is a nice thing to do.
John:
They're kind of expensive, but they make nice gifts and they're a good way to, uh, they're a good, nice alternative to making prints and then putting the prints in a photo album.
John:
You can just make an actual book.
John:
It's really neat.
John:
Um,
John:
they're ending that service and the way you would find out about this and the way that the person on twitter found out about it is they went to order a book and photos pops up a dialogue and says hey hey just so you know uh we're not going to do this anymore and after september 1st we're not going to take any more orders for books so if you didn't i wouldn't have found out unless i had gone to make a book right and normally i make a book like once a year after i come back from my
John:
you know long island vacation and i have photos and i make a book that's when i would have seen that dialogue and that would have been very close to september 1st uh so i'm glad i saw this on twitter uh thank you to whoever put it up there uh i'm sad that they're ending this program because i have i've been printing books uh for my beach vacations and i've been going back in time for past years and printing a book like i started from 2017 then i went backward to 2016 15 14 working my way backward through time
John:
I made a book for my parents for a Christmas gift.
John:
I did a book of our Disney vacation.
John:
I did all sorts of stuff like that.
John:
But but, you know, it's kind of like whenever you get around to it, it's kind of a time consuming thing and whatever.
John:
Now that I know that they're canceling them, I'm making books like crazy.
John:
I'm dumping all my money.
John:
I was I think I've ordered like seven books and I'm not done.
John:
I'm still going because I got I have to race back to, you know.
John:
to i have to do all the years we went on beach vacations and all the major vacations and just i gotta get and maybe asking why why bother buying it just get your book from another place apple's not the only company that makes photo books tons of places make photo books photos has even has a thing where it's like a third-party plug-in system a terrible terrible third-party plug-in system for like uh what is the thing not smug mug uh snapfish or whatever can make a little plug-in thing where you can order a book
John:
using the photos app but if we printed at snapfish or whatever so you get different pricing you get different layout options but all those plugins are pretty terrible um and i've had books printed not me personally but my wife and for school things and stuff at other other uh businesses and they're fine but the apple ones are very appley like they're very elegant and simple and
John:
I'm not going to say tasteful because it just depends on your taste.
John:
The Snapfish ones are tasteful too.
John:
Put it this way.
John:
If you like Johnny Ive in his white room and all of the featureless glass and aluminum hardware, you'll like these photo books.
John:
That's the aesthetic I go for.
John:
In my books, the layout I use is...
John:
uh it's a little uh misleading because if you look at the different layouts they have the app is terrible at previewing them but one of them is like the big picture i want pictures to be big so i'm going to pick that one don't what you want to pick is called garden blooms which doesn't make any sense but just trust me it gives the most layout just saying most of my pages are full page full bleed edge to edge top to bottom right to left photo
John:
But you also have the option to do two photos vertically or three photos vertically.
John:
You have lots of different options of just basically slicing up the page into regions.
John:
That's the way I like my books to me.
John:
I haven't found another photo bookmaker that has layouts like that, but...
John:
even worse to someone who's very picky about these type of things, there's no way it's going to match my existing books.
John:
It won't be exactly the same dimensions.
John:
It won't look the same.
John:
So I need to go and print tons and tons of books before September 1st, go through all my photos and just slap them together and throw them into a book and get everything printed.
John:
And I'm really sad about it because...
John:
Like, certainly, I can't print the books for next year and the year after and the year after, right?
John:
And so I'm going to have this discontinuity, my beautiful collection of books that are all, like, nice and neat and the same size and everything.
John:
And then this is going to be the new books printed by somebody else.
John:
So I don't blame Apple for a stoplight.
John:
I'm sure they don't make a lot of money on this, but most people probably don't even know this feature exists.
John:
But if you've never tried this feature, you know, give it a try before it's gone.
John:
Like I said, the books are actually kind of expensive, especially if you put in a lot of photos in them.
John:
But they look pretty nice.
John:
And they're... For gifts and stuff, they're interesting and unique.
John:
It's not like you just bought something off the shelf.
John:
If someone gets something and they don't understand how you made this amazing one-off book, you'll be impressive to them.
John:
And I find them a little bit more pleasant than the old-style photo album with a bunch of printed photos shoved into little clear sleeves or whatever.
John:
So...
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
That's it.
John:
I'm just sad and I'm spending hundreds of dollars on books.
Casey:
I can't wait until the official announcement on September 2nd that the demand for photo books has ramped up so much, thanks mostly to John Syracuse, that we're bringing them back.
John:
There's been this spike of usage in Massachusetts for some reason.
John:
We can't figure it out.
John:
I do have some complaints about them.
John:
My main complaint about the books... Well, the software for putting your photos into books and photos is grim.
John:
It is real.
John:
I've complained about it before.
John:
It is like...
John:
It's just like a master class on how to be a frustrating piece of software.
John:
It's like the simple job of taking photos and putting them onto pages is made so difficult by bugs, by missed features, by just so much about it is terrible.
John:
I can't wait for you to use one of the web-based ones.
John:
The web-based ones destroy it.
John:
Really?
John:
Because usually they're real bad.
John:
All right.
John:
My favorite example is...
John:
it has like there's a photos along the bottom and a tiny little strip that you can't make much bigger and you can't you can't like spacebar or zoom or whatever to see the pictures bigger so if you have two similar looking photos good luck figuring out which one is which without actually placing them but set that aside you got photos on the bottom and in a horizontally scrolling one one just one single row of you know horizontally scrolling forever right
John:
And you scroll to find the picture you want and you drag it up onto like one of the pages and a little book thing.
John:
Right.
John:
And it loses your scroll position in the bottom thing.
John:
So you go, let me get that next picture.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
Now you're back to one end again.
John:
So now horizontally scroll, which is everyone's favorite thing to do.
John:
Horizontally scroll to find where you are.
John:
Drag it up.
John:
Nope.
John:
You've lost your scroll position again.
John:
That's just basics.
John:
That's just like it's there to torture you.
John:
So you can do it.
John:
You eventually scroll back and find the place where you were.
John:
Don't get confused.
John:
uh it's it's a bad interface but anyway the actual books you get printed my main complaint about them is they don't do a good job of aligning the dust jacket on the spine of the book right so you know dust jacket work they wrap around or whatever and they they let you do printing i think they make you do printing on the on the spine of the book that says you know whatever long island 2016
John:
If you look at where the printing is on all my different books as I sit in there on the shelf, it's all over the map because when they fold the dust jacket onto the books, they don't quite get the text lined up with the spine.
John:
And that kind of annoys me, especially given how much money I've spent literally over $100 for a single one of these books sometimes because I'm a crazy person and I max out the number of pages they're willing to put in and they charge you like a dollar extra each page.
John:
So it adds up fast.
John:
Don't do that.
John:
But they look really nice.
John:
If anyone wants to come to my house and check them out, I'll show you.
Marco:
I've never seen one, but I've always heard, not even just from you, I've always heard that they really are high quality.
Marco:
It is kind of sad when an option like that goes away.
Marco:
Tiff gets a book of our Instagram family pictures every year.
Marco:
Every year we have the same little... I think it's Blur or somebody.
Marco:
It's one of those big companies.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And, like, there was some threat they might go out of business a few years ago.
Marco:
And I remember we kind of freaked out.
Marco:
We're like, well, but what if we have to, like, the size of our book would change and we have to find someone else who integrates with Instagram.
Marco:
And it's like, it was actually, you know, fairly scary and disruptive.
Marco:
And the good thing is they didn't go out of business and so we're still using them.
Marco:
But, like, I remember, like, that was, like, the same thing you just said.
Marco:
Like, you know, the spines aren't going to all line up.
Marco:
They're going to be different.
Marco:
There's going to be the old kind of book and then a new kind of book.
Marco:
Like, there's something to be said for that.
Marco:
If you look at Apple today, if they didn't have this service already and there was some rumor that came out that Apple was going to launch a photo book printing service today, we would laugh it out of the room because it would seem ridiculous that today's Apple would be printing you photo books for $80.
John:
Well, they do make leather sleeves for your laptops.
John:
I think people would just file it mentally with one of those little things that Apple does for people who have more money than cents.
John:
Another reason Apple felt that it should do the photo book type stuff with the iLife things is that back then Apple was very big about, we want you to have an experience that is Apple quality.
John:
And it's definitely a Steve Jobs thing.
John:
I don't know if he said this on stage, but he could have.
John:
We looked at the photo books that are out there and they're all terrible.
John:
We want one that's up to Apple standards.
John:
So we're doing one ourselves.
John:
And now if you order a book from our software, you'll get an Apple quality book.
John:
I don't know if that is still true or if it was ever true, but that ethos that it's worth doing ourselves because to give the Apple quality experience, we can't trust the third party to do this.
John:
If we outsource it or use some vendor, which of course they are like, it's not like they're doing this themselves in their own Apple factories or whatever, but like that they, they are able to assure the quality of the product that you get.
John:
So you get a Mac and you get iLife and you get a photo book.
John:
It will be an Apple quality photo book.
John:
right down to the apple logo that's on the book but then you can also opt to not have on the book because that's just the kind of company apple is yes they will watermark your thing with a little apple and not watermark your pictures but put a little apple logo on the back but you can say you know what apple don't do that and that's what you should do by the way tell them not to do it because you don't want an apple logo on your books so
John:
I'm not sure that Apple is entirely gone, but certainly the Apple that would do it just because they couldn't stand the idea of any Apple customers having a less than Apple quality photo book, that Apple doesn't seem to exist anymore.
Marco:
I'll see you next time.
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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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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Marco:
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Oh.
Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Colin Belfills writes in, is having a dedicated picture machine useful?
Casey:
I'm thinking about getting an Icon D3400 and a 50mm Prime.
Casey:
Having interchangeable lenses and an adjustable aperture seems like it would be useful.
Casey:
Can a camera that cheap be worth it compared to phone cameras?
Casey:
I don't know barely anything about the Nikon D3400 that Colton is citing here, but I can tell you that I was really, really worried about spending, I think it was around $1,500 for my Micro Four Thirds camera and a
Casey:
uh and i think it's a 25 millimeter prime which i think is the equivalent of a 50 millimeter prime if memory serves anyways yep um i when i bought this camera right before declan was born i was deeply worried that i was wasting a pile of money and i cannot tell you i i don't i i genuinely don't think i can describe with words how thankful i am that i spent that money and that i use that camera anytime we have something that's even vaguely important
Casey:
Because the pictures that come out of my iPhone are great.
Casey:
The pictures that come out of that camera, by comparison, are incredible.
Casey:
And I'm not trying to say that this particular camera is particularly better than any other camera.
Casey:
It may be quite a bit worse or better than the D3400.
Casey:
And I'll let one of you guys chime in in a second and tell me if it is.
Casey:
But having a camera that has proper glass on it, and I find it useful to have interchangeable lenses, but that's not even necessary, really.
Casey:
But having a camera that can get a real wide open aperture with really decent glass on the front of it can take phenomenal pictures.
Casey:
And I am so unbelievably proud of some of the pictures I've taken of my family.
Casey:
And a lot of that has been me, but a lot of that has also been the equipment.
Casey:
And I don't think these same pictures would look near as good with an iPhone as they do with my particular camera.
Casey:
That's just my two cents.
Casey:
I suspect you guys are going to agree with me, but let's start with you, Marco.
Casey:
What do you think about this?
Marco:
First of all, I love the way this question was phrased.
Marco:
Is having a dedicated picture machine useful?
Marco:
Talking about a camera?
Marco:
Because when I first read that, I thought...
Marco:
Oh, they want to build a computer for photo processing?
Marco:
I thought the same thing.
Marco:
Because if you want to build a dedicated machine for Lightroom or something, then maybe it should be a Windows PC because Lightroom runs on Windows and you can build this giant crazy monster PC.
Marco:
So that's what I thought.
Marco:
But no, it's about the camera being a picture machine, which is just a glorious way to phrase that.
Marco:
Having a separate camera from your phone
Marco:
is a pain in the butt it's simple as that it's it's really a pain in the butt you have to you have this other thing you have to carry you have to buy it to begin with you got you got to buy accessories for it you got to buy batteries and chargers you got to keep it charged it's never charged when you want it to be charged if you don't use it that often you have to maintain it you have to do firmware updates sometimes if you ever have to transfer the photos off of it onto your computer or phone or ipad it's kind of a pain it's kind of slow you know it's
Marco:
There are luxuries that you get with the phone camera that you don't get with any other camera.
Marco:
Things like, you know, obviously connectivity, being able to snap a picture and immediately share it without using some weirdo Wi-Fi transfer app, which are all terrible.
Marco:
You get certain advantages with the processing that an iPhone does.
Marco:
You get things like automatic HDR.
Marco:
You get things like different skin tone stuff.
Marco:
You get certain stabilizations.
Marco:
And you get really good video with surprisingly good sound right out of the iPhone.
Marco:
All these things are either absent or worse on most or all standalone cameras.
Marco:
But then you see the pictures.
Marco:
And the pictures make you want to take more pictures with the camera.
Marco:
Well put.
Marco:
And it's always this constant battle because...
Marco:
It never stops being a pain in the butt.
Marco:
I had this battle with myself.
Marco:
I used my good camera yesterday for the first time in probably two months.
Marco:
And that sucks.
Marco:
I should be using it more.
Marco:
It's kind of a waste.
Marco:
But using a camera is inconvenient.
Marco:
But when I look at what all of my super favorite photos are.
Marco:
Photos that are so good that I would want to get them framed.
Marco:
Or photos that are so good that I use them as my desktop wallpapers.
Marco:
Those are always shot with good cameras, never with phones.
Marco:
So there is certainly a quality argument on a number of fronts.
Marco:
You know, big cameras will just have way better resolution.
Marco:
Usually they have the ability to have way better optics.
Marco:
They don't always, but they have the ability to have way better optics.
Marco:
What they mostly give you, though, besides a much larger sensor and being able to capture more detail and lower noise and oftentimes just better everything, they also give you flexibility in what kind of optics you're putting on them.
Marco:
With your iPhone, I hope you really like
Marco:
high aperture or like narrow aperture 29 millimeter perspective because that's all you're getting with your iphone if you happen to have an iphone that has the 2x lens like the 7 plus 8 plus or 10 you can get two choices neither of which are that useful you have your default like 29 28 millimeter one and then the 2x one is like a 40 or 45 millimeter one which is like fine but
Marco:
It's not amazing.
Marco:
It's not a good portrait lens.
Marco:
It's certainly not a telephoto by any means.
Marco:
Neither lens is particularly wide or telephoto.
Marco:
So the iPhone basically gives you a really easy, convenient middle of photography.
Marco:
It's like you can shoot the middle 70% of what you probably want to shoot, and it'll look pretty good.
Marco:
But when you want to do something that's outside of that, that's like on the more specialized areas of optics or capabilities or quality, you can't do that with a little tiny pinky nail-sized lens and sensor that probably costs $40.
Marco:
You just can't.
Marco:
There's no way to match the quality of a camera or the optics when you have something that's small and that cheap.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Phone cameras are great because they're always with you.
Marco:
And there's lots of stuff, you know, as the saying goes, the best cameras when you have with you, like there are so many great photos and videos that if I didn't have a phone camera, I would not have.
Marco:
I would just miss because I would be in those moments.
Marco:
My camera would be at home and I would just have no way to capture them.
Marco:
And I have my phone to capture those now and it's great.
Marco:
But if you really want amazing photos, you need to use a real camera usually.
John:
So the specific question was, can a camera that cheap, as cheap as the Nikon D3400, be worth it compared to phone cameras?
John:
And this specific model?
John:
Yes, definitely.
John:
Because this is an APS-C sensor, which is just massively larger than the sensor in your iPhone.
John:
And it's a reasonably reputable brand.
John:
So yes, this camera will absolutely be worth it.
John:
All the things that Marco said are true, but just to make sure that you don't end up buying like
John:
a camera with a tiny, tiny sensor.
John:
And it's like, oh, you know, this, this camera doesn't need to take better pictures than my iPhone.
John:
If that's what you're worried about, this specific model, the Nikon D3400 will absolutely take better picture.
John:
It'll be able to take pictures in situations where your phone just can't like, cause they just come out as a blurry mess because it's like, it's too dim or you'd have to use the flash and it'd come out all gross.
John:
So yes, yes to the specific model with the 50 millimeter prime lens, you will take pictures you could never take on your phone if you have the camera with you.
Casey:
And you think it's worth it?
John:
Yeah, it's only like 500 bucks.
John:
Like, it's totally worth it.
John:
Like, it's a good, like, to see.
John:
Because what you have to determine, like Marco said, is, but will you bring it with you?
John:
Or will it just sit in your house?
John:
If it sits in your house, it's doing you no good, right?
John:
So you have to actually bring it with you.
John:
Like, you have to come up with some kind of arrangement where you decide, is this a time when I'm going to bring the big camera or no?
John:
If you never bring the big camera, then obviously it's not worth it.
John:
But if you have occasions where you think you might want to use it, this will be worth it in terms of the quality that you get out of a $500 camera with an APS-C sensor.
John:
Yes.
Casey:
Aaron Bushnell writes, I believe Syracuse mentioned doing more Node.js development on a semi-recent episode of ATPFM.
Casey:
This was probably from like six months ago, but that's okay.
Casey:
What are his thoughts on Node so far?
Casey:
What has he liked and disliked?
Casey:
And I haven't written any Node in a long time, but I have done a semi-reasonable amount of Node for someone who never did it professionally.
Casey:
So I have thoughts on this.
Casey:
But John, you were the one addressed.
Casey:
What do you think about Node?
John:
Maybe it was from six months ago, but I'm still doing Node stuff as far as I'm doing any stuff.
John:
I think my first impressions haven't really changed.
John:
I've been using it for about a year and a half or two years now.
John:
I'm coming from the Pearl world, obviously, which most people aren't familiar with, but it is a particular kind of world.
John:
It has...
John:
A lot of the things that you see in modern languages like Ruby and Python and Node owe their existence to things that were in Perl.
John:
And Perl's got like the old creaky version of them.
John:
But so one of the things that's very popular about Node is, of course, NPM having a common standard and...
John:
a common uh repository for to package up software and reuse it which is why every node product has a million dependencies is the the beauty and the horror of node um so i'm constantly comparing npm to cpan which is pearls like the the og uh
John:
distribution mechanism for open source software right there's it's one well-known place where everyone uploads their stuff and that you know we you know you can share this the old thing was like oh there must be a pro module for that because there was a pro module for everything now people say that about node uh of course in the node world there's not one node module for everything there's a hundred of them and 99 of them are terrible
John:
And they have nonsensical names because namespace solution is like, I think one of the problems in those teams to have is they made it just too darn easy to contribute.
John:
To contribute to CPAN, there was enough of a hurdle that you just didn't get random stuff.
John:
But NPM is just, it's too easy to contribute.
John:
So all the sensible names are taken by crap modules that are not maintained.
John:
And everyone has nonsensical names for the good ones.
John:
And it's very difficult to tell out of the 800 NPM packages that claim to do this thing, which one is not a virus, is not written by someone who has no idea what they're doing and is actually maintained and is popular.
John:
And you learn that through culture, like, oh, you just sort of as you spend more time in the new ecosystem, you learn.
John:
Everyone knows about package X or package Y or whatever, but it's not it's not a great system to enter into as a new person trying to figure that out.
John:
And even the ones that are supposedly, quote unquote, good.
John:
The backward compatibility ethos is very different than it was in the pro world where they would like very rarely break backwards compatibility, even when adding new features.
John:
Whereas when I start to give an example, when I started doing node, we're using Mocha for testing.
John:
I think it was Mocha.
John:
I forget the specific version.
John:
Uh, it might've been some other nonsense word.
John:
Uh, and then I took one of my original projects.
John:
I'm like, Oh, I should update that and run it through our new CI or whatever.
John:
So I grabbed the project.
John:
I'm like, I should update these things.
John:
I've wondered if there's been any new versions.
John:
Uh, the particular unit test thing I was doing had gone from version like 0.9 and now it was on version six, 6.0.
John:
And in between every stage, you know, 0.9 to 1.0, 1.02, 2.0, those are all breaking, you know, the semantic versions.
John:
Those are all backwards incompatible changes, right?
John:
I had to go through all those transitions, say, oh, you've got a 0.9 code.
John:
You want to change it to 1.0?
John:
Do this.
John:
And then you want to change from 1.0 to 2.0?
John:
Do this.
John:
Oh, you want to change from 2.0 to 3.0?
John:
That's just two years.
John:
That is a little bit ridiculous.
John:
So my two main complaints, and this is not new complaints.
John:
Everyone who uses Node has all these same complaints, is that there's too many NPM packages.
John:
Most of them are terrible.
John:
Almost none of them are up to the standards of the well-known decades-old Perl modules that I'm used to, like for performing a certain function.
John:
Like, oh, what's the best node package for talking to a Postgres database?
John:
Whatever you think the best is, it is worse in terms of reliability, speed, features, comprehensibility, documentation.
John:
standardization stability all all measures that i care about uh everything was better in the pearl world uh for that perhaps not performance because pearl super slow but you know what i mean um so i feel kind of like a cranky old man saying you whippersnappers you're making all these nonsensical npm packages with nonsensical names most of which are really bad and you break things too often and your documentation is bad and you don't have good tests
John:
so yeah i just it just makes me feel like a cranky old man but beyond that you like it yeah but no the thing is i do like it i do like it because it's nice it's working working in a language like if people don't know node like it's javascript right but it's not javascript like it is in the browser it is so refreshing to be able to work with modern javascript standards it's
John:
It feels like a different language.
John:
It is a different language.
John:
It is nothing like writing JavaScript for the browser.
John:
It is so nice.
John:
We don't use transpiling.
John:
We just use ES6 straight up.
John:
It's so much nicer.
John:
And it's fast.
John:
And despite me complaining about all the packages, usually you can find something to do what you want, even if it...
John:
just don't look at the source code.
John:
That's my advice.
John:
If you're old and cranky like me and you find a package that does what you want and it seems like it's pretty popular and reasonably well-maintained, just don't look at the source because you'll get sad.
John:
But anyway, yeah, that's basically it.
Casey:
I mean, I think everything you said is reasonable, which maybe indicates that I'm becoming a cranky old man as well.
Casey:
But I mean, when I was teaching myself Node, it was when it was getting really, really popular.
Casey:
This was 2013, I think.
Casey:
um it was getting really popular and i wanted to teach myself node and so i wrote what i call camel which is my blogging engine and basically once i wrote it i have barely touched it ever since because it's been pretty foolproof and that's not a challenge before everyone tries to break my blog it's not a challenge i'm sure there's problems yeah again i'm sure there's problems i'm not saying it's perfect all i'm saying is
Casey:
I knew zero node.
Casey:
I knew JavaScript okay, but I knew zero node.
Casey:
And within like a month or something like that, I was able to come up with an entire blogging engine.
Casey:
It's not the world's best blogging engine.
Casey:
It has a lot of problems, but it does exactly what I want it to do and exactly the way I want it to.
Casey:
And for that, I think it's really great.
Casey:
And I was and remain really pleased with how approachable it was.
Casey:
However, I echo everything you said, John, that it's easy to fall into one of the many traps that are set on either side of the path you need to walk to, you know, get to have a successful node project.
Casey:
So I do quite like it.
Casey:
I think it has certain uses where it's really, really good and certain uses where it's not as great.
Casey:
But by and large, I like it a lot and I have no regrets having used it.
John:
We didn't mention one more thing about the about NPM security.
John:
Not great.
John:
They are always getting, you know, security of that guy pulling left pad.
John:
That's not really a security issue.
John:
But recently they had a malware thing that was added to like an ESLint configuration module or something like that.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, there are controls on who can upload to popular packages.
John:
You know, again.
John:
package signing some form of authentication your your github keys like it's all all the wonders of the modern open source world uh but because some everyone has so many dependencies with npm and the dependencies are so small and so distant and so deep it's very easy to get one package that you don't realize that like 50 of the world uses and injects a malware into it and now you've affected a lot of people that's not great either
Casey:
And Marco, you've never really touched it, right?
Marco:
I wrote my first feed crawler for Overcast in Node.
Marco:
Well, not my second.
Marco:
My first one in PHP.
Marco:
Second one was Node.
Marco:
Third one is the one I use now, which is in Go.
Marco:
The Node one ran briefly, but I kept having memory leaks and stuff with various block capture problems.
John:
That was like Node version 0.7.
John:
or something like the the language not not just the npm packages because things change so fast like what are we up to now like node node 9 or something like there's a new major version node like every five minutes yeah i can't keep up like even just hearing about like i don't even use it just hearing about it i can't keep up with like what the heck is going on in node or any javascript web framework
John:
and like the language they add major language features with every new every new version picks up something more from another one of the you know uh ecma uh specs right major important features and it's like you're still using that sucker they added async await what are you doing it's like when did they add async await it was like last week it's like oh they just added async await okay then all right finally gareth thomas writes and i thought this was a really clever question
Casey:
you get a magical extra garage bay and must fill it with a car you have fifteen thousand dollars and may only buy a car that is 25 years old or older what do you choose for those of you who cannot do mental math that means 1993 or newer
Marco:
Nintendo 3 or older, you mean.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Did I say anywhere?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Older.
Casey:
I will start us off.
Casey:
It took me about four and a half seconds to figure out the answer to this question.
Casey:
There is only one answer to this question as far as I'm concerned.
Casey:
It is a 1990 through 1993 choose your year.
Casey:
uh nissan 300zx twin turbo because i had the non-turbo edition uh in the early 2000s it was obviously quite old at the time uh but i loved that car i still think it looks reasonably modern today i miss that car even the naturally aspirated version i miss it and i kind of wish i never sold it and i would definitely get a twin turbo version and i'm pretty sure you can be those can be had for under 15 grand
Casey:
So Marco, you're buying an MR2?
Marco:
Yeah, pretty much.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I looked at my other options.
Marco:
I don't follow old cars that closely.
Marco:
So I kind of just browsed around Autotrader, which made this very easy to just be like, all right, price cap of like $16,000.
Marco:
I figure I can negotiate it down to $15,000.
Marco:
So price cap of $16,000, maximum year 93.
Marco:
And you could just browse through different brands and what's available.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I actually was unable to find any DeLoreans within this price range, but... You wouldn't want one.
Marco:
Yeah, probably not.
Marco:
But, you know, I was able to find a bunch of other stuff.
Marco:
One other option I looked at was the... I wanted to say, what does BMW offer?
Marco:
I only found... There was one M5 that fit the qualifications for sale.
Marco:
Unfortunately, it was white, and it also had like 115,000 miles on it or something.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
If I actually got an old BMW, a 25 year old BMW, that would last like two seconds before something broke.
Marco:
Yeah, you don't know what you're getting there because those aren't original parts anymore.
Marco:
Who knows what's in that thing?
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
There were a good number of BMW 850s.
Marco:
which was a v12 coupe those are interesting it's like and it's funny they actually just announced like recently they're doing a new eight series which is basically the new version of their massive high power coupe which is basically like an even bigger version of the six series yeah the new eight is just the six but they made the number two bigger just to make you spend more money on it
Marco:
exactly yeah it's like it's like a tweaked up six but anyway um so yeah maybe i'd look at something like this um but ultimately i'd be very afraid i mean i'm i'm too afraid to own a four-year-old bmw out of warranty to try to own one 25 year old and trade even like if a car that old breaks you
Marco:
how do you fix it like who do you even go to you have to like you have to like have like special dealers that you know that can even get the parts or make the parts or find the parts that work somehow like i don't even know how you maintain a car this whole but it breaks i have no idea how that world works i imagine it's a big pain in the butt and probably very expensive but also i imagine certain things break and it's just like well you can't fix that sorry you're out of luck
Marco:
uh so i i ruled out bmw for the most part because i knew that more things would break on them than what i would be willing to fix um so yeah i looked at uh basically yeah the toyota mr2 91 my favorite generation of mr2 which again i've never actually driven or even been inside any of these uh this is the one i saw when i went with two cars and coffee with you so i saw the outside it looked awesome just as i expect but uh
Marco:
But I would love to someday drive one of these and maybe own one if that wouldn't be totally ridiculous.
Marco:
But I don't have the garage base, so oh well.
Marco:
But this is – I think it would be fun because it is – I know realistically it's – by any modern standard, it's not going to be fast.
Marco:
It's sure as hell not going to be safe.
Marco:
You can make an argument that nobody should be driving 25-year-old cars now because modern safety standards are so much higher that anything this old is just a death trap, even if it was good by the standards of its day.
Marco:
You really shouldn't be driving any of these, but if for some reason I felt like driving one of these, this would be kind of cool.
Marco:
I think it would be fun.
Marco:
It looks very retro, like 80s slash early 90s, but it looks pretty cool in that way, I think.
Marco:
And they seem to be not that hard to find.
Marco:
And because they Toyota, I feel like I have some chance of it being remotely maintainable.
Casey:
All right, John, you can choose to either simply answer the question or do what you really want to do, which is make merciless fun of our answers and then answer the question.
John:
We all know what's going to happen here.
John:
I want to point out that Gareth, I think, phrased this part of the question for me.
John:
But then Marco needed it as well.
John:
You get a magical extra garage bay because Gareth knew that my objection would be I'd have nowhere to put the car.
John:
Marco just said, oh, I don't have the garage space for it.
John:
You forgot about the magical extra garage bay.
Marco:
No, I said in reality I would never buy this because of that.
Marco:
But in this hypothetical exercise, I accepted that premise and moved on.
John:
The magical extra garage is real, Marco.
John:
Um, and to people who are asking the chat room, the parameters, the question that I think we all answered is that you're buying it today.
John:
So it's a used car.
John:
$15,000 is your budget now.
John:
So you could go on to like auto trader and pay someone $15,000 for a used car.
John:
It's nothing to do with what the car was cost when it was new or anything like that.
John:
No time travels involved here.
John:
Um, so if you ask this question to two oldish people, or at least people who are much older than 25, um,
John:
I think our first inclination and what we all did is to try to buy a car that we liked back when we were alive 25 years ago when it was new.
John:
Casey's buying his old car.
John:
Mark was buying a car that he wanted but never got.
John:
My first instinct was to go to get my first car, which is the 1992 Honda Civic, which I still think was a great car.
Casey:
Oh, John, why?
Marco:
a stick shift 1992 on a civic now here's here's part of the reason actually so i can kind of so one of the one of the things i looked at was old acura integras which are basically like civics um because my friend had one of those in college and i drove it all the time and it was a lot of fun it was it was like some like crappy like late 80s integra that was totally beaten up and horrible but it was a pretty fun car to drive for a college kid
John:
Yeah, and if you get the newer Integras, some of those are actually pretty decent, pretty quick cars, like after the generation you're talking about, the square headlights, when they had the four tiny circle headlights.
John:
We had one of those.
John:
My parents had one of those, and then it became my brother's car.
John:
It had a sunroof, though, so my head hit the headliner.
John:
I didn't like it.
John:
But anyway, the thing about the 92 Civic is you can get a 92 Civic for like $2,000, right?
John:
But I've got a $15,000 budget, so what I would be looking for is like
John:
the 1992 civic in amazing condition with low mileage.
John:
Like it hasn't, the problem with these civics this generation is that is they've all been massively modified because these were like the original, like tuner import car.
John:
Like you can do so much to them.
John:
So it was very, very difficult to find a 92 or 93 civic that has not been modified.
John:
But if you have 15 grand, maybe you find a low mileage pristine thing.
John:
Right.
John:
So, but anyway, that was my first instinct, but I did look in the other direction as well.
John:
And so let me just not pick my nostalgia car.
John:
Uh,
John:
What else can I find that has nothing to do with nostalgia?
John:
Kind of like I did in our original neutral thing where I came up with the Acura NSX because you could get one for 25 grand, which probably isn't true now because they're going up in price, but back then it was.
John:
Be amazed at some car that you didn't think you could get 15K, but you can because it's 25 years old.
John:
And I was leaning towards Mercedes there because I always love those, you know, uh, late eighties, uh, Mercedes.
John:
And back then they really made them like tanks and they over-engineered everything.
John:
Not to say that they have great reliability, but it's to say that the parts tended to last a long time.
John:
There wasn't things chintzy on them.
John:
They were very big, very heavy.
John:
The safety is not terrible because they were just so big and heavy.
John:
So if you have a fighting chance of like, unlike a 92 civic, which will crumple like a tin can, uh,
John:
uh an 80s s class or something would probably protect you uh reasonably well for a 25 year old car i couldn't find any s classes that were in the the price range but i did find you can get yourself i really wanted a v12 but i couldn't do it that can i could not get a v12 mercedes for a 15k like i just couldn't find one auto trader um you can't get the 850 from bmw yeah i don't like that car um but i could find
John:
The V8 ones.
John:
My car, if I don't go with just buying my 92 Civic, is 500SL.
John:
I always loved that generation, like the late 80s, early 90s 500SL.
John:
I should have had a link to it, but I hope you're envisioning the one that I'm thinking of.
John:
It's a convertible.
John:
It's a two-seat.
John:
It's got a big V8 in it.
John:
It's built like a tank.
John:
It's old-school 80s Mercedes.
John:
It's incredibly heavy.
John:
It's just...
John:
I always wanted to have one of those if I can't have a big S-Class because it was just so ridiculous to me that it's like, oh, it's convertible.
John:
Is it small and light and nimble?
John:
No, no, it's a gigantic battleship.
John:
And that's why you need the V12.
John:
It's a gigantic battleship with like 600 horsepower V12 in the front, like a two-seat car, two-seat convertible with a 600 horsepower V12.
John:
It's ridiculous today.
John:
And they made them back in the 80s and they were awesome.
John:
If I can't get that, I'd get the V8 and I would be satisfied because it's kind of amazing to me that you can get
John:
uh you know a 500 sl for 15k but you can if it's 25 years old you get a 500 sl for six grand that's actually not a bad price and what was the mileage in this 104 000 miles i mean like the 80s it's kind of like buying that's that's an early 90s one yeah both uh yeah both both honda and mercedes like
John:
made cars differently back then honda was before the big japanese decontenting and mercedes just everything was just massively over engineered and ridiculously heavy and just beefy so there's some chance that this car will still be holding together and i think people treat mercedes pretty well like unlike an integra which people are going to beat the hell um boring rich people drive the mercedes so hopefully it's in better condition
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Jamf Now, and Northwestern University.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was 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.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
Hey, so let me give you the good news and the bad news.
Casey:
The good news is this press car that I have has answered a lot of the questions that I had about what I need to buy for a new car.
Casey:
The bad news is the press car that I have has raised a million new questions about the next car I need to buy.
Casey:
So we're all going to go on this journey together over the next few months before I finally make up my mind.
John:
Even.
John:
We're going to go on the journey like we haven't been on this journey.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
The journey is never ending, my friend.
Casey:
It's going to go on forever.
Marco:
The journey has been like every other after show for the last six months.
Marco:
Six months.
Marco:
It feels like it's been years.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
It's going to be a lot longer.
Casey:
It's like the M5 purchase story all over again, but with something far less exciting at the other end.
John:
Now that you don't need to go anywhere anymore, I don't think you need a car at all.
John:
Let's just solve this problem.
John:
Let's cut the Gordian knot here and say no car for you.
Casey:
That's actually something I've been considering, but we'll see.
John:
You could get something done like a smart car.
John:
I think someone mentioned in one of our slacks, but I saw what I can only assume was a convertible smart car in London.
John:
No, I mentioned that.
Marco:
I saw one in Paris.
Marco:
I thought it looked really good.
Marco:
It was apparently smart a while back, made basically like a little coupe.
Marco:
It looked almost like a little sports car.
John:
No, that's not what it looked like.
John:
It looked like a smart car that had gone through a bridge that was too low.
Casey:
Yes.
John:
It's like the cartoon where the person goes rolling past the camera like they're no longer under engine power, but their head is all blackened from an explosion.
John:
It goes and rolls to a stop after the top of the car has been torn off.
John:
It looked incredibly unsafe and ridiculous.
John:
It looked like you were riding one of those little cars outside the shopping, outside the grocery store that your kids go in that rocks back and forth.
John:
That's what it looked like.
Marco:
Yeah, so it's called the Smart Roadster.
Marco:
I would say it looks almost like the smart car version of the Miata.
Marco:
It's very much in that vein.
Casey:
I think that's fair.
Marco:
I walked past one that was in Paris, and I was like, ooh, what's that?
Marco:
Not in the sense that I want that, but that's really interesting looking.
Marco:
It's kind of cool.
Marco:
It has something to it.
Marco:
I thought it looked really cool in person.
John:
Yeah, that's the picture you posted, but that's not what I saw.
John:
What I saw looked much more ridiculous.
John:
That car is just ugly.
John:
But the one I saw looked much more ridiculous.
John:
It literally looked like the grocery store little put a quarter in and the car shakes back and forth, but with adult humans in it.
Casey:
My word.
John:
Trying to figure it out.
John:
There is another 2018 smart convertible, but this also isn't what I saw.
Marco:
And I think the one I saw, I mostly saw the front of it, but I think the one I saw had the little hatchback version, the coupe convertible version that's on the Wikipedia page here, which does look, I think, significantly better than the one that has just like the chopped off truck back thing.
John:
so here's the smart convertible but it's also not what i saw this this is the thing the thing that i saw is like a quarter of the size of this assuming that's a normal size person yeah this is what i'm talking about this the rest of their lineup is terrible the smart roadster was so good they had to stop selling it it's it's an ugly car it's an ugly car
Casey:
What's the relationship, by the way, between smart and... I don't think the smart roadster is ugly.
Casey:
I really don't.
Casey:
What's the relationship between smart and Mercedes?
Casey:
Because I believe Mercedes was selling smart cars here in Richmond.
Casey:
Now, maybe that was a one-off on that particular dealer.
Marco:
I think they own it.
Marco:
Is that what it is?
Marco:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's a sub-brand of Mercedes.
Marco:
I don't know if it always was.
John:
Isn't there A-class?
John:
Doesn't it share a platform with the smart?
John:
Maybe I'm misremembering that.
Casey:
I have no idea.
John:
It's an acronym for something that I think might involve Mercedes in the M part.
John:
Yeah, I don't even know what the acronym is but for the hard drive checking thing.
Marco:
Wow.
John:
Smart car.
Marco:
I'm trying to remember what the hard drive one stands for.
Marco:
Something monitoring of...
Casey:
Derives from cooperation with Swatch.
Casey:
There you go, Marco.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And Mercedes.
Casey:
Swatch Mercedes Art.
Casey:
S-M-A-R-T.
Casey:
Swatch Mercedes A-R-T Art.
Marco:
That's why they're so ugly.
Casey:
Holy smokes.
Casey:
I never knew that.
Casey:
That's crazy.
John:
Self-monitoring analysis and reporting technology.
Casey:
I feel so much better, John.
Casey:
Thank you.
Marco:
Knowing the meaning of that is almost as useful as the functionality itself.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.