Hotel California Keyboard
I got to go get a cup of water because I didn't I realized I don't have one here.
So hang on a second.
I'll be back.
Play some fish.
I'll be back in a second.
Oh, God.
No, please don't.
We learned a lot more about the MacBook Pros and everything this week.
And honestly, I feel like we spent too much time on it.
But the news is so big that we do need to talk about a few angles of it.
And it's the kind of news that whenever there's a brief little scandal about a new Apple product, that news is relevant for like a week.
And then after that, the value of it is basically zero.
Except for the keyboard, which has had like a three-year life now.
Yeah.
Well, because they haven't fixed that.
It's one thing when they fix it.
You never know.
Have they?
Well, I guess we don't know.
When they fix it, then the value of the scandal that happened is basically zero.
It's rough that we have to spend pretty much three shows talking about this, but there's a bunch of angles in this that are kind of interesting.
I've learned a lot about this, and so I hope we can provide some value besides, hey, there was a problem, and now it's fixed.
Yeah, you know, it's been weird because we caught the drama with regard to the brand new i9.
Is it i9 or i7?
I'm having a brain fart.
I mean, technically it's all of them, but the one that caused the most drama was the i9.
Okay, I'm not crazy.
Anyway, so we recorded just after that all broke, and in the time between we recorded and now, when we're recording again, it's basically all blown back over.
But we'll talk more about that.
Our timing was perfect, I think.
Yeah, actually, that's true.
These crazies were perfectly timed for our recording, so thank you, Apple.
Yeah, actually, yeah, I agree.
So the big fix came out yesterday, was it?
And so, yeah, we actually are perfectly timed to...
Talk about this in a way that is probably complete, that has a decent amount of informing-ness to it.
Inform-ness?
Information to it.
Last week, we were kind of in the middle of it.
We had seen the videos and Reddit posts that there's a problem with the new MacBook Pro, we think.
And we could speculate a whole bunch on what that was.
And we could say, but I spouted off about what should and shouldn't be the case.
Now we have the information to actually, now we have way more information than last time.
We'll get to that.
So I guess, let's end this preamble for now.
We'll get to that.
But suffice to say, I know this is a lot to talk about the new MacBook Pro and its weird throttling thing.
But I think we have value to add.
I will try to keep it brief.
With that in mind, everyone look at your timestamps now.
All right.
So to start off, let's do some of the more mundane things.
It turns out that it is easier to replace the keycaps on the brand new keyboards.
From this small website I've never heard of called 512 Pixels, an Apple service document tells us that the keyboard buttons is the word I'm looking for.
They're easier to replace.
And the membrane is, quote, to prevent debris from entering the butterfly mechanism.
Be careful not to tear the membrane.
So that's good news.
And hopefully it works.
You tried to combine two follow-up items there.
What are you doing?
Dude, I'm following the show notes, man.
What do you want from me?
That's a violation, sir.
That's right.
You violated the indenting.
Oh, my God.
Just for a reason.
It's like Python.
Significant white space.
Oh, God.
John, why are you... I thought only Merlin got bad cop John.
Now I'm getting bad cop John.
There's no such thing as bad cop John.
You messed with follow-up, Casey.
I mean, what do you expect?
Oh, my word.
The easier keycap replacement, I think, is a good move.
Independent of the reliability of the keyboard or how you like it or whatever, being able to just fix just one keycap is a smart thing to do.
And...
Again, three years.
We're three years into this keyboard now, starting from the 2015 MacBook.
The fact that they went three years with a keyboard where if a keycap pops off or something that you have to replace the entire keyboard, it just seems like not a smart move from a...
cost and repairability perspective right so i'm glad that they've addressed that because it's just you know it's such a shame to see there's nothing actually wrong with my keyboard but like i dropped something on it and it broke this one key cap off well top case replacement like that used to be the answer
So now that you have a fighting chance, you know, repair people have a fighting chance of fixing your key cap by itself.
Although you have to be careful not to tear the little membrane thing because the membrane, as I fix it, tear down as shown is all one piece.
So if you tear it, it's not like you can replace just the membrane under that key.
It's just one giant thing.
So you need a whole new top case.
And the second thing was like, I mean, we talked about this last week.
I just wanted to put in here for confirmation, like that Apple just said the keyboard is quieter, but they had a patent about keeping debris out and the patent looks like the keyboard.
So presumably that thing is not there to make it quieter is to keep stuff out.
Apple's own documentation.
It's internal documentation for it's like service guide or whatever.
So the keyboard has a membrane under the key caps to prevent debris from entering the butterfly mechanism.
It's right from Apple's mouth.
So if anyone still had any question whether the membrane was there to make it quieter or to keep debris out, Apple has settled that once and for all.
And we have another follow-up item here that I'd like to also read.
This was from Josh Fenton, because this is related to this.
When Apple issued the release of these new MacBook Pros, and they said, this new keyboard design is quieter.
And everyone's like, does it fix the dust-killing-it thing or not?
And
And it was, you know, it's pretty clear now that Apple was kind of BSing us on that.
Like, yeah, I guess it is a little quieter, maybe, but people are like straining to hear the difference.
Meanwhile, both Apple's support documents now and, you know, iFixit teardowns and things confirm that this is not really to be quieter.
It's really there for this, you know, ingress prevention.
So obviously that's the real reason it's here.
And Apple was kind of BSing us.
One of the reasons why people speculated, including us, why they might be not saying why this is actually here is that there are a number of class action lawsuits about the keyboard failure.
And so people are speculating maybe they didn't want to say that it's
quiet or say that it fixes this problem because that would admit fault that there is a problem in the first place.
And we got a nice email from Josh Fenton, who is a lawyer, saying that there's a legal doctrine that prohibits introducing subsequent remedial measures as evidence of the existence of a previous negligence or design defect.
So the idea is
According to this doctrine, it is not a valid legal argument to say you definitely had a defect before because the new product changed in this way to make this thing better.
And Josh Fenton says, while counterintuitive, this doctrine exists in support of a public policy that the law should not serve as a disincentive for people or companies to improve the safety and quality of their products, services, or premises.
Because that would be counterintuitive and damaging over time.
So I don't know.
I mean, chances are Apple is being exceptionally conservative and not even wanting to try to have to invoke this kind of doctrine.
Like they probably want as much immunity as possible against these lawsuits.
So this doesn't say like, you know, they don't have to come out and say that this is fixed.
But, you know, it does seem like they have less legal reason than we predicted to avoid saying that this is fixed because of ingress.
So if that's true, what's left is what people were thinking before, which is pride, as in corporate pride, or like, why would we admit that we ever did anything wrong?
Why don't we just say, we have a new keyboard, it's great, best keyboard we ever made, and it's quieter, and just don't answer any questions about, you know, reliability, right?
Because if it's not legal, keeping their mouth shut, it's a worse look, because if it was a legal thing, like whatever, lawsuits are weird, and you're right, maybe it still could be an abundance of caution, and who knows, there's some
specific case law related to this or whatever but if the legal reasons are taken out of the equation the only thing left is like I think a uh
miscalculation a pr miscalculation perhaps because it looks better when you say uh we had a problem and we fixed it and the new ones are great and it's not like they're not admitting they had a problem because they do have the repair extension program and you don't do that just for the hell of it you don't do a repair extension program on a keyboard that has perfect reliability right there's obviously a problem and yet still somehow they could not bring themselves to say this new keyboard is more reliable
Going back to the keyboard and these membranes, iFixit did some really interesting work with regard to testing whether or not the membrane does anything.
So they have this post, which we'll link to, where they did a few things to kind of figure out, does this make a difference?
And what they did was they sprinkled blue powder on top of the keys, used them for a while, and then popped off the keycaps to see, okay, where's this blue powder?
And the conclusion they seem to come to is that, yeah, it definitely helps.
I think the most relevant part of this test, though, is so they did this glowy sand, which is like very, very fine.
And, you know, it's kind of cool because you can track where it is and everything and showing that it mostly keeps it, you know, an important part is I think they compared it to one without the membrane.
Say without the membrane, it's all over the place.
And with the membrane, it's mostly on the edge.
It's good, right?
But then they took a little bit of sand and put it on and it wedged the keys like instantly.
Yeah, because there are holes in the membrane.
There are big holes where the hinges come through.
So it's not like sand can't get in.
And it's not like sand has to sneak in through a tiny opening.
The openings are pretty big.
So still, you should really avoid getting sand on your keyboard.
The good news, as we mentioned before, is if you do get a piece of sand under your keyboard,
There's a chance that they can pop off the keycap, take out the sand, and put the keycap back on, and you don't have to have all top gate replacement.
But, you know, like I said, if you're going to make some kind of barrier to keep grit out, and there are five giant holes under every key where grit can get in, there's only so much you can do.
So probably improved, probably better, but maybe don't use your MacBook Pro on the beach.
Yeah.
You know, it's too early to know whether in practice this will actually reduce the occurrence of the keyboard problems.
But it is kind of nice that they did this test.
It is kind of nice to know we aren't totally out of the woods on this.
Like if you have one of these, you still can't like, you know, eat a muffin on top of it without running a pretty big risk there.
You're simply you have a reduced risk.
But in a way, I also think, Casey, you've had with your MacBook One, you've had a lot of compressed air adventures, as Apple recommends, trying to move around the piece of dust that gets under the key so it goes to a different key.
I think with this, that's probably not going to work.
With this, I think the dynamic here will be that it is harder for things to get in, but it's even harder for anything to ever get back out.
So if something does get in, which is, as John said, which is still possible, it's just less likely.
But if something does get in, I bet you're done.
I bet that's it.
You have no recourse.
It's nice that they're making this better.
I hope in practice it's going to be so rare because, you know, I fixed it, said they had to like try pretty hard to finally get something in it.
Like I had like, you know, really blast it with sand, I think.
So it was I hope that in practice it's not going to be a problem.
But they still have a keyboard that if a piece of dust gets in the wrong spot, it will kill it.
They just have made it less likely for that to happen.
So progress, but not probably completely out of the woods.
I put a thing in the thing I put in the show notes is that they didn't actually have to try hard with the sand.
Like this is a quote directly from the thing.
We sprinkle a pinch of sand over the keyboard, type on the keys for a minute, and we don't even have to lift the key caps to realize that something is wrong.
A few keys have seized up.
So it wasn't actually that hard with sand.
Oh, that's not good.
I don't know what to think about this.
I do think that listening to Marco, I've come up with the official unofficial name for this keyboard, which is the Hotel California keyboard where you can enter, but you can never leave.
It's a Roche Motel.
I was going to make the Roche Motel joke, but you tried to make the Hotel California.
I think the Roche Motel is better, but that may be before your time.
First of all, it is slightly before our time.
But second of all, come on!
Hotel California is so good.
Anyway, all in the chat room has an interesting question, which I think we should cover real quick before we move on.
Do you guys think this is an acceptable solution?
And taking that word specifically, acceptable, I think this is acceptable.
I'm not in love with it.
I think that...
Yeah.
the Achilles heel status of these keyboards hasn't changed.
And that's a problem.
And it's also tough because I've been going back and forth between my MacBook Adorable and my full Darth Vader 104-whatever-key wireless keyboard.
And although I do love this Magic Keyboard that Apple makes, and I've said that many, many, many times on the show, I still like the feel of my Adorable a little bit more, which is weird because I never thought I'd like anything more than this Magic Keyboard.
So it's acceptable, but I feel like time will tell to see if it's really enough.
I don't know.
Marco, obviously you have thoughts on this.
So let's start with John and then Marco, maybe you can bring us home afterwards.
So what was the question again?
Is it acceptable?
Yeah.
So do you guys think this is an acceptable solution?
I don't know.
I really know what acceptable means.
I think the question for me is, would I like recommend these laptops to people?
Right.
Like is, you know.
say yeah you go ahead and buy one they're good like it's okay they fix the keyboard things and the answer to that is i i the jury's still out as far as i'm concerned like i don't i don't know yet it's too early uh it would make me more comfortable surprisingly like i know they're not gonna do this but like if these were included in the repair extension just because you have this keyboard and it's supposed to be better about reliability and it probably is but if it isn't
I don't want to pay for a new top case after a year.
Right.
I want that.
I want the, it's almost like the, the 2017 and 16 and 15 models have the assurance of like, well, you get one and if you do have a problem, don't worry, they'll cover it for four years.
Right.
And that's probably how long your laptop will last anyway for the batteries host.
Um,
Whereas this one, it's like, oh, that problem is probably gone, so you're probably fine.
But if it turns out the problem isn't gone, and again, with the sprinkling of sand, we see that it actually isn't entirely gone under the worst possible conditions.
Oh, someone spilled some sand on your laptop, right?
And you typed on it for two seconds.
And I don't want to be stuck having to replace it.
So...
It's an improvement.
It's better.
I particularly like the idea that you can replace a keycap without replacing the whole keyboard.
That, I think, is a big possibility.
You won't have to pay for a whole new top case.
You'll just bring it in.
Yeah, it's annoying, but you got some sand under your keyboard.
They'll pop it.
I'll give you a new keycap.
Or you break a keycap by dropping something heavy in your keyboard, and they can fix it.
But I feel like it's still not up to the bar of the 2015, which is basically a keyboard that...
I'm sure people had problems with it and people broke keycaps off and stuff like that, but it didn't raise to the level of some high percentage of people you know with 2015 MacBook Pros had one or more keyboard problems.
No one ever talked about the keyboard.
It was like the keyboard was the keyboard and whatever.
I don't think this one has crossed that bar yet.
I feel like it's just the, as we said in past shows, it's just the accumulation of Band-Aids.
This is like the maximum number of Band-Aids all piled on top of this little wound, but the scab is kind of still there.
Yeah.
well said i think the jury is still out on this i really i can't wait for you know i did order one of these machines we can talk about that later if you want tell you one thing i did when i ordered it i also ordered one of those silicone covers for the keyboard for like 10 bucks on amazon oh no
Because I just don't know.
The correct solution to this problem is to design a keyboard that either dust can get in and out freely so that dust getting in for a second isn't a big deal because it can just come right back out again like the old ones or design a keyboard that dust can't get into at all.
If you look at the design of the smart keyboard for iPads where it's basically like a cloth membrane over the whole thing covering the key, like one big thing over the whole keys so that even you can basically spill water on it and it doesn't really go in anywhere.
i think i feel like those two extremes are the way to go here either make it so dust can come in and out freely or make it so dust can't get in at all and they haven't done that yet as john said this is still a band-aid on this keyboard design i still really want to know what the next design is like what's the next major keyboard here this keyboard they took a lot of risks they did a lot of crazy things they optimized for factors i don't give two craps about like great my keyboard is precise and stable
Two things I have never once pushed the key on any other keyboard and said this is too imprecise and unstable.
I've never had that opinion of anything.
So I want to see where they go next.
So would you say it's acceptable?
I'm not trying to snark.
I'm genuinely asking.
I feel like you're kind of on both sides of that.
So yes, no, acceptable?
with the caveat that it's still way too early to tell just by the way it by the way it seems by the way it looks like based on iFixit and stuff and they're testing i give it like a b like this seems like it's probably a decent solution but it's not the best solution fair enough by the way with your little silicone cover thing i'm wondering if you have just increased the amount of finger grease that's going to appear on your screen
We're already past that point.
You're all on board with it.
I've fought that for years.
When I had my very first PowerBook, my first laptop, I was very careful with how I arranged the backpack.
I made a whole custom padded compartment out of black felt so it was never squished against.
I told you before my theory about what causes the keyboard imprint on the screens when it's closed flat on top of a desk.
they don't make contact, but if it's compressed slightly in a bag, I think the screen lid flexes slightly inwards, and that compresses the keyboard against the screen.
So it really depends on what kind of bag you're putting it in, whether anything is on top of it or pushing against it.
So I used to care a lot about that.
In the last few years, I just started losing that fight more and more as I got different backpacks and different bags and everything, and now I just don't care anymore.
Yeah, the other thing I noticed with looking at laptops around work is, I think it was the 2015s and maybe the couple years before, like the anti-glare coating would start coming off.
Have you seen that?
Oh, yeah, the delamination.
Yes.
Yeah, a bunch of the ones at work have it, but surprisingly, it's one of those problems that if you don't, like people don't notice it until I point it out to them and say, you realize your anti-glare thing is, I don't know if it's the anti-glare or delamination or whatever, but you can tell.
It looks kind of like
There's, like, grease on the screen, but it's not grease.
You can't clean it off, and it tends to happen around the edges or whatever.
But people are like, eh, they shrug.
And one of the reasons they shrug is the rest of their screen is covered with finger grease from the keyboard and directly from their fingers.
So their entire screens look like a mess anyway, and they're just used to it.
Marco, you have something to smile about, though, because a little birdie has told us something very, very interesting.
Can you tell us about this?
Yes.
So as I've ranted a lot about before, the USB-C ecosystem is just not really panning out.
And for me, one of the biggest problems with it
Yes, you can convert everything.
If you go out and buy all new cables, you can get all cables that have USB-C on one end and whatever you need on the other end for all your stuff.
So you can convert your cables pretty easily, but you can't convert hubs because there doesn't seem to be any kind of actual USB-C hub that just takes one USB-C port and makes four other USB-C ports out of it.
And, you know, there's lots of complexity to the USB-C spec with things like Thunderbolt and DisplayPort and power.
It's very, very complex.
So making such a thing is apparently very difficult, which is why they don't really seem to exist.
There are a few products in the market, like a couple of those like $300 docks that have like two output ports maybe, but...
That's usually about your only option.
And I think USB-C requires hubs that just take one port to multiple C ports for it to really finally take over.
And we've heard from an anonymous person that Intel is finally releasing a hub chip for USB-C next year.
So this would be a chip that could be put into hubs.
We may not see products based on it until 2020.
I don't know enough about this kind of stuff to say whether this is it, whether this is all we need, whether this is even true or plausible, but typically the chips that are in USB hubs and Thunderbolt hubs and everything, they tend to be made by very few manufacturers.
That's why you have a million different brand names on Amazon for what appears to be about the same hub or the same kind of thing.
It's because there's one company that makes those chips in there and
And usually it's somebody like Intel or Viya or something like that, like, you know, like one of the big chip makers.
And so apparently if the chip to make USB-C hubs hasn't really existed yet, that would certainly explain the problem that we have.
And if Intel is making one in the next couple of years, that's probably good news.
Although I kind of wish it was out now.
And I kind of wonder, like, we've had USB-C ports on MacBook since 2015.
Like, what are we waiting for?
Do we want to talk about the history lesson that was also associated with this?
I thought this was a good summary because the larger issue, I mean, it's not really related to throttling, but what's the deal with Intel CPUs these days?
There's the bigger picture of Moore's Law and everything we've talked about, but Intel CPUs haven't been getting that much faster or that much better in recent years for a variety of reasons.
And one of the reasons is that they haven't been able to get their new process, their 10 nanometer process,
online so they've just been making part after part after part out of 14 nanometers and it's only so much you can do by sort of rearranging the deck chairs like can we add more there i think they're adding even more cores they're going to go eight cores in the same cpus that we have six cores in now because like what else what else can they do uh because they don't have a smaller process and uh this this sort of semi-brief history i think it's a good uh rundown of
what the deal was and why apple might find itself in a difficult situation designing its laptop around these chips so uh 2016 and when the sky like macbook rosary released canon lake was supposed to be around the corner in 2017 with an lp ddr4 controller supporting 32 gigs right so in 2016 they're like oh no problem next year 2017 we'll be able to start support 32 gigs with low power that didn't happen right uh
Then Cannon Lake got pushed in 2018.
Kaby Lake was inserted, which is just Skylake with HEVC and HTCP 2.2.
Then Coffee Lake got added in 2018, which is just Kaby Lake with more cores, and Cannon Lake was canceled.
Although this person says the same in honest person.
Yes, really, although Intel hasn't fessed up yet.
Now Ice Lake is teething around the edge of failure, and Intel is prepping yet more 14 nanometer parts for 2019.
And here we still are, 14 nanometer with Skylake memory controller.
And the new 15-inch MacBook Pro uses the built-in memory control, which works just fine with DDR4, which is what we're seeing right now.
Apple has made plenty of own goals in soccer parlance, football parlance, in the MacBook Pro primarily due to design hubris.
But trying to plan products on Intel's roadmap has become masochistic.
Like, what do you do if you're going to plan, like, this is the new generation of MacBook Pro, and we're going to design three models for the next three years, and Intel tells us this is their roadmap, and then they just...
miss that roadmap entirely and just keep releasing 14 nanometer parts it's not a great situation to be in now but you can argue that the correct choice is to scrap everything and redesign a new case to handle 14 nanometer things but the lead times might just not have been good enough to do that so you know we're all we're all in the same boat here it's not like someone else has secret better intel cpus than apple apple gets the same ones as everyone else and
And Intel really needs to get its process online.
And we have a topic about that we might get to later.
But it's yet another reason why people continue to entertain fantasies of ARM-based Macs.
Because one thing that has happened in recent years is Apple's ARM CPUs are getting better all the time.
And they're really, really good.
And every time I go to Geekbench or whatever and look at the scores for the iPhone X versus Apple's MacBooks, like Apple's 2018 MacBooks, they're not that far apart.
And I think about exactly how many fans there are in an iPhone 10, right?
How big it is, how big the battery is.
And then I look at the Geekbench scores and you're like, our Macs are looking, you know, I know it's not apples to apples.
I know it's not the same.
I know it doesn't have 32 gigs of RAM in the phone.
Like I understand, I know it's not a giant monster GPU, discrete GPU in there, but boy, Intel is really making our Macs look more and more attractive every year.
We are sponsored this week by the Aftershocks Bone Conduction Headphones.
Go to atp.aftershocks.com to learn more and check out the Weightless Wireless Trex Air.
I love bone conduction headphones, especially in the summertime.
Here's why.
So any other headphone you have, it's going to be something that either goes on top of your ear or has a big cup around your ear or something that goes into your ear.
And I have problems with both of those things.
The in-ear ones just hurt me.
I just don't have the ears for them.
The ones that go around or on your ears are too hot for the summertime.
And when you're walking around outside, it's hard to hear things like cars driving by or if someone's trying to talk to you when you're wearing big headphones.
Bone conduction headphones solve these problems.
First of all, there's nothing in or on or around your ears.
Instead, they have these little transducers.
They're very small.
They have like a little wraparound neck band and these little transducers that rest kind of in front of your ears on your cheekbones.
And they send little vibrations that your eardrums pick up as sound, but the world doesn't hear it that way.
In addition, because nothing is blocking your ears, you can still hear the world around you.
So it's very practical when you're doing outdoor activities, walking, cycling, even just doing stuff around the house.
If you want to hear if someone knocks on the door or if someone else in your house is calling your name, they're incredibly nice.
And the Aftershocks Trex Air are just great headphones, too.
They have their Bluetooth, of course, so they're wireless.
They are pretty much weightless.
Like, they say they weigh like an ounce, but honestly, the weight is nothing.
Like, you feel it like nothing.
Good range, good battery life.
There's a great warranty if you need it.
They're water-resistant, IP55 certified, so if you get caught in the rain or if you're sweating all over them, no big deal.
The Trex Air are the only headphones I wear in the summer.
I like them so much that this summer I'm testing a lot between my watch app and my phone app, and I wanted two different headphones so I could just grab one that's paired to each device without having to repair them, and I bought a second Trex Air.
That's how much I like them.
I like them so much I bought a second one.
I highly recommend the Aftershocks Trex Air.
Check it out today, atp.aftershocks.com.
And you can use code ATPBUNDLE to get $55 off of a Trexair bundle.
So once again, ATP.Aftershocks.com.
Use code ATPBUNDLE to get $55 off a Trexair bundle.
Thank you so much to Aftershocks for just making awesome headphones and for sponsoring our show.
In one of my big rants last episode on this throttling thing, honestly, I've mostly tried to stay out of the i9 throttling thing because I just didn't know much about it, and it was a configuration I didn't have and I couldn't get access to, and it just seemed like it was mostly playing out on YouTube and Reddit.
But one of the big lines I drew in the sand was, a CPU should never run below its base clock.
It should never have to do that in normal operation.
It should be able to sustain its base clock indefinitely, and if it can't, there's something seriously wrong with the thermal design around it.
it.
And it turns out that was not a complete picture of how things work anymore.
We've learned a lot since the last episode, and so I wanted to go over a few things.
First of all, we pointed out last episode the 800 MHz clock where the CPU would drop down to 800 MHz.
Now,
In the throttling problem where it would cause like the big sawtooth graph basically of like constant spikes up and down, that actually was the real problem.
But sometimes the CPU will drop to 800 megahertz because it's idle.
800 megahertz is simply the lowest clock that the CPU will typically use in just power save mode.
It is also used in very extreme cases for throttling for thermal reasons.
But if your CPU hits 800 megahertz, that might just be because it wasn't doing that much and it clocked itself down to save power.
Secondarily, so going back to a CPU must always maintain its base clock no matter what.
Well, it turns out that when Intel's recent AVX instructions are being used, their processors reduce their base clock because AVX instructions are apparently so heavy duty and complicated to execute that the processors are designed to actually reduce their base clock while running AVX instructions.
um and and i don't i honestly don't know that much about avx but it's it's kind of like the continuation of like mmx like you know back in the early days mmx uh and then what are the other ones there were there were like a bunch of sse and all those like you know like extra instructions like big vector instructions to process lots of data at once um so avx is like the recent version of that kind of idea doesn't even mention altivec but i'll do it because i have to
Yeah, your Altevec really took over the world there, John.
Altevec was awesome.
So much better than MMX.
So among the valid reasons that a CPU might operate below base clock are either it's saving power because it's idle, or it's using AVX instructions, even if it's at full load.
And then finally...
You know, we talk a lot about the CPU's TDP.
I mean, this is a figure in watts, which is the maximum power draw or heat generation, kind of the same thing, that a CPU will issue.
And it turns out my view of TDP and my definition of TDP was outdated.
The 15 inch is usually like a 45 watt TDP on those processors, which I thought would mean that at peak load, no matter what, it would not exceed 45 watts of heat output and therefore power usage.
It turns out that's not the case.
It turns out TDP is the expected maximum average power draw with all cores operating at the base frequency.
If turbo boost is being used, it can exceed TDP all the time.
It can exceed TDP constantly.
It can do it whenever it wants.
TDP is just when turbo boost is not being used, when it's the base frequency and all cores are maxed out, that's roughly what you can expect the maximum power output to be.
Now, we've been told by people who know more about this than us, thank goodness they exist, that before Coffee Lake, which is this generation, and before Kaby Lake, which is the 2017 generation, there actually used to be a lot more headroom in practice before the CPUs would really hit TDP.
The TDP figures were apparently very conservative.
CPUs would not normally surpass them much under load, even using Turbo.
But as we mentioned a few minutes ago, Intel not being able to get to their 10 nanometer process, get those chips out the door, has had to cram more and more transistors and chips into this old 14 nanometer process, which means that they're cramming more cores and more stuff.
into the chips without shrinking their process size, which means they're just going to use more power.
Simple as that.
The design of each core hasn't changed substantially to make them more efficient, and there's no process size shrink to give us a cooling benefit there.
So basically, these chips are getting more and more complicated without increasing their efficiency much.
So they are using more power.
So we didn't just get two cores for free.
we got two more cores by basically Intel is now approaching and surpassing the quoted TDP figures much more often.
So when a CPU is under load, that 45 watt TDP processor in the 15 inch can use way more than 45 watts.
It,
probably won't sustain it for very long, but it frequently and will easily pull 65 watts.
I think somebody even said it could pull 100 watts at max load, like if max turbo is on.
This is pulling massive amounts of power.
It's generating massive amounts of heat.
And this is not just the i9, but all of the Coffee Lake CPUs, even down to the 13-inch ones.
So basically...
Everything I knew about both clock speed and TDP was outdated and wrong.
I say this because it's something I really am trying to get better at.
We want to make sure our hot takes are well-informed.
Because I...
it's hard because like whenever there's something like this whenever there is you know some kind of big apple drama like when that that you know annoying guy on youtube broke his iMac pro and cleaned up and wouldn't fix it because it was broken not because he destroyed it um like everyone whenever anything like that happens everyone comes to people like us on twitter and is like hey what do you think of this this is crazy right oh my god and
I try to get a really fast opinion out there because everybody wants it and because I want to give it because I'm excited too.
And I, and I, and if Apple has done something wrong, I want to call them on it too.
You know, I thought I knew enough about this stuff to be able to say like, this should never happen.
XYZ should never happen.
And they're wrong.
And I just didn't in this case.
There's so much about this that's way more complicated than I thought it was.
Some of it has changed recently.
Some of it I just didn't know.
And so it's just nice to be able to step back for a minute and try to get a little bit better at not jumping to so many absolute conclusions about this stuff so quickly.
So I apologize for doing that so often.
I'm trying to get better at that.
And this is one example where I think maybe we could all get a little bit better at that.
Intel is kind of in a similar situation in that they had existing definitions based on the way their chips used to work.
As things have changed about chips, as they always do, as the process shrinks, the things that used to be steady or reliable before now become more variable and different things become important.
As they've had to spend more and more time on 14 nanometer, they've had to fudge things just because you can't get blood from a stone, like you were saying.
You're going to put more cores on
You're not getting that for free.
You've got to put more area and your things get bigger and they dissipate more heat.
And there's more transistors and they're the same size as they were before.
So where do you think you're getting any savings from?
And whatever headroom you had, you're eating it.
So a couple of people wrote in to pull the definitions of TDP and base clock and stuff from Intel's documentation.
And what used to be a straightforward definition is now...
a little bit more wishy-washy and has more caveats and more special cases and in some cases is somewhat circular like the base clock is the is the clock that can maintain while you know while satisfying tdp and tdp is the power used when it's running at base clock like they just they you just go around in circles but then asterisk asterisk except for avx instructions and uh you know it's as we've seen from the fix which i think we'll get to in a little bit
There's the whole profile of how the cooling system works and how the hardware deals with changes in load and heat and how that integrates with the cooling system and what the optimal arrangement is.
And it's not just as simple as...
uh if cpu gets hot make cool now please right there's a bunch of those curves and their settings and like it's very complicated right so it was so much simpler when you know there was no turbo boost and the cpu had a had a speed and maybe you could overclock it but either way just stay to that speed all the time and there was no speed step and there was no you know throttling and it was just and we still use those same terms and those same sort of measurements and the same conception of how they work but
But in this modern age, like I was saying before, with the thin and light laptop, like the and the over provisioning, like things are more complicated and everything is trying to some kind of compromise because you can't have a laptop like this with a CPU like this that behaves like one from a decade ago where it can run a maximum power all day.
And that's how you can measure battery life.
Right.
Everything is a very complicated compromise involving hardware and software management and various curves and specific loads, specific applications, sets of instructions.
Everything is much more complicated than it used to be.
And, you know, I can only imagine what it's like in phones, like the world.
The only reason we don't know about the world is going inside there is because it's like just a sealed box to us.
And, you know, we don't have we don't have a history of smartphones where things were replaceable.
And we had we could talk about them in this sort of modular way.
But on laptops, we do.
But most of that is out the window now.
So it's we're grappling with it.
And so I think is Intel because they have to sell these things and sell a benefit.
And the last thing you want to do when selling a benefit is to explain all the nuances like.
It's faster under these conditions with these caveats, assuming you did this, that, and the other thing.
It's better to just say it's faster.
And then when people find, but what about this?
What about that?
And you look at Intel's documentation and say, yeah, no, that's in the docs, but it's very nuanced and we didn't feel like explaining that to you in the sales brochure.
Ultimately, what this boils down to is the numbers that Intel quotes on the CPUs.
Like, this is a 2.9 gigahertz processor.
It basically means nothing.
Basically, you can't take anything as absolute anymore.
It means it can run faster than the 2.7 one or the 2.2 one.
The numbers are still comparable for the most part.
Although, sorry, I just saw flyby right before I recorded.
But they aren't even proportional.
The 2.9 is not 40% or whatever it is faster than the 2.2.
Yeah, well, because you have to look at the turbo things and they might not be proportional to the base clocks.
Well, here's one that makes it even worse.
The story I just saw before we recorded is that in the upcoming generation, which I think they're going to go to eight cores instead of six, again, on the same process, as far as I could tell, they're taking hyper threading out of the i7s.
So now instead of it being a six core, like 12 thread, it'll be an eight core, eight thread.
just just to confuse you even more and should still end up being faster than the old ones but people are going to run their cpu meters and be like hey there's fewer lines it's just this 14 nanometer forever thing is it's kind of like the uh what the hell was it a chat room could help me 533 megahertz front side bus on the g4 for like years and years even when it was obscene uh
So to take a half step back, there was a Reddit post that got really, really popular a few days ago where somebody who strikes me as very intelligent and very well read, and I don't say that sarcastically, had come up with a theory as to why this throttling was happening.
And they have since edited their posts with some new information, which we'll get to in a minute.
But if you scroll down on the link we'll put in the show notes, you'll see where it says original post below.
So what they said was they think the problem is the voltage regulator module being unable to satisfy the power desires of the i9 CPU.
And they did a bunch of crazy stuff with setting some switches in either the CPU or the VRM in order to get it to not limit the power going to the CPU itself.
Which, from what I can tell, having obviously not tried this, seems to have worked if you're willing to disable SIP and install a Kext, a kernel extension, all this other crazy stuff.
So that worked reasonably well for a little bit until, I believe it was yesterday, as one of you said earlier, Apple released an official fix.
So...
i don't i i feel like this has been mostly resolved but do we have any thoughts on this reddit thread or the fix that came out of apple just yesterday i think the reddit thread is a good example of like people trying to figure it out on their own like they don't know what the problem is but they can see that we have measurements we have some tools that we can use and there's the thing about the tools that we'll get to a little bit too but we're like what what's the problem here what could be the problem like because it's not as simple as uh
You know, just like an on off switch or like it's always running a maximum cooling.
There's lots of decisions to be made exactly how much power should the CPU draw for how long when it turbos?
When should it decide to turbo?
When should it say I've turbo enough?
I should go down.
Right.
And there are other chips involved on the motherboard, not just the CPU that could be involved in a cooling decision.
And so someone was just poking in some registers or firmware or something and changing a bunch of value, hex values and some, you know, big bit mask thing and saying this controls how long it turbos to maximum speed or how, you know, you're allowed to draw 100 watts for 30 seconds and you're allowed to draw 150 watts for five seconds and just like playing with those numbers.
with the goal of taking some workload, I forget what they were doing as the workload, and making that workload complete faster, because it's inefficient to bump really hard up against your thermal ceiling and throttle way, way down, and then bump right up back up against it and throttle way, way down.
It's much better to oscillate with smaller moves, like turbo for a shorter period, so you don't hit your ceiling and don't bump way, way down, and so you can just bump from your base clock up to turbo, base clock up to turbo, or whatever.
It's better than going from turbo all the way down to like 800 megahertz or whatever.
Again, like Mark was saying before, if you
If you say, oh, it's not actually the CPU, it's the voltage regulation module.
When that overheats, it responds by pulling power from the CPU and all sorts of theories.
And there's a lot more going on inside there than anyone outside Apple is probably going to be able to tell.
So Apple's fix, as the new updated thread says, doesn't just operate on the CPU, but takes the entire system into account so it can handle cases where what if your GPU is making really hot because it's something in your application is using the GPU.
Like, it's all the same kind of cooling system inside there, and an excess of heat can make everything hot because it's all next to each other inside the same case or whatever.
So Apple's patch takes a more holistic view of the system, as it always does, and tries to balance the heat and tries to make the components, you know, not slam hard against the thermal ceiling, but just creep right up to it, but have the cooling system keep them below it and have them oscillate back and forth as you'd expect.
Basically saying if it gets too hot, go back down to your base clock, cool off for a while, and then go, you know...
So it's some heroic armchair attempts at fixes without access to source code or anything like that, but just access to a machine.
But it's, you know, I would never recommend someone do something like that, not the least of which because it requires a kernel extension and require disabling system integrity protection, all sorts of other stuff.
And if it really is a real problem, you should have some confidence that Apple will do something about it.
And in this case, they did within days.
So this is a pretty fast turnaround time from Apple.
And it's some interesting, you know, experiments by people out in the field.
But I would warn people, like, if you have one of these, like, you know, give it some time, give it a few days, give it a week.
Don't rush out and install software that some person posted on Reddit, even if it might look cool.
Well, but I think there is some value to the other side of that.
When you look at what we mentioned earlier about how the alleged reason that Apple PR gave for the keyboard membrane was to make this keyboard quieter when that appears to be pretty BSE, right?
So whatever Apple says or doesn't say about problems like this,
it's hard to know whether it's accurate or not without people playing around with stuff like this.
One of the reasons I was watching this thread was like, all right, so they say that the VRM throttling is at fault here, that basically the thermal settings were not good for that processor, and changing the thermal settings would fix this problem.
So the very first thing I wanted to know when the patch came out was, did they change those settings?
Because with this method, you're using some utility to read the settings, and then you figure out what the value should be and write new settings back.
So I was very, very curious to go back to this thread once that patch was out to see, like, all right, has this person who wrote this, like, gone back and updated it with the new one?
Because if the value has changed with this new, you know, with the patch that Apple released, Apple's reason was, you know, BS that this is actually the real reason here that this value was wrong.
And it would still be great that they fixed it, but if the value had changed and that was the real reason, that would be worth knowing, worth experimenting to find out.
Fortunately, that wasn't the case.
Fortunately, the value has not changed of this VRM profile thing of how much sheet it can draw for how long.
So fortunately, the PR explanation appears to be correct.
And we'll get to that, I guess, now.
indeed so uh apple has released a software fix and we'll put a link to uh jason snell's coverage on six colors but the quote from apple is as follows following extensive performance testing under numerous workloads we've identified that there is a quote this this is from them missing digital key in the firmware that impacts the thermal management system and could drive clock speeds down under heavy thermal loads on the new macbook pro
A bug fix is included in today's macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 supplemental update and is recommended.
We apologize to any customers who experience less than optimal performance on their new systems.
And then there's some marketing drivel after that.
So Macworld took a look at it, and they said their preliminary results from our 4K Premiere test is that the 2017 2.9 GHz Core i7, 90 minutes to do this thing.
The 2018 Core i9 before the patch, 80 minutes, so a delta of 10 minutes.
The 2018 Core i9 after the patch is 72 minutes, which is eight minutes quicker.
And additionally, they also saw that the clock speeds were pretty flat, which indicated that things were operating as they should have been.
Yeah, because before the patch, the symptom was basically you have this, as I mentioned, the sawtooth graph of the processor frequency where it would peak really high and then drop all the way down to 800 megahertz and then peak really high again and then drop all the way back down and just like constant fluctuations.
And something was clearly,
overheating or being mismanaged.
That's not normal.
It's not supposed to be that spiky and crazy.
The patch did indeed fix the problem.
I actually talked to Apple about this.
I had a call.
I asked about the VRM thing.
They said that was not it.
But ultimately, I don't really have any more information than that that isn't in the statement.
I'm really, really curious to know...
Just some more technical detail about a missing digital key in the thermal management system firmware.
I'm curious what that means.
You didn't ask Apple about it?
I did, but I didn't get a lot of technical detail.
They were very friendly and open to whatever they knew how to answer.
But unfortunately, this statement really covers it all.
Besides that I was able to confirm that the VRM thing was not it, I don't really have any other information that wasn't in the statement.
But it was nice.
I talked to them.
They seemed genuinely concerned.
I asked them if they bought a freezer to rerun the YouTube test.
They did not.
They didn't seem to think that was very funny.
But...
otherwise uh yeah so it's i i would like to hear from any listeners who who know about like just how this stuff works at this low level like what like what is that a missing digital key does that does that does that just mean like whatever their method of controlling this in software maybe like it was not running or if it was not being loaded by some like firmware download at the cpu level if the cpu was like falling back to its like built-in profiling instead of having apple customize it which i think might be what's going on but
I just want to know more about this at a low level, just out of curiosity's sake.
But the reality is the problem is fixed in the sense that it is like, you know, before it had these weird thermal characteristics.
And in many tests, it was slower than the one that came before it or was at least not faster by very much.
and now the performance graphs have smoothed out, and it is faster than... Basically, it is, as what you'd expect, the fastest CPU option is the fastest performing in real-world tests.
So that was the real problem, and that problem seems to have been fixed.
They did tell me
that this problem affected all of the 2018 MacBook Pros.
So not just the i9 and the 15 inch, but also the i7s and the 15 inch and the 13 inch options as well.
This bug apparently affected all of them, which does lend more credence to the fact that they are most likely telling the truth on the source.
It isn't like some weird thermal thing with the i9 that it affects all of them.
But I don't think people really saw it that much with 13 inches yet.
So I don't know if we have a lot of test results to confirm like maybe how bad it was before and where it is now.
But
But regardless, it's fixed.
I'm happy.
And it seems like it's pretty much a closed book.
I have the same academic curiosity about the explanation, because the fact like this one paragraph thing doesn't have technically tears, but does decide to say a missing digital key, which is just enough to intrigue you to say, really?
Like, right.
What does that even mean?
I mean, the theory that I've heard, you know, like you just said, the most prevailing one is it's some piece of software that's supposed to be signed and wasn't.
And so didn't get loaded or something.
But I don't know.
I mean, they.
they're not into giving you a technical explanation, but I think the most interesting part about this... Again, it's not interesting to consumers.
All you care is that the thing is fixed and it is so great, right?
But it's not actually like... It's one of those boring software problems where it's basically like a build system problem or like a...
You know, a CI pipeline problem or a packaging problem like it's not actually a problem with the technology is a problem with the boring part of the system where you package up the bits for sale and make sure that those are the same exact bits that you tested.
But of course, you have internal only things.
And so it was like.
like what they, what they were selling to consumers was not exactly the bits they thought they were.
And it's, it's great.
Cause you can fix a problem like this.
It's not a hardware problem.
It's like purely a software thing and they can send you a software patch and it fixes it.
Right.
This must be relief to all the hardware people involved.
Like every, everything's fine.
The cooling system is fine.
It's not a catastrophic failure of thermal paste or something.
It's just the software we thought we were sending out to you on your laptop is not actually the software that you got.
So here's a patch and you know, everyone's relieved.
Uh,
it's kind of like how a lot of the recent leaks from Apple have been like,
It's similarly related to like the build system or like putting things on URLs temporarily where they shouldn't be or like just sort of mundane human error unrelated to the creation of the product.
People creating the product are working really hard and doing all the things and doing everything right as best they can.
And then someone goes and accidentally puts like, you know, an unreleased version of operating system up on a public URL or like the build system builds something that they think is an exact match for what they tested, but actually isn't.
And they ship these laptops to people and they have the wrong bits on them.
stuff like that happens like it's not a big deal this is a pretty fast turnaround time but i'm still technically curious about the details and some somebody's boring tell-all nerd book about apple 20 years from now can include this in a chapter this will be the most boring chapter and we're like let me tell you about the time that the build system screwed up somehow
We are sponsored this week by Linode.
Go to linode.com slash ATP to learn more and get a $20 credit.
Linode is my favorite web host.
If you need a virtual private server, not only is it the best VPS host I've ever used, and I've used a lot of hosts, it's the best web host I've ever used, period.
Because now the VPSs are so fast now, they compete with dedicated, in my opinion.
Like I've used a lot of dedicated servers.
VPSs, I think, are the way to go for almost anybody.
And Linode is the place to do that because they have 24-7 friendly support.
They have phone support if you need it.
The performance is fantastic because you're running on native enterprise-grade SSDs.
You're backed by a 40-gigabit network running on Intel Xeon E5 processors.
So this is really high-spec stuff here.
All that's for an amazing price.
Their one gig plan is just $5 a month.
They have all sorts of plans that go up from there, depending on what your needs are.
You can pick 10 data centers.
You can put your server.
All this is backed by a seven-day money-back guarantee.
So you can see for yourself there's nothing to lose.
The pricing is very, very fair.
As I mentioned, they're great value.
I think consistently the best value in the hosting business by far.
And they back it up, too, with constant upgrades.
Like, they just did an upgrade now.
About every few months, they will do an upgrade where you just get more.
Whatever plan you were paying for before, you can go click a button and you just get upgraded to a bigger server.
And you just get even more resources for the same price you were paying before.
I love Linode.
And if you have a need for your own virtual private server, whether that is a web application like what I'm running on mine...
You can run Docker containers.
You can use encrypted disks.
You can run VPNs.
It is by far the nicest host I've ever used.
I've been there the longest, and I think it's the best value in the business.
So check it out today at linode.com slash ATP.
That will get you a $20 credit.
And if you pick that one gig plan for just $5 a month, that could be four free months.
That's pretty awesome.
And once again, there's a seven-day money-back guarantee, so there's nothing to lose.
Check it out once again, linode.com slash ATP.
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my stuff and supporting our show.
All right, and then we have one final piece of drama over the last few days that luckily this show has avoided.
The Intel Power Gadget utility, which I guess is a way I've not used this.
Marco, have you used this?
I have, actually.
It's Intel's kernel extension that you have to install.
But basically it becomes an app that you can run that simply shows you nice little graphs and numbers about what your processor is doing, how fast it's going, what kind of utilization it has, like as a percentage, and how much power it's drawing.
So that's how we're able to see things like, oh, this CPU is spiking to this peak frequency and then dropping, and then spiking again, and then dropping, and the wattage is going crazy, and the temperature is not.
You can see all things like that because of this utility from Intel called the Intel Power Gadget.
And as far as I know, I don't think there's another way to get... You can get heat from various system settings reading apps, but I don't think you can get clock speed and CPU wattage that easily or that precisely from anything else.
Right.
So this thing existed and then didn't and now does again.
So apparently it was pulled from Intel's site right around the time everyone was trying to grab it to figure out what the hell is going on with these new MacBook Pros.
and then so i guess was version three just appeared in the last 48 hours that sort of does the same thing uh one of you guys was kind enough to put a quote in the show notes in version three there there are additional features that include estimation of power on multi-socket systems as well as externally callable apis to extract power information within sections of code and apparently it's important to note the latest release also includes support for windows 10
that's like the entire changelog so the the mystery again with the you know if you wanted to assume that apple is evil it's like oh they found this problem and their solution is to get on the phone and tell intel to pull the power gadget like but then it's back a day later or whatever and when it comes back the changes have nothing to do with like it's not multi-socket system it's not windows 10 and it's not about instrumenting sections of code like why did it disappear and why
you know, why did they then release version three?
Who, who knows?
It could have been just a coincidence, but either way, all the people screaming that it was a conspiracy theory about some terrible problem.
Apple had, uh, you know, the problem Apple had was actually not terrible.
It was actually easy to fix and they fixed it immediately.
And then the power get it.
It's back.
So don't always assume that Apple is out to get you.
Well, but at the same time, you could see why people got here, right?
Because Apple's solution when the 2016 MacBook Pro came out and had weird, terrible battery life, depending on what you were doing, was to hide the battery life remaining indicator in the menu bar forever.
So their solution there was, here's this thing that's showing people how weird our battery life is with these new complicated laptops.
We're just going to hide that information.
So it actually was totally plausible that Apple's solution to people are seeing weird things in the frequency graph might be convince your partner Intel to pull the frequency graph utility from your website.
That is a totally plausible outcome based on their past performance.
So I can see why people thought that.
Don't you think hiding the number, though, is partly because the numbers weren't accurate and they were misleading?
The thing with the speed thing is, look, you can hide the power gadget or not let people install the power gadget all you want.
They still have a stopwatch.
They can still run a workload and time it versus the old version and say...
I don't need to see what the frequency is.
I don't know what the problem is.
All I know is this thing is slower than it should be.
Like, you can't stop people from doing that.
And, like, the battery power thing is, like, we have bad estimates of battery power, and people are flipping out about... Because they're flipping out when they see the bad estimate.
They never actually say, okay, is that actually how much time I have remaining?
Start a stopwatch now.
Like, they're just flipping out on the numbers.
So...
And like the fact that it was back like a day later, it just doesn't add up to me.
And maybe they did.
Maybe some panic PR person did call and ask them to pull it.
But I don't think it was part of some grand conspiracy to hide a big problem because there wasn't a big problem.
There just wasn't.
Like the problem was a small problem and it was fixed.
And it was like it was not unexpected.
They didn't have to research it for a month.
They didn't have to do extensive testing.
I bet it was pretty quick when someone said, I figured out the problem.
People don't have the right bits on their computer.
Like, it's the best problem to have.
Like, this is not actually a problem.
It was the build system or whatever.
I'm calling it the build system.
That's probably the wrong word.
I'm sure there's some Apple word for, like, the way things get onto the computers that you buy.
So, you know, I don't think you can...
yeah i can see where people got there because again people assume apple is always evil or whatever but just things happen so fast and we're so quickly disproved in this case that i don't think people even had enough time to get up a full head of steam about being angry about the conspiracy theory about apple apple making intel pull its gadget and then re-added with windows 10 support it could be like the sticky note on the store where it's like this is every time they update the power gadget utility it's always gone for a day
All right.
So moving on, let's talk a little bit more about Intel, because about a month ago, a friend of the show, Ben Thompson, wrote a really, really, really great article at Stratechery with regard to kind of Intel's problems and how they got in this, I guess, mess that they're in today.
It's been a while since I've read this, although I certainly did read it.
John, I think you might have added this to the show notes.
Can you come take it away and tell us about this?
On this show, we've talked about Intel, I think most of the time in the context of like ARM stuff, you know, ARM Macs or Intel chips and phones, you know, just...
kind of the comparison, uh, between what Intel offers Apple and what Apple is essentially offering itself by like buying PA semi and making its own chips and making its own GPUs and doing all of this stuff.
And I think maybe a year or two ago, one of the focuses was that, uh,
Intel had a big strategic advantage to Apple in that their process technology, meaning how small they can make the features on their chips, was a generation ahead of everybody else.
And so no matter how much more efficient ARM CPUs were, no matter how much Apple could custom tailor them to their exact needs, it's very hard to overcome the fact that Apple had to make all of its ARM chips using larger feature sizes, bigger transistors.
than intel did so even though intel may have old and creaky chips and x86 is old and creaky even x86 64 and it's inefficient and all these reasons why arm is better than intel intel has this advantage of like they take whatever their designs are and they can make them much smaller than everyone else and they use less power and they just have all these advantages and the discussion then was wouldn't it be great if apple could get it's like it's arm cpus or system on chips or iphone stuff
And design them, you know, but then have Intel make them.
Say, we have designs, Intel, we don't actually want your chips.
We just want you to be a fab for us.
Here's the design, you make it for us.
And you make it on your industry leading, smaller than everybody else, always ahead by a year and a half, two years ahead of everybody else.
And that would be the best of both worlds.
It would be the best chip designs and then the smallest fabrication size.
And the discussion then was like, yeah, but why the hell would Intel do that?
Because they can't charge you as much.
They can charge you way more for their high-end, you know, Intel CPU, you know, Xeons or i9s or whatever, because it's like, that's our intellectual property.
We design it and we fab the chip.
And so we get, you know, we can double dip there.
Whereas if we're just a dumb fab and we just say, oh, we'll manufacture things for you and you'll bring the thing yourself, we can't get as much money from you.
And we're ahead of everybody else.
So I bet everybody would love for us to fab their stupid designs, but we're only going to fab our designs.
That's our competitive advantage.
You all suck.
Intel is great.
And that seems like such a long time ago.
Maybe it wasn't as long ago as I thought, but it seems like such a long time ago.
And over the time since then, there's been smaller stories about Intel willing to fab chips for other people, which I think that have appeared in our show notes at various times.
And maybe we haven't actually talked about it.
Maybe they just got booted out because the game became irrelevant.
But the most recent story, as we've talked about on the past few shows, is Intel, it's supposed cadence.
It used to be the tick tock where it would be like they do an architecture change, then a shrink, then architecture change, then shrink on like a yearly cadence or an 18 month cadence or whatever the hell it was.
has been slowing down and they made all these pr things it used to be tick tock and now it's like uh process optimized but like they made a three-step process and then as marco said a few shows ago now it's tick tock tock tock tock tock they've been stuck at 14 nanometers for a really long time for longer than anyone thought they would be including intel intel had grand plans for their 10 nanometer thing now about six months ago we were hearing like uh tsmc taiwan semiconductor manufacturing corporation
They've made it to 10 nanometers or 7 nanometers or whatever.
They're ahead of Intel.
Then people are quick to say, well, again, kind of like base clock speed and TDP.
Feature size is another one of those things that used to have perhaps a more common and simpler definition than it does these days because now people are making transistors with these strange 3D arrangements of elements at the microscopic level, like building these little...
you know pyramids and structures and fins and like it's it's not as easy to say well what what is your feature size what are you measuring between what is your you know it's like dot pitch on a monitor or versus dot pitch on a trenitron like it's all kind of fuzzy and the gist of it was that intel's 10 nanometer is actually smaller than tsmc's 10 nanometer or maybe even smaller than tsmc's 7 nanometer or whatever and so
There was, maybe six months ago, still a reason to say, yeah, it looks like Intel might have lost its fab lead, but it's not actually true.
But at this point, with Intel still unable to deliver 10 nanometer stuff, and TSMC making, I think they call their 7 nanometer or whatever, it doesn't matter that Intel's 10 nanometer, it may be as good as or better than a similar number from TSMC.
TSMC looks like it's going to actually deliver its process in shipping products for customers.
and intel still can't and so i mean ben thompson's article is more about the history of intel and like how how it got to this point but i feel like intel's strategy aside from like selling their arm holdings and losing and and opting out of uh the contract to make the cpu for the original iphone and various other strategic mistakes if intel was still ahead of everybody on process
They're, you know, they're integrated design, as Ben calls it, where they make the CPUs and and have the fab would still be a viable strategy.
But if you're not the best fab in the world and you and during when you were, you also refuse to fab things for other people.
All you're left with now is x86 and its legacy of compatibility and a fab that is not helping you at all.
I mean, at a certain point, it might be better for Intel to have TSMC manufacture their chips for them.
Right.
if they can never get 10 nanometers, like, like it's just, they're in a bad situation.
And it's, it's one of those best situations that's explicable.
It's like, this stuff is very difficult to do.
You make some bad bets seven years ago or five years ago, whatever the crazy lead times are and deciding how you're going to fab your, your 10 nanometer.
And sometimes it just doesn't work out.
Like it's a bummer.
It's a bummer for Intel, but it's like an, it's an honest loss.
Like,
You know, I feel to me it feels honest.
It feels more honest to me than boneheaded decisions like, you know, sticking like Itanium, their instruction set that was going to compete with X8664 and opting out of the iPhone and all that other stuff.
And maybe also feels like a more honest loss than refusing to fab for other people.
Because I feel like there was a way when, because they were a leader, their fab was in the lead for so long.
There should have been a way for them to leverage that to make money while also maintaining like their, you know, their top end deals.
Like, well, we'll fab for certain other people, but we won't fab things to compete with their own chips.
And I'm sure they did that to a limited degree.
And that's what those stories were about a few months ago.
But now they're in a really rough place where, um,
they need to get their 10 nanometer process online because they can't just keep making new arrangements of the same cores in 14 nanometer forever.
Eventually, if they get stuck with this for much longer, Apple will have no choice but to leave.
It's kind of like the...
the power mac g5 situation all over again where where they just apple just couldn't get better parts they couldn't get laptop parts period and they couldn't get faster chips for their high-end thing so it's like we what choice do we have we have to go to intel essentially because the option would be i guess we'll just keep shipping water-cooled power mac g5s forever at the same exact speed because we have no one to buy a faster cpu from and intel said we have faster cpus and we make them faster every year and so you should come to us and they did
Say Intel comes out with these 8-core i9s, right?
What happens next year?
12-core i9s?
Eventually, it becomes the size of a Kraft American cheese slice inside your computer.
You can't just keep adding cores, and there's not enough parallelism into workloads to deal with that anyway.
I don't think they're in that situation.
I think they probably will get their process online.
They're highly motivated to do so.
But...
um it's it's probably safe to say that intel has lost the massive lead they used to have and we you know not not that we're on board this sinking ship because again these the arm cpus that we're imagining are theoretical like hey where is the arm cpu to compete with the zeon doesn't exist it could maybe it does inside apple but you can't say there's an obvious thing to go to and of course there's amd which is resurgent and which does not fab its own chips
It uses Global Foundries, which is the fab part of AMD that they spun off.
And I think Global Foundries also might be catching up to slash matching Intel and process at this point.
I haven't been keeping up with them as much as TSMC.
But yeah, the world order in the silicon chip CPU world has really...
really turned upside down from even just a few years ago.
And we just, you know, we're we collectively as consumers and Apple are all kind of stuck having to make some very difficult decisions, which is like our decision is, do I keep buying these new new computers every year, even though they don't get they aren't getting that much faster or better?
Right.
At a certain point, it's like, what's the point of me buying a new laptop if it's about the same as the one I bought last year?
or if my phone is faster, again, look at the Geeky Bench scores for the iPhone X and compare them to Apple's entire current MacBook and MacBook Pro line, you will be depressed.
And Apple's choice is, do we basically have to
You know, should we have started a project to switch the Macs to ARM three years ago?
And in retrospect, we only realize it now, and now we're kind of screwed, too, because it's not like we have alternatives.
Did we start talking to AMD and see if they can make some kind of, you know, Ryzen technology laptop chips for us?
Like, you know, it's so much easier when you're like, we have the best CPUs, and every year Intel comes out with new ones, and we're on this great gravy train that lasted a long time, but...
it's you know the the smooth ride is over and some hard decisions are going to be coming soon and it's not really anybody's fault like except for maybe you could you could say apple should have had more contingency plans but uh but yeah things things are about to get real interesting it seems like
We are sponsored this week by Backblaze, unlimited cloud backup for Macs and PCs for just $5 a month.
Go to backblaze.com slash ATP for a fully featured 15-day free trial.
Backblaze is by far the best cloud backup.
I've used a bunch of these services.
Backblaze is the best one I've used.
I've been with them the longest.
I entrust them with my data.
With Backblaze, you can access your data anywhere in the world, on the go, on your phone, on a laptop, on the web, whatever you want.
You can even use it as not only just like disaster recovery, but even if you just forgot a file on your home computer, you can open a Backblaze while you're traveling or whatever on your phone, your laptop, and you can go pick that file and just download that file from Backblaze.
So it's great even just for practical uses like that, not even including disaster recovery.
And of course, if you have a disaster, cloud backup is what you want because it is out of your house or your apartment or your workplace.
It is somewhere else off site.
So the disasters that affect your stuff can affect your backup as well.
if you already have backblaze at home tell your sysadmin at work to go to backblaze.com slash atp also because they can hit a business backup link over there on the top of that page they offer the same awesome service with more admin tools using their backblaze groups feature backblaze all this is just gimmick free five dollars a month for unlimited full backups you can plug in as many hard drives to that computer as you want for five dollars a month and they will back them up
You can see for yourself with a 15-day fully featured free trial at backblaze.com slash ATP.
Go there, play with it, start protecting yourself today.
This is the kind of thing, like, it's like saving for retirement.
Like, you want to start this yesterday.
You don't want to be caught without this if it's too late.
You want cloud backup.
And if you're going to have cloud backup, Backblaze is the best.
Go to backblaze.com slash ATP for that 15-day free trial.
Thank you so much to Backblaze for sponsoring our show.
Greg Kolodijek, he writes, do you ever use higher than default scaling on retina screens?
If so, when?
So let me see if I can figure out the right way to summarize this.
So since retina is by default, just kind of pixel doubling everything.
So you have two pixels worth of information where one would have been before.
That's a summary.
I'm sure it's somehow technically inaccurate, but you get the idea.
So what you can do is if you have good eyes, which I do not, then you can actually go in some laptops, you can go to the native resolution such that you can get everything to be really, really tiny and you can fit a whole bunch of stuff on your screen.
So...
I have terrible eyes and I never do that.
And in fact, I think on my actually maybe on my adorable, I do now that I know I have to double check that.
But on my old work laptop, which is a 15 inch laptop, I absolutely left it as the default.
And that's because I have terrible eyes.
John, you now have a laptop.
What are you doing with this?
I do run mine at non-native REST because I never look at that screen.
And remember, my goal was to have my external monitor be exactly the same resolution as my internal monitor because I mirror them because then every time I connect my external monitor, none of my windows move.
So that's what I do.
My internal monitor, I run in a non-native 1920 by 1200.
And I just never look at that screen.
And that's exactly what my external monitor 24-inch runs at.
And so, yeah, I don't like non-native res when I have to take my laptop to the meeting and I have to look at the non-native res.
A, it's too small for me, and B, it's blurry.
So it's not what I prefer, but I do it at work for that particular reason.
So it is worth pointing out that the default scaling has changed.
The 2016s, you know, didn't actually change the number of pixels or the size of the screens, but they did change the default to be one notch higher than native.
Rather than saying, do you use higher than default scaling?
What we really should be doing is do you use higher than native 2x scaling, which by default are the new ones you do.
So anyway...
um so on the on the 15 inch that would be if you use the one that simulates 1680 instead of 1440 that would be one notch up that is the current default but the actual native pixels are 1440 times two i use the 1440 setting most of the time on my 15 inch um because even though things are kind of big and kind of chunky i like that like i like the scale that it's at when i'm doing like work like heavy work like xcode or logic i will bump i will bump it up
I use a utility called iFriendly.
That's E-Y-E, not I, you know, the letter.
So iFriendly is, I've mentioned it before, it's a utility where you can just assign like a certain combination of modifier keys and then the up and down arrows to next resolution up or next resolution down.
So you can change resolutions really quickly just with a key command.
And so I will use that to oscillate between the super high one that John uses, the 1920 simulated one, if I'm doing podcast editing and logic,
Or the 1680 one, which is the one step above default or one step above native, which is new default.
I'll use that one doing coding, Xcode, stuff like that.
Or if I'm just doing like email and Twitter and wasting time like that, I will use the 1440, which is the native 2X mode where everything's a little bit bigger.
Real-time follow-up on my adorable, I actually do have it set to more space.
So the default is 1280 by 800.
I have it set to 1440 by 900.
I guess my eyes aren't as bad as I thought.
Go me.
An actual 2x pixels on that or something like, it's like the 1152 by whatever.
That's the actual 2x pixels on that screen.
Yeah, 1152 by 720.
Your eyes are bad, though, Casey, because you couldn't tell it was non-native.
Yeah, it's real blurry.
I hope so badly that when they do a major redesign of these laptops, I really want to see the 2x pixel, actual pixel nativeness move up one step.
I want the 15-inch to actually have...
you know 1680 times two i want and you know similar like i want 13 inch to have 1440 times two like i want them to actually move up a step in pixels to match their current space setting uh defaults do they ever do that on the plus phones oh that's a good question they the plus phones are still using their like 3x scaling down to a 1080p screen um but the iphone 10 actually has three those 3x pixels
Yeah, that's kind of a shame about the pluses.
I was hoping that eventually there was like a stopgap and eventually it would just do native, but I guess they did, but just on the 10.
So maybe when they're all 10-ish phones, will we finally be done with that non-native?
Not that it's bad.
It looks fine on the pluses, but it bothers me at like a anal retentive level.
Honestly, I think on the 15-inch, when you run it at the one step above at the 1680 step, I think it looks okay.
I can usually stop noticing it after a little while.
But when I spent that day owning the 12-inch, I never stopped noticing.
The screen just looked kind of blurry and crappy.
I think the smaller the screen is, the more apparent that difference is.
And the 12-inch, I think, looks noticeably bad in that way.
I am glad I cannot see it.
Yeah.
James asks, what tech-related opinions that you once strongly held do you now cringe about?
For example, saying something like the original iPhone size was the optimum size, which I think I might have said.
Me too.
And the bigger Android phones were ridiculous, which I think I also said.
Me too.
What other opinions did you have that maybe you were wrong about?
And I was thinking about this earlier today.
And it occurred to me that not only do I have a great opinion to share with everyone, but I have documentation to prove it.
So when I was big into Tumblr back in like 2008, and I at the time was running Ubuntu on a ThinkPad, and I did a distro upgrade from like Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron or something like that.
I forget exactly which one it was, but everything crapped the bed.
And I decided I'm over it.
And meanwhile, I was going back and forth with one Marco Arment via Tumblr discussing what really, why do you like Macs?
It's just you're paying for the name, you're paying for the design, whatever that means.
They're just a big waste of money.
I can build something much cheaper.
And you and I, Marco, basically had this back and forth over the course of like a month over Tumblr, like quote tweets, good grief, Tumblr reblogs and things of that nature.
And it is all there for you to see, my friends.
If you go to the URL in the show notes, you can laugh at how ignorant and silly I was back in the day.
And that is something that I probably shouldn't put in the show notes because I'm pretty embarrassed by it.
But you know what?
it's part of me and uh that was me 10 years ago so marco what do you regret having said i mean a lot i regret most of what i said like by the next day let alone like if i look at like my old blog post i mean you're really playing on hard mode here casey like looking at your own blog posts like yeah everyone's old blog posts aren't embarrassing to them or and if well they should be if they're not luckily yours are dead links
tumble log which is not a word dot marco.org slash post slash big number is 404 or actually the host name doesn't even resolve and actually speaking of that i found a link on one of my posts to an old marco.org post like the old old old marco.org where it was just marco.org slash number and those are very broken as well
They're very rough.
The links are still up.
Maybe some redirects are broken, but those pictures are still up somewhere.
Oh, God, they're bad.
Please don't find them.
There's one where it was right after the iPhone was announced, and I'm like, I'll care later about the iPhone.
It's actually called the iPhone I Will Care Later, and it's like, yeah, it's expensive.
I just got this awesome new Sprint Motorola Q. I don't need the iPhone.
Yeah.
Yeah, that lasted like three months.
But yes, I mean, look, I've always been an idiot with this stuff.
So a lot of what I say, I look back on very poorly.
If I can try to pick out some major themes, I think one major theme is that I still view phones as these secondary and inferior devices.
But a whole lot of people out there view phones as their primary device.
And I still need to get a little bit more on board with that.
Also, I think kind of a major theme of my mistakes and misstatements and regretted opinions is...
Something that I think is pretty common here.
Judging new tech primarily by its specs or its pricing.
And this is kind of like what you were saying a second ago, Casey, about when you were judging Macs before you saw the light.
It's so common for people like us to react to some new device or tech or announcement or whatever as like, oh, you can...
The iPod has less space than a Nomad, lame.
To judge tech based on, oh, that's a terrible deal.
I can build a cheaper machine than that.
Why does anybody buy this thing or whatever?
A larger theme of that is understanding...
The reasons why things can be good or compelling or the reasons why people might choose to buy something go beyond specs and pricing.
There are lots of other factors.
There are lots of utility factors that we might not know about that aren't just raw specs.
There are pricing things that...
the price might matter a lot more to somebody than somebody else, or whether it's people at different income levels, or whether it's a business buying something versus a person buying something, or the value something might have to somebody might be very different depending on who they are, what their needs are.
And even things like
under estimating fashion and visual appeal of things like one of the big reasons why the 12 inch macbook has been pretty well selling as far as i can tell is that it's cute it's really cool like it's it's just like it it really does hit that fashion and visual appeal thing in addition to you know the practical nature of having something very small like
There's a reason why people buy this incredibly compromised machine, and it's not because it's incredibly compromised.
It's because there is some practical aspect to it being so small in life, but also it's really cute, and a lot of people like that, and it just looks cool.
And then finally, to kind of close this out, just generally my biggest – the biggest ways I get things wrong –
are assuming that whatever the important factors are in evaluating things like this today will be equally important tomorrow.
That basically, assuming that the factors that matter...
won't shift over time when in fact if you look at what happens in tech they always shift over time everything is constantly shifting we are standing on quicksand everything is constantly moving around but I too often assume that whatever the situation is now it'll just be that way indefinitely and that's far from true
John?
It's a burden being on the right side of tech history so much.
While you two were toiling in the PC minds, I was trying to tell anyone who listened that GUIs be the future.
That mice were awesome.
This is like the best statement ever on the show.
No, seriously.
I'm not trying to be silly.
I was trying to think of an opinion that I would cringe about.
And you thought of none?
I've been an Apple fan from the start.
My opinion is that it's so hard being right all the time.
Well, no, but like, if you're an Apple fan from the start, you had to endure like a decade of everyone telling you you were nuts and that you knew nothing about technology and that only toy computers had mice and the GUI was stupid, right?
And there was, you know, it wasn't actually that long, but it seemed like a long time and it seemed like everyone else said that and you were in this, but we were eventually proven right.
And cringeworthy opinions, like I was thinking about how much I preferred Apple
essentially 72 dpi black and white screen like on the original mac like the pixels could be black or white there was no gray like to be clear to the people listening who don't remember this that was it black or white but the pixels were really really small like they were essentially 72 dpi like 1x what we would consider 1x in today's retina parlance not not 2x retina but 1x like the you know half of that resolution um
And I preferred that to CGA, 320 by 200 with pixels the size of bolters, even though they had color, right?
Whatever was CGA, eight color, 16 color, eight color, I think maybe eight ugly colors.
And you would think, well, okay, one later you'll look back on that and say, how could you have preferred black and white?
Um, but I look back on it and say, I still think that was, you know, for my taste, my personal taste, that's what I preferred.
And I don't regret it and saying, oh, you were just saying that because your computer couldn't have color because the original, there was no option for color on the original Macs until the Mac two, right?
Which I didn't have, uh, even when it came out.
um so was it motivated by just the things i can't have but i look look back on it now you know many many years distant and say i kind of do prefer the precision of the monochrome screen than having eight very ugly colors in cga with like whatever rectangular pixels or whatever right i still hold that opinion um and that that gets to the heart of this whole cringe about now um
I don't regret having opinions that were based on the best information available at the time, right?
Like that, that, you know, I couldn't have been expected to know the future.
And so I don't, you know, don't regret like, I mean, maybe you could say it's a lack of foresight or whatever, but yeah,
it's difficult for me to think of uh you know big phones are a good example i still don't like big phones and you could say well you know i never made a proclamation that the world won't like them or that no one should have one right but i made a proclamation that i don't like them and i still like they're just not for me right um if i had made a proclamation that apple should never make a big phone because no one will ever buy them uh
maybe i would i would cringe about that but i don't think i ever did that like i i tend i'm so retentive about this maybe comes from writing all those articles and getting all people yelling at me about them early on but it's like i'm pretty careful in what i say to be measured it may not be what people hear but it's what i definitely what i always wrote because i my greatest joy in the world was quoting myself back to people because they would say you
you said the blah, blah, blah.
And I just copy and paste from the article in the comment section and say, here's the sentence that I wrote.
And they would say, but that sentence says whatever.
And then I would paste the same sentence and I put a word in bold and be like reading comprehension people right there.
That's not what I, you know, I'm very, I try to be precise and podcast is obviously harder to be precise, but in general, I feel like I've been mostly measured with things.
The best I came up with, and I think it's a pretty good one.
Although still, I feel like it falls under the category of best information available at the time.
I don't think it's cringeworthy, but it's probably my worst call ever.
It was a call.
It wasn't like a strongly held opinion, but this thing was stated as like, you know, what strongly held?
This wasn't a strongly held opinion.
This is more like a one-off, which is perhaps just as damning or whatever.
But I feel like it was something, an opinion, a prediction based on the best information available at the time.
And it was...
Back before, you know, like Steve Jobs, I think they had bought Next or whatever, right?
Apple had bought Next, right?
And Steve Jobs is not really back.
He's like, you know, I don't think he was even I CEO, interim CEO at that point or whatever.
It's like, so what's the deal?
So Apple got Next.
You know, they were looking at B. They got Next.
Next is cool.
B was cool.
They went with Next.
And hey, you get Steve Jobs back.
Isn't that great too?
And the reason I remember this one is because I wrote it and people like quoted back to me occasionally.
And it was like,
I was not optimistic about the chances of Steve Jobs coming back at Apple.
I was like, give him a few years and he'll burn out because he's such a loser.
He's such a burnout.
He burned out of Apple, right?
Because he did the Mac and then just got ousted and just was a big baby about it and started Next and...
And that company basically failed to do anything that they wanted to do and just got acquired by Apple.
And so, yeah, you got Next and it's a cool operating system.
You got some great technology and you got Steve Jobs.
But what are you expecting Steve Jobs to do for you?
He's a two-time loser, right?
Like he's not cut out to lead this company.
And so I had like a one-off line in one of my articles.
So it was like, yeah, Steve Jobs is back, but...
I'm not sure how great I'll do.
I'll give him I give him a few years.
Right.
And based on Steve Jobs's entire history as, you know, an entrepreneur and a manager of corporations and as a CEO up to that point, that was to save money.
It was the wrong call, obviously, and perhaps the wrongest call ever to be wrong, but it was based on the best information available at the time.
It's not like I was ignorant of Steve Jobs' history.
I'd read everything about him.
I'd been following his entire career.
He was like my idol, right?
I loved the Mac.
I loved everything about it.
But as a great person to lead a company in the right direction, he had not proven to be that person.
at all, right?
So that's probably my worst call.
And I don't cringe about it too much, but it's just so incredibly fantastically wrong.
And again, just a one-liner.
But all my other tech campaigns, I feel like mostly are founded on
reasonable conclusions based on the information available.
I'm going to throw this to you too, because maybe I'm just terrible at remembering places where I made a terrible call.
Is there any that you can recall in the history of ATP or even before that you want to remind me of that I'm forgetting?
Bazell.
Moving on.
Ian Bradbury writes... It's a strongly held opinion.
Come on.
Don't ruin my joke.
That's all you got?
You got nothing?
I honestly don't know.
I mean... Oh, remember when John thought that one-star reviews are only left by old people or by young people?
What was it?
You were totally wrong.
I do remember that.
It was so comically wrong.
I think that was a case where I was more precise than you thought I was.
Oh, my God.
yeah okay that's what the subsequent debate was about about the precision about what you heard versus what I said but anyway we already had that debate and no that's not a cringeworthy thing and we didn't have any good information in one direction or the other so it was inconclusive
I mean, honestly, I can't think of anything that you've said that has been just unequivocally wrong.
And I'm sure there have been things said.
Well, that's factual, Iris, but this is a strongly held opinion.
No, I remember you were saying that negative reviews and badly written reviews were all young people, that old people would never do that.
I'm sure I said all young people.
I'm sure I said never.
Yep, that was you.
You know, I'm always going with the absolutes.
That sounds like you.
Moving on before we all divorce each other, Ian Bradbury writes, can we get an update on your crash plan situation?
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Who rearranged this?
This was done on purpose.
See, I'm just a monkey.
I put the most frivolous one at the end.
But there was a reason it was in that order, John.
You're messing with my system.
All right, well, now I'm committed.
I always put the most frivolous at the end.
Oh, but there was a purpose for this, but that's okay.
This purpose is not discernible to me, so feel free to rearrange.
Is this one of your biggest regrets?
All right, now we just got to reboot this whole darn thing because, well, we'll just see how this turns out.
Okay, here we go.
Where's the little clapper?
Take two, clap.
James Evans writes, there are too many recipes online and I'm clueless.
Would Syracuse share the secrets of his favorite pasta sauce?
I think I've talked about this on other shows.
No, I don't put the recipe of my family's pasta sauce recipe.
It's boring.
Most people wouldn't like it.
It's not exciting.
It doesn't have anything interesting.
There's no secret ingredient.
It is not novel.
It doesn't taste any different than anything you see.
It's very straightforward.
And so I say no reason to put it up because if I put it up, it'll be like an endorsement.
You should try this recipe.
You'll love it.
You probably won't love it.
It'll probably just be like, why would I ever do this?
It's like, I'd rather have it out of a jar because that's what you want.
But
It's the pasta recipe that I want, and it's the pasta recipe that I feed my family, and that's fine with me.
I feel no reason to share my incredibly boring family pasta recipe with anybody.
Knowing full well that you would say something along those lines, I have a bonus question, Ian Bradbury writes.
That's the most BS answer ever.
But it's true.
I don't want the burden of people saying, hey, I tried your recipe, I didn't like it.
Good, fine, whatever.
You're not missing anything.
Go find any recipe online, try it, find the one you like, go with that one.
What should sauce absolutely have in it, and what should sauce absolutely not have in it?
We're talking about tomato sauce.
It should probably have tomatoes.
Okay.
I'm going to say that.
I feel like a safe bet tomato sauce should have tomatoes.
Fresh?
Crushed?
Cubed?
Diced?
Not diced.
What do you mean?
Canned, I assume?
You can do it with... I've done it with fresh.
I've done it with canned.
I think fresh is probably better, but it's really difficult.
It has to be just the right tomatoes at just the right time.
We grew them ourselves in our backyard for a little while, and even then it was like depending on like...
the crop and like when you pick them and what you got like it was variable canned is much more reliable and that's what we use all the time so either way what should not go in it like tons of stuff before you leave so what kind of tomato are we talking like you like fancy like san marzano kind of thing like is there a certain kind you like is there a certain brand because there's a brand that's called san marzano but they aren't actually san marzano tomatoes yeah
I think we talked about this with the olive oil thing, like olive oil and San Marzano tomatoes.
It's very difficult to know whether you're getting the authentic article.
I don't have any secret techniques for doing so.
We just try to get legit San Marzano ones because we feel like there is a small difference in taste that makes it.
But your mileage may vary.
Maybe you like ones from New Jersey better.
Maybe you like from California better.
I think it's personal preference, but there are good ones and bad ones.
So try different ones.
Are there any other tomato products that you mix in with the canned tomatoes, like adding additional tomato paste or something like that?
Nope.
You can do that.
I mean, we do that with bolognese and stuff, but that's not a recipe.
That's just from a book.
But no, our family recipe does not add any tomato paste or anything.
But I wouldn't, you know, if it's part of the recipe that you like, go for it, whatever.
Garlic, onions, both?
Both in mine, yeah.
Some people add sugar to sauce.
Are you one of those?
Or do you have an opinion about that?
I am not one of those.
I know people do that if that's what you like.
Whatever.
I don't do it.
Do you cook the meat in the sauce with the sauce or do you cook them separately and apply the sauce to the meat table side?
This is an interesting thing.
The recipe that we use is basically my father's mother's recipe slightly modified but my mother's mother also had a recipe.
My mother's mother
baked the meatballs in the oven, did not cook them in the sauce.
My father's mother fried them in a pan and then let them cook the rest of the way through in the sauce.
And so that's what we do.
We form them, fry them in a pan to brown the outside, and then they cook the rest of the way in the sauce.
That seems like the most common.
But I've had my mother's mother...
did the baked ones and i like those too and her sauce is a little bit different as well so i like i can you know i can picture in my mind her sauce and my other but i had both of them all the time you go over one grandparents house you have one sauce you go to the grandparents house you have the other sauce i prefer the one that we have now but i like both of them do you prefer a sauce with a prominent note of oregano or other spices like that or do you prefer it more just like you know tomato garlic kind of thing
Oregano for me brings to my, I like, I like oregano.
I like tons of oregano.
I put tons of oregano on my pizza.
So oregano, a prominent oregano flavor and pasta sauce makes me think of pizza sauce.
So I tend not to go in that direction, but lots of fresh herbs, you know, parsley, basil, stuff like that.
I like that to be a flavor in the sauce.
And it is a big component of my sauce, but not so much on the oregano.
Cause like I said, it just, I mean, I love oregano.
I probably, I put way too much oregano on my pizza.
My family hates it, but I love oregano, but it makes me think pizza and that's not where I want to go.
If you were forced – if you were somehow compelled in a way that you couldn't just weasel out of to have a jarred sauce.
For some reason, you're desperate.
You need tomato sauce.
You have to buy one of the jarred ones that would be in a typical grocery store.
What do you buy?
That would never happen.
I would not.
I know.
I don't care.
You're forced.
Somehow you're forced.
I don't know.
I don't even know what brands are or what are available.
I would not eat it.
I would not buy it.
I just wouldn't do it.
When's the last time you have even had canned sauce?
My wife bought jarred sauce that she used in like...
One of her family recipes, like it wasn't just on pasta, it was like some family recipe she had that one of the ingredients was like a jarred sauce.
Probably the last time I had it is in whatever that recipe was, which I don't think we've made in years.
I don't think I've ever had, other than like being a guest over someone's house when I was a kid, jarred sauce on pasta.
like in my own home under my own control.
Wow.
What would you say to that question?
Do you have a preferred sauce, jarred sauce?
I'd go Rayo's.
There's a lot of decent sauces these days.
Rayo?
I've never heard of this.
Yeah, R-A-O.
It's common now.
It's a little expensive.
One of the big jars might often be like $8 if it isn't on sale, but it's really good.
Their vodka sauce is also fantastic.
It's really easy to make sauce, though, and it's really easy to make a huge amount of it for not a lot of money and freeze it.
There's no reason anyone should have jarred sauce.
Don't do it.
So was there anything else that people should absolutely not put in their sauce?
I mean, there's a million things.
Don't put a whole turkey in it.
Don't put donuts in it.
I mean, like, what kind of question is this?
Thanks.
You have fulfilled all of my expectations for this question.
Yeah.
well you kept you kept going that what should absolutely not go in it like i don't know your cat like it's come on like is there some specific thing you're trying to get at like you asked you tried to ask the sugar thing i don't think there's anything like anything commonly used that's particularly controversial that like you can come up with ridiculous stuff but there's no commonly used ingredient that i'm gonna say you should definitely not do i mean sugar is the closest because i feel like you probably shouldn't do that but some people do so whatever
Are we done?
Or do you want to do the last question?
Let's do the bonus question since it'll hopefully be quick.
Although now my whole joke is ruined because I put this question in expecting John to not say anything about his sauce.
And I'm actually kind of proud of you, Marco, because you were able to tease out some facts despite all that.
Made with tomatoes, basil, and oregano and onions and garlic.
You've cracked it.
You've cracked the code.
Hey, it's more than you were willing to share just a few minutes ago.
I told you like, and just all those in reasonable proportions and you're fine.
Anyway, Ian Bradbury writes, can we get an update on your crash plan situation?
How do we come back from that?
We don't have to.
Cut it.
This is why you have an edit.
No, go for it.
Go for it.
We're talking about crash plan.
Yeah, let's talk about crash plan.
By the way, we're sponsored this week by Backblaze.
Go ahead.
Can we get an update on your crash plan situation?
Are you still using them or have you bailed?
I am still using them on the small business account for reasons, and most of them are laziness.
John, what are you doing?
I'm still using it.
I think I got upgraded to the non-Java client.
It's weird that I can't actually tell because it doesn't like I don't know.
I don't think that the non-Java client, if that's what I indeed have, is any better or worse than the other one.
Maybe I just have too much RAM on my Mac and I don't notice it.
It's a little bit weird that I can't seem to get the menu bar thing to stay in the menu bar.
like i think you know the menu bar icon for crash plan like it's not there a lot of the time and i'm like does that mean it's not backing up but then i launched the app and then i tell it to put the menu bar thing and it's like oh my last backup was like 10 minutes ago so it's working and it's doing its thing and i can confirm that the backups are there but it seems a little bit weird and flaky anyway i'm still using it um
I think it's still backing up my external volumes.
Again, sometimes it seems like it's not.
It's like, wait, it's unchecked.
It's not backing up my external volume.
But then I go look for a file that I put on my external volume like a week ago, and it's in the backup.
So it's a little bit weird and flaky, but the price is still right, and it's still doing it.
Why?
Okay.
We're sponsored this week by Backblaze, and I like them a lot better than Crash Band.
That aside, like...
Why in God's name would you want your backup program, your last line of defense, to be a little bit flaky and to not be entirely sure it's working?
That's not my last line of defense.
You know how many lines of defense I have.
That's like one of many lines of defense.
There's no other thing that will do my backup drive without me doing iSCSI or something.
The drive I'm backing up, to be clear, is my media drive, which really I don't care.
that much about like it's mostly just stuff i've ripped from disk like so it's not there is no essential data that i'm that i have that i'm questioning like i'm not sure if it got backed up or anything it's just that i have no other way to back this up for such a low price and crash plane continues to do it so i let it that's mostly just for convenience so that if i do lose everything i can get all my media back for my backup uh without having to you know worry about rebuilding that whole thing but if i lose my media because it didn't back up or something like i don't care it's it's just you know movies and stuff
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Aftershocks, Backblaze, and Linode.
And we'll see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter.
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
and my media is also duplicated to a second sonology that's sitting right next to it so it's not like it's just done wait wait wait wait wait wait time out i have a lot of backups which two sonologies do you have you have a play i have a play whatever play number something yeah
I think it's 214, if I'm not mistaken.
I think it's like a two drive or a three drive or something.
You don't have enough media to long over... I have enough junk.
My giant Synology with eight bays, only two or three drives are dedicated to media.
And those two or three drives are duplicated to the second Synology.
Huh.
and and and it's also i believe it's also they're both also in some kind of raid arrangement oh my god i have a lot of backups like the chances of and that's for my media that i don't even care about it's just ripped movies and stuff like i don't it's not even i care about my the data that i care about is backed up like a thousand times so i think i'm i think i'm good
When you make the meat in the sauce, are you talking just – is it just meatballs?
And we'll get to meatballs in a second.
Or is it meatballs and sausage?
And if it includes sausage, do you get sweet sausage, hot sausage, or a mix of both?
uh for most of my childhood it was just meatballs but when i would go over to my uh mother's mother's house she would do sausage too and i like that so in my own life we have in recent recent decades gone to both uh because my wife really likes the sausage so we do sausage and meatballs mostly meatballs but with a little bit of additional sausage uh i go with sweet sausage uh no hot at all that's that's no hot at all it's just that's what i prefer i think it works better for me
I would argue you're missing out.
I prefer a 50-50 split, but I like it.
It's fine, but it's not what I'm looking for.
I'm looking for something that tastes like what I remember.
And when I was a kid, my grandmother always did sweet sausage.
That's what I like.
Now, the meatballs.
Similar to before.
What definitely goes into the meatballs and what definitely does not that some people might frequently put in?
Did either one of you ever have my pasta sauce and meatballs in?
I feed it to you when you were over here, maybe?
I did.
They were delicious.
But I forgot about what's in them because that was a long time ago.
Let me just add my rule of meatballs.
For me, but I feel like it's applicable to other people, and it's not related to making them at home.
It's that of all the things that you can order in an Italian restaurant, the one that someone like me most often avoids, and I would argue most people should avoid, is meatballs.
i have never had a meatball at a restaurant in my entire life that was to my liking it's not because they were bad they were just different than what i wanted uh usually because they were fancier or weirder or they're trying like but the variability of meatballs in restaurants is astounding it is way bigger than the variability of like any other thing i can think of you
never know what you're going to get meatball could mean anything you have no idea what the predominant taste is going to be what the size is going to be the consistency is going to be you know nothing about it it is totally a black box and if you like just rolling the dice and it's fun you know to do whatever like i feel like swedish meatballs have have more consistency in restaurants than italian meatballs because swedish meatballs they taste like swedish italian meatballs you have no idea what you're getting so that's just my tip for meatballs
my meatballs are boring they are beef only and you know and like uh breadcrumbs and and you know uh parsley and like oh just like it's not that's it no no pork do you use an egg to bind it yeah
Okay, so you got ground beef, you got an egg, parsley, breadcrumbs.
Salt and pepper.
Salt and pepper, okay.
Like, they're very boring.
Like, that's the problem.
The reason I'll never go in a restaurant is if you serve this at a restaurant, they'll be like, those meatballs are kind of bland.
That's my meatballs.
Sorry.
That's why, you know, that's it.
they're very boring no no i've made the fancier ones at home just to see if like i'm missing out on anything like the whole you know bread soaked in milk and see ever do that whole big thing like that yeah i mean i don't i don't you tiff is our meatballer in the family and she's very good at it but she doesn't do that i don't think and i've done it and those are fine it's just not what i'm personally looking for in a meatball like i like them i'll eat them and sometimes you know i've other people have ordered meatballs in restaurants occasionally i've had one oh
that's a pretty good meatball but it's not what i want mine are boring they are they are what i want i it has taken me 20 years of marriage to get my wife who is the meatballer she's the former of the meatballs in our in our chain right i'm the cooker of them she's the former to form them at the expected size because i have a specific size that i want them to be and i want that was gonna be my next question so like is it like you know golf ball size like or you know bigger smaller it's she's she's got it down to a weight she uses a food scale now she's hacked the system
I don't know what the weight is.
I can do it by eye, right?
But she's the one who forms them.
So she uses the food scale.
And if she was here, she would tell me the exact weight.
Maybe it'll be followed.
But next week, it is bigger than a golf ball.
It is smaller than a tennis ball.
Yeah, that seems about right.
Because like one of the ways that restaurants often go wrong is by making them really big.
No, like a lot of restaurants, you'll get like two.
The giant one, the American.
Yeah, like baseball sized ones, right?
Yeah, that's like a meatloaf.
That's like a bad meatloaf.
Because there's no good way to cook that.
Like something that's that big.
Yeah, you have to bake it or you have to leave it in the sauce forever.
Yeah, it's never going to cook enough without overcooking the outside, or you'll just cook it forever and kill it, and it'll just taste like nothing.
There's no good way to do that.
I see more often in restaurants the tiny ones, like golf ball or smaller.
That's too small.
I have a feeling those are usually frozen.
I bet they're usually brought in, because when you buy a big bag of bulk meatballs at Costco, or if you... Which you should also not do.
Do not buy bags of meatballs.
Oh, those Costco meatballs are good.
Oh, come on.
Of course you think they're good.
Meatballs are so easy to make.
You take meat, you put it in a ball.
It could not be easier.
I'm pretty sure it's the Costco ones that I have realized over the last year or so are friggin' delicious.
I love those things.
I'll have to look and see what we have.
I feel like if you have meatballs for some not very important purpose, like if you're making a meatball sub, I love a good meatball sub, but honestly, the quality of the meatballs on a meatball sub is not as important as the quality of meatballs if you're having pasta and meatballs as your entree.
If anything, you want the meatballs on a meatball sub to be, like, the crappiest meatballs they could possibly be because it's, like, fast, crappy fast food.
Like, it's, you know, it's like wanting American, it's like wanting processed American cheese on your grilled cheese because that's what a grilled cheese is supposed to be.
Or, like, a cheesesteak with Cheez Whiz because, like, that actually, everyone's got their line.
No, no, like, I've been converted on this over time.
Like, I used to be solidly provolone on the cheesesteak.
But then, but I tried, you know, with a couple trips to Philly in the last few years, I finally tried Cheez Whiz, and I had to admit, like, I even did, Tiff and I, like, I got a provolone one, she got a Cheez Whiz one, and we each traded half of the others so that we could each have half of one, half of the other.
It was unanimous.
We both agreed, yeah, the provolone's good, but the Cheez Whiz was definitely better.
Well, we learned about both yours and Tiff's junk food tendencies from top four.
So that kind of fits with my new culinary vision of both of your palates.
Real-time follow-up with regard to the meatballs.
Little Birdie has told me that the correct weight is three and a half ounces.
All right.
Thank you, Little Birdie.
So I'm curious.
You mentioned what goes into it, breadcrumbs, an egg and everything.
I don't remember hearing you mention onion.
Do you not put onion in meatballs?
And if not, why?
I do not.
why uh i don't know why it's because my because my parents didn't right that's why that's literally why like that's not i'm not making this again i'm making i want to make that because we we had to be clear we had pasta and meatballs every week of my life essentially like not on the same day every day but pretty much once a week for my entire life until i left home right so it was a staple and a staple like that like i liked it it was good it was one of my favorite meals i want to keep having that meal
Why do I not put onions in it?
Because they weren't in when I was a kid.
And neither one of my grandparents put onions in it.
That's why I don't do it.
I'm sure it would taste good and it would be fine.
It would change it.
It would make them a lot more moist.
And that's not what my meatballs are like.
So that's not what I do.
Are there any ways in which you deviate from your parents' recipe on this traditional meal?
Yeah.
The sausage is combining because my father's mother didn't do that.
We put that in.
Yeah.
The recipe I got from my dad because he was the one who always made sauce home.
Like, you know, my wife can tell you by, you know, I message Casey, like the amounts that he wrote down seemed to be like off.
And we like mess with them a little bit because they don't seem to be right.
And what really we need to do is write down a more accurate recipe for our children at this point.
Like, I don't even know.
Because my wife's the mixer of ingredients, right?
So she's the one measuring out all the stuff and dumping it into the big thing.
And she's the one mixing up the meatballs and forming them into balls, right?
Following the recipe, supposedly, quote-unquote, following from what my dad wrote in our cookbook.
Like, when it was like, you know, take this cookbook out with you to be an independent adult.
But he didn't write down.
Like, what we do is not what he wrote down.
So we really need to...
nail this down in some reproducible way.
Now we just do it out of habit.
This is just a thing we do, and it's just like an assembly line, and it just happens.
But we have honed it a little bit to the point where when my dad visits and he makes his, quote-unquote, his sauce, he doesn't make it as good as ours, so we must have done something to change it.
Maybe we...
maybe we're changing the ratio of like it could just be as simple as like salt and pepper or like using preseason breadcrumbs versus not preseason but anyway what we make is now what i like and i think it's actually has drifted from what i had when i was a kid but it matches like because it's been a continuous gradual thing like it matches my memory of what it should be like your accent
kind of like yeah it changes over time but i i honestly i think we've improved it i think now i think i would rather make my sauce for myself than have anyone else make it well that's good like like that's kind of how you want it to be right because if you're not doing that then like if you if you have some recipes like oh but i can never make it like my mom makes it figure out how your mom makes it right like
Or figure out a better way to do it.
Don't assume that the way that your family's done it forever is the best it can be.
Find your own path.
Yeah, that's kind of why we did it with Fresh.
Because my parents, to my knowledge, no one ever made it with Fresh.
But we had a tomato garden in our house when we got our house.
And we're like, let's try making it with Fresh.
And boy, it was a lot of work.
And a couple of them were really good.
But a couple of them we made with Fresh were kind of stinkers.
And we were like, overall...
The math doesn't add up to get that one great one, but those five cruddy ones, and then our neighbors built a bigger fence and put too much shade for us to grow tomatoes.
But anyway, same thing with the cans.
We're always pursuing what are the best tomatoes to get?
Where can we get what we think are real San Marzano tomatoes, and are they actually better?
I'm always reading articles about
Different canned tomatoes dry and cost wise, because we still make it a lot.
So we're looking for the big ones that we can buy in bulk, you know, cheap.
We don't want to pay $8 for a tiny 16 ounce can because we will break the bank on that.
So we'd much rather get the we get like a giant restaurant size, like barrel type can things because that that's what works out.
We make it in big batches.
So you mentioned earlier that you don't like ordering spaghetti and meatballs at a restaurant.
And I agree with... If you're going to an Italian restaurant, to me, ordering spaghetti and meatballs is... It's like going to a bagel shop and ordering a plain bagel with plain cream cheese.
It's like...
okay, that's probably going to be alright, but that's the most boring choice you can make, and you're probably missing out on much better options.
Well, the other thing is the red sauce, the tomato sauce in Italian restaurants, really hit or miss.
Even good Italian restaurants, because the difference is in taste.
Some people like it spicy, some people don't.
Some people like it bland, some people like lots of oregano, lots of garlic.
There's so much variability, you just don't know what you're getting.
So the meatballs are very variable, but even the red sauce is pretty variable in my experience.
So I do not
order that ever at any italian restaurant okay so then my so my question is you go to an italian restaurant you know it's a pretty good one what do you order when i was a kid uh growing up on long island where we went we go to italian restaurants all the time because that's the kind of restaurant my dad liked my wife can relate i'm shocked i like i like to um the the kid thing to get the thing that i i and my siblings always got and i just associated in my mind like this is what kids get italian restaurants i have no idea if this is true but what we always got was baked ziti
Oh, that's a good choice.
All the time.
And it came in an oval ceramic thing.
Oh, God, what a waste.
Oh, my God.
That's what we did on Long Island.
We get baked ziti.
If your children, I understand, children have terrible food at restaurants.
What do you order now as an adult?
All right.
So as an adult, first of all, I hardly ever see decent baked ziti.
Right.
So I don't order that anymore.
I still like it.
um recently i was in i was in colorado visiting my parents and they have a hard time finding good italian food there and they had baked z less than on the menu my parents said yeah it's actually well like what you remember and i got it like out of pure nostalgia and it was it was like it was in the same sort of oval shaped oven safe ceramic thingy on top of another plate because it's super hot with the cheese really you know crunchy on it like it's it's you know it's it's good comfort food so i have heard that recently but mostly what i get my go-to is always uh and everyone's gonna hate me for this but it's the truth
Uh, veal parm.
I know, I know about the cows.
Believe me, my mother is a vegetarian.
Every time I ordered veal parm for my entire life, she told me about the poor cows taken away from their mother.
I know about the cows.
You don't have to tell me.
She's literally told me my entire life.
The only time I ever get it is at an Italian restaurant.
I do get it a lot.
Casey, I'm afraid to ask you.
Oh, if I go to an Italian restaurant, what do I get?
Velveeta.
Velveeta shells and cheese.
Oh, if only.
Oh, that'd be amazing.
I actually had that for dinner last night, coincidentally.
No, if I go to an Italian restaurant and... Do I have to answer this question?
Yes, honestly.
All of a sudden, I feel like...
All right.
So if I go to an Italian restaurant, in my personal opinion, which the entire Internet is now going to write me and tell me how wrong I am.
And I don't care.
Just save your keyboard fingers.
I don't care.
Don't tell me.
I like lasagna.
I like lasagna a lot.
I think you can get good lasagnas at a restaurant.
You can get bad lasagnas at a restaurant.
And I feel like it's a good metric.
And so because of that, I will often order lasagna.
It's a little risky, but less risky than spaghetti and meatballs.
I was never a big lasagna fan as a kid at restaurants or whatever, but I've been making the Lydia's lasagna recipe at home, and it is amazingly good.
Wait, Lydia's?
You don't know Lydia?
No.
The famous TV chef, Lydia Bastianich, I think her last name is.
She is she's my favorite television Italian chef.
I really do like her recipes.
She has a lasagna recipe, which is guess what?
Really boring.
Like it is the straightforward like this is lasagna.
There is nothing weird about it.
It is just plain.
I make her bolognese recipe also very straightforward.
I just I just made her bolognese recipe like two days ago.
She's my favorite like other person to get Italian recipes from because like she's from the same sort of, you know, geographic and culinary background as my grandparents.
Right.
You know, New York City, New York metro area, Italian American, same generation of immigrant, more or less.
And she makes food like they made food and like I like.
And yeah, that's, you know, but Italian restaurants are all sorts of things I love.
All kinds of pasta dishes, like all kinds of like, again, boring pasta dishes.
It's one of my favorite Italian restaurants.
I'll order, you know, pasta with garlic and oil.
I'll order pasta with tomato, garlic and oil, like just very simple.
I love pasta.
That's I'll order that if it's on the menu.
Not exciting recipes.
It's just a question of something that catches my eye at a particular time.
I will wander an Italian menu much more than I will another restaurant where I feel like there's only a few safe havens.
First of all, that reveals a lot about your psychology of restaurants that you look at this as a safe haven.
I can only order these things that are safe on the menu for things I don't know.
Yeah, well, if you go to a fish place and you don't like fish, you're looking for the one fish option.
I'm not particularly adventurous with food, so looking at a menu, there's often only two or three things that I think I would even potentially like.
But in an Italian restaurant, I'll like almost anything that's not fish.
I'm being told by the Arbiter that you do indeed order a lot of veal parm, but not as consistently as you used to.
Sometimes it's not always on the menu, and sometimes I have a crisis of faith, and I'm like, this veal parm is not going to be good.
I can't order this.
You just don't know.
You see it on the menu, but you're like, hmm, maybe not.
Does it not bother you?
You mentioned a minute ago that you often will just get pasta with garlic and oil or whatever.
Does it bother you to order something that you could very easily make at home?
Oh, no, it doesn't bother me at all because someone else makes it for you.
That's what you pay them for.
Like, I mean, I will very often complain when I order an exact dish that I make at home and I order it and I go, mine is 10 times better than this.
See, that's the risk.
Like, you know, ordering like a veal parm, that makes sense because that's something that like most home cooks are not going to make.
right like that's so that you're not gonna buy veal because you're too guilty in the store but at the restaurant i'll do it right yeah the restaurant's like well you think well they already have it back there uh i know it's terrible but um you know and like you know it's like to me like you know i'll go for usually if i'm in an italian restaurant which honestly isn't that often but um but when i'm when i'm in an italian restaurant i usually go for some kind of fancy pasta dish so like maybe a ravioli or a tortellini or just like a cool shaped pasta like oraceti or something with
sausage and vegetables or something like that, like, some kind of, like, a fairly complex dish.
Like, I probably could make this at home, but it would be, like, a lot of chopping and a lot of, like, a lot of steps.
So, like, I'm probably not going to.
And, you know, something like that, like, fresh flavors, you know, fresh tomato, fresh mozzarella, stuff like that.
Like, I wouldn't go for something as simple as just, like, pasta with, you know, garlic because I would be afraid of that happening, of, like, I don't want to...
order something that in this restaurant that i could go make at home for 50 cents that would be better yeah i mean sometimes i feel like it would just even if i feel like i could do it slightly better as long as it's good enough i'm fine with it and yeah it is a waste of money we don't go out to eat that often we very rarely go out to eat but and so i don't mind paying 16 for something that cost them 10 cents to make like i don't care it's it's fine that's the whole point of of going out um but occasionally like one of my favorite things i make at home is like
pasta with sausage and broccoli rabe which is a combination that's probably my favorite thing that I make and lots of restaurants are starting to have it and I make the mistake of ordering it and every time I'm disappointed I'm like and sometimes it's like it's okay but I eat it and I'm like I just think
Mine is just so much better.
Often because mine is simpler.
Like, they add more stuff to it.
They put cream or peas in it.
It's like, what are you even doing?
Like, stick to the basics.
Those are good.
Cream and peas and maybe, like, onions and, like, prosciutto maybe.
Oh, man.
I would rather be having my... I've ruined my wife with the carbonara.
She always asks me to make carbonara, which isn't actually carbonara.
It's a modified Lydia recipe that isn't actually called carbonara, but anyway, that's what we call it.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
You butcher carbonara?
She orders it at restaurants, and her complaint is always, this is not as good as what we make at home.
So now at this point, she's stopped ordering it.
She doesn't do it anymore.
She's like, I know I'm going to be disappointed by this.
I'm not going to order it.
Oh, you're lucky.
I've tried to make carbonara a number of times, and I butcher it.
It's so bad.
It's my wife's favorite recipe.
She periodically gets uncontrollable cravings for it.
I'd be like, I need carbonara today, and so I have to make it for her.
there's that's actually a good point as i've forgotten that you know for years my go-to was lasagna stated earlier but in the last handful of years i have started getting really into carbonara and i try not to have it often because it is extremely extremely bad for you oh yeah it's horrible man is it good and uh tina is writing me now to say that john's carbonara is awesome and now i want it so it sounds like you're making carbonara a
I may have triggered it again.
You're making carbonara tomorrow and I'm coming over for dinner because I want some of that.
Next time we're at your house, here's the menu, right?
We figured it out.
The thing about my carbonara, though, is even though my wife loves it and I really like it and one of my children will tolerate it,
uh i i don't serve it to guests because i assume everyone else will find it just disgusting because honestly like it is it is disgusting in a unhealthy way and it's it is very what i make is very it's oppressive it is like it is
It's heavy.
It is.
I would never serve it to guests because you'd be like, that's carbon.
Okay.
So, so normally carbonara, feel free to correct me.
Normally carbonara is some kind of pasta, often linguine, I think, or whatever the broad version is.
Usually pancetta, peas, onions, some kind of cream and egg, right?
You are making the restaurant version of it.
Right.
So, so how do you, what, how does yours differ?
So the, and again, what I'm making is not actually carbonara.
Actual carbonara is, uh,
like parmesan cheese egg you can either do whole egg or just the yolks uh and then you know spaghetti uh and uh black pepper and that's it and and like no no peas no cream uh oh yeah and pancetta and pancetta and one or guanciale right all right wait i can be talked out of cheese not peas
Yeah.
So now the peas are not like go look at like what is traditional carbonara or go to Italy.
Like you're not going to get cream and peas in it.
Right.
So that's that's it.
That's the basics.
And then American restaurants to try to, you know, kick it up a notch.
Boom.
Emeril.
Add all sorts of other crap to it.
The cream is in addition to, like, add to the richness.
And I'm sure there's some variation of it in the way it's like that.
But anyway, Italian-American carbonara does not have cream.
But adding it, it's like it fits.
Like, you see how it works with it.
And it's cheaper to add cream than to add more Parmesan cheese.
What I'm actually making is a variant of Lydia's recipe, which is not called carbonara.
I think she calls it with, like, she calls it, like, linguine with, I don't know.
I forget the hell the name of it is.
It's some descriptive name that's just, like, listing the ingredients.
Yeah.
I do not add cream, but I do add onions and I add chicken stock, which is not on the menu, but it's something that I add to my thing.
I only use yolks, no whites, and I use way, way too much Parmesan cheese.
And the meat has changed.
I used to use plain old bacon because it's all we could get when we were in Georgia and we just kind of stuck with it because, hey, bacon is good tasting, only a specific kind of bacon.
Now we switch over to pancetta.
I'd use guanciale if you could ever find it, but it's like impossible to find it.
That sounds pretty awesome.
Yeah, so it is not really... The reason we call it carbonara is the predominant flavor is parmesan cheese and egg yolk.
I mean, I'm on board with that, but that is very different than what I envision as carbonara.
Yeah, because you're all thinking of the restaurant one that has cream and peas in it.
Yes, exactly.
yeah basically add peas to yours and i'm sold even i just went to so our our favorite italian restaurant that we've been going to you know since 1994 i don't know how many years that is but it's a lot that still exists and it's great because they no longer even have a sign on it like there's no there's no word on the outside of the restaurant that says the name of the restaurant at all uh so it's very small just says nothing literally says nothing there's no words um
But anyway, it's still there.
We still go to it.
And they make a thing they call chicken carbonara, which has chicken, mushrooms, cream, pancetta, and rigatoni.
And it's like, how is that carbonara?
I guess because it has the, you know, like it has the pancetta and it has cream and that kind of counts.
It's a great meal.
I love it.
I love the taste of it.
But it's just, it's like...
It's a restaurant variation.
And it has cheese on it.
And honestly, I think the cream is because it fits in with the richness and it kind of works, but it's much cheaper than adding more of the $21 a pound Parmesan cheese to it.
Similarly, there's an Italian restaurant by me that serves a farfalle carbonara, which seems wrong in every measurable way.
Those are the bow ties, right?
Correct.
Now, see, honestly, I like bow tie pasta for saucy dishes because it picks up the sauce really well.
so they there's is described on their menu as chicken sauteed in a cream sauce with prosciutto peas and farfalle pasta and oh man it's it may be like terrible restaurant carbonara but it is delicious terrible restaurant carbonara it is so good yeah that sounds great i would probably order that and the reason my wife doesn't like them is because they're not what she's expecting she's not expecting cream and so even though it may be like oh this is a good creamy pasta dish it's not what she wants when she wants carbonara she wants the thing that i make which also isn't carbonara but you
Anyway, there's good.
There's probably some good.
You can just probably look up Lydia's thing of like watching her make carbonara.
There are very few ingredients.
It's very simple.
It's easy to screw up.
You can obviously scramble the eggs, but a little bit of practice, you'll get it.
And at least then you'll know like this is this is the base.
And then if you want to start adding stuff after that, fine.
But I would say draw the line of cream because if you're adding cream, that's a different.
That's a different thing.
Maybe good, maybe great, but just maybe call it something different.
Now I really want carbonara or something awful.
I was just glad you didn't say you put Velveeta in yours.
No.
Well, I would never cook it, but... He just puts it on top at the end.
Yeah, right?
Shells and cheese are good, man.
Don't knock it till you try it.
I have tried it.
I've tried it.
I've tried it.
No, it's good.