It Also Deserves to Die
Casey:
As I have for the last two or three weeks, I think the first words out of my mouth were, I'm busy right now.
Casey:
For two or three weeks running, I've said that to Marco, even though every single time I've been doing nothing important.
Marco:
I mean, one could argue that most of what we do is not that important.
Marco:
That's also true.
John:
Being busy doesn't mean you're doing important things.
John:
It just means you're doing something.
Casey:
That's also fair.
Marco:
oh tired your meetings from eight to five too i was working this is a meeting of one actually it was two most of the time i was teaching tiff how to edit podcast today oh yeah i saw that on instagram or i don't know she posted a picture of it yeah yeah stories i still don't know what i should be posting on my instagram stories i i really i don't think i've ever posted anything on there and i don't really know why i've never done anything i don't see why i would
Marco:
I want to be the kind of person who just has always done that and does it routinely.
Marco:
But I'm not.
Marco:
And to transition from not having ever done that to doing it, I don't really know how to do that.
John:
Why do you want to be the person who does that routinely?
John:
Why?
John:
Why do you aspire to that?
John:
What is it about that person that you would like to be?
Marco:
That's a good question.
Marco:
It seems like the way you're supposed to use Instagram now.
John:
hmm maybe i mean like there's there's stories up top but there's you know square inch wise there's way more pictures as i scroll through the terrible application well slow down what's wrong what's wrong with instagram oh the application it doesn't it doesn't give me a chronological timeline that keeps track of where i was it never has
Casey:
You know, that used to really grind my gears real bad until the genius—so genius I should have thought of it myself, but didn't—you're all caught up.
Casey:
Which, I agree with you, John.
Casey:
I would prefer the chronological timeline.
Casey:
I'm not trying to deny that in any way, shape, or form.
Casey:
But—
Casey:
I feel like – and what did I hear this on?
Casey:
Independence with Jelly and Alisou and Curtis Herbert.
Casey:
I think it was Curtis who was making this pitch that once we got the you're all caught up, that was sufficient.
John:
I said, no, it's still stupid.
Marco:
Instagram was never good for completionists.
Marco:
Even back in the day, it would just lose your place.
Marco:
It would scroll you to the top if you left the app for 10 seconds.
Marco:
It was always hard for completionists.
Marco:
Now it's actually easier because if you keep visiting the app, eventually you will be all caught up, even though it won't be in order.
Marco:
If you scroll through a few things now...
Marco:
and then you quit the app, and you go back a little bit later, you see different things on top.
Marco:
And they aren't necessarily newer, they're just different from what you saw before.
Marco:
And eventually, you are caught up.
Marco:
It's just, it's harder to see things in exactly the right way you wanted to, but it's actually, I am now sold on the algorithmic timeline, even though I also hated it at first, because it just changed the way I had to browse.
John:
You're sold on it?
John:
Ugh.
John:
i feel like it's reading it like reading a book and going i'm going to read from the back of chapter five to the middle of chapter five and then i'm going to put the book down i'm going to pick it up i'm going to read from the back of chapter eight to the middle of chapter eight then i'm going to put it down and i'm going to go and then being excited by the fact that oh the book lets me know when i've actually read all the pages like screw you not how i want to interface with it what's nice is that if you don't have time to fully catch up
Marco:
you can at least be relatively sure that you're going to see your wife's posts and your best friends.
Marco:
You can be relatively sure it's going to show you the things that you want to see.
Marco:
And you will be caught up on those.
John:
Briefly, I had that experience today.
John:
I saw some of my wife's Instagram posts.
John:
And what I did was I went to go post a picture of it to one of our Slacks because I wanted to talk to Stephen Hackett about it because my wife and he were in the same location, it seemed.
John:
And I briefly left to go to Slack to post a picture when I came back to Instagram.
John:
Where the hell is my wife's picture?
John:
I hadn't paged through all of them horizontally because it's the multiple things.
John:
So I had to go find her picture by scrolling down the stupid algorithmic timeline, all the while convincing the application that I'm looking at these images.
John:
But I'm not because I just want to get back to the image that I was on before so I can swipe through it.
John:
I hate it so much.
John:
And there's no iPad app.
John:
I mentioned there's no iPad app.
John:
I'm not sure if that whole iPad thing is going to catch on, but as far as Instagram is concerned, it is not a going concern.
Marco:
Yeah, that to me is the more egregious thing.
Marco:
If I had to pick either give me an iPad app or give me back a straight timeline option, I would easily pick the iPad app because the iPad is so good for browsing and content consumption.
Marco:
Yes, I know you can work
John:
Who wants to see pictures on a big color screen?
Marco:
That's so stupid.
Marco:
But it's so good for browsing through stuff like that.
Marco:
I don't understand why they haven't done that yet.
Casey:
So I derailed the conversation.
Casey:
Marco, you were starting to say that you want to be a cool kid if we're taking the definition of cool kid, which is probably under debate.
Casey:
But if we're taking the definition to be somebody posts to Instagram stories or Insta stories, you want to be one of those people, but don't feel like you have a way in.
Casey:
And let me give you...
Casey:
Some really good advice.
Casey:
The way in is to just do it and not care.
Marco:
I guess that's how people do this, huh?
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
And I've been watching Mike be more prolific.
Casey:
And we've talked about this on Analog.
Casey:
I've watched Mike be more prolific with his Insta stories and been jealous of it for reasons I can't put my finger on.
Casey:
And I think this is kind of true for you.
Casey:
It just feels like something that I should be taking part in.
John:
I can't believe you two have this feeling.
John:
I have the opposite feeling.
John:
Every time I see someone's story, I'm like, and this is why I never do that.
Marco:
I just sent a horrible picture of my microphone right now to my Instagram story.
Marco:
I don't know what I'm supposed to do about that.
John:
Accented a live picture.
John:
Put on some pants.
Marco:
Oh, my gosh.
Marco:
I think if you're going to really build a following on Instagram, you have to participate in stories.
Marco:
But I think it's also like one thought I've had about Instagram recently is
Marco:
Maybe I don't need to care about building a following there.
Marco:
I care on Twitter because it's so tied in with promoting my business stuff.
Marco:
But it's kind of hard to promote audio on Instagram or to promote apps on Instagram.
Marco:
You can do it, but it's not very effective.
Marco:
It's not really made for that.
John:
You should pay Casey to use your app on one of his stories.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I'll be an influencer.
John:
Casually, like, oh, yeah, I'm just listening to some look-ahead limiters here.
John:
It's pretty cool.
Casey:
I am happy to be an influencer, a hashtag influencer on Insta.
Marco:
Influencer?
Marco:
Is that how you say that?
Marco:
Influencer.
Marco:
So I wonder, like...
Marco:
I know this is the biggest first world problem in the universe, but there's always a level of I don't have a big following there.
Marco:
And so I feel like it's actually a little more relaxing to be there that I'm not a super Instagram pro.
Marco:
And so I kind of want to keep it that way.
Marco:
It's nice to have an outlet there that is under a lot less scrutiny than whatever I would post on Twitter.
Casey:
Isn't there a way to retweet or reblog, if you will, somebody's story?
Casey:
I could swear there's a way to do this.
Marco:
Yeah, there is.
Marco:
You can add something to your story and then it puts it in that frame.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
How the hell do you do that?
Marco:
Oh, I don't know.
Marco:
I don't know how to do anything with stories.
Marco:
I view stories.
John:
That's Tiff.
John:
She's good at stories.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
It's funny.
Marco:
Occasionally, when Tiff is building Adam's Halloween costume over the last week or so, occasionally she would ask me to hold her phone and shoot a little video segment on her story of her doing something.
Marco:
And
Marco:
she would have to explain every little detail of how to do this because it was just baffling to me like how what like i hold this down and then i get adam to do it next time yeah it's it's bizarre when when you're not accustomed to help her who understands computers
Casey:
This is how old I am.
Casey:
I am now looking at a Wired post from March of this year.
John:
Actually, the day after my birthday.
John:
You Googled it?
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Well, somebody in the chat room pasted it, but I'm old enough that I'm like, oh, this is wonderful.
Casey:
This is exactly what I need.
Casey:
The rules of regramming, which presumably, oh, how to regram.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
Yada, yada, yada, yada.
Casey:
You copy a link to the Instagram photo you want to repost, but I don't want to do that.
Casey:
I want to do with somebody's story.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Man.
Casey:
I'm so old.
Marco:
I'll tell you what, though.
Marco:
Here's something that I... It's a thought I've had over the last few months that I know no one else is going to agree with.
Marco:
I think retweeting ruined Twitter.
Marco:
I think retweeting is the reason why it's so easy for hate to spread.
Marco:
I mean, there are other things that they should be doing to cut down on that, like basic community management and basic rule enforcement that they seem to not be able to do.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
So retweeting is what makes Twitter so horrible to be on when you express any kind of opinion because when people follow you and they see your posts, they get to know you and they get to see things in context and they get to see you more as a person.
Marco:
So they're less likely to just lash out and attack you.
Marco:
What gets the most hate is when something you post gets retweeted to someone else's audience who doesn't know you, who is less inclined to see the whole round person that you are, and is more inclined to see this one isolated thought as something they should lash out at, especially somebody who has their own angry army of people who go to battle for them.
Marco:
So, like...
Marco:
So retweeting, seeing someone else's post on timelines of people who don't know them at all, while it might spread users more easily or might spread content more easily, it also is responsible for those people who get retweeted getting all sorts of waves of trash responses and abuse responses.
Marco:
And back before Twitter had retweeting, you could do it, but it was harder.
Marco:
And so basically fewer people did it.
Marco:
And responses wouldn't always go to the person depending on how you did it.
Marco:
And so there was a lot less.
Marco:
You would see a lot less of that trash.
Marco:
But now it's so easy to see all these different thoughts totally out of context and to not even see them as people or to not know the people.
Marco:
that you get waves of hate just being spread like wildfire all over the platform.
Marco:
And so Instagram does not have native reposting, retweeting, whatever it would be.
Marco:
They don't have that.
Marco:
And I kind of like that.
Marco:
I guess they kind of have it in stories, maybe.
Marco:
But for the actual pictures, they don't have that.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
Something I post, not only is it easier to see me as a human because it's a picture or not like a thought, because humans don't deal well with other people's thoughts.
Marco:
But if you see a picture of something nice, that's harder to throw trash at.
Marco:
But it's also because whatever I post is only really being seen by people who have chosen to follow me.
Marco:
And the vast majority of them have followed me for more than just this one post.
Marco:
So they kind of have an idea of who I am, and they see me as a human, so they're more likely to be decent to me.
Marco:
Whereas on Twitter, you don't have that.
Marco:
When you see something that's retweeted or reposted, you are seeing that totally out of context and you don't know the person and you're less inclined to treat them like a person.
Marco:
So I really hope Instagram never adds native reposting.
Casey:
You know, I mostly agree with you, but S. Harding, or sharting in the chat room, man, that's really unfortunate.
Casey:
Anyway, it has the following to say... There's a D in there.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's not sharting, it's sharding.
Casey:
I generally agree with what Marco was saying, but on the other hand, a lot of interesting people I follow I have found because someone else I respect retweeted them, and I do think that that's a good point.
Casey:
Maybe... I almost wonder if, like...
Casey:
But instead of a quote tweet, excuse me, instead of a retweet, a quote tweet would be the only like officially blessed thing in this phantom universe where Twitter isn't evil.
Casey:
And I wonder if that would make it better.
Casey:
So there's at least a little more context, although I guess somebody could just be like, LOL, which is super ambiguous.
Casey:
So I just argued my way out of that.
Casey:
Never mind.
Casey:
I got nothing.
John:
we all didn't we all use twitter before retweets like this is not just a theoretical thing like we used it and that you know we saw the origin of retweets with people typing the capital letters rt and then pasting in the content of a tweet and everything but it was harder and it did require you to put in more effort so it was less prevalent but i felt like it was still possible to discover things because people would do exactly that they would copy and paste the person or a portion of their thing or whatever like
John:
I mean, in some respects, it would be hard to stop retweeting from existing because of that sort of before there was retweeting, there was the thing that led to retweeting and people would just continue to do that today.
John:
So I'm not sure it would help that much because I feel like the problems are fundamental.
John:
But making native support for it certainly let it spread more quickly and makes it much more accessible.
Marco:
I feel like if they removed native support and you just had to do it the old-fashioned way where you type in RT username and then you already have fewer characters, you've got to maybe start editing the tweet to fit.
Marco:
People did a lot less of it because it was harder.
Marco:
By making it so easy, by making it one or two taps to do, it's something that orders of magnitude more people do than if it was still the old hard way where you had to basically copy and paste the tweet.
Marco:
That was harder, and so I really think it was multiple orders of magnitude, less of it happened then.
Marco:
And would happen again if it went back to that.
Casey:
But don't you think that this is somewhat rooted in stuff that you did?
Casey:
I could make an argument that this came from reblogging.
Marco:
I mean, it might have.
Marco:
Tumblr had reblogging years before Twitter had retweeting.
Marco:
But I don't know if Tumblr inspired... Tumblr also didn't invent it.
Marco:
It was like a term on blogs.
Marco:
Tumblr just made it easy.
Marco:
And similar, it was a thing that bloggers would occasionally do before Tumblr.
Marco:
Tumblr made it really super easy to do and so it exploded in usage.
Marco:
And that had problems too.
Marco:
It didn't have quite the problems of Twitter in part because, well at least when I was there, in part because it was just a smaller scale platform than Twitter, but also in part because it was much more about longer form thought and much less focused on the social feed and constant social activity.
Marco:
And it did, like, over time, it did kind of go closer to that.
Marco:
But it was never to the same level that Twitter was in a lot of these areas.
Marco:
And a lot of that was just due to the format.
Marco:
But, you know, certainly it was in a similar vein, but nowhere near the level of ease and kind of like the mania and the speed and the mass at which any thought would get huge amounts of trash thrown on it from other people.
Casey:
So in summary, you should just continue doing Insta stories and not to put any peer pressure on you, John, but Marco has taken a photograph of his setup and I have of mine.
Casey:
We could go for the trifecta and you could do that right now live on the air.
John:
Same.
John:
It's unlikely.
John:
My main objection to all that stuff is I don't want to share more aspects of my life with the public.
John:
The amount I share is the amount I want to share.
John:
So giving me an outlet to share more aspects of my life is not attractive to me.
John:
And I look at Instagram stories.
John:
I find that other people do it.
John:
I enjoy that.
John:
But it's just not something that I want to do.
John:
It doesn't matter how much other people do it.
John:
It doesn't change my inclination to not do it.
Casey:
But John, everyone else just jumped off the bridge.
Casey:
Don't you want it to?
John:
I don't have that problem.
John:
Whatever, the opposite of FOMO.
John:
What's that thing?
Casey:
I know FOMO.
Casey:
I don't know what the opposite of it.
John:
No, fear of not missing out.
John:
Someone in the chat room will get it.
John:
There is an actual reverse FOMO.
John:
FOMO, proud of missing out.
Casey:
actually is that that's probably it is that it i just made that up i don't know it's probably it um now i've found that i've been i've been enjoying contributing insta stories for things that are not well so i was going to say things that are not mundane but like me washing my car is mundane i do that freaking hourly it seems but if i can speaking of uh washing your car and doing things if i can give you one one suggestion as someone who watches all of your instagram stories yeah
John:
whatever whatever the name of that effect is where it goes forward reverse forward reverse never do that again you're not a boomerang fan huh nope you are a boomerang fan i am not and by the way it's jomo the joy of missing out i definitely i'm all in on jomo and i am anti-boomerang real-time follow-up very important oh man i like the boomerang but you know who else hates the boomerang
Casey:
Aaron.
Marco:
Aaron hates the boomerang.
Marco:
She knows what's best.
Marco:
The problem with all those built-in effects and the little, like, sounds they play, like, the little, like, woo, kind of party music, like, whatever that is, they get so overused.
Marco:
Those have all been there for so long now that they're just old and so played out, and they don't add new ones very frequently.
John:
And they never looked or sounded good.
John:
They were always hacky, and now they're hacky and played out.
John:
But the boomerang, that's not my objection, the fact that it's hacky or played out.
John:
I just don't like it.
John:
I don't enjoy that effect.
John:
i find that upsetting fair enough it's on the list the list of upsetting things it is like something about it makes a clip that i might enjoy oh look there's casey doing his car and it's a go forward back forward back forward no stop it stop it and you just want to close the window wait close the window how do you know what i mean it's like when we uh when we tape things we all still say tape things and eventually people will start rolling their eyes at that
Casey:
No, but I've enjoyed posting to finish my thought earlier, posting things that are not mundane.
Casey:
So like not the everyday consistent machinations of my life, but things that are slightly more interesting.
Casey:
I hope he says with no commitment whatsoever.
Casey:
And I think it's fun.
Casey:
I think it's interesting and neat.
Casey:
And I enjoy watching other people's stories.
Casey:
And I like that.
Casey:
i i like that instagram is a two-headed monster it is both the super curated look at how perfect my life is as well as oh look at this disaster this is just kind of what's happening to me today haha who cares and i like that you can get both of those in one spot and i've heard a lot of conversation recently i can't remember the where i heard this particular conversation that i'm thinking of but about how instagram is is maybe it was on rec diffs actually i don't remember now
Casey:
um but anyway but instagram is like oh look at my perfect life and everything's perfect and and you should be jealous of how perfect i am and my perfect vacation with my perfect wife and my perfect children and all that and there's certainly an element of that but i don't know i think most of the people i follow on instagram even if they're even if their timeline is that curated perfect life which i think i'm fairly guilty of as well their stories are a little more haphazard and human which i really enjoy
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Aftershocks bone conduction headphones.
Marco:
Let me tell you, these have ruined me for all other headphone types when I'm out walking around listening to podcasts.
Marco:
Every other headphone now feels like it's keeping my ears too hot and sweaty or pressing too much on them or I don't like how they block the sound around me because then I can't hear like if a car is coming.
Marco:
Aftershocks avoids all of these problems because they are bone conduction headphones.
Marco:
Here's how this works.
Marco:
Instead of having some kind of like speaker driver that your ear has to hear through the regular ear canal, so like it sticks something in your ear or it squishes against your ear or it goes around your ear, Aftershocks works differently.
Marco:
They have these little transducer pads that rest next to your ear.
Marco:
And they send little vibrations that you can't really feel that your eardrum picks up.
Marco:
So you hear it, but there's nothing on or in your ear.
Marco:
And so not only does it keep your ear from getting sweaty, which is great for exercise use or for just walking around in the summertime.
Marco:
I love these in the summertime.
Marco:
But also, because it isn't blocking up your ear, you can still hear the world around you in addition to the podcast you're listening to in your Aftershocks.
Marco:
And this is great if you're walking or running or biking or doing anything else in the world where you need to for safety or practicality concerns.
Marco:
It's really nice to hear the world around you.
Marco:
This is what this gives you.
Marco:
I really don't like walking around with headphones that cover up my ears anymore because I miss hearing the ambient environment.
Marco:
I want that.
Marco:
So Aftershocks are great for that.
Marco:
They're also just really good Bluetooth headphones.
Marco:
They are, of course, wireless because they're Bluetooth.
Marco:
They have great battery life, great reception.
Marco:
You can place calls on them and they sound great too.
Marco:
They have a warranty if you need any help, although I don't think you will because they're really nice.
Marco:
And they're also just super small and they weigh nothing.
Marco:
I think they're like less than one ounce.
Marco:
They weigh nothing.
Marco:
I highly suggest you check them out.
Marco:
Go to atp.aftershocks.com and you can get the Trex Air bundle for $50 off.
Marco:
it's a really good deal with code ATP bundle.
Marco:
So once again, atp.aftershocks.com and you can get $50 off the Trex Air bundle with code ATP bundle.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Aftershocks for making really awesome headphones and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Tell me about your look-ahead limiter.
Casey:
I would give you a standing ovation because I hear good things have happened, but the whole house is asleep.
Casey:
So I'm just going to very quietly say, well done, sir.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So on the last show, I was talking about how I was trying and not very well succeeding to implement a look-ahead limiter for audio processing for part of the upcoming Voice Boost 2 feature of Overcast.
Marco:
and other tools that I make.
Marco:
And so I was having lots of trouble last week getting the gain processing to work on my limiter.
Marco:
And I'm happy to say that a few hours after I posted the show, I got it working.
Marco:
And I've been tweaking it and improving it the whole rest of the week.
Marco:
I have ported SmartSpeed into this new architecture.
Marco:
Ooh.
Marco:
If you're listening to this, you are listening to Voice Boost 2, Processed Files, because I've used it on the tracks for this podcast to normalize the volume and apply my EQs for each of us, each of our individual tracks.
Marco:
So that's one role to use it for me is in podcast pre-production or podcast production, I guess.
Marco:
Also, a big part of designing a heavy audio processing pipeline
Marco:
intended to run on phones is you have to really think about performance and battery costs to doing this.
Marco:
You have to have something that's really well below 10% CPU usage for people who really not notice the battery cost of it.
Marco:
And on my iMac Pro, where I've been doing most of the development, actually all the development until about two hours ago, on my iMac Pro, I was able to get this down to using 0.1% of the CPU with real-time playback.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
But the whole time I'm thinking, well, this is my iMac.
Marco:
When I run this on the phone, I'm going to have to lower the... It's going to raise these numbers up and I'm going to have to really pinch the pennies on that and lower the budget and maybe reduce the quality of some things.
Marco:
I ran it on my iPhone XS and it ran at exactly the same cost as on the iMac Pro.
Casey:
Wow.
Marco:
0.1% CPU usage or about 900 times real time.
Marco:
I'm shocked that the iPhone XS runs this stuff, which includes a lot of bulk math operations, a lot of vector operations, as I mentioned last time, on large arrays of floats.
Marco:
Huge amounts of number processing here.
Marco:
The iMac Pro and my iPhone XS run at the same speed.
Marco:
And so I'm very, very happy about that.
Marco:
Not only does that bode well for me being able to ship this with the high-quality modes enabled and with some pretty advanced processing, but also that's just awesome.
Marco:
It's an awesome statement about how fast the iPhone XS is.
Marco:
That's pretty amazing.
Marco:
I also, for comparison, ran it on the iPhone 5S, and that runs it at 0.5% CPU usage.
Marco:
My word.
Marco:
About four times lower, roughly.
Casey:
But still, you have so much headroom that that's fine.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
If it can run on a 5S, which is my slowest supported device, using only 0.5% of the CPU, then it's totally fine to ship even the highest quality stuff on the iPhone 5S.
Marco:
So, very, very pleased with this.
John:
So we had one listener write in to suggest, I think it was an audio person, I forget, about like using multiple limiters instead of just one, like a cascading series of them culminating in like the hard cutoff limiter just to get rid of, just to make sure everything's within the envelope.
John:
But basically a series of limiters, you know, starting with a very gentle one and then whatever.
John:
There's this whole theory behind it.
John:
Did you...
John:
Did you read that?
John:
Did you take any of that advice?
John:
Was it helpful?
Marco:
I did read that.
Marco:
That was one of a handful of really great emails that we got from really great people, and I thank them all for that.
Marco:
I haven't had time to respond to all of them yet, but I'm very, very thankful for those emails because they were really good.
Marco:
So when you're producing a music album, you do much more sophisticated processing than what I'm doing here because you have different needs.
Marco:
What I'm doing here is trying to maximize the perceived volume of speech in talk podcasts.
Marco:
And that's very, very different from trying to master a rock album or something.
Marco:
So one of the reasons you'd use multiple limiters is, I mentioned last time the whole deal with being a look-ahead limiter, where as the volume of something is approaching the clipping point, you want to start reducing the gain on it before it clips, so that way it doesn't hit that clip and sound bad.
Marco:
And the look ahead part can make that perfect.
Marco:
It can make it such that you look ahead of where you are by enough time that the time that you're applying the reduction is going to be less than that.
Marco:
So you look ahead by like five milliseconds and you can apply the reduction over two milliseconds.
Marco:
So you know if you can see five milliseconds ahead and you can see that you're about to clip five milliseconds from now, you can over the next two milliseconds apply that reduction gracefully.
Marco:
And then by the time that peak signal comes in, you're low enough that it doesn't clip.
Marco:
The problem is that if you take that method for all of your volume reductions, you kind of cut off or tame or diffuse what are called transients.
Marco:
So the hit of a drum.
Marco:
You get this nice smack, this nice big hit.
Marco:
Whatever your average loudness level is...
Marco:
you want those quick little transients to actually be louder than that.
Marco:
You want those to be able to break through that wall.
Marco:
Not to clip, but if you're having a lower limit of your target loudness than the actual clipping threshold, you want those transients to be able to get through.
Marco:
because otherwise everything just sounds kind of flat and muffled.
Marco:
So when you're doing pro mastering, you do stuff like that, where you have some limiters that will let things through, usually that don't look ahead.
Marco:
So they will let through quick sounds and then reduce their volume over a few milliseconds after that.
Marco:
This is what compressors do, too.
Marco:
This is kind of the point.
Marco:
And so the idea there is you can let those quick transients through, but still maintain the kind of average loudness within the desired range.
Marco:
So you need that for kind of loud music production.
Marco:
But then you still need another limiter at the very end of the chain to make sure, even despite that, that nothing is going to clip.
Marco:
So usually you'll have one or two limiters or compressors earlier on in the process to help shape that volume, but still allow transient loudness things through.
Marco:
And then at the end of the chain, you'll have a look-ahead limiter that can do a perfect job of making sure nothing ever clips.
Marco:
But ideally, very few things are even approaching where that limiter is set.
Marco:
And that's the kind of thing that a lot of these audio engineers who were actually pros at this, unlike me, have been writing it to tell me.
Marco:
And that's really nice to know.
Marco:
But in the case of a podcast app, I'm not going to use that kind of complex setup because I'm not trying to preserve those transients.
Marco:
Like when somebody smacks their lips together on a podcast, I don't need to let that through louder than everything else.
John:
You need to let that file system bell ring.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else on your look at a limiter?
Casey:
I'll snark aside.
Casey:
I'm very excited for you.
Casey:
That's really awesome.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
This is one of those times where I'm doing hard stuff and it's working and that's such a satisfying thing for a programmer.
Marco:
You don't get a lot of times like that.
Marco:
So much of what I do is just BS moving stuff around or laying out forms.
Marco:
This is so much better and I'm so happy.
Marco:
I'm having a really good week.
Casey:
Awesome.
Casey:
John, tell us about iOS and swapping.
John:
One thing we forgot to mention last week when we were talking about Photoshop on iOS and how to deal with the fact that iOS doesn't support swap and files take up a lot of memory and all that other stuff is one aspect of using your disk for memory in a situation where you're going to be using it a lot is
John:
is that you may wear the SSD faster than you normally would.
John:
Now, this is true of the SSDs in our Macs because all our Macs have swap.
John:
It's true of our hard drives.
John:
If you ever ran Mac OS X in the early days, you saw how it massively abused your hard drive, especially if you didn't have too much RAM, pulling things off the disk and into RAM and out of RAM and onto the disk.
John:
But given SSDs being what they are and they have a particular wear life,
John:
And, you know, it's potentially putting more wear on a phone as a phone's flash storage than would happen in normal usage.
John:
Because I would imagine that most iOS applications, A, do not deal in the huge amount of memories that potentially Photoshop could be subjected to.
John:
because B, they don't have a built in swapping system to deal with it.
John:
So I don't think this is a real concern because, you know, again, Mac apps do it all the time.
John:
But it is probably something that Adobe has to think about and that Apple has to think about.
John:
And hopefully we'll not have any unpleasant surprises about.
John:
But I meant to mention last time we did.
John:
Oh, and the second item of this is that while this is being discussed on Twitter, a couple people suggested, I think Steve Trotten-Smith was one of them, that swap is surely coming to iOS devices eventually.
John:
I think they were basically making an infinite timeline argument to saying, well, like, look, you know, the reasons for not having it were because you could barely get, you know, an OS X derivative to run on a phone at all, and any kind of lag or anything related to swapping would...
John:
have killed the experience and that's all still mostly true but today's iphones have way more memory way faster flash way faster cpus way faster gpus at a certain point there is no reason not to have swap on an ios device other you know like you can add it without impacting user experience we're
John:
probably not exactly there at this point but eventually like whether whether it's swapped traditionally or unified memory architecture where disk and ram are the same thing or any sort of you know very future world things like this is not the steady state forever um where macs have it and ios devices don't eventually the you know like i said whether whether it's unified memory architecture or uh some some swap like usage it's probably in the future
John:
Not this year, not next year, within 10 years, conceivable.
Marco:
I disagree that it's an improvement overall.
Marco:
iOS has benefited greatly from the architecture of not having swap because both the system and the apps are forced to
Marco:
to manage their memory in some way.
Marco:
On desktop OSes with Swamp, you can grab as much memory as you want, and the system will figure out a way to give it to you, and there's all sorts of optimizations, but the reality is if you write bad code on the desktop, you don't get punished for it nearly as much.
Marco:
Whereas on iOS, if you write code that takes too much memory, your app gets killed.
Marco:
So you don't do that, and you have to think about it, and you have to be conscious of it.
Marco:
If iOS gained swap, you wouldn't have that so much anymore.
Marco:
If your app just slows down a little bit over time, you as a developer might not feel that so much, or you might not care about that so much.
Marco:
It's very different if your app just gets killed because it uses too much memory.
Marco:
If it just kind of slows down, it's going to be hard for you or your company to prioritize fixing that.
Marco:
So what you're going to get is a whole lot of much more bloated, much more sloppily coded apps.
Marco:
And I think iOS as a platform has benefited greatly from that restriction it's had so far where that's just not really possible.
John:
Well, it's also been hurt by that restriction in that you'll launch a game and it'll kick everything else out of memory.
John:
And those things have to relaunch from scratch, which takes battery life.
John:
And so there's downsides to it as well.
John:
But the other thing that's important to remember is you don't have to have the same rules as on a desktop.
John:
You can still have rules about the maximum amount of memory an application can take.
John:
Having swap just gives you a little bit more flexibility, right?
John:
Maybe it's just the OS that's allowed to swap.
John:
You can just make the limits a little bit higher.
John:
Because if you had to think of like, I launched some big application.
John:
Uh, and I, and I go back to my, you know, uh, web browser cause I was doing some research in it cause I'm the teaching on an iPad and I have 12 things open.
John:
Right.
John:
And Oh, the web browser got booted out of memory cause the application used too much.
John:
And I have to wait for that application to relaunch and restore its state.
John:
Right.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That's not a better experience than allowing that application to go to swap and swapping it back in because presumably swapping it back in is faster than letting the application go through the entire launch procedure again.
John:
It doesn't mean that you just have to say... It might not be.
John:
It definitely will be because you're just... You have to read less from disk and you get right back to the state you were.
John:
You don't have to
John:
restore that state by executing a bunch of code it's just pulling stuff in for memory especially if you dedicate a special pool of slightly faster memory like a like your swap disk right you can there's all sorts of things you can do when they control the entire widget inside there to make it you know to have a memory hierarchy that is not exactly the same as on a desktop it's just just giving you a little bit more flexibility so maybe you just raise the ram ceiling for applications by you know some tiny percentage to give a little bit more headroom to make it seem like ios devices have more ram than they have
John:
That's the type of thing I think about.
John:
Not like it's just a free-for-all and you just get to allocate memory until everything slows to a crawl.
John:
And even the Mac's not entirely like that.
John:
I mean, there are limits.
John:
You'll find out if you ever try to install database software on your Mac exactly what those limits are.
John:
The limits do exist.
John:
They're just way higher than on the phone.
John:
So I think there's a reasonable compromise to be had at some point and that it would be a benefit.
Casey:
All right, John, tell me about, and hopefully our editor can put in a little bit of taps or something in the background.
Casey:
Tell me, John, about your last Apple Photos book.
John:
This is only memorable for one reason.
John:
We talked about the deadline when Apple was going to stop selling you photo books and you have to use one of those third-party things.
John:
I said, I want to get all my books out of the way so they have a nice match set of books.
John:
I wanted to go back all the years I wanted to go back to and print all my books before the deadline.
John:
And I did.
John:
And they came and they're nice and got it all done.
John:
But right around the time of the deadline, I realized, oh, there's one more book I should make.
John:
We did one other trip.
John:
That's worth making a book.
John:
Right.
John:
So I did.
John:
It was like a San Francisco trip that we did, like unrelated to WEC.
John:
We just went to California and did touristy things.
John:
Right.
John:
I'm like, that was significant.
John:
I bet I can make a book out of that.
John:
And sure enough, I could.
John:
I made a book out of it.
John:
And it was like, you know, I thought maybe I didn't have enough pictures, but I did.
John:
It was fine.
John:
And I ordered that book and I ordered that book on the 30th, like literally the last day you could order the book.
John:
So just getting under the wire.
John:
Um, and that book eventually came and like, I don't know why I like, I had this fear a little bit when I ordered the last batch of books.
John:
Uh, but I was like, I made it out.
John:
Everything's great.
John:
I have this beautiful match set of books.
John:
I got this book.
John:
I looked at it.
John:
I'm like, great.
John:
This book looks great.
John:
I, you know, look through it with the family, check it out.
John:
It's, you know, I did it.
John:
I got all the books and then I went to put it on the shelf and I realized, wait a second.
John:
This book didn't come with the big cardboard sleeve that all the other books come in.
John:
It's kind of like, what is that called on Blu-rays where like the Blu-ray slides into like a cardboard thing?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
Figure what that's called.
John:
Like a slip cover.
John:
Right.
John:
I have the same thing with my Studio Ghibli Blu-rays.
John:
Like for the longest time, they would come with those cardboard things, but then they started not.
John:
And so now I have on the ones on my shelf, half of them have the cardboard things and half of them don't.
John:
it's very upsetting to me anyway this book didn't come with the cardboard thing so i have an entire line of books that are all exactly the same size and shape inside the little cardboard sleeves and one book that's not i'm so sorry so my dream of having a completely consistent apple photo book collection is dash and so i also loaded the third party stuff to see what it's like uh the mimeo one looks okay i kind of like this is sad to say but like i mean i tried the third party ones before i knew they were going away and i didn't like them
John:
They're better now, but honestly, the Apple one, because I'm so familiar with it, it's much faster for me to get the result I want.
John:
The new ones have more options, but they're very buggy and weird, and I'm worried about what the things will come out like.
John:
So I'm kind of dreading ordering next summer's.
John:
long island book but i'm gonna do it and hopefully it will be roughly the same size you know there will be a discontinuity but the discontinuity is kicked off by my last apple photos book which did not come with a cardboard sleeve and of course my wife's like oh you should you should uh email them and call them tell you to bring your car be like yeah they're gonna they're gonna be like this crazy person wants the cardboard sleeve i'll be it'll never happen so i'm i'm resigned to having a one mismatched book
John:
which is going to be the beginning of what will surely be a series of mismatched books as I move away from Apple as a vendor.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Linode, where you can instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode cloud.
Marco:
Get a server running in seconds with your choice of Linux distro resources and its location.
Marco:
Linode is by far my favorite web host I've ever used.
Marco:
I've been with them recently.
Marco:
long before they were a sponsor i think i've been with them for about eight years now nine years something like that not only are they a really really good value so for example plans start at just five dollars a month that gets you a one gig of ram plan and they also have of course everything if you know if that's not enough for you they have all sorts of bigger plans i i use for overcast i use i think about 25 linode instances right now
Marco:
And they span the gamut.
Marco:
I think my smallest ones are 2 gigs.
Marco:
Those are $10 a month.
Marco:
And then I go all the way up to, I think my biggest ones are like 64 gigs.
Marco:
And these are all amazing competitive prices compared to anything else I've ever seen in the business.
Marco:
But it's also just a really nice host to use.
Marco:
I love their control panel.
Marco:
I've used a lot of web hosts.
Marco:
And the control panel is usually terrible.
Marco:
But Linode's is really pleasant, really nice, really easy.
Marco:
Their capabilities are really nice.
Marco:
They have, of course, things like backup services.
Marco:
They have built-in load balancers.
Marco:
They have great stats called Longview.
Marco:
If you need any help with any of this, they have 24-7 support.
Marco:
I file tickets here and there.
Marco:
I usually don't need to, but usually when I do, they are really responsive and really helpful.
Marco:
So I just love Linode.
Marco:
And you can see all this yourself because they also have a seven-day money-back guarantee.
Marco:
So there's nothing to lose.
Marco:
And they're hiring.
Marco:
If this is the kind of business you want to be in, go to linode.com slash careers.
Marco:
I just love using Linode for all my server needs, and I suggest you do too.
Marco:
You can get a $20 credit when you visit linode.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP2018 at checkout.
Marco:
Linode is just my favorite web host.
Marco:
You should really use them if you need a web host.
Marco:
linode.com slash ATP for that $20 credit.
Marco:
That could be four months on that $5 a month plan.
Marco:
Or use promo code ATP2018.
Marco:
Thank you to Linode for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
We should talk about the Apple event, but before we do that, we should talk about the iPhone Tenor, which the reviews have been dropping over the last few days.
Casey:
I actually was a guest on my buddy Tyler Stallman's podcast, and we talked about his experience with the iPhone Tenor.
Casey:
He got a preview in New York for it because he works on YouTube and...
Casey:
Apple believes that YouTube exists yet Apple does not believe podcasts exist not that I'm bitter anyway we had a really good conversation about it and I encourage you to check that out if you are at all interested in the iPhone XR like I said Tyler is had had some time with it he's a phenomenal photographer and
Casey:
a professional photographer and had some really interesting thoughts about it.
Casey:
But plenty of other people have had them too.
Casey:
I haven't heard any other talk about it as yet because I'm behind on podcasts.
Casey:
But the rumblings I've heard via Tyler and via text that I've read is that it's really freaking good, like really, really good and without too many compromises.
Casey:
And I'm stunned and really excited about this.
Casey:
I think, as many have said, this is probably the most interesting phone, possibly even device, at least up until next week, that Apple's released this year.
Marco:
I don't have a lot to say on it yet because I've never held one or used one or seen one in real life.
Marco:
But all the reviews seem really positive.
Marco:
The summary, if I can editorialize a little bit, the summary basically seems to be
Marco:
I keep looking for ways that this phone is worse and I'm not finding them.
Marco:
That's kind of like what everyone's opinion has been.
Marco:
It should be worse in more ways than it is.
Marco:
And in some ways, it's actually better.
Marco:
Ultimately, I think if I wanted a phone that was a little bit bigger than the X and I didn't mind losing the 2X camera, I would probably go for it.
Marco:
Unfortunately, neither of those are true.
Marco:
I really like the 2X camera, and I use it sometimes.
Marco:
Not as much as I thought I would, admittedly.
Marco:
Partly because it's such a worse camera in any kind of low light.
Marco:
But I do use it sometimes.
Marco:
And the size is such that...
Marco:
I like that you can get the plus screen resolution.
Marco:
I know it's not, I know it's two X to three X, but like you get the plus point size.
Marco:
So like you get the pluses screen real estate in a phone that is not quite as big as the plus or the max, excuse me.
Marco:
Um, so that's nice.
Marco:
Like I, I like the potential of having more screen real estate, but without going quite so big on the phone.
Marco:
But yeah,
Marco:
ultimately that losing that camera would hurt i do think it's really interesting how you know i think one of the biggest features that's lacking is 3d touch but no one seems to care because it turns out not a lot of people use 3d touch that much and even for the keyboard uh cursor movement which a lot of people don't know about but like that's that's what i use it mostly for
Marco:
I've been learning through all these reviews that you can now do that by just holding down on the space bar for a second and then moving your thumb.
Marco:
So like they even kind of fixed that part of 3d touch not being there.
Marco:
So I, it, it kind of seems like it's a really good option if you don't mind that, that camera.
Marco:
And you know, the only, the major difference is, is the screen being a different type that is not as good, but even though I love OLED, I love my OLED TV and,
Marco:
I do love my OLED iPhone 10 and 10 S. I love the OLED watch.
Marco:
I'm a snob.
Marco:
I'm picky.
Marco:
Despite all those things, I could switch back to an LCD phone tomorrow and not even notice.
Marco:
Like, it just doesn't matter that much on your phone.
Marco:
I thought it would matter more than it does.
Marco:
It just doesn't matter that much.
Marco:
And,
Marco:
OLED we also thought would bring a big battery boost because it should use so much less power.
Marco:
And it turns out it kind of hasn't like the battery life is basically the same as it was.
Marco:
And part of that's because we look at so much bright content, but that has, that isn't changing anytime soon.
Marco:
So, you know,
Marco:
I feel like the XR has a better price, a better screen size to body size ratio.
Marco:
It has a screen that is supposed to be a lot worse, but kind of isn't.
Marco:
It's a better battery life.
Marco:
Like it's a pretty awesome phone.
Marco:
As long as you don't want that 2X camera, it's a pretty awesome phone.
Casey:
Yeah, it comes in colors.
Casey:
The back doesn't have the ridiculous lozenge of camera array.
John:
I like the lozenge.
Casey:
I don't.
John:
I don't like that it's vertical, but I kind of like the lozenge.
John:
Actually, I do like how it looks vertically.
John:
I just don't like it underneath my finger.
John:
But yeah, the little circle... I don't mind the lozenge.
John:
Yeah, I think it actually is a good look.
John:
It's just underneath my finger too much.
John:
On the screen thing with OLED versus LCD, like...
John:
Bright content is one problem, but the real problem is that the 10S and the 10S Max have true 3X, right?
John:
So if you had a true 3X LCD and it had to crank the backlight to shine enough light through all those stupid transistors, it would not be as good battery life-wise.
John:
But, you know, it's the right compromise for the screen.
John:
Like,
John:
The best analogy, I mean, Gruber came close to it, but he's not as much of a car person as we are.
John:
The XS and the XS Max are luxury cars.
John:
The price premium of a luxury car over a less luxurious car, it's never worth how much additional you're paying.
John:
How much more expensive is an Audi than a Volkswagen?
John:
you don't get that much more value it's not linear it's like if i pay twice as much the car will be twice as good no it will not be twice as good it'll be better it'll be 1.25 1.5 but the times is good but it won't be twice as good right so you pay a lot more for the the 10s and 10s max or phones that are better
John:
But not in proportion to the price.
John:
I think the XR is the type of phone, kind of like I've been saying that they should do with laptops, but they never do.
John:
The type of phone that will make people who buy it really, really love Apple and iPhones.
John:
Because...
John:
when they get that phone it will it will have the things that it doesn't have they're unlikely to care about or miss because they don't have anything to compare it to especially if they're first time iphone buyers and the things that it does well and the things that it does better than anything else are really important like the one i keep coming back to is best battery life of any iphone ever made of any size and anything like it's the best battery life and it's thicker to get best battery life nobody cares like it's lighter because of the
John:
like it feels less dense than than the other phones which maybe makes it feel less luxurious and expensive but who cares it's got a beautiful screen it gets incredible battery life it's the size most people want it comes in fun colors it's the kind of phone that if someone buys it as their first iphone they're gonna be like boy iphones are great like this is the best phone i've ever had like it does all the things that i want it to do and it looks nice and it's pleasant to use and it feels good and the battery lasts all day
John:
uh and you know the the price is the magic of anchoring of like selling it for the same price the most expensive iphone has been for years and years it's just you know last year we cranked that up it's even higher so now we have this new again like luxury car this new ridiculous tier where you can pay us even more money and suddenly like the regular bmw seems reasonably priced after you've looked at the m's right it's like
John:
Wow, this is like their bargain BMW.
John:
No, the M's are just really expensive.
John:
It's the typical... So they're clever with the money.
John:
It would be great if this iPhone was more accessible to more people.
John:
It's not.
John:
It's just a very expensive phone.
John:
But I think it is a wonderful balance for most people.
John:
And it's like...
John:
Well, Apple used to say this about the Macs when they were trying to cover their excuses for why their Macs were slower than PCs.
John:
They'd be like, it's a well-balanced architecture.
John:
Like, we didn't want to have too much of this and too little of that.
John:
So everything is kind of evenly balanced.
John:
But it's really true in the XR.
John:
It's a nicely balanced phone in terms of...
John:
well one of the balancing things unfortunately is making sure apple continues to make its expected margins right so they take out a camera that they take out a gig of ram because they don't need it because the you know the the scroll back the the graphic buffers are smaller because it's 2x instead of 3x like they didn't have to do that but you want to maintain their margins right um
John:
But everything they took out, they took it out of, it's like a, you know, JPEG compression or MP3 compression.
John:
It took out it in places where people won't notice it and gave it things to recommend it.
John:
Like the, you know, the real long battery life and sacrificing thickness that no one will notice.
John:
And yeah, in some ways it makes me wish like the tennis line came in more colors.
John:
Maybe it makes me wish that there was a thicker version of the luxury thing.
John:
what if i want battery life like that uh can i pay more to get that battery life no you can't you have to pay less to get that battery life like i'll trade the thickness or whatever so there's still some balancing to be done in the line but um and i'm i'm not i was gonna say i think this is a great product very well balanced and will be very successful i was about to say i honestly don't know how it will sell because i can't tell how how skewed apple's audience audience or customers are uh in always being obsessed with buying the best and the most expensive so
John:
Maybe we'll never know exactly how well it sells, but I can tell you if you are in the market for an iPhone at any point until before the next iPhones are released, and you're trying to decide which iPhone is the one you should get, consider the XR.
John:
Don't consider it a lesser phone.
John:
Consider it just a different set of trade-offs than the other phones.
John:
I don't even consider it lesser.
John:
It just...
John:
You know, especially because I feel like the battery life is the type of thing that most people would trade for the 2X camera.
John:
Why do I need two cameras?
John:
I'll take the extra hour of battery life.
John:
I'll take it all day long.
John:
Oh, and it's the cheaper phone and it comes in color.
John:
It's great.
John:
I don't know how many people make that call, but I support that call.
Casey:
I completely agree.
Casey:
I am really interested to see one in person.
Casey:
As I've said many times, I feel like the iPhone 10 is bigger than I want it to be, but I can't go back to like an SE sized phone.
Casey:
It's just not going to work.
Casey:
Um, so something even bigger still, I can't imagine I would really care for, but I want to try one out.
Casey:
I want to hold one.
Casey:
I want to play with one for a few minutes and see, see what I think.
Casey:
So that'll be my homework between now and the next episode.
Casey:
Uh, because we certainly won't have anything to talk about next episode.
Casey:
Definitely not an entire event, uh, which is happening.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
A Tuesday, the 30th at 10 in the morning in the one true time zone, which I'm excited about.
Mm hmm.
Casey:
It was funny hearing Jason bemoan having to travel across the country to do something Apple related.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
This is how the rest of the world lives.
Marco:
When we all go to the Apple events?
Casey:
Well, no, I'm just saying like when we go to WWDC, like we have to cross the country for WWDC every year.
Casey:
But at least it's not in San Francisco anymore.
Casey:
Am I right?
John:
Anyway.
John:
Well, so we'll all be in the Brooklyn event, right?
John:
Because we got our invitations as press.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Well, the theater holds 2,000 people.
Marco:
Obviously, we'd be among those 2,000.
John:
There's plenty of room for, I mean, Marco's practically like right there.
John:
He could like walk there.
Yeah.
Casey:
If only.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
If somebody wants to put in a good word, good word.
Casey:
No, I meant in general jerks.
Casey:
But anyway, that's OK.
Casey:
So there's an event.
Casey:
It seems pretty clear that iPads are going to be the stars of the show.
Casey:
What do we think we're going to see?
Casey:
And I can either start throwing ideas at you guys and we can talk about it, or if you just want to do an overview individually of what you think you're going to see, how would you like to handle it, gentlemen?
Marco:
Well, I do have an opening statement.
Marco:
Please.
Marco:
I'm really excited about this event because... Because there's a possibility that the word Mac will be mentioned.
Marco:
A possibility, mind you, not a guarantee.
Marco:
Right, yeah.
Marco:
But what we've heard, the rumblings we've heard about what is likely to be announced at this event are really exciting things, but we know pretty much nothing about them.
Marco:
So it's actually a really great balance of what's being spoiled versus what hasn't been spoiled yet.
Marco:
What's been spoiled?
Marco:
For me, there's these three major themes to me.
Marco:
There is completely redesigned iPads.
Marco:
And those have basically been spoiled.
Marco:
What do we not know about them?
Marco:
Oh, there's a lot we don't know about them.
Marco:
All we know about the iPads is that they're most likely going to have face ID.
Marco:
They're most likely going to have a more edge-to-edge style design.
Marco:
And if you believe the case rumors, then they have a new connector on the back for something.
Marco:
Right?
Marco:
A lot of the other stuff that we've heard has been based on really loose speculation or based on software leaks or software spelunking.
Marco:
And so that's things like the Face ID came from that.
Marco:
Things like the USB-C support, that's all just from software spelunking.
Marco:
So there's a rumor that it's going to have USB-C ports and possibly only USB-C.
Marco:
instead of having lightning which i think actually i would i would support that decision that's based on software support for outputting video over usbc that's 4k it could just be over a dongle yeah it could that could literally just be a new lightning to usbc dongle that can output 4k video so that the fact that support is there in the software we don't actually know that the ipad will have usbc ports based on that
Marco:
so that that's that's an unknown like usbc huge question mark who knows right and that's and does it get usbc instead of lightning or in addition to lightning does it get more than one usbc port those dramatically change you know what this product is and by the way i think that's a great idea because then not only can you just have one set of dongles because like let me look if we're going to live in a dongle world at least you can reuse them between devices right
John:
They should have two USB-C ports that can have more than Casey's MacBook.
John:
Oh, that's just brutal.
John:
In fact, even with one, it can have more because you can charge it while you use the USB-C port.
John:
If it still had lightning, I mean.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I'm guessing it goes to just one USB-C port and no lightning.
Marco:
That's my best guess.
Marco:
But my ideal case would be two USB-Cs and one lightning, which would really make it like a real power machine.
Marco:
But I don't see that happening.
John:
That would be, yeah.
Marco:
That would be a MacBook Pro at that point.
Marco:
But also, like...
Marco:
When this rumor first started, one thing I thought was, boy, there's so many made-for-iPhone, made-for-iPad, the MFI program, there's so many peripherals that you can plug into the iPad through the lightning port.
Marco:
There's a lot of audio stuff, audio interface and everything.
Marco:
And they wouldn't want to give that up, right?
Marco:
But then I thought about it some more.
Marco:
I've owned a lot of these lightning port peripherals.
Marco:
And first of all, there aren't that many.
Marco:
Many of them never even made the jump from the dot connector.
Marco:
And the ones that exist are mostly garbage.
Marco:
Like they're really not very good.
Marco:
The most powerful thing you can do with that lightning port is use that USB adapter with the charging pass through, keep it powered with the charging port, plug it into a powered USB hub, and then plug in real devices.
Marco:
That's like the best thing you can do with that port.
Marco:
If you actually want like hardware devices plugged into your iPad.
Marco:
And so getting rid of the lightning devices...
Marco:
Yeah, people would not be very happy if they owned them because there would be no way to adapt them, as far as I know.
Marco:
So you just lose those if you upgrade your iPad.
Marco:
You just have to throw those away and replace them.
Marco:
So that part kind of sucks.
Marco:
But that ecosystem is not very good.
Marco:
It's just full of mostly crap and not that much of it.
Marco:
So to move the iPad to the USB-C ecosystem...
Marco:
opens up such a world of possibility for external device support, even without having a lot of software support on the iPad.
Marco:
Just with the built-in HID profile support that it has for standard things, like standard audio devices, standard input devices, the built-in support it already has is enough to have a lot of wonderful USB devices be natively supported on that device if it just had the port, and then you wouldn't need all these dongles.
Marco:
And that, I think, would be really, really nice for the platform.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
I don't see any chance of it having USB-C and Lightning.
Casey:
I think that, I don't remember which one of you just said it, but I think it would be one USB-C port only.
Marco:
Yeah, that's the most likely, I think.
Casey:
But it would be interesting to have Lightning for sure.
Casey:
But I would expect it's going to be my same MacBook scenario all over again.
Casey:
And I don't necessarily think that's a problem.
Casey:
I think that's just fine.
John:
well it's like we're in that world anyway right so like we might as well at least be able to use these dongles on more than one device it'd be great if it had one usbc port uh but no new place to charge the pencil and the pencil was unchanged so it's like you can get a pencil and you can plug it into your iphone to charge it or use a dongle to charge it from your ipad like just continuing the trend of the pencil being being like the person who you know loses in musical chairs and it's no place to sit down
Marco:
here i am on pencil oh everything's taken i guess i'll just i'll just be here on the desk don't worry i'm slightly weighted yeah and like and that's that that whole thing like with having the having potentially this new connector on the back what is it for huge question mark right and then what does that mean for the smart keyboard and the apple pencil it means apple gets to sell you a new smart keyboard and apple pencil that's what i mean
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
They went from 9.7 to 10.5 and had to get a new smart keyboard.
Marco:
They're happy to do that.
Marco:
That's the cost of doing business with this kind of stuff.
Marco:
You as the buyer, when you buy a new iPad, you're going to have to buy new accessories for it.
Marco:
That's just how it goes.
Marco:
That's how your iPad ends up costing $1,000 somehow.
John:
and this the 9.7 size last well i mean them changing the bezels and everything has caused a little bit of a problem but sizes last usually more than one year right yeah that's true yeah so it's just the smart connector coming into the mix versus before the spark connector with the bluetooth keyboards this has been a little bit very good but i don't i don't think it's that bad honestly i'd rather have a keyboard that exactly fits than or than them trying to like maintain compatibility through things and they should
John:
to rethink their connector strategies as we've discussed.
Marco:
And that's the thing.
Marco:
I really want to see what this means.
Marco:
This is why this is exciting to me because we've heard enough that it sounds like this is going to be a really cool iPad update with a bunch of major changes.
Marco:
But we don't know what any of them are.
Marco:
And the small rumblings we've heard of the directions they might be in, things like USB-C, things like a new connector and new pencil and probably new keyboard...
Marco:
Those are all really exciting because these are all areas that the iPads have been kind of lacking or kind of not great or not as good as it could be.
Marco:
And if Apple has rethought these things at some fundamental level, that's promising.
Marco:
Like they could just go off the deep end and ship total crap and give us like, you know, a keyboard that dies with a speck of dust that falls into it.
Marco:
I mean, they would never do that.
Marco:
But, you know, if
Marco:
If they did, maybe they'd stick with it for three years and just pretend it's fine.
Marco:
But so far, the iPad hasn't had those things.
Marco:
The iPad smart keyboard is fine.
Marco:
It is totally sealed in, so nothing ever gets in those keys.
Marco:
It works very reliably.
Marco:
It feels okay, and it's totally fine.
Marco:
If you have the A-Team and Apple keyboards working on a new iPad keyboard,
Marco:
that possibly connects in a more convenient way, working on a new pencil that possibly connects or charges or whatever in a more convenient way, and maybe working on designing the new iPad to better support the keyboard and pencil, that's really exciting.
Marco:
I want to see what that means.
Marco:
And we have no clue yet.
Marco:
And that's even more exciting.
John:
I'm still fixated on the idea that I put into my own head a couple of shows ago, which I'm assuming there are still no rumors about because I certainly haven't seen them.
John:
But I and maybe no one else in the world really wants an OLED iPad because I watch a lot of TV shows on my iPad and the blacks suck.
John:
yeah like i know it's silly let's like why are you watching i have a big fancy tv like that's where i watch most of my tv but sometimes like as i've talked about erectives there are ipad shows where it's like i'm not paying that much attention it's before i go to bed and i'll watch i mean i know people love this show but the good place it's it's a short show it's like 20 minutes or you know it's a 30 minute show without commercials or whatever
John:
I watch The Good Place on my iPad most frequently because it's like, oh, before I go to bed, I'll watch one episode.
John:
It's short.
John:
It's, you know, like, I don't feel like I'm missing anything.
John:
It's not like Game of Thrones, like this epic imagery.
John:
It's a bunch of people standing around talking.
John:
It's a comedy, right?
John:
But I would like that to be better.
John:
I would love an OLED iPad.
John:
I mean, I'm assuming because there are no rumors, it's just not in the works, and I kind of understand why, but it would be neat.
Marco:
I agree it would be really nice, but I don't think it's ready yet.
Marco:
I don't think we're there yet.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Are we seeing Macs?
Casey:
I think we are.
John:
I think we have to.
John:
Put it this way.
John:
If we don't, it will be very disappointing.
John:
In a way that I think Apple, if we weren't going to see any Macs, that Apple would strategically leak or otherwise...
John:
uh prepare the ground for the idea that there would be no max whatsoever it doesn't mean that the max we see will be the max that we want but i feel like if there wasn't going to be any if it was if the only thing of the event was going to be the ipads and by the way i'm assuming we all agree ipads are like a lock right and will probably be the focus of the event and now we're just talking about in addition to the ipads what else might there be
Marco:
Yeah, and I think it's going to be limited to, you know, a small number of slides before the real meat of the event.
Marco:
It's going to be like, here's an intro, look at how great the iPhone is selling, everyone loves it, here's some quick updates about the Mac, you know, and it'll be, you know, we've updated the iMac with the new processors that, you know, now it has more cores, etc.
Marco:
Do you think they'd say that on stage?
Marco:
It might get a quick mention, like, you know, iMacs are updated today with, you know, the latest Intel whatever generation processors, and then, and, you know, maybe some other minor thing.
Marco:
And then,
John:
You don't think they're going to put T2s in the 5K iMac?
Marco:
That's a good question.
Marco:
I would be surprised if any new Mac was shipped that didn't have the T architecture in it.
Marco:
I think they're all going to have it now because it's such a dramatic improvement for not only SSD performance and such a gain for manufacturing integration to have that part be one of theirs, but it's also just massive improvements in security of the system.
Marco:
The fact that they put it in...
Marco:
Even the 13-inch MacBook Pro this summer, and not just the 15, not just the iMac Pro, there's a reason they're putting it in all their laptops now.
Marco:
I bet we're going to see all Macs shipping with the T-whatever chip by maybe a year from now when they've all been updated.
John:
talked about when the iMac Pro came out that this isn't just a thing they're doing with iMac Pro this is the new way that Apple makes Macs like because we had the T1 before it but like the T2 was such a dramatic statement of not just like a fancy thing we're doing for our top end computer but like this is the new architecture of Macs going forward something like this until and unless we do the arm switch or whatever but the reason I mentioned it for the 5k iMac is like if it really is just a speed bump and they just swap the CPUs it probably wouldn't mention probably wouldn't be mentioned on stage and
John:
And it would be a way to say, well, this isn't the new 5K Mac.
John:
This is just the old 5K Mac with a more traditional speed bump.
John:
So I don't know what the timelines look like on getting the actual new 5K Mac, which will surely have a T-something chip in it.
John:
I'm just wondering if this one is just going to be like a CPU swap or whatever.
Marco:
I'm not expecting, as I think you just implied, I'm not expecting an iMac redesign at this event.
Marco:
Also, the iMac just isn't in that much need of a redesign.
John:
The bezels are a little wide, but it's fine.
John:
An internal redesign, like the next 5K iMac, meaning the next one that has all new internals.
John:
As you've mentioned in a couple of past shows,
John:
ditch the spinning drive use a more imac pro like cooling system but use all the all the desktop all the non-zeon components and you know like just basically a non-pro version of the imac pro which doesn't exist we have the previous generation uh 5k imac and we have the imac pro which represents the next generation we don't have a non-pro of that generation i don't know if that's ready to come yet so i'm wondering exactly what this 5k imac will
John:
will look like inside.
John:
Although, honestly, externally, the iMac is probably due for a redesign as well.
John:
But if the iMac Pro didn't get it, I'm not holding my breath to see one anytime soon.
Casey:
I actually don't think that it is a lock that we would hear mentioned on stage, even if there was a slight visual refresh, even if they add the T2 chip.
Casey:
I think Apple would be willing to do a lot of
Casey:
with, at most, a little hand-wavy, oh, and we've got some new iMacs.
John:
We've got to fill time.
John:
If it's just the iPads, there has to be something else.
John:
So what else do we think it's going to be?
John:
Mac Mini!
Marco:
Honestly, that's the funny thing, is that what's rumored for this event, which is backed up by a little bit more than just wishcasting, what's rumored is the magical unicorns, things that we've been wanting forever and thought we'd never get, a replacement for the MacBook Air, and a new Mac Mini, and a new iPad Mini was recently...
Marco:
Oh, stop it.
Marco:
Where did that come from?
Marco:
And I don't necessarily think we're going to get all those things, but it sure does seem like we are probably going to get at least the MacBook Air replacement and maybe even the Mac Mini.
Marco:
That is amazing to me.
Marco:
I mean, look, Apple over the last few years has shown two different paths they can take when they do massive new products like this.
Marco:
They can make it really suck.
Marco:
That's what the 2014 Mac Mini did.
Marco:
That's what the 2016 MacBook Pro did.
Marco:
And that was probably about it in the suck department.
Marco:
Or they can do something really freaking amazing that shows that they still care and are still capable of greatness, like the iMac Pro.
Marco:
The iMac Pro is awesome.
Marco:
It's so, so good.
Marco:
Still now, I don't know how many months in, I love my iMac Pro so much.
Marco:
I have zero complaints.
Marco:
It is perfect.
Marco:
So, we know Apple is capable of greatness still, but we also know that they don't reliably deliver it.
Marco:
So the question is, if we do have a MacBook Air replacement, and if we do have a new Mac Mini, are they good?
Marco:
Or do they make these products even more punitive than they already were?
Marco:
And then leave them that way for five years.
Marco:
So I'm guessing, let's start with the Mac Mini, because that's, I think, the lesser known thing.
Marco:
I would be shocked...
Marco:
I think all of us would be shocked just to see a new Mac mini.
Marco:
That's such a long shot.
Marco:
It's been such a long shot for so long.
Marco:
It's been the butt of jokes.
Marco:
Like whenever anybody's doing event predictions and some listener is like, what about an iPad mini?
Marco:
And we're like, ha ha ha, that'll never happen, right?
Marco:
The fact that it actually is rumored to happen credibly at this event is shocking and would be amazing if it happens.
Marco:
But there's so many questions.
Marco:
I mean, we covered this a few weeks back, so I'm not going to go into too much.
Marco:
But like, you know, what does it have in it?
Marco:
Does it have...
Marco:
My theory was that it'll probably be the guts of the new 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
It'll have the T2.
Marco:
I think all new Macs will have the T2.
Marco:
It'll have a T2.
Marco:
It'll have that 28-watt processor class.
Marco:
You could have four cores in it again, hopefully.
Marco:
I don't expect them to...
Marco:
increase the expendability or upgradability of it from the 2014 model, which is basically none.
Marco:
So I expect it to be totally locked down, everything soldered to the board, including the SSD.
Marco:
I don't expect it to support hard drives at all.
Marco:
There was a rumor a while back that it would be, quote, pro-focused.
Marco:
I think what that means is SSD only, like the laptops, like the iMac Pro.
Marco:
So I'm guessing it is a very small box,
Marco:
unfortunately i think it's also going to have way fewer ports and i consider that a loss because part of what makes the mac mini so versatile for so many different things is that it has a bunch of ports in the back and of all different kinds and so chances are whatever you need to plug into it you can probably plug in without a dongle and i don't think the new one would have that i think the new one they would go for making it super super small which they don't need to because no one looks at their mac mini and says boy i wish this was smaller
Marco:
I do.
Marco:
I don't even have a Mac mini.
John:
You don't have one.
Marco:
The people who have them or who want them are like, I just want this thing to be updated for God's sakes.
John:
It could be a little smaller.
John:
We need to find the link to that because we did actually cover this really well.
John:
And so you should go back and listen to that episode if you haven't.
John:
So we'll sound really smart when the Mac mini comes out.
Marco:
because i think we did cover it really well yeah so but either way like i hope they put as many ports as they possibly can fit on the thing i know they won't but that that will that makes the current one useful and it will it will make the new one useful too um but ultimately like anything about this is going to be a pleasant surprise even if they make it suck even more in some ways which they probably will
Marco:
That's been their pattern with the Mac Mini is like, you know, two steps forward, one step back.
Marco:
So we'll see about that.
Marco:
But the fact that there was going to be a Mac Mini at all that is credibly rumored is really, really promising on some levels.
John:
I think what they should do is come out and announce that they're working on a new Mac Mini to thunderous applause and say, we've listened to Mac Mini owners and we think we know what we want and we're going to give them a new Mac Mini.
John:
And then sometime in the middle of next year, say Mac Mini is not going to be ready in 2019.
John:
The new Mac Mini is a 2020 product.
John:
At least it would be something.
John:
Because the Mac Mini people think they've suffered.
John:
But there's nothing like the interminable wait after they tell you that they're working on a new Mac Pro.
John:
It's actually getting that Mac Pro.
John:
I have to wait until June to even see anything about it, probably.
Casey:
Well, I was going to ask, so are we going to have even a tip of the hat in the direction of the Mac Pro during this event?
John:
I think it's a perfect time for a trailer.
Marco:
I agree it's a perfect time for a trailer.
Marco:
I don't think we're going to see it.
John:
I don't think there'll be a trailer either.
John:
It feels like June, but I'm not even... Go for it.
John:
I'll be pleasantly surprised.
John:
But I'm mostly thinking about... So the mini...
John:
I still have trouble believing it, but it's conceivable.
John:
The laptop thing, you kept describing it as a MacBook Air replacement.
John:
I'm just conceptualizing it as a new laptop that is not one of their existing laptop lines.
John:
Yes.
John:
But I have no idea what the hell that will mean in terms of like, what does this product mean?
John:
And as we said before, I don't even think it means they'll stop selling the frigging Air, right?
John:
But just a new laptop.
John:
A new laptop and a new laptop is a potential vehicle for all our hopes and dreams because maybe it has an actual different keyboard.
John:
Maybe it doesn't.
John:
Who knows?
John:
But like a new laptop gives you an opportunity to not just, you know, beg for scraps of modifications to the existing laptops that we have frustrations with, but to say if it's a new laptop, everything's up for grabs.
John:
This could be the new and a whole new line of laptops like or it could just be more of the same.
Marco:
This could be the new direction that all their laptops will be migrated to over the next couple of years.
Marco:
That's what they do.
Marco:
They start with one model.
Marco:
The generation that we see today started in 2015 with the MacBook 12-inch, the MacBook 1.
Marco:
It started with that.
Marco:
That showed the new way forward, the new construction style, the new keyboard, some of the USB-C only, all that stuff.
Marco:
They started that in 2015 and then brought it to the rest of the line in 2016.
Marco:
if this is a new style and not just like a really cheap cut-down thing, it might be a preview of what we're going to see for the rest of the line.
Marco:
So it is exciting from that point of view.
Marco:
It's also just exciting that even if it is something totally different, which it seems like it probably would... So, I mean...
Marco:
To get out of the way, one possibility is it's just a really cut-down MacBook Escape.
Marco:
It could be that their new low-cost laptop is just a really stripped-out MacBook Escape.
Marco:
So maybe it has... Same keyboard.
Marco:
Yeah, it would have the same keyboard.
Marco:
It would have the same case.
Marco:
Maybe it has a crappier screen.
Marco:
Maybe it goes down to one USB-C port like Casey's unfortunate beast of a machine.
Marco:
Maybe it goes to...
Marco:
It wouldn't have a P3 screen.
Marco:
Maybe it wouldn't have a good processor.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
There are ways they could cut it down.
Marco:
They could really cut back the stock hard drive size and RAM and everything else.
Marco:
So there are ways they could cut that machine down to give it a low entry price to get it kind of near where the error has been.
Marco:
I really hope that's not what they do.
Marco:
I think that's what they were hoping to do when they launched this in 2016.
Marco:
But I think the market has spoken, and the market has said, that's not what we want, and that's why the market keeps buying MacBook Airs.
Marco:
Because if you remember, even in the 2016 introduction of the new MacBook Pro line, when Phil Schiller introduced the Escape, he mentioned the MacBook Air and basically said something along the lines of – he positioned the MacBook Escape as the new MacBook Air replacement.
Marco:
But the market just didn't agree with that and has not, as far as I know, has not really bought them to fill that role.
Marco:
And for lots of good reasons, you know, ports, price, keyboard.
Marco:
So anyway, assuming that it's not just a really cut-down MacBook escape, that it's actually a different laptop, it's so exciting because we don't see brand-new laptops from Apple very often that are totally different new styles or new bodies or new generations.
Marco:
So even though it's going to be most likely a low-end product,
Marco:
it's still going to be exciting.
Marco:
The 12 inch MacBook is a very low end product, but people love them and people buy that.
Marco:
Even people who could afford, you know, higher end models.
Marco:
So many, so many, so many of those people buy the 12 inch one because of its other qualities.
Marco:
So anytime Apple releases a new laptop is exciting, even if you don't think it's going to be the kind you want, because it might be the kind that you end up wanting, or it might be, it might be really cool in other, in other ways that, that, that, you know, that you find, you know, useful or nice or pleasant.
Marco:
So I personally am curious about this just to see number one, like what do they do with the port situation?
Marco:
And number two, this is really my number one, what do they do with the keyboard?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You know, that's my huge question.
Marco:
Like, are they going to have the same keyboard or is it going to be tweaked or different or what?
Marco:
Like, huge question mark for me.
Marco:
But ultimately, I just hope that whatever they do does actually finally replace the MacBook Air.
Marco:
Because the MacBook Air, while it is wonderful...
Marco:
has had the same design and general specs for eight years.
Marco:
And when it was launched, the 2010 MacBook Air was one of Apple's most successful products in their entire history.
Marco:
This generation of this laptop...
Marco:
was flawless.
Marco:
It was perfect.
Marco:
It was improved over the previous generation in every way.
Marco:
There were zero downsides to it.
Marco:
It was affordable.
Marco:
It was fast.
Marco:
It was versatile.
Marco:
It was widely appealed.
Marco:
It was such a good computer for so long.
Marco:
It really does deserve a place in history, in Apple's history, for being so successful.
Marco:
it also deserves to die eight years later.
Marco:
Like it's really, it finally needs to die.
Marco:
It needs to be replaced.
Marco:
There is no reason they should still be selling that body style in 2018.
Marco:
There should be a replacement.
Marco:
Apple should do it justice by giving it a really good replacement.
Marco:
And I think they might be about to do that.
Marco:
And that's why I'm excited.
John:
It needs to die, but mine has been killed, which is why I'm actually in the market, potentially, for whatever new laptop.
John:
What happened?
John:
Did you lend it to Casey?
John:
It's a 2011 MacBook Air.
John:
My children use it.
John:
My daughter dropped it to crack the screen.
John:
She beat that thing to hell.
John:
The only thing that finally killed it is cracking the screen, because then you get those lovely green and colorful...
John:
lines of pixels going you know it's it's a mess but you can actually see physical cracks and it still works you can still use it as long as you don't like you see if you can see what the heck you're trying to do uh but it's it's dead right so it's been a problem in our house since the school year started because they have to do homework on the computer and then they end up using my wife's computer and then they both need to do homework at the same time so we basically need
John:
At minimum, one homework laptop.
John:
And I keep rephrasing it as that because I'm going to try to say that you can't use it unless you're doing homework, because honestly, like they do everything else in their iPads and their phones anyway.
John:
Right.
John:
It's only when they need to, like, use Google Docs with a keyboard or, you know, my son is taking a programming course in Swift.
John:
So.
John:
he's taking a programming course in swift but you know kids these days right what does he use to do his programming homework and it's because they make him do it in the course he types his swift code into a giant fancy text box in a web browser on some website that lets you type your swift code in and run it for you oh god like that's everything is on the web including programming swift because that's just i showed him playgrounds but he's like oh but i don't know how to get it to print something it just shows me the results on the right hand side i'm like whatever just go back to what your teacher wants you to do it's fine
John:
Anyway, we need a homework laptop.
Marco:
To be fair, I still stand by the fact that Swift is a terrible learning language and is not at all for beginners.
John:
It is a complicated language, but I think it's reasonable to learn in.
John:
Because you're not learning all the nuances of Swift.
Marco:
You need a language that's forgiving and nice and friendly.
Marco:
Swift is just such a dick.
John:
If you just do the simple things, they're just doing conditionals, loops, functions, arrays, strings.
John:
It's fine.
John:
They're not into the parts that are annoying in Swift yet.
John:
Anyway.
Casey:
Swift is the friend that you kind of fall in friendly love with real hard.
Casey:
Like, oh, there's this person that just really gets me, and I love this person.
Casey:
And then after you really, really get to know them, you realize, ooh...
Casey:
Yeah, they have some dark spots that I was not prepared for.
Marco:
Now I'm not sure how to... Swift is the friend that insults you within five minutes sitting down at the table for the first time to meet it, and you're like, all right, I'll see you later.
Marco:
Ah, you're such a baby.
John:
The only part of the ugliness is coming through a little bit is so much of the standard library deals with optionals, which is a concept that I think beginners shouldn't have to understand.
John:
That's very true.
John:
He's mostly taking it in stride.
John:
but anyway the whole point is we need a homework laptop so i'm watching this event i've been holding off on it and dealing with contention for the computer and all sorts of whining and everything because like just wait there's an apple event coming up and then no matter what happens if they don't do anything then we'll i don't know we'll buy something but i really hope they they offer a laptop that is cheaper than any of their existing ones that is fine for doing homework on
John:
That's what I want.
John:
And I don't want to buy another MacBook Air because, you know, 2011 MacBook Air, if I bought a new one, I'd feel like I was buying another 2011 MacBook Air.
John:
I understand I'm not, but the screen is still basically the same.
John:
The case is the same.
John:
The CPU is faster.
John:
The SSD is faster and bigger.
John:
But other than that, I don't want to buy another MacBook Air.
John:
macbook air i want a new laptop so i am actually watching this event with the intent to spend money obviously i'll probably also want a new ipad and my wife definitely wants a new ipad but neither one of us needs one so i'm going to try to hold the line on that we'll see how it goes so you are getting a computer maybe one or two ipads marco what's your intention sitting here now not really knowing what's going to happen i i mean i use my ipad every day
Marco:
I'm using it more and more over time, not less.
Marco:
It's a 10.5.
Marco:
So I might rationalize whatever new one comes out.
Marco:
Ultimately, though, my 10.5 is fine.
Marco:
With one exception, the screen coding on this model shows fingerprints like crazy.
Marco:
It always looks horrible.
Marco:
And I've even heard that the more recently produced ones don't have this problem, but mine was one of the first earlier ones.
Marco:
And
Marco:
No previous iPad and no iPhone I've ever owned has shown fingerprints the way my 10.5 inch iPad Pro does.
Marco:
It looks horrible all of the time.
Marco:
To the point where it actually interferes with content displaying on screen when it's on.
Marco:
You have to constantly be wiping stuff off the screen.
Marco:
It's really gross.
Marco:
And so I would love to replace it just for that.
Marco:
But ultimately, that's a really small reason to replace like $1,000 iPad.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Casey:
I have seen you use much less to purchase much more.
Marco:
If the new cheap laptop exists and has a non-butterfly keyboard, I will buy it.
Marco:
I don't care how low end the specs are.
Marco:
I will buy it.
Marco:
That's how much I hate the butterfly keyboard.
Casey:
I keep hearing butterfly keyboard, and I keep thinking of the 701C.
Casey:
And I know that's not what you mean, but RIP, little buddy.
Casey:
You know, Rafola reminded me of something that I meant to ask you, John.
Casey:
That's an excellent question.
Casey:
So they announce a brand new Mac Mini and an Apple 4K display or even 5K display.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter, but something that is made by Apple.
Casey:
What are you doing, John?
John:
nothing i don't want a mac mini okay i had a feeling do a mac mini i don't know many things he's to hold up some component of my mac pro i want to want to raise can i put it underneath my monitor to raise it up a little bit because apple doesn't make adjustable stands maybe you can put it under a home pod to keep it from making a ring on the desk
John:
Yeah.
John:
Might interfere with the base.
Marco:
I have a Mac Mini for home server stuff, but it's totally fine.
Marco:
I don't see any need to replace it until it dies, and it's probably going to be a while.
Casey:
You know, this is possibly the most ATP episode we've ever recorded.
Casey:
We started out briefly talking about Waffle Makers, which you may or may not hear in the beginning, but you'll hear at the end.
Casey:
critiquing how all these social networks are from the perspective of old dudes.
Casey:
Then we talked about math and look-ahead limiters.
Casey:
We briefly touched on a brand new iPhone that's never existed before.
Casey:
And then for the iPad event, we decided to talk about Macs instead.
Okay.
John:
I like to think of it as the Mac event, really.
John:
I know it's the iPad event, but as far as I'm concerned, if any mention of the Macs is made, it suddenly becomes the Mac event.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, and to be fair, like, we did talk about the iPad a lot also, and yeah, and I think it's going to be most, like, the iPads are going to be the focus of the event, I think.
Marco:
I do think the Macs are going to be relegated to a brief segment of slides at the beginning of the event, kind of like in, like, the low-priority updates, like, hey, we touched the Apple TV, here's an update, like, it'd be, like, in that section of the keynote, right?
Marco:
So it's not going to be, like, a major thing
Marco:
But even like right now we have these pretty significant rumored Mac updates.
Marco:
If any of them happen, that's newsworthy.
Marco:
Like if we get the low end laptop or the Mac mini that both of those are newsworthy and awesome and that we've been waiting for both for a long time.
Marco:
so here we go I really hope we get them I'm very excited to see what this event is and I'm more excited about this event than I've been in a while because of what is rumored but yet how much we still don't know
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
I get the feeling that this is going to be really, really interesting.
Casey:
And I don't have a lot of specifics, as we've already discussed, but it seems like it's going to be interesting.
Casey:
And I haven't felt that way in a while, I don't think.
Casey:
We all thought the iPhone X was going to be interesting, but we also knew most of what was coming.
Casey:
And I don't get the feeling like I know most of what is about to come.
Casey:
We'll see what ends up actually happening.
Casey:
But it seems, as you've been saying, Marco, over and over again, and I think you're right, that this is kind of up in the air.
Casey:
And that's really exciting.
Marco:
We were sponsored this week by Warby Parker, who believes your glasses should not cost as much as your phone.
Marco:
They make prescription eyeglasses starting at just $95, including prescription lenses.
Marco:
They believe glasses should be viewed as a fashion accessory, so you should be able to afford maybe more than one pair for different moods or different looks.
Marco:
And for every pair of glasses sold, they also distribute a pair of glasses to someone in need, so you can accessorize and they're doing good for the world on your behalf.
Marco:
They also have sunglasses.
Marco:
Even if you don't wear glasses, I don't wear glasses, but I do wear sunglasses.
Marco:
And I recently bought Warby Parker sunglasses.
Marco:
They start at just $95, including polarized lenses.
Marco:
Or you can get them with prescription lenses starting at just $175.
Marco:
And all of these, sunglasses and regular eyeglasses, are available through their home try-on program.
Marco:
Here's how this works.
Marco:
They send you, for free...
Marco:
five pairs of glasses of your choice.
Marco:
Whatever you want to try, you know, try them out, see how the frames look on you, see how they fit.
Marco:
They will send you up to five pairs.
Marco:
You try them on for five days and then you send them back with a prepaid return shipping label.
Marco:
None of that is, there's no obligation.
Marco:
You don't have to buy anything.
Marco:
They don't bother you.
Marco:
They don't hassle you.
Marco:
There's no like automatic buy if you don't do something.
Marco:
They send you the trying kit.
Marco:
You send it back when you're done and then you can decide whether you want to buy any of them or not.
Marco:
They also have an app to help you out with looks and buying and everything.
Marco:
Their app is super easy to use.
Marco:
And if you have an iPhone X, you can use the brand new feature called Find Your Fit.
Marco:
This uses the iPhone X's TrueDepth camera to map and measure your facial features.
Marco:
It's pretty amazing, really.
Marco:
And it can use those measurements to recommend about 12 frames that are likely to be the best fit for your face.
Marco:
And it only takes a few seconds.
Marco:
So check all of this out today at warbyparker.com slash ATP.
Marco:
And you can see for yourself, you can get that home try-on kit.
Marco:
You can try on your glasses up to five frames, no obligation, five days.
Marco:
Check it out today.
Marco:
Once again, warbyparker.com slash ATP to get that home try-on program.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Warby Parker for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
We got an interesting question from Cameron Deardorff.
Casey:
Cameron writes, Apple names their chip series with a letter.
Casey:
We have the A series on iOS and other devices, the S series for watches, security T-chips, and some Macs, W, et cetera.
Casey:
On an infinite time scale, writes Cameron, in which Apple puts ARM chips into Macs, what letter should the chip series get?
Casey:
So to recap, A is system on a chip.
Casey:
S is for the watch.
Casey:
I'm sorry, A is the iOS system on a chip.
Casey:
S is for the watch.
Casey:
W is the Bluetooth Wi-Fi system on a chip.
Casey:
T is the Mac security system on a chip.
Casey:
And there's also M, which is the motion coprocessor.
Casey:
So, John Syracuse, what would the Apple design Mac CPU, what letter would that have?
John:
It's easy.
John:
The answer is A.
John:
really yep it'll be a and a bigger number boom done i did not see that coming really that confident i was gonna go with r s which is partially influenced by our chat over the last few days in the car thing yeah the the mac pro gt2 rs yeah i guess it would be r then because s is taken gt2 rs i was using porsche think don't mind
Casey:
I'm with you.
Casey:
I'm with you.
Casey:
I'm with you.
Casey:
I'm just, I'm re-looking at my list I put in the show.
John:
Now I'm saying Porsche like Marco.
John:
See what's happening to me?
Casey:
We've ruined you, John.
Casey:
Marco, what letter are they going to use?
Marco:
So I thought about this.
Marco:
At first, I thought that X would be kind of cool.
Marco:
Not only because it would introduce... I think you mean 10.
Marco:
I was going to say, like, it would introduce all sorts of horrible pronunciation jokes.
Marco:
Like, imagine if it was like the X1X and it's like one of, like, it's pronounced X110.
Yeah.
Marco:
So one thing to consider, though, with this lettering is that Mac chip names need to represent a much wider range of capability at any given time than the iOS A series.
Marco:
iOS devices all have basically the same power budget.
Marco:
The phone gets the A12, right?
Marco:
And then the iPad has the A12X, right?
Marco:
But the A12X is the same chip as the A12 for the most part.
Marco:
Sometimes it's like a little bit higher clocked.
Marco:
One year it had one more core.
Marco:
It had three instead of two.
Marco:
But for the most part, the main difference is that the X versions have more GPU bandwidth and because they're driving way more pixels.
Marco:
But for the most part, those are like basically the same chip.
Marco:
But in Macs, you have a huge variety of basically thermal classes.
Marco:
You have like the little 5-watt chips that are in the 12-inch, all the way up to the like 180 or 200-watt chip in the iMac Pro.
Marco:
And you have all sorts of models in between.
Marco:
So there's going to need to be more than just every year.
Marco:
You can't just have the A12 and the A12X cover the entire range of Macs.
Marco:
That's not enough to denote the differences.
Marco:
Even if they are very different, you would still want more letters to denote that.
Marco:
And so I didn't want to pick X as the first letter because I think we're going to need that as one of the suffixes for like the pro version of the chip.
Marco:
So you want like, you know, the something 10 X to be like maybe the, the, the pro version that's, that's in the iMac pro and the Mac pro.
Marco:
Apple hasn't used Z. You can put a Z at the end for a speed suffix.
Marco:
And then you're also going to probably need more letter suffixes for like some of the other ones.
Marco:
Like I thought it may be like a C or an L for the super low power one because C is used in cheap cars and L is for low power.
Marco:
And then like the Mac LC, Celeron, all sorts of great things going on with that.
Marco:
The iPhone 5C, that's a thing.
Marco:
So C for the cheap one, basically, or the low-power one.
Marco:
And then no modifier for the middle one, the one that's in the 13-inch laptops and the 4K iMac.
Marco:
The kind of mid-range base model processor gets no suffix.
Marco:
And then maybe for the high end, you have X. And maybe if you need another one in the middle, you use S, because Apple uses S for the faster one.
Marco:
So I would have... My vote for the first letter is M, even though it's already been used for the motion coprocessor, because A, they don't talk about the motion coprocessor anymore.
Marco:
The last time we heard about the M1 chip, I think, was when the iPhone 5 came out.
Marco:
M7, right?
Marco:
M7?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Was that it?
Marco:
Yeah, you're right.
Marco:
They started at 7 there.
Marco:
Yeah, so we haven't heard about it since.
Marco:
We've never heard about an M8.
Marco:
It isn't a separate chip anymore.
Marco:
It's built into the A system on a chip now, as far as I know.
Marco:
So it's not a thing anymore.
Marco:
So that's available as far as I'm concerned.
Marco:
It also avoids confusion with the iOS lineup.
Marco:
It avoids most trademarks that might be a problem.
Marco:
Like BMW has the M cars, but that's a totally different industry.
Marco:
It's probably fine for Apple to use it for chips.
Marco:
All those roads in England.
Marco:
Audi has cars that begin with A and have a number after them, but that doesn't have a problem because it's a totally different industry.
Marco:
I'm guessing M would be available to use.
Marco:
As far as I know, it avoids all of Intel's trademarks.
Marco:
Using X might be a problem with the Intel Xeon.
Marco:
They certainly can't use I. Intel has trademarked an I out the I, and so they can't go anywhere near that.
Marco:
M is available.
Marco:
It stands for Mac.
Marco:
It also means fast to BMW people.
Marco:
It's a cool letter.
Marco:
It's right in the middle of the alphabet.
Marco:
So my proposal here is you'd have, say, for the first generation, you'd have the M1, right?
Marco:
And this is for...
Marco:
the low-end laptops, and the 4K.
Marco:
It has to be the 1M because of that really fast Mac that they introduced a while ago.
Casey:
Nicely done.
Casey:
Nicely done.
Marco:
And then you have the M1C for the 12-inch, the M1S for the high-end laptops.
Marco:
As you enumerate this, it's making me think you are perfect for Apple's naming because these are terrible.
Marco:
I know, yeah.
Marco:
And then the M1X would be in the highest-end 15-inch laptop, the iMac Pro, and the Mac Pro.
John:
You're talking about all these things making me think that – I know this question is about what letter would it be, but it's making me think about something that allows me to bring Destiny into the podcast for the second time in two weeks.
John:
Nicely done.
John:
You guys are not familiar with StatCrunch?
John:
Do you know what StatCrunch is?
John:
Nope.
John:
Nope.
John:
Well, you are familiar with it.
John:
Is that an exercise?
John:
You are familiar with it in a different form because you're familiar with GPU name.
John:
So if you like the first letter is the first letter.
John:
And but the idea of having a letter followed by numbers, especially if you're over year, like with the A series on the phones, you know, like last year was the A11.
John:
This year is the A12.
John:
At a certain point, you run into problems.
John:
And you're on the A37 versus the 38.
John:
You're like, I feel like the numbers start getting too big.
John:
They become unwieldy.
John:
And your note about the range in the Mac line, that you're probably going to need some more numbers there than you need in the iOS line, at the very least one or two more numbers than you have in the iOS line just because of the range.
John:
And if every one of those numbers needs to go up every year or change or whatever, eventually the numbers start to get big and they start to become meaningless because people can't remember the distinctions anymore, right?
John:
that happens in gpus look at the you know the ati now amd line where it was you know the radeon and then some number it was like the 1000 series 2000 series 3000 8000 nine once you get around 9000 it's like are we gonna go with 10 000 no you have a stat crunch stat crunch in mmo is when you've been giving higher level items that have some stat about them and like maybe when the game rolls out like the highest level things are like 100 because it's a cool number it's like wow you have a level 100 whatever right
John:
But then an expansion comes out and you need to raise the level cap or raise the highest level of your items.
John:
And that's like 110, 120, 130.
John:
Eventually, you're up to like 900.
John:
Do you want to go to 1,000?
John:
It's going to blow your UI.
John:
It'll take four digits or whatever.
John:
So you have a stat crunch, which means that everybody's numbers go down, but nothing gets less powerful.
John:
It's just that you change the scale ratio.
John:
So what was before 500 is now 350, but it's exactly the same damage as it always was.
John:
We've just done a stat crunch.
John:
And AMD did the same thing with its video cards.
John:
They restarted the numbering.
John:
and went to like hundreds instead of thousands and with a different you know like because they just get too big so no matter what they pick on the mac line and probably eventually on the ios line too they're going to have to have a stat crunch if they go with the same naming scheme all that said the one meta comment about naming is we've learned anything from the last several years of apple naming is any system that we think we come up with that sounds sensible is probably not what they're going to do because they always surprise us with something that is just a head scratcher and it's like
John:
what like the only last time they did something that made sense i still didn't like which is the tv os ios mac os like case but at least that makes sense and it's consistent but it's bad but everything else they do is just like 10r 10s max so uh you know even though i was so confident in my a series thing
John:
it's you know probably more likely that they will be like no we're naming them after like you know kinds of bread i thought you'd do like a naming or something like why the hell are the mac operating system named after places in california because that's what somebody felt like doing so who knows anyway casey what's your what's your guess this is the m7 rye
Casey:
I mean, I stand by like R because of the car connotation.
Casey:
But Marco's convinced me pretty strongly that M has something to it.
Casey:
So I think M or R. M are too.
John:
Nice.
John:
But not in France.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let me tell you a short story.
Casey:
On Twitter, it is very popular to make some sort of really cheesy and silly pun out of your name around Halloween time.
Casey:
And that's all well and good until... First of all, no, it's not.
Marco:
But go ahead.
Casey:
Well, right.
Marco:
It's never good.
Casey:
Well, here's the thing.
Casey:
Then you write into a podcast with a question.
Casey:
And now I'm in the position that I have to read out the following from Michael Goulbriel.
Yeah.
Casey:
are you rethinking that now michael anyway uh new tech or products often come with regressions uh necessary like you know lcd or plasma adds latency or sometimes not necessary such as the iphones lose the headphone jacks what was the last of each apple product line without regressions you cared about subjectively better in any way that matters to you
Casey:
So I guess we can round robin this by platform.
Casey:
So let's start with the iPhone.
Casey:
I have not bought a new phone in a year, but I don't feel like I had any regressions in my iPhone 10.
Casey:
Like Face ID has always worked pretty darn well for me.
Casey:
I don't feel like I missed Touch ID at all.
Casey:
I feel like my iPhone 10 is pretty much without compromise.
Casey:
Marco, how do you feel about the iPhone line specifically?
Casey:
When was the last time you didn't have a compromise on something new?
Marco:
Yeah, I think this entire question is not going to go as Michael might have expected.
Marco:
It's going to be the most recent product in every line.
Marco:
Almost all of my answers are the most recent model.
Marco:
But yeah, the 10S has no regressions compared to the 10.
Marco:
Now, if you look at the 10 compared to the 7 before it, maybe Face ID...
Marco:
is a regression sometimes in some ways but overall like it's fine you know compared to touch id like it's mostly fine and so like if i look at literally like the last product compared to the one before it like the 10s compared to the 10 has zero regressions but even the 10 compared to the 7 has i think nothing i really cared about john
John:
Yeah, if I'm not talking about products that I own, yeah, the XS has no regressions over the X. But I would say that the X has regressions over the 7.
John:
But again, this is for me personally, because I prefer the phone to be a little bit smaller.
John:
And so I like the size of the 7 better.
John:
And I'm still slightly struggling with, again, not touch ID versus face ID, but the home button.
John:
So the 7 is the last one that I owned in this line that I felt like had no regressions.
John:
The 7 lost the headphone jack.
John:
that i don't you know i thought that might have bothered me but it didn't didn't you know like in the end it didn't i forgot my dongle once it only happened once and it's fine um but yeah i feel like it's mostly the size like i think i like the seven size slightly better than the 10 size uh and i would consider that a minor regression but taking its face value 10s versus 10 the 10s has no regressions
Casey:
For the watch, I still have not bought one.
Casey:
I'm probably going to try to buy one when I go look at the Tenor next week.
Casey:
But I feel like as excited as I am to try the new one and from the position of not owning one yet...
Casey:
I think that my Series 3 that's on my wrist as we speak is probably the most recent one without regression because it added cellular, didn't really give up much on battery life, and is still working great a year on.
Casey:
Whereas I feel like from the moment I buy a Series 4, it's either going to be a hair smaller than I want or a hair bigger than I want.
Casey:
Marco, you don't really believe in the Apple Watch, but nevertheless, what was the last one that did not have regressions?
Marco:
I almost picked the Series 4.
Marco:
The only reason I didn't is because of software.
Marco:
That not only is the built-in software just a little bit buggy with the new curved screen just still, and they still need to work that out, but I think the curved complications on the old faces, like my favorite utility face...
Marco:
really hurt that like i still have not found a face that i'm happy with on the series four that has analog hands like most of the time i just end up using solar which has the digital time and then the big sun thing through it i love the way solar looks even solar is buggy as hell on this watch because a lot of times it'll like it seems like all the complications will just crash they all disappear but
Marco:
And so you just have no complications for a while until you force push and go to customize and go back and then they all appear again.
Marco:
So it's buggy.
Marco:
The software is not ready for this watch yet.
Marco:
But if the software was better, I would pick the Series 4 because it is wonderful in so many ways.
Marco:
Because I can't do that yet, though, my official answer right now is the Series 3.
Marco:
It did get thicker than the one before, but it wasn't by enough that I really cared that much.
Marco:
And it was so much faster than the Series 2 that I thought it was worth it.
Marco:
But yeah, Series 3 had no major downsides.
Marco:
Oh, wait, wait, no.
Marco:
The red dot.
Marco:
That's a big one.
John:
Oh, why did you ruin it?
John:
And it was thicker.
John:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Okay, Series 2, I guess, would be the... Again, really, I should be picking the Series 4 because I am very happy with it, but...
Marco:
I really wish the software was a little bit tweaked on it.
Marco:
So it's probably the Series 4 in reality, but if I'm being a real stickler, it'll be then the Series 2.
Casey:
Yeah, see, I think the Dot is a bummer, but I don't think it's enough that it actively bothered me to consider it a regression in the spirit of the question.
Casey:
Oh, no, it's real bad.
Casey:
I stick by Series 3 for me.
Casey:
John, do you have any thoughts on this?
John:
I would pick the Series 4 because the things that Marco mentioned I don't care about.
John:
Like, I'm not so picky about watch faces.
John:
Not that I even have one, but I don't care about the curve complications.
John:
I'm sure I could find some watch face that's fine.
John:
I would just use utility with some whatever.
John:
Like, it doesn't have any regressions for me.
John:
I definitely wouldn't pick the 3 because of the thickness.
John:
And so I would have to go back to the 2 before.
John:
But I think the 4 does not have any regressions that I care about.
Casey:
iPad, the last one that I bought, and the last one without, I think, any compromises to me, was my iPad Mini that I feel like I got 13 years ago.
John:
What regressions did the iPad Pro 9.7 have?
Casey:
I don't want a 9.7-inch iPad.
John:
That's not a regression, though.
John:
It's for me.
John:
Subjectively better.
John:
No, a regression from the previous model of the iPad 9.7.
Marco:
The regression is he doesn't own it.
Marco:
No.
John:
That's why it's worse.
John:
It's like saying the 12.9-inch iPad is a regression from the mini because it's too big.
John:
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
Casey:
That's exactly what I'm saying.
Casey:
That doesn't make any sense.
Casey:
For me, I want an iPad.
Casey:
And actually, I don't really get to this earlier, but I think that even though I never touch my iPad mini anymore, in part because it's so darn old, I am...
Casey:
I actually think that there's a pretty good shot I'm going to buy an iPad after this event because I'm really interested in what's being shown.
Casey:
But anyway, up until Tuesday, I don't feel like I want a full-size iPad anymore.
Casey:
I did that and I don't want it anymore.
Casey:
I want a Mini.
Casey:
And the most recent Mini was the best iPad for me.
Casey:
It's just ancient now.
Casey:
And so any of the other ones, yeah, they're not a regression in terms of like
Casey:
You know, year over year, the 9.7 from one year is better than 9.7 the prior year, and the 10 was better than the 9.7, et cetera.
Casey:
But for me, as the question says, subjectively better in every way that matters to you.
John:
But it says product line.
John:
It doesn't say individual product.
John:
It's difficult when a product line has like – the reason I could talk about the 10 versus the 7 is they were essentially replacements for each other.
John:
There is no more 7 size.
John:
The 10 is the replacement for that.
John:
But the 9.7 is not the replacement for –
John:
the mini any more than the 12.9 is a replacement for the 9.7 like the ipad line has different sizes and i feel like you have to pick within those size classes just so happens that your size class dead-ended i suppose but i don't think every new ipad that comes out you should be saying it's a regression over your mini because it's too big like john this is this is my answer you can answer your own way this is my answer i'm answering the question i'm answering my own question that i made up
Casey:
Yeah, you've never done that before and totally rejiggered the rules of a question to suit you.
John:
I haven't.
John:
I've addressed the question as written and then also said that the question is dumb, but you're saying that you don't want to address the question as.
John:
You should give your answer within the rules of this question as well.
Casey:
I don't even know enough about modern iPads anymore.
Casey:
I would suppose that whatever the most recent 10-inch one is probably my answer.
Casey:
Sounds like it's got a fingerprint problem.
Marco:
And that's my answer.
Marco:
The 10.5 almost made it for me, but because of that fingerprint problem, I have to say the 9.7 Pro that came right before it because that had no downsides.
Marco:
Well, it was more expensive, but otherwise it had no major downsides.
Marco:
And to gain the support of the keyboard and the pencil was massive.
Marco:
It was a great all-around iPad.
John:
great release um and the 10.5 would have beaten it if not for the fingerprint screen i don't have enough experience with the 10.5 to know whether it's a regression so i'm going to pick the 9.7 as well just because it was it was great it was better in all ways than the ones that came before it still using it still love it i even love the accessories that go with it um maybe the 10.5 is is also but i you know just as just as good a leap over but i don't have one so i can't say
Casey:
So I don't have a 9.7-inch iPad, John, or 10.5-inch or 12-inch.
John:
You could have given that answer, but you didn't.
John:
Moving on.
Casey:
You said it's because it's too big.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
For the Mac, I actually think...
Casey:
And this is either going to go over really well or really poorly, and I'm not sure which direction.
John:
Is it the Mac Mini?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I think that my most recent 15-inch MacBook Pro with anti-glare, with an SSD in it, which I don't remember if it came from the factory that way, so I'm kind of cheating a little bit, and I admit it.
Casey:
It didn't.
Casey:
But, okay, so the 10.5...
Casey:
high-res anti-glare, especially once an SSD went in it, was probably the least amount of compromise of any of the Macs I've ever owned.
Casey:
And that even though I love, I love, love, love both my 5K and my adorable,
Casey:
I think there are some amount of compromise in both of those machines.
Casey:
And I think that the 15-inch high-res anti-glare was with the least amount of compromise.
Casey:
And that's the one that I remember most fondly.
Marco:
So I have a split between desktop and laptop.
Marco:
Desktop, obviously, the iMac Pro.
Marco:
As I said earlier, it's fantastic.
Marco:
There's nothing about it that's worse than anything that came before it.
Marco:
And it's better.
Marco:
It wins on every front, whether I'm comparing it to the 5K iMac or the Trashcan Mac Pro.
Marco:
which I think you could argue it's a successor to both of those at the moment.
Marco:
And compared to either of those, on every front, it wins.
Marco:
It is a spectacular product that I'm immensely happy with.
Marco:
In the laptop line, it depends on whether you're talking about years or generations.
Marco:
If you're talking about years, technically, the 2018 MacBook Pro, all the horrible things about it were already horrible in 2017.
Marco:
So they're either the same now or better.
Marco:
So technically, the 2018 MacBook Pro would be my laptop pick.
Marco:
If we're talking generations, though, which I think is more interesting, I would say the Retina MacBook Pro.
Marco:
That's the generation that went from 2012 to 2015.
Marco:
That generation...
Marco:
I think that's the one I wrote the best laptop ever article about.
Marco:
It's such an awesome generation of laptop.
Marco:
As much as I love the 2010 MacBook Air, this is more recent.
Marco:
And so it did lose the optical drive, and it did lose upgradable RAM and disks, but those didn't really affect me.
Marco:
Even back in 2012 when I got the very first one, those didn't really affect me.
Marco:
So the 2012 Retina MacBook Pro is my laptop answer.
John:
I will continue to follow the instructions of the question and say the product line being Mac and then pick the iMac Pro because I'm taking the Mac.
John:
I hate all laptops anyway.
John:
iMac Pro.
John:
Easy answer.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Finally, the Apple TV.
Casey:
I don't personally have any need for 4K because I don't have a 4K TV.
Casey:
So my – what is it?
Casey:
The third generation where it got the whole new interface and all that –
Casey:
I don't mind the remote.
Casey:
Everyone's going to yell at me.
Casey:
I don't mind the remote.
Casey:
The remote is fine for me.
Casey:
I don't feel like it's a compromise.
Casey:
I like it.
Casey:
It's fine.
Casey:
So for me, the third generation Apple TV is the one with the least amount of compromise.
Casey:
Marco.
Marco:
I go with the Apple TV 4K.
Marco:
I think you should get the Apple TV 4K even though you don't think you need it because it is significantly faster and more responsive and, in my experience, more reliable.
Marco:
I maintain, at any given time, between two and four Apple TVs, depending on, like...
Marco:
Beak stuff or my in-laws or something like that.
Marco:
We always buy Apple TVs for everybody for various Christmases and everything.
Marco:
I have a small fleet of them, basically.
Marco:
The first one with the Siri remote, which I believe was the fourth gen, maybe?
Marco:
I thought it was third.
Marco:
Is it fourth?
Marco:
I think it's fourth.
Marco:
Anyway, that one, the one that runs tvOS, the first generation of those not only gets really slow at really weird times and is unresponsive for weird reasons more often,
Marco:
But I've had them flake out.
Marco:
I mean, they are older, but I've had them flake out and die in weird ways and just be generally unreliable.
Marco:
Whereas the 4K ones, again, while they are younger, so far have been rock solid and are way faster and way more responsive to input and touch and everything else.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
The 4K actually is really good.
Marco:
And I think the original fourth gen had a major regression in the design of the remote.
Marco:
But again, the 4K didn't get worse.
Marco:
It actually got slightly better with that stupid white circle they put around the menu button.
Marco:
So it is slightly less horrible.
Marco:
And everything else about it is better.
Marco:
So Apple TV 4K is my pick for this.
John:
Me too.
John:
Apple TV 4K.
John:
Everything Marco said.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then finally, Fabian Deem writes, are you using the shortcuts app at all?
Casey:
And if so, what are your favorite uses or shortcuts?
Casey:
I actually have kind of gotten back into workflow slash shortcuts since shortcuts came out.
Casey:
My favorite one is a slightly revised version of what I call ETA to Aaron.
Casey:
So what I can do is I can say, hey, dingus, I'm on my way home.
Casey:
And it will figure out where I am, figure out how long it takes me to get home by car.
Casey:
And what's great about shortcuts over workflow is it will actually, without my intervention, send a text to Aaron saying, you know, I'm leaving now, I'll be home in whatever minutes, and that'll be at such and such time.
Casey:
That's my favorite.
Casey:
A couple that I've found are really nice are I have a good night shortcut, which among other things, sets my brightness to all the way down.
Casey:
So it's the volume of my phone all the way down, turns on do not disturb, but also attempts to SSH into both my laptop and my desktop and turn the volume of them all the way down.
Casey:
Because sometimes I'll leave the volume up and then in the middle of the night, I'll hear myself get like a text message or something like that.
Casey:
And, um, and I don't know why do not disturb wouldn't have caught that.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Anyways, somehow or another, I, I sometimes hear audio coming from my computers.
Casey:
And so my shortcut actually will turn their volume down, uh, using Apple script, uh, as called via SSH, which is really convenient.
Casey:
And then as an example of something interesting you can do, although this is something that's really only useful for me, is that I use this app called MoneyWell to kind of keep track of our finances.
Casey:
And it doesn't do terribly well when you run it in multiple places at once.
Casey:
It syncs over Dropbox.
Casey:
And as long as you're only ever running it in one spot at a time, you're good.
Casey:
But if you run it concurrently in two different computers, bad things happen.
Casey:
And so I have a script that will log into my desktop.
Casey:
figure out if money while it's running and then let me know either you know you're good to go or you know stop everything you need to you know a remote desktop oh god i'm a windows user you need to vnc into uh you need to vnc into screen sharing case there you go you need to screen share with your uh with your imac tough guy and you need to uh and you need to close money well and so i use all those uh pretty frequently and i've really enjoyed those
Casey:
Since I was beating on Marco a lot first last time, let's start with John.
Casey:
This time, John, are you using shortcuts at all?
John:
I'm still laughing about money well, colon.
John:
Throw your money down a well, TM.
John:
I understand.
John:
The idea is the money is coming out of the well, but I think of money well, and it's very close to money pit.
John:
Anyway, sorry, money well.
John:
I'm sure the app is great.
John:
I have a bunch of shortcuts that I've either tried to make myself or imported from other people.
John:
I have a whole topic on this that's slowly getting buried in our very long topic list.
John:
I think I'll talk about it more later, but shortcuts just don't mesh with the way I want to do things.
John:
As a programmer, I find them frustrating.
John:
I'm glad they exist, and I'm glad to have shortcuts.
John:
For example, based on the last show where we talked about contacts and Apple's
John:
um rules suggestions guidelines about how big your contact photos should be someone made a shortcut that will uh you know run on your phone and it will look at all your contact photos and tell you how many of them are over the limit right which is neat and it's like hey i'd love to have that shortcut and he sent it to me and i ran it and it told me i had like 12 pictures that were too big which is less than i thought i would have but it's still some um
John:
but it's not like i don't i'm a mac person i do anything remotely complicated i do on my mac i have some shortcuts that i think might be useful but it tends not to occur to me to use them and i just find being productive on ios devices does not match the way i want to work so i am not a heavy user of them i don't have any particular favorites but i'm still very glad that the functionality is there
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
Yeah, basically with John.
Marco:
I don't use shortcuts at all.
Marco:
I never used Workflow before it either.
Marco:
I've never gotten into the iOS automation scene with Drafts and Long Center Pro and stuff like that.
Marco:
I just never got into that scene.
Marco:
Whenever I want to do something that involves complex automation,
Marco:
I want a Mac.
Marco:
And that's just, again, it's what I'm used to.
Marco:
It's what I'm good at.
Marco:
It's where all my skills are, where all my tools are.
Marco:
The kinds of things that our friends who are more into iOS power usage than me, the kinds of things that they do with shortcuts, they talk about on podcasts and stuff, all those things they do are never things that I really want to do.
Marco:
It doesn't really pique my interest, I guess.
Marco:
So I just don't do it.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks for our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Warby Parker, Linode, and Aftershocks.
Marco:
And we'll see you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
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 Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Marco:
So Casey, I've heard you've had some drama with, of all things, your waffle maker.
Marco:
What is going on there?
Casey:
This is a sad time.
Casey:
So I have to set the scene.
Casey:
A year or two ago, maybe even more than that,
Casey:
We dug our waffle maker out from the back of our deepest kitchen cabinet, and we had gotten this waffle maker for our wedding, and we didn't use it but a couple times for the longest time.
Casey:
And then we fell into the tradition where we would do Sunday morning waffles and bacon.
Casey:
And so Erin, the saint that she is, would prepare homemade waffles and bacon for the family.
Casey:
And these waffles were delicious.
Casey:
There was nothing particularly special about the preparation.
Casey:
I think she uses a particular kind of bisquick and mostly follows the direction of the box.
Casey:
I don't need to hear about alternative waffle recipes.
Casey:
That's not the point.
Casey:
But suffice to say, I loved these waffles.
Casey:
They may not have been the best waffles in the entire planet, but I loved them.
Casey:
And one morning, about a month ago, I want to say, I bumped our waffle maker.
Casey:
And I must have done so at either the exact right moment or the exact right way.
Casey:
In retrospect, I should have sent it to Dr. Drang to analyze.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
Somehow or another, I bumped it, and basically the entire thing fell apart.
Casey:
The plates that were not removable fell away from the iron part, if you will, or the steel part behind the plates.
Casey:
The hinges all but basically exploded.
Casey:
It was as though the thing was a hair's breadth away from falling apart, and me bumping it just put it right over the edge.
Casey:
So I went on a search to find a replacement waffle maker.
Casey:
And the one we had was a wearing WMK 300.
Casey:
And I would like for you to not yet look that up.
Casey:
I want you to wait just a moment.
Marco:
Too late.
Marco:
Wait.
Marco:
That's the one you had.
Marco:
That's the one that I recommended to you, I think.
Marco:
Oh, wait a minute.
Marco:
No, this is... Is it?
Marco:
This is $500.
Casey:
Well, that's the thing.
Casey:
The one that I had did not cost $539.95, which is what this costs on Amazon.
Casey:
This waffle maker was amazing until it exploded.
Casey:
It was amazing.
Casey:
The waffles were fluffy and light on the inside, but always crisp on the outside.
Casey:
It beeped when it was warm enough for you to put in the batter.
Casey:
It beeped again when it was...
Casey:
When it was ready and it cooked the waffles reasonably quickly, everything about it was pretty much perfect.
John:
Except for the fact that it makes round waffles.
Casey:
Don't even start with your square waffle nonsense.
Marco:
My waffle maker is very similar to this.
Marco:
It's also a wearing.
Marco:
It was only $100, not $500.
Casey:
Well, we're going to come back to that, but carry on.
Marco:
But it's very similar to this.
Marco:
It's a two-size, so it makes two at once, which I think is a critical feature.
Marco:
And it's kind of like what you see at hotel breakfast bars, where it's round, and you pour the batter in, and you flip it over.
Marco:
And then you can pour batter into the other side, and then flip it over again, and you can make two at once.
Marco:
And just like Casey was saying, it beeps when it's ready, it's crisp, it's like...
Marco:
it's a great waffle maker in most ways.
Marco:
There's one major critique I have of it, which is that at least on mine, the plates are not removable.
Marco:
So it's really a pain in the butt to clean.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
That's absolutely accurate on this one.
John:
I can't believe everyone, I mean, I know everyone cites it because they want you to be familiar with it.
John:
It's like,
John:
oh it's like at the hotel breakfast bar or some people say oh it's like in your dorms uh you know dining hall both of which are true but those are not two things i would ever cite when when saying you're interested in fine dining you know you know like a hotel breakfast bar no or or dorm dining hall oh anyway uh yeah i don't like ron wobbles
Casey:
Well, I feel like there might be an argument that you and I should have about that, but let's leave that aside for now.
Marco:
We will.
Casey:
Don't worry.
Casey:
So when this was purchased for us, I can assure you it was not $539.95.
Casey:
And although this waffle maker was darn near perfect in my estimation, even still, even as much as I love my waffles, I don't think I would spend $539.95 on this.
Casey:
And so I went digging before the show.
Casey:
to find our wedding registry, which I had printed and made a PDF of years ago, you know, 11 years ago when we got married.
Casey:
And sure enough, I found on our Bed, Bath & Beyond wedding registry that we had listed this exact waffle maker, which at the time was $80, which is still a lot of money for a waffle maker, but way more reasonable, of course, than $540.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
I ended up replacing this one with, I don't actually have it handy, but some Hamilton Beach model that makes square waffles.
Marco:
Like an animal.
Casey:
Like an animal, Marco.
Casey:
It's so true.
Casey:
And so it makes two square waffles.
Casey:
I will put the link in the show notes.
Casey:
I just don't want to look it up right this second.
Casey:
It makes two square waffles.
Casey:
The thing costs like 30 bucks.
Casey:
Hamilton Beach is actually a local firm.
Casey:
They're based out of Richmond.
Casey:
And so I had some amount of affinity for them.
Casey:
For that reason, I shouldn't have because it's just not very good.
Casey:
Not gummy isn't the right word, but not the greatest on the inside.
Casey:
And the outside is nowhere near as crispy.
Casey:
It doesn't make any beeps.
Casey:
It takes forever to cook.
Casey:
I don't like it.
Casey:
And so now I don't know what to do because I am a man that likes myself what Americans describe as a Belgian waffle.
Casey:
I'm not here to debate whether or not that definition is accurate or not, but what that means to an American is a waffle that is very thick, so typically around an inch thick, with very deep pockets.
Casey:
That's the way I like my waffles.
John:
There's more to a Belgian waffle than just that.
Casey:
Well, yes, but when you're looking for a waffle maker that makes that style of waffle, you're going to look for a Belgian waffle maker.
Casey:
And that's exactly what this is called, a Wearing WMK300, the old one.
Casey:
Belgian waffle maker.
Casey:
And that's what I like.
Casey:
And so what I want, listeners, is I want something that will cook a waffle reasonably quickly that will give me that nice crisp outside and then that not too gummy inside.
Casey:
And I'll be the first to tell you, I spent $25 on the replacement.
Casey:
I should have known better, but I didn't know what else to do.
Casey:
And so I tried something and I'm probably going to end up either donating it or throwing it away or doing something with it because it's not up to snuff.
Casey:
So I got to figure out what the right answer is.
Casey:
Maybe I need to come and visit Marco and make you guys make me waffle.
John:
I don't know why you were asking the listeners because I already gave you the answer to this question in Slack.
John:
And I just found out today that there actually is a round one if you prefer.
John:
oh the round versus square thing you get but anyway the waffle make i was faced in a similar situation i had a waffle maker that i liked i like a different style of waffle than casey and i was disappointed that i couldn't because i like a thinner one i was disappointed that i couldn't find one that made waffles the the size and shape that i want but despite that despite the fact that this makes like one inch thick waffles which are to casey's taste but not to mine
John:
i'm very impressed with my breville waffle maker it does what you expect it to do but it also has like settings for what kind of waffles you want if you're like isn't there one kind of waffles and as casey was saying no there isn't just one kind of waffle like the difference between a regular waffle and a belgian waffle isn't just the size and shape of it it's also how crispy the outside is versus how fluffy the inside is like you can have a waffle that is kind of
John:
the same doneness all the way through or a thing that's very well done on the outside but not as well done on the inside like there's lots of variations plus there's the overall darkness and those settings on this waffle maker really actually work waffles you know you don't need to use any non-stick stuff with it the waffles come right out it has a special thing in it that makes it so that there's any overflow it doesn't make a mess you don't like you're saying the plates don't come off plates don't come off this either you'll never need to there's nothing nothing in this thing you can't clean up by just like
John:
pulling it out with your finger it is absolutely amazing it makes the waffles fast it has all the settings you want it has all the lights and the beeps and they make a round one which seems like it doesn't have the belgian setting so maybe you want to check it but anyway it makes four waffles at once not two each one is gigantic and thick and so your your waffle maker that you should get uh that you will be very happy with because it makes the kind of waffles that you like
John:
is this revel what the hell is that number stupid amazon with his mouse over things uh it just says the smart four slice waffle maker i'm sure but this one is square you're saying yeah the round one the round one i will put in this is the round one
John:
uh it doesn't seem like it has it doesn't have the screen and i'm not sure how many settings it has but it's the same design basically with the gutter around and all that other business they are very big they are very heavy and they are ridiculously expensive for waffle makers but as i thought i might regret getting the one that i got despite the fact that it makes waffles the wrong shape for my personal preferences it does a really good job of making the wrong shape waffles
John:
a glowing review right i i was impressed by it i i thought i might end up returning this because it was so expensive and i didn't like in the pictures but like it it just does a really good and the settings really do things like that's the thing that blew me away i'm like ah it doesn't matter what the settings are right and i changed the setting one day
John:
I was like, what the hell?
John:
This is not how I want them.
John:
And I realized, oh, I didn't I didn't have it set to the setting that I like.
John:
Like you can actually dial in exactly the waffles you make, which most waffle makers don't have.
John:
They just have like a light that says put in a waffle now and then a different light that says your waffles are done.
John:
This one has adjustments and yes, an LCD screen, all sorts of silly stuff.
Marco:
Mine has a knob that works and you can adjust things.
Marco:
I don't think I've actually never seen one that didn't have an adjustment knob.
John:
Right.
John:
But no, but the thing this has with the settings is it's kind of like my toaster has to like how what is the ratio?
John:
Like, do you want it to do?
John:
It doesn't do the same temperature the whole side, like one of the settings.
John:
I think the Belgian one is basically like cook it normally until it's cooked through, but then crank it at the end to make the outside extra dark and extra extra crisp without drying out the inside.
John:
Or the regular one, which is keep it kind of the same slightly higher temperature for the whole time so it's kind of evenly brown all the way through.
John:
Those are the type of settings.
John:
It's not just like, what temperature do you want me to be?
John:
It's like a curve.
John:
At what time during the cooking process do you want me to be at what temperature?
John:
Kind of like the bagel setting in toasters, if you put the cut side of the bagel face up, will, for the last 45 seconds, crank the top element as high as it can go to crisp the top of the bagel without over-crisping the toppings on the bottom or whatever.
John:
It's a complicated science.
John:
It's not just...
Casey:
a dial that says hot or cold yeah i don't know what this wearing one that i had did but it worked some sort of magic maybe it was temperature maybe it was something else that got me that just delightful uh crisp exterior with the light fluffy interior and i miss it so dearly i guarantee you'll be able to dial that in on the the big four slice one on the round one i'm not sure but the round one is only 122 so
Marco:
And it's worth pointing out here, there's a Wirecutter article on Best Waffle Makers.
Casey:
Oh, I looked at it.
Marco:
While I have my occasional issues with their picks, these do seem reasonable.
Marco:
And actually, is their budget pick at the bottom?
Marco:
Is that the one you got?
Marco:
It looks like it matches the description, exactly.
Marco:
But even their top pick is... Look, if I made a lot of waffles, I would probably upgrade to their top pick here because...
Marco:
The one thing, I love my waffle maker so much except washing it sucks so much that the one thing I would require of any new waffle maker purchase is dishwasher safe removable plates.
John:
I think I got that one and returned it, the one that's on there.
John:
You think removable plates would be a thing?
John:
Again, plates are not removable.
John:
I have never washed it.
John:
There is nothing to wash.
John:
The bagels just come out.
John:
You just pick the last two weeks.
John:
Pick the cooked waffle thing off of the thing and you wipe it.
John:
That's it.
Marco:
There's nothing to do.
Marco:
I usually will do cooking spray in there.
Marco:
Are you not doing that?
Marco:
I am not doing that.
Marco:
So you're just pouring the batter straight in and it falls out?
John:
Sometimes I put butter in it, depending on my mood, but that gets absorbed by the waffle, so it doesn't remain behind.
John:
But you don't have to put anything in it, nothing.
John:
And I would encourage you not to.
Marco:
Okay, so you're pouring the batter right onto the plate with no lubrication, and you're relying on the nonstick for it to just basically fall off.
John:
And as part of the expenses, you're hopefully getting a good nonstick thing.
John:
Recently, my nonstick pan.
John:
Nonstick pans always die, like a skillet or whatever, right?
John:
And we bought a cheap one to replace it, which is the quote-unquote ceramic coating, which works great until it doesn't, and it lasts like less than a year.
John:
Whatever coating they have on this waffle maker, maybe it's going to go bad and it will be terrible in a few years, but I've had it for at least a year now, maybe more, and it's still going strong.
John:
Interesting.
John:
I feel like that's what you get out of it.
John:
So the one they recommended, the Krups thing, it just felt like it was chintzy, and it just wasn't a quality appliance.
John:
And yes, you could take the plates out, but then the heating elements were there, and then gunk got under the heating elements, and then it's just...
John:
It was not satisfactory in any way, whereas the Breville one, for all ridiculous costs and everything, it makes better waffles.
John:
It makes better waffles than the Krups one does, and it makes less of a mess.
John:
It's just a better thing.
John:
Obviously, it better be better for like three times the price or whatever.
John:
And it's sad because the Krups one, I think, is closer to making the shape and size of waffles that I want.
John:
But I think I'll just have to wait for that fad to come around.
John:
I wish I could have found... If I could have re-bought the one that I had... Like, mine just died.
John:
Like, died, died.
John:
Like, it doesn't work anymore.
John:
But it was older than all my children.
John:
Like, this was either from my parents or my grandparents.
John:
It was an old waffle thing.
John:
It was, uh...
John:
Waffle Master or some brand.
John:
That's awesome.
John:
I don't remember what the hell brand it was.
John:
Waffle Master.
John:
But I looked for it.
John:
It wasn't Waffle Master.
John:
It was something else.
John:
But I looked for it online and it didn't exist.
John:
And I looked for it on eBay and I couldn't find it.
John:
So I'm like, all right.
John:
I would have just re-bought it because it gave me what I wanted.
Casey:
Well, and it's funny you bring that up because I may have found one spot online that might have a few of these left.
Casey:
And when we're both awake tomorrow, I pretty much plan to plead with Aaron.
Casey:
Hey, can we spend $80 on a replacement for old waffle maker?
Casey:
Because this thing, while it was working, was flawless.
Casey:
But yeah, I saw the Wirecutter post.
Casey:
I looked at it a lot.
Casey:
The thing that gave me pause was it was hard to tell both from the Wirecutter and from the Amazon reviews, which are always hit and miss to begin with, whether or not the waffles were thick as I wanted.
Casey:
Plus, I don't want a square waffle.
Casey:
That's just...
Casey:
We could have this fight, but I honestly don't have a lot to back myself up.
Casey:
I just think that square waffles are not as good.
Casey:
Not in a taste perspective, just in an aesthetic.
John:
This is kind of like the Midwest pizza thing where they take a round pizza and they cut it into squares.
John:
It's disharmony, right?
John:
The things in a waffle, the little holes, they're square.
John:
Right.
John:
And the second thing that really bothers me is if you're going to have a round waffle, the only way I will accept a round waffle is if it is one waffle.
John:
I don't want a round waffle that then cut into four things.
John:
So it looks like what I'm getting is instead of getting four waffles, I'm getting four three quarter waffles.
Casey:
Oh, no, John, no, no, no.
John:
Because they're not complete waffles.
John:
It's like, so I had a waffle here, right?
John:
And then someone ate around the edge, and I'm missing that part of it.
Marco:
But I came into this conversation expecting to totally fight you on this, but I think you're convincing me that that round actually is not what I wanted.
John:
no no here's the thing we can agree on the waffles no matter size and shape they all taste good and like you know in general like a round waffle i'll take a round waffle over no waffle like we can all agree on that waffles are universal good and we should accept them into our hearts and just eat them but if given a choice oh and by the way casey on the recipe side mix some fast action yeast into some warmed but not too hot like in the microwave milk uh like whatever milk you're going to use to make the batter like
Marco:
warm up the microwave for like i don't know 30 seconds like make it just warm like lukewarm to the touch dump in a packet of fast action yeast stir it up dump it into the batter make the batter put plastic wrap over it for 20 minutes come back you have a very light airy batter
Casey:
Man, you give me far too much credit with regard to my patience, but I appreciate the tip.
John:
You can also just make them yourself.
John:
It's 20 minutes.
Casey:
It's not that big of a deal.
John:
You don't need to use a mix.
John:
You can just make it yourself.
John:
Most waffle acres will come with the recipe.
John:
The recipes vary wildly, I will warn you.
John:
You might want to just look one up or whatever.
John:
But if you are going to use a mix, I'm going to put a shout out for Aunt Jemima over Bisquick.
John:
really i have i don't think i've tried that yeah it's what i grew up with uh i've had bisquick as well because that was my wife's brand but we've converted uh i've converted her over to think it's not it like if you like bisquick and that's what you expect you're going to continue to like it but i answer my is more to my taste and the fact that i was able to convert my wife show is something to recommend homemade tastes better unless you have a bad recipe like i made the home i used to make the homemade ones for my kids and they eventually told me like i would do the blind test like which one do you like better
John:
They like the mix better because I've been giving it to them for too long.
John:
So the homemade ones that I painstakingly made for them, I think it's probably a tie because I haven't found a really good recipe, but the convenience of the mix just wins out.
Casey:
Yeah, well, in order to be more specific, we're using the Bisquick HeartSmart mix, which is, I think, almost maybe a little bit better for you.
Marco:
Let's be honest, your heart doesn't like any part of eating waffles.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
You're attacking the wrong problem if you're subbing out a different waffle mix.
Marco:
for heart health.
Marco:
Agreed.
Casey:
Well, and also, let me remind you that it's not just waffles on Sunday mornings, kids.
Casey:
Bacon.
Casey:
It's waffles and bacon.
Casey:
So, I'm, it doesn't really ultimately matter.
John:
My one tip for the mix thing, by the way, this will work with Best Quicker as well as anything else.
John:
Maybe you could say this is just for kids or the kids do love it, but I think grown-ups like it too.
John:
Put a tiny little bit of vanilla extract into your waffle mix.
Casey:
Aaron does that.
John:
I'm almost sure.
John:
It's not in the recipe, but I just want to make sure people do that.
Marco:
Yeah, I always use a little bit of vanilla.
Marco:
I use one more egg than they ask me to.
Marco:
I wouldn't go that far.
Marco:
And I do the yeast trick if I have time and a little bit of baking soda if I don't.
John:
The yeast trick makes me think that's the thing that a beer drinker would like.
John:
Like, make everything yeasty.
Marco:
No, it gives you more air bubbles, basically, which I like.
John:
Yeah, I know what you're going for.
John:
And it's also like the sort of the malted waffle type things.
John:
Again, dorm dining halls and stuff like that.
John:
It was never to my taste, but some people really like that.
Casey:
All right, so one way or another, I need to find myself something better than this Hamilton Beach abomination.
John:
And someone brings up in the chat room, I'm almost afraid to talk to you about this, Casey, but I feel like we need to have this intervention.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
Okay.
John:
Please use maple syrup on your waffles.
John:
Please, please tell me that you do.
John:
Please.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
What is it that we use?
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Let me open any list.
Casey:
Oh, no.
John:
That's not good.
John:
No, there's not.
John:
It's either maple syrup or it's not maple syrup.
John:
No, no, no.
John:
It's not.
John:
It's something.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
Oh, come on, Casey.
John:
What are you doing?
John:
Come on.
John:
You're making these waffles.
John:
You're worried about how good they are, and then you're ruining them.
John:
You have to use maple syrup.
John:
You have to.
Casey:
You're pouring corn syrup on them?
John:
You have to use maple syrup.
Casey:
We use Log Cabin Light with no high fructose corn syrup.
John:
No, you're pouring corn syrup on your waffles, please.
John:
With no high fructose corn syrup.
John:
Now we know what to get Casey for Christmas.
John:
We're getting you maple syrup.
John:
Oh, my God, Casey.
John:
Stop feeding your children corn syrup.
Casey:
I've had it.
Casey:
I've had it numerous times.
Casey:
I actually prefer the taste of the package crap.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
Of course you do.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
I would rather you switch back to a white car.
John:
Velveeta, shells and cheese, and corn syrup.
Casey:
It says no high fructose corn syrup right on the box or the jar.
John:
So it's just sugar slime.
John:
Please.
John:
Whatever.
John:
You need actual maple syrup, which is nature's sugar slime.
Marco:
no i i am in full agreement that's i using oh god i mean look it's fine if you can't afford maple syrup it is more expensive a bottle of it's like 12 bucks you can afford it it's like real parmesan cheese like i you could have less of it and have it less often but have it be good like yeah like if you're drinking enough maple syrup the price is a problem you're probably drinking too much maple syrup yeah i mean exactly how much are you going through like you have a family of 17 i can see the economic argument
John:
And also, there's such a thing as sales and coupons.
John:
Like, it doesn't really go bad.
John:
It's pretty shelf-stable.
John:
So if you are just a little bit smart about finding it, you can get yourself maple syrup for not that much money.
John:
And it's so worth it.
John:
So worth it.
Casey:
I love that I've trained you two so well that you assume it's a money issue.
Casey:
It's not.
Casey:
I'll spend the money if it's worth it.
John:
No, I assume it's a South issue.
John:
Because you're so far from fall in New England that you just don't know how to do waffles.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
You realize, like, when Mike comes to visit the U.S., he goes back with maple syrup.
Marco:
He brings maple syrup to England because that's hard to get there.
Marco:
Like...
Casey:
No, no, I'm not arguing that it is.
Marco:
That's how good it is.
Casey:
Yeah, no, I'm not arguing that by almost any measure it is superior.
Casey:
It's just my taste buds, as screwed up as they may be, I like the package crap.
John:
Exactly.
John:
It's what you were raised on, I know, but I feel like maple syrup is the kind of thing that even if you were raised on the other thing, you can be converted as an adult.
John:
It is possible.
John:
You can get to the point where you are not craving the other thing.
John:
Shelton cheese, maybe not.
John:
Maybe you'll never be converted off that, but I feel like you can be converted on the maple syrup.
John:
You can come around.
John:
And certainly I'm saying for your children.
John:
For your children, Casey.
John:
Don't get them started.
Marco:
Create a better future for your children.
John:
Exactly.
Casey:
Whenever we go to my parents and stay overnight, which happens, you know, once every few months, typically dad will make pancakes and he will warm up some honest goodness maple syrup and he'll warm up some sugary sludge.
Casey:
And every single time I reach for the sugary sludge, I am aware of what maple syrup tastes like.
Casey:
I've had it many times in my life.
Casey:
I don't find it to be superior.
Yeah.
John:
You should try it cold if you don't like it warmed up.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Refrigerator cold.
Casey:
Like literally, I thought you just meant like room temperature.
John:
I mean, refrigerator cold.
John:
I mean, you know, warmed up is definitely a thing.
John:
Room temperature is a thing.
John:
But try it cold.
John:
Yeah, I actually prefer it cold.
Marco:
I like pouring cold maple syrup on a hot waffle like that.
Marco:
I know it doesn't make sense.
Marco:
I mean, waffles only stay hot for like two seconds anyway.
Marco:
So, you know, I kind of like the temperature contrast.
John:
There's also the divide of pour over versus a puddle next to and dipping.
Marco:
Oh, you have to pour over.
Marco:
Well, I pour over, but I kind of overshoot the waffle a little bit so that I have edges that I can dip into.
Marco:
You're doing a hybrid, yeah.
A hybrid.
Casey:
Oh, and to go back to the circle conversation, part of the reason I like the circles is because it's four.
Casey:
You can fill the whole plate.
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, that too.
Casey:
Part of the reason I like the circle waffles is because what ends up happening is the first waffle, when we were using circles or when we had circles, was I would give a quarter to Declan and I would have the remaining three quarters for myself.
Casey:
And then subsequent to that, I could take half waffle or quarter waffle.
Casey:
So typically I would do a three, two, one.
Casey:
I would do three quarters of a waffle, half a waffle, and then one quarter of a waffle.
Casey:
And at that point, pretty much every single Sunday morning, I knew that I was full.
Casey:
And I liked having that time to space it out and eat slowly and enjoy my waffles.
Casey:
And you can't do that easily with a square waffle.
Casey:
You're just going to be hacking at that thing.
John:
See, the thing is, your kids are going to grow up and you have a four-person family.
John:
And if you make four waffles at a time, it's very convenient.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Four full waffles.
Casey:
That I totally understand.
Casey:
But that has nothing to do with... Ready for the next batch?
John:
One for everybody.
Casey:
But that has nothing to do with shape.
Casey:
That's just the particular model that you happen to have.
John:
The circle is not an efficient use of... Anyway, we've already gone through the shape thing.
Marco:
So I'm a little curious, because I struggle with this.
Marco:
What is your buttering strategy?
Marco:
Because the problems I have with waffle buttering are, A, like, you could make an argument that you actually kind of don't need the butter, but I like it better.
Casey:
I think it's...
Casey:
Sometimes waffles are just a butter delivery device.
Marco:
Yeah, I think they're way better with butter.
Marco:
Absolutely.
Marco:
But I have two challenges when trying to butter my waffles.
Marco:
Number one is the aforementioned heat capacity of a waffle is very low, or the specific heat, rather, of a waffle is very low, where it loses heat real fast, like faster than eggs.
Marco:
Waffles stay hot for two seconds and they're cold.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
you have a very small window in which to butter it before it's too cold to even melt the butter and then unpleasant to eat and then also the shape of a waffle is such that it's hard to spread butter through the pool in one of the holes and you're not going to get any butter right right so how casey you're hopeless john how do you butter a waffle effectively oh
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
I didn't even have a chance.
Marco:
I have a secret.
Marco:
Casey probably just sprays on margarine.
Marco:
He sprays on pan.
Casey:
There was a window of time in my life where I did use spray on butter, but this is not that window of time.
Casey:
Of course there was.
Casey:
No, the correct answer to this question, we don't even need John.
Casey:
We don't even need John to answer.
Marco:
I'm already using Kerrygold, which is great.
Marco:
Kerrygold because it's softer, it's grass-fed, it's great butter.
John:
Are you using the spreading tub kind?
John:
Sometimes.
John:
Not every time.
John:
Because that is softer than the sticks.
John:
We also have Kerrygold most of the time.
Casey:
So the correct answer to this question, which is something that Americans find barbaric, is to leave butter out and do not refrigerate it so it is not rock hard.
Casey:
Rejected.
Casey:
And then it is so much easier to spread.
John:
Especially when it gets that hard crust on it and the mouse is nibbled on the corner.
John:
It's great.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Stop it, you.
Casey:
It's not like I'm leaving it sitting just out there on the counter.
Casey:
It's covered.
Casey:
The point is it's room temperature.
Marco:
What Casey's buying is not real butter, so no animal wants it.
Casey:
No, we are buying real butter, you big jerks.
Casey:
Just trust me on this.
Casey:
Try leaving a little bit of butter sitting out for one.
John:
That's not – I mean, you don't have to do that to get that solution.
John:
There's a question.
John:
There's two parts of it.
John:
One, you can – even with the nonstick things, like I said, that you don't need to do any lubrication, you can put a pad of butter down on each thing for flavor, not for nonstickiness, and it will sort of butter-infuse the waffles –
John:
depending on if you're making homemade depending on the recipe lots of the recipes have melted butter in them sometimes too much melted butter so you can you can balance the butteriness before you even get it to your plate and start considering putting butter on top of it because if you if the if the waffle itself is more buttery you're less reliant on getting butter evenly smeared and then for the for the spreading of the butter on i have one technique that's gross the casey might like and then i have like basically
John:
The basic thing is like if you just leave the butter out while you're cooking and preparing it, it will be soft enough.
John:
And the Kerrygold tub stuff is softer than the sticks.
John:
So you can basically do the, you know, the thing that you should never do with the stick.
John:
If you do this with a stick, you should feel bad where you scrape.
John:
Do not scrape the stick.
John:
Scraping the stick is bad, and you should be punished for scraping someone's butter stick.
John:
But if you get the tub, the tub is meant for scraping.
John:
So if you get Kerrygold in the tub, which is already softer, you can scrape and end up with these big shaving things, and those can spread very easily because they're already very thin, and you can get lots of coverage.
John:
But in the end, you're right.
John:
It's not going to spread as easily as it does on a pancake.
John:
Whipped butter is a way that you can help with that.
John:
I'd rather not have.
John:
whipped butter on my my pancakes now the gross thing that casey would probably like it maybe there's something i did as a kid so as a kid on long island they had diners which is another thing that we have on long island that are the new york metro area that they don't have much of us but we had diners and we'd go there like every sunday after church and we eat diner food which is ridiculous and expense ridiculously inexpensive unlimited quantities of breakfast food and what i would usually get because i was a teenager and had unlimited capacity for calories is i would get a
John:
I would get a waffle, two fried eggs, bacon, sausage, Canadian bacon, and sometimes one other kind of eggs or a pancake.
John:
And what I would do is make a slurry of maple syrup and butter and dip the sausage into that.
John:
slurry and also dip the pancakes into that slurry because then when you're dipping like you get each you don't have to worry about did i spread the butter onto all the thing or did i cool it down too much you take the waffle that is as warm as it's going to be because you haven't put anything cold on it yet you take a piece and you dip it into the maple syrup butter slurry which i admit is gross but if you haven't had maple syrup butter slurry on breakfast sausage in a diner on long island you are missing out
Casey:
Oh, I'm sure everyone's going to get right on that, John.
Casey:
No, I don't find that to be gross.
Casey:
I find it to be weird, but not gross.
Casey:
But I think part of the fun of having a waffle is the inexact nature of it and the fact that there's going to be some pockets in the waffle that are just going to be pools of butter and some that are going to be butterfree.
Casey:
And it's that...
Casey:
The fact that it varies between bites is something that appeals to me.
Casey:
So I understand what you're saying, Marco, that having uniform butter distribution is extremely difficult.
Casey:
But I say you just lean into the fact that it is not uniform and will never be and just enjoy the randomness.