First of All, It’s Easy
Marco:
Casey has just seen the modern version of Skype for the first time, like the one that the rest of us have been seeing for like six months or something.
Casey:
It is hilariously bad, just truly hilariously bad.
Casey:
The entire window is one humongous pane of blue that shows Marco's floating head until I mouse over it, and then I get a whole bunch of what the cool designer kids called fabs.
Casey:
Are you familiar with this trend, Marco?
Yeah.
Marco:
No, not like silicon manufacturing production facilities, but like something else?
Casey:
No, floating action buttons, Marco.
Casey:
It's the new cool thing.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
So when I hover and get all these round things, that's what these are?
Marco:
These have a name, not just badly implemented buttons?
Casey:
And guess where I heard it first starting?
Casey:
Google.
Casey:
of course remember remember kids material design is where it's at anyway so why are our heads in fabs that aren't buttons that look identical to the buttons except they have our heads in them oh it's so this is truly heinous and why is john's head floating in the middle of the screen while your head is up on the upper right next to mine well see you're you're my floaty guy title and john is just relegated to the corner
Marco:
And also, didn't the previous version indicate to you who was talking?
Marco:
Yes, that's correct.
Marco:
So if you were on some big conference call with a bunch of people you didn't know, you could tell who's talking, which is really nice.
Casey:
On the plus side, I can show you a red heart, which I'm doing right now.
Marco:
Oh, yes.
Marco:
There's a red heart on top of your fab.
Marco:
Yes, indeed.
Marco:
Can I put a middle finger on top of mine?
Marco:
it's a thumbs up i can only do a thumbs up why you know jelly just sent me a text message which makes a good point why aren't we trying like group facetime or something it's i don't know inertia this is proven we know this works it's the kind of thing that like it's like why don't you try you know new toilets in your house it's like it's just you know this is serving a function for us that we need to just work and we're not that interested in exploring a bunch of other things like we just need this to work
Marco:
Well, welcome to the same hell that the rest of us have been in for some time.
Marco:
I'm glad you were able to get to avoid it for this long.
Marco:
At least be thankful for that.
Casey:
Yeah, the only reason I upgraded, or I don't know if this is really an upgrade, side graded, downgraded?
Casey:
Updated, at least.
Casey:
Yeah, updated is probably a better word.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
The only reason I did is because the old Skype that actually made some amount of sense was pegging my CPU on my 5K iMac anytime it was open.
Casey:
And so I figured, okay, I might as well just bite this bullet.
Casey:
And wow, do I regret it.
Marco:
Must have been your third-party Ram.
Marco:
Here we go again.
Casey:
Welcome to the 300th episode, everyone.
Casey:
We are recording our 300th episode, and we are going to skip follow-up unbeknownst to John for a few minutes and mention that this is the 300th episode.
Casey:
How have you two been able to stick with me for this long?
Casey:
And more importantly, how have we not killed each other?
Marco:
Yeah, that's kind of impressive.
Marco:
By the way, I should just claim right up front, I have a cold and my voice is going.
Marco:
So I sound worse already, and I might sound worse as the 300th episode spectacular goes on.
Marco:
We will find out.
Marco:
Anyway, so that aside, I think part of the reason why this has worked so well for so long for us
Marco:
First of all, it's easy.
Marco:
All three of us have no trouble talking tech.
Marco:
There has never been a week out of 300 weeks that we have not had enough to talk about or that we have had trouble filling the time.
Marco:
So that's part of it.
Marco:
Part of it is that all of the practical stuff, the technical stuff, the scheduling stuff, all pretty much works out.
Marco:
The three of us are all within the same time zone.
Marco:
We all have really good, solid internet connections.
Marco:
Seriously, no, you laugh, but when you're doing a podcast with somebody for a long time, that kind of stuff matters, right?
Marco:
We never have severe technical problems.
Marco:
Even John's Mac Pro has not lost more than one recording.
Marco:
so like you know so all the technical stuff is good but you know ultimately you know we're friends and we talk well together and I think we have good chemistry like I don't think it's boasting for us to say this and so I think you know we just we like bsing with each other and you like listening that's all that really matters you know like everything else is secondary
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Casey:
And as the chief mush of the three of us, the chief emotional one of the three of us, self-anointed, I should add, I would just like to say that it is our tremendous pleasure, the three of us, to be able to do this at all, much less be compensated for it, much less be compensated for it.
Casey:
reasonably well for it so um it is because of all the listeners who listen to us who spread the word about the show who buy our t-shirts and and other merchandise who who do itunes reviews which we haven't talked about in like 200 episodes but that's still i guess maybe counts uh but anyway it is because of all of you that that we are able to do this and enjoy doing this and and you know there wouldn't be ask atp without you there really wouldn't be atp without you so if you are listening to the words coming out of my mouth right now then thank you
Casey:
because it is because of all of you that we are able to do this.
Marco:
Well, there would be ATP without them.
Marco:
It would just be a once-a-year show of the three of us BSing in the WVDC keynote line with each other.
Casey:
Which is arguably how this all started.
John:
That would be a long episode.
John:
That was a lot of reminiscing.
John:
I put the item in the list here for episode 300.
John:
We normally don't do anything for occasions, and I plan on doing anything for this occasion.
John:
But I figured this was a good time for me to reflect on what I always reflect on when we have anniversaries.
John:
But this time I actually looked up some information about it.
John:
And that is the fact that we have been surprisingly very, very consistent.
John:
So our first episode was released on February 7th, 2013.
John:
That was five years, nine months, and approximately eight days after you're probably listening to this.
John:
2,107 days ago.
John:
And I looked up our release schedule and we released that first episode, which if you don't know the origin of the show, like it's in the song, but kind of, um, but it was actually was an accidental show.
John:
We were doing neutral as car podcast and we talked about tech like after the episode of neutral was over and those sort of neutral after shows about tech and
John:
became the first episodes of accidental tech podcast so the first episode was like 36 minutes or something ridiculous like that long because it was just an after show for another podcast so we released that and then there was a two-week gap and then we released episode two and that two-week gap was like i don't know we were just figuring out this is a thing we're gonna do or like i don't even remember do any of you remember why there was a two-week gap
Marco:
Well, the first episode was on SoundCloud.
Marco:
We didn't even have a website or anything because we didn't think it would be a thing.
Marco:
We kept the recording going after Neutral and talked about tech in a way that maybe our audience would want to hear.
Marco:
Let's just put it up somewhere and see what people think.
Casey:
down, though, because if my recollection serves me and I have a terrible memory, that wasn't we that decided that.
Casey:
That was 100% Marco that decided to just throw this up on SoundCloud.
Casey:
You probably ran it by us.
Casey:
It's not that you did it in a nefarious way.
Casey:
But either way, it was because of your insight that you put that up on SoundCloud.
Casey:
You're absolutely right about that.
Casey:
And I don't I thought it was like three or four episodes before we really realized, oh, this is what we should have been doing this whole time.
Casey:
And this car stuff while entertaining to the three of us is really not our bread and butter.
Marco:
Yeah, like I'm pretty sure it only took until the second episode before we had outdone neutrals traffic.
John:
like it was real quick yeah so that but anyway the release schedule according to our rss feed which may or may not reflect the actual schedule of the way things dribbled up we have that two-week gap but after that two-week gap between episode quote-unquote episode one which again was like very abbreviated in episode two after that from episode two through episode 300
John:
We have done one episode a week for five years, nine months, and eight days.
Casey:
That is ridiculous.
John:
And it doesn't mean that we do them all exactly on a Wednesday because we have vacations and we arrange things.
John:
So the bottom line is they're, you know, 52 weeks in a year and every year we're putting out 52 episodes for five years.
John:
The only exception being that little gap when the thing was getting started with the weird episodes at the beginning, which are totally weird.
John:
Like the people who go back and listen to episode one, A, I salute you, and B, boy, it must be really weird.
Yeah.
John:
to hear the first episode so that that's one of the things i'm the most proud of then for for lack of a better name even though marco said this is easy our work ethic like yes it is easy but we all have lives and and you know other things going on and try doing anything every single week for five years and having any other kind of obligations let alone you know families and kids and
John:
in my case, another job to go to and all the other stuff.
John:
So, um, that's it.
John:
That's all I wanted to, uh, to mention, uh, to give her, you know, we're already up our own butts about this whole thing to give ourselves a pat on the back about the fact that we've done a thing every single week for five years.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm very proud of that.
Marco:
And we cheat a little bit by like, you know, if there's a holiday or somebody's traveling, we will like double record one week and maybe, you know, release it like a little bit later.
John:
Yeah, but we're just trying to provide a consistent product.
John:
You know, 52 times a year, you'll get an ATP episode.
Marco:
So while we're in the mushy butts segment, I also just wanted to point out that this about, I don't know, about a year ago or something like that.
Marco:
this surpassed my previous longest job as this is now my longest job I've ever had.
Marco:
And this for five, for about, you know, five and three quarters years.
Marco:
Previously, Overcast is the runner up because I started Overcast only a few months after we started this show.
Marco:
It wasn't long yet, but I started working on it like roughly that June.
Marco:
So Overcast started, you know, roughly, you know, June, 2013.
Marco:
So that's about five and a half years.
Marco:
And then Instapaper was next longest.
Marco:
Tumblr was actually the least long until I go all the way back to my job in Pittsburgh.
Marco:
That was only two years.
Marco:
But Tumblr was a little over four.
Marco:
Instapaper was four and a half.
Marco:
Overcast, five and a half.
Marco:
And ATP, about five and three quarters.
Marco:
So this is my longest job I've ever had.
Marco:
And it's going to stay that way for a long time, probably, because Overcast started after it did.
Marco:
So yeah, it's pretty cool.
Casey:
You know, it just occurred to me, just this moment, that's true for me too.
Casey:
Because my longest stint was...
Casey:
When I first moved to Richmond, I worked for a company for four and change years or something like that.
Casey:
So I knew that this was the longest for you, and that's because, ha-ha, Marco always changes his job, ha-ha-ha.
Casey:
But actually, for me as well, it's the same story.
Casey:
It just occurred to me now.
Casey:
I never even realized that.
Casey:
Wow, that's wild.
John:
Got a while to go to catch up with me.
John:
I think I'm about double that in my current job.
Casey:
Oh, wow.
Casey:
That is a long time.
Casey:
It's a lot of pearl.
Casey:
It's a lot of pearl.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, you know, when we were realizing, when we had come to the realization that we were approaching episode 300, we all kind of looked at each other, well, as much as you can inside a Slack chat room, but we all looked at each other and said kind of,
Casey:
Are we going to do anything?
Casey:
And in typical ATV fashion, the answer was basically no.
Casey:
But I was trying to rack my brain for something.
Marco:
I did something.
Marco:
I looked up things.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
I computed all of these job durations.
Casey:
Well, and my contribution to not recognizing this 300th episode and not making it that spectacular is I wanted to ask you to...
Casey:
What is your favorite episode or perhaps moment that you can think of in the run?
Casey:
And this came from me thinking, not that I necessarily wanted to do a clip show, but it would be fun to have gotten a handful of clips from years past and handed them to Marco to staple in.
Casey:
We are not doing that because...
Marco:
we're not but actually so it actually crossed my mind like wouldn't it be funny to make like a clip show as a joke really and then I realized like that would actually be way more work for me exactly you know like when like a TV show makes a clip show it's it's great because like they don't have to like have all the actors come in and shoot new scenes it's way less work for them because they can just have a couple interns going through clips and pulling things together whereas like when you are the editor of the podcast a clip show is actually way more work for you than it is to just record a new episode
Casey:
Exactly right.
Casey:
So we're not going to do a clip show, but I ask and I will start with Marco.
Casey:
What is your favorite episode or perhaps a moment from the show that at least sitting here today?
Casey:
Maybe maybe change your mind.
Casey:
But sitting here now, what was your favorite episode?
Marco:
Oh, easy.
Marco:
Windows of Syracuse County.
Casey:
Why do you say that?
Marco:
it was i i think it was it not only was it incredibly entertaining but it revealed it was like the best kind of thing it's like i don't even remember what the rest of the episode was about i don't care it's just the after show like it was it was revealing after show i thought that was a topic
John:
No, I think it was the after show.
John:
We have no idea what happened in the show.
John:
There's so many episodes to remember.
Marco:
I'm sure we'll get corrections.
Marco:
As a listener of shows like the kind we listen to and hopefully the kind we make, I care much more about
Marco:
the people, then the topics.
Marco:
And my favorite moments of podcasts are when the people have a really funny moment with themselves where their chemistry just works really well together and they uncover something crazy about another host or one another and they all laugh about it.
Marco:
That's not an uncommon pattern.
Marco:
That happens a lot on the kind of shows that we make, the kind of unscripted shows with friends talking.
Marco:
But
Marco:
And I think that was one of our moments when we discovered the way John runs his windowing on his computer and quite the extent of which that happens.
Marco:
I think that was a moment for our show.
Marco:
It was my favorite as the host of the show.
Marco:
And I've heard a lot from listeners that it was their favorite as well.
Marco:
So that to me is probably my favorite moment.
Marco:
John?
John:
It's tricky.
John:
Like, as a listener, I bet listeners to the show have different favorite episodes than we as hosts do.
John:
I'm trying to think of favorite episodes slash moments.
John:
One of my favorite moments, which probably does not rate for highly in listeners' minds, is...
John:
Our first live show when the audience sang the song, I thought that was pretty cool.
John:
A lot of people don't like our live shows, and they're definitely different than our regular shows.
John:
And if you're not at the live show, I can kind of see where you're coming from.
John:
It's like, well, can I just have a regular episode?
John:
And there's all this weird audience noise, and the shows are shorter, and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And honestly, I don't know how it's like to be there, but I can tell you to be the person doing the live show and to have the audience sing your theme song.
John:
That's really cool.
John:
So for me personally, that was a really cool moment.
John:
And my honorable mention in top four fashion is this is kind of a, in typical Marco fashion, is not actually an episode, but a category of episodes.
John:
And again, this is just strictly as a host.
John:
And so like occasionally I'll have
John:
I guess there's a typical day at work or whatever, work and family stuff, right?
John:
And at the end of my long day, I have an episode of ATP.
John:
And I know sometimes it can seem like, oh, you've had a full day and now you have to sit down and record.
John:
You have to keep working.
John:
There's more stuff that you have to do, right?
John:
And then right after that, you're going to go to bed.
John:
It can feel like a very full day.
John:
But my favorite kinds of episodes are the ones where I had a crappy day or just...
John:
a tiring day.
John:
And then we do an ATP.
John:
And by the end of the ATP, like I feel better.
John:
Like, you know, it's not usually not that impressive of an episode, but we just had a good time.
John:
We talked about, we talked about fun things.
John:
Like it cheers me up at the end of the day.
John:
Like those are my favorite kinds of episodes for me as a host is when just had just a grind of a normal day.
John:
And, you know, maybe I'm not even looking forward to doing like, oh, I got to do a podcast.
John:
By the end of the episode, I go to bed happy.
John:
Those are my favorite kinds of episodes where like the additional quote unquote work I have to do that day actually makes the whole rest of the day better.
John:
And I have a surprising amount of those.
John:
Sometimes it makes it hard to go to sleep at the end of it because I'm like happy and jazzed about whatever it is we talked about it again.
John:
I don't know if those are the episodes that end up being favorites of the people listening.
John:
But as the person who does the episodes, I really like that.
Casey:
All right, so to answer my own question, I have two honorable mentions because I also listen to top four.
Casey:
Honorable mention number one was the two minutes that just happened because now I'm all misty-eyed, and that's adorable, and I love you, John.
Casey:
But my other honorable mention actually is exactly what John said when the audience sang to us.
Casey:
Was it 2017?
Casey:
It was not this year.
Marco:
That was the WWDC 2017 show.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
That was, like, on the one side, I think all three of us kind of expected it to happen, but actually witnessing it happening was bananas, was utterly bananas and extremely, extremely cool.
Casey:
And to be in front of a thousand people that are genuinely jazzed to see you and your two really, really good friends is a really messed up feeling in the best possible way that I don't know how to describe.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
That is a true honorable mention.
Casey:
But if I had to choose only one moment, I can tell you off the top of my head, it is the end of episode 96, which is called The Windows of Syracuse County.
Casey:
Because as Marco said, my recollection anyway, and this was a couple of years ago now, but my recollection is that I was literally crying.
Casey:
I was laughing so hard.
Casey:
listening to john and and ribbing john and and and just all everything about in marco and i going back and forth in in various states states of utter disbelief utter hilarity and like almost anger that john was defending himself with this and you have to understand that um what was john the episode of hypercritical that involves syracuse county do you remember off the top of your head bridges of
Casey:
Okay, there you go.
Casey:
Right, right, right.
Casey:
Okay, because it was Madison County and knockoff on Madison County.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
And so because of that episode, Bridges of Syracuse County, for the longest time, every single... And this actually still kind of happens sometimes.
Casey:
And that was episode 15.
Casey:
Holy smokes.
Casey:
I didn't realize it was that early in Hypercritical's run.
Casey:
So anyway, so episode 15 of Hypercritical was Bridges of Syracuse County.
Casey:
And so every time we had somebody in the chat room...
Casey:
suggesting titles for all of these ATPs.
Casey:
For 95 episodes, they would always come up with something of Syracuse County titles.
Casey:
To the point that I coded the show bot to give a snarky reply about, oh, you can do better than that, anytime somebody suggested that.
Casey:
And at the end of episode 96, it was clear, at least to Marco and I, if I remember correctly, that we had no choice.
Casey:
but to use a Syracuse County title.
Casey:
And our agreement, if I recall correctly, Marco, was that this is the one and only time that will ever happen, and it will never happen again for the rest of the run.
Casey:
And I stand by that decision because, oh my word, that episode is great.
Casey:
And if you haven't heard it, you need to go listen to it.
Marco:
Yeah, I firmly stand by that we made the right call that if we're going to ever do this once, this is the time to do it.
Marco:
And sure enough, almost four years later, that was still the right call.
Marco:
I would also say, now that I know that it's okay to recommend topics instead of just episodes, my favorite type of diversion is the food diversion.
Casey:
Yes, I have concluded that as well.
John:
This is a recent trend.
John:
I don't know if we're all hungry because we're on diets now.
John:
It's coming up on this show.
Marco:
Well, it's great because all three of us feel very strongly about food and cooking and how we make things and what is good.
Marco:
At the same time, though, our taste in those things and our opinions of those things have fairly little overlap.
Marco:
And so it's a very, very good area for us to go into.
Marco:
And the audience seems to enjoy it quite a bit as well.
Marco:
So it isn't just us who like it.
Marco:
They're all on diets, too.
John:
I had a young person at work ask me today what Sicilian pizza was, if you want to know what kind of day I had.
LAUGHTER
John:
I pulled up a picture on the internet of my favorite pizza in the entire world, which happens to be Sicilian.
John:
I said, it's this.
Casey:
So, okay, I'm going to bite.
Casey:
Tell me why Sicilian is not just deep dish, man.
Casey:
Because it's not.
John:
It's nothing like deep dish.
John:
What are you talking about?
John:
Well, first of all, it's square.
John:
No, that's not the major difference.
John:
The major difference is it's not a giant, weird cornmeal bucket filled with sauce and cheese.
John:
I don't even know what you're talking about.
John:
It's not that.
John:
It's not even... Have you had deep dish pizza and have you had Sicilian?
John:
They're not the same thing.
Casey:
No, they're not at all the same.
Marco:
See, I don't think I've had deep dish, at least not like proper Chicago deep dish.
Marco:
I have had Sicilian a lot, though, and I like it.
Marco:
But it is a lot of bread.
Marco:
There's so much more dough in it that you fill up on so much bread so fast.
John:
Finding good Sicilian is really difficult because you can screw it up very badly.
John:
But my favorite pizza in the world happens to be Sicilian, not because from two particular places all around.
John:
But I don't think I've had Sicilian that I like almost any place else.
Casey:
That's odd to me that a true-to-form, proud New Yorker would enjoy a pizza that does not require it to be folded.
Casey:
You can't fold it.
Casey:
I know that's my point.
Casey:
But to me, you would know a New Yorker because they immediately fold their pizza whether or not they really need to.
Casey:
But this, to your point, you are not folding a Sicilian pizza.
Casey:
It is not happening.
Marco:
See, I actually don't fold my pizza.
Marco:
You're from Ohio.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
But even once I learned the way of the fold, I don't do it because when you fold it, the little crease in the back becomes a dripping spout of grease.
John:
That's where the orange grease comes out.
Marco:
Right, and I don't like getting my hands greasy or anything like that, so there's a high risk of hand greasiness if you fold it.
Marco:
It's much lower if you don't.
Marco:
As Merlin would say, you're a fancy duchess.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
All right, well, anyway, we can stop navel-gazing.
John:
We just did it again.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
But no, thank you to the listeners one more time for indulging us, not only just over these last few minutes, but over the... Somebody should add up exactly how much time all these 300 episodes have added up to be, because...
Casey:
Oh, my word.
Casey:
We've talked to each other for a lot.
Casey:
And and I am very proud of the work we've done.
Casey:
I'm very proud of our work ethic because, you know, like John was saying, it takes some pretty significant scheduling hurdles and gymnastics in order to get this stuff done, especially over summertime, where it has come to my conclusion that the three of us are extremely talented at picking.
Casey:
not overlapping times to go on vacation, because especially I think this past summer, it was basically three straight weeks that one of us was going to be gone and in a position where recording would be very uncool.
Casey:
So it isn't that hard in the grand scheme of things, but it's hard.
Casey:
And I'm proud of us and I'm proud of our listeners for sticking with us.
Casey:
And I appreciate all of our listeners for sticking with us.
Casey:
And thank you.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Change the Terms.
Marco:
Visit changetheterms.org to learn more.
Marco:
Following the deadly events of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017, the tech industry finally started to take real steps to address the spread of hate speech online and the ways their platforms are used to organize, fund, and recruit for white supremacists and other hateful movements.
Marco:
Transcription by CastingWords
Marco:
The coalition has shared these policies with tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
Marco:
The corporate policies that changed the terms developed are intended to help internet companies reduce hateful activities that are taking place on their platforms.
Marco:
By implementing and following these policies, tech companies can help stop the spread of hateful activities via social media, web hosting, and online financial transactions.
Marco:
Change the Terms is asking internet users to call on tech giants like Facebook, Google, and Twitter to lead the industry in stopping online hate.
Marco:
To learn more and to help out, visit changetheterms.org.
Marco:
Once again, visit changetheterms.org to learn more.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Change the Terms for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
We should probably do some follow up.
Casey:
And let's start with Apple making a MacBook Air with a display battery replacements easier so that it no longer requires replacing the top case.
Casey:
How excellent is that?
Casey:
Do you want to tell us about this, John?
John:
You look at the iFixit teardown of the new MacBook Air.
John:
It's got some interesting things in there.
John:
Of course, iFixit's whole position is they want everything to be repairable.
John:
And Apple's position for the past several years is they don't care about that.
John:
So they would make these devices, obviously the phones and the other iOS devices, but even the Macs.
John:
Sealed up with no room to spare for anything and lots of components glued inside it or lots of components combined together into a single thing.
John:
We talked a lot about replacing the...
John:
Any part of the keyboard, one of the 2016 and 2017 and probably also 2018 MacBook Pros, that you had to replace the entire top case.
John:
You couldn't just replace the keyboard part of it because everything was all glued together.
John:
So the new 2018 MacBook Air has some interesting developments sort of reverting to a simpler time of Apple laptop design.
John:
where the batteries are yeah okay so there's still there's lots of things that are still glued in there like the speakers and the batteries but they're on these little uh i don't know how to describe it but you guys know those 3m strips where you can like put a hook on the wall but they know that you're gonna have to take it off because like command strips the apartment yeah whatever um
John:
And there's a little there's a little pull tab at the bottom of it.
John:
And you pull like there's adhesive on the back and you stick it to the wall.
John:
But there's a little dangly bit of the adhesive that hangs down.
John:
You grab that little dangly bit and pull it stretches the adhesive out.
John:
And in the course of stretching it out, it lets it disengage from the wall in theory without damaging the wall.
John:
So a whole bunch of the components, including the batteries and the speakers inside the MacBook Air, have these little pull tabs on them, which is way better than the thing being glued down there and having to like pry it up or melt the glue.
John:
Like they're designed with the knowledge that, look, you might need to replace a battery on this.
John:
And actually the MacBook Air has two batteries, one on each side of the laptop.
John:
that you can replace individually same thing with the speaker assemblies um they've done this for a while uh but i noted in the mac fixer thing as well that the ports like the things the precious few ports that are even in this thing are all on secondary circuit boards so if someone jams something into one of your usbc ports or someone breaks off the headphone thing and the precious headphone jack is on the side or whatever you don't need to replace the entire motherboard such as it is you
John:
You just need to replace this tiny, tiny little daughter card that's connected by a ribbon cable to everything else.
John:
Lots of Apple laptops have done that for a while.
John:
And just in general, the ability to get into the thing and take pieces out and replace them is better than it has been in the past.
John:
And this is especially impressive considering that the MacBook Air is not a roomy machine.
John:
It's not like, well, this is the big one where there's tons of room.
John:
No, it's very skinny and things are very tightly packed, but it is better designed for repairability than the other ones.
John:
So I thought that was worth noting because it is a trend in the right direction.
John:
That also brings up a secondary topic.
John:
This is based on some conversations I think people have been having in Slack lately and elsewhere.
John:
Like how the MacBook Air that we see now, is this a product that was started many years ago and it has finally come out?
John:
Or is this a product that was created in haste based on feedback from the beginning in 2015 line of laptops?
John:
Obviously, Apple's never going to tell us.
John:
But looking at the inside of the thing,
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm thinking there are some things to suggest that this was not a hastily slapped together laptop.
John:
But there are also things to suggest that its design reflects feedback received from the 2015, 2016, and maybe even 2017 years of MacBook Pro.
John:
So...
John:
i'm you know i i like the trend is in the right direction and i'm not sure which would be more reassuring if this was hastily assembled based on poor sales of the macbook escaped or if this was a three or four year project that just happened to come out when it did i like to believe that it was a longer running project and they merely incorporated feedback into it as it was being developed but
John:
Again, we'll find out in 50 years when people write their tell-all books.
John:
If they can still remember what the heck happened because we can't even remember what happened five years ago on our show.
Marco:
I'm one of the people who thinks that they probably started this about two years ago.
Marco:
When it became clear that the reactions to the MacBook Pro line that launched two years ago were not as positive as they wanted them to be because this does incorporate a lot of feedback from those.
Marco:
It is improved from those in a number of ways while still being one of those generation machines.
Marco:
You know, I don't think back then Apple thought they had to replace the MacBook Air.
Marco:
I think they thought the new MacBook Pros would eventually come down in price and be able to get cheap models to replace it.
Marco:
And that kind of happened with this new one.
Marco:
Like, it's kind of that, but, you know, kind of not.
Marco:
And so I think I'm very happy to see these design updates.
Marco:
It's not major in the sense that it doesn't have things I wanted.
Marco:
It doesn't have a new keyboard.
Marco:
It doesn't have more ports or the return of a card reader or anything like that.
Marco:
So this is not a machine that is ideal for me.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I got to say, people do seem to be liking it a lot, and liking it a lot more than they have liked, say, the MacBook Escape, which is very similar.
Marco:
As I talked about before with this machine, on paper, if you weren't buying the MacBook Escape for some reason, I don't see why that reason still applies, and all of a sudden people want to, or it doesn't apply, and all of a sudden people want to buy this who didn't want to buy that, but they do.
Marco:
And over the weekend, I was in a store a couple times, and I got to pick one up and play with it for a little bit longer.
Marco:
And you know, I got to say, it does feel a lot better.
Marco:
Like, I've been carrying around the 13-inch MacBook Pro for a while now, which is very similar.
Marco:
It's only a quarter pound heavier, and it's a little bit thicker at the front.
Marco:
You know, it doesn't have the wedge shape.
Marco:
But the Air feels better.
Marco:
Like, the difference in how good it feels is
Marco:
is bigger than you would expect like when you when you're carrying it when you're holding it when you're using it it really is a nicer feeling computer than my 13-inch macbook pro and there's a few reasons a few areas a lot of it just comes down to the size like how easy it is to pick up off the table you know john's favorite argument it's you know it's super great picking it off the table you know opening and closing one-handed it it just it feels the wedge feels really nice um
Marco:
If you remember, I had a very obscure complaint with the 13-inch MacBook Pro, which I think applies to all the 2016 and forward MacBook Pro models, where the ridge under the left and right front side of the case, which I believe is an intake vent, there's a ridge on both sides.
Marco:
And when you pick up the laptop, your fingers go into that ridge and it's sharp.
Marco:
And it feels pretty unpleasant to actually hold the laptop by those edges.
Marco:
The MacBook Air doesn't have those ridges.
Marco:
It's a totally different design on the bottom.
Marco:
And so I found it really nice and really pleasant to pick up and carry around and use the MacBook Air in ways that the 13-inch and 15-inch touch bar models don't feel that nice.
Marco:
So I can see why people like this thing, even though it's not completely rational or not completely based on specs, because the specs, I think, aren't a very good deal for the money.
Marco:
What a lot of reviewers are finally noting is that the screen is also a lot less bright.
Marco:
It's only 300 nits instead of 500 compared to the MacBook Pro.
Marco:
So it's not a very bright screen.
Marco:
It is a nice screen, but it's not a bright screen.
Marco:
It's pretty slow.
Marco:
It's roughly MacBook class.
Marco:
And reviewers are saying that you hear the fan spin up a lot when it's working hard.
Marco:
And because it's MacBook class, that's often.
Marco:
And so there's reasons why it will remind you it's a low-end machine.
Marco:
But it does seem really nice.
Marco:
And so I'm understanding now a little bit better why people who didn't like the Escape or 13-inch Pro like the Air, even though on paper it doesn't make sense.
John:
We have ours here now as well.
John:
And I've been using it.
John:
And if I don't think about the price, it's nice.
John:
Having Touch ID with no touch bar is really nice.
John:
It seems nice and quick.
John:
The wedge shape, to your point about it feeling nice, I talked a lot about this over the past year or so, but the wedge shape really is a perceptual thing that makes the thing feel nice.
John:
It's different and better and familiar to people who like the MacBook Air.
John:
And I was replacing a 2011 MacBook Air with the 2018 one, so it all fits together.
John:
Well, I like the fact that it's smaller length and width-wise than the 2011 that it's replacing.
John:
but that it has an equal screen, more or less, if you run it in non-native res, which is still a bit of a sore point.
John:
Yeah, it looks like a machine that's well put together.
John:
I really wish it had more ports.
John:
I really wish it didn't have this keyboard.
John:
We already talked about this before, but in the grand scheme of things, it is...
John:
a reasonable, what we hope is the last gasp of this particular laptop design with some changes internally that I hope continue on into the future laptop designs, all that stuff about command strip, pull tabs on all the stuff and being able to replace pieces individually.
John:
Uh, you know, and that's, that's all good.
Marco:
Yeah, especially for the MacBook Air line.
Marco:
I mentioned when we were talking about this new model, the MacBook Air needs to be especially serviceable and especially rugged and durable because it is used so often in places like schools where they're going to get beaten up.
Marco:
A lot of kids use them.
Marco:
A lot of careless adults use them.
Marco:
Or they use it in environments that are just difficult environments.
Marco:
And
Marco:
That's why I think the butterfly keyboard is still a huge problem on this machine.
Marco:
But other than that, that is now my only complaint about this machine.
Marco:
Everything else seems like they really addressed the needs of the MacBook Air market pretty well, at least as well as modern Apple could have.
Marco:
Also, by the way, I find the gold color really fascinating on this thing.
Marco:
Between the website and the press hands-on area and seeing it in stores, in a couple different stores now...
Marco:
This color looks different every time I see it.
Marco:
It kind of floats between gold and orange and a little bit salmon-y pink, and I have no idea what to call this color, but if I was at all into the goldish hues of things, I would love this color.
Marco:
Unfortunately, I'm not, but it's a really fascinating case color.
Casey:
So I have a really random question with regard to the MacBook Air.
Casey:
It is clear that since it has no touch bar, that that is a concession.
Casey:
And I would guess it is almost certainly because of cost.
Casey:
But it does have Touch ID.
Casey:
So do you view this keyboard layout, so do you view the presence really of Touch ID as a concession that the touch bar isn't perfect?
Casey:
Or do you think it is strictly and only a financial problem?
John:
Just cost.
Marco:
I think what will answer that question for us is when there is a next generation of MacBook Pros, do we get this option?
Marco:
Or is this all that we get?
Marco:
Is the touch bar totally gone from them?
Marco:
Or does it become optional replaced with this as one of the other options?
Marco:
And we don't know yet.
Marco:
And honestly, I wouldn't bet on that happening.
Marco:
It does seem like Apple is really in on the touch bar, even though many of us are not.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think in this model, it's very likely to just be cost.
Marco:
And even if they could have put it in there and maintain pretty good margins otherwise, I think they probably didn't put it in for market segmentation reasons.
Marco:
Like the touch bar, whether or not it costs them extra money, it is used to justify higher prices on the higher end models.
Marco:
So if they put it on the lower end models, that removes a key difference from them, and that makes the pricing jump less justifiable to customers.
Casey:
Yeah, that's a fair point.
Casey:
Also, some real-time follow-up on command strips.
Casey:
You will never guess, particularly Marco, what the URL for the command strips is, what hostname it is.
Casey:
It is command.com.
Marco:
Oh, man.
Casey:
How does that make you feel from like 15, 20 years ago?
Casey:
I thought I was going to say command.strip.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
No, it's a Windows reference, not a Mac OS reference.
Marco:
Actually, it's a DOS reference.
Casey:
A DOS, yeah, right.
Casey:
So how about them apples?
Marco:
Unfortunately, autoexec.bat is not a valid DLD.
Casey:
What about config.sys?
Casey:
Anyway, tell me, one of you who put this in the show notes, about Mac Pro going ARM in 2020.
John:
This is actually related to our moments ago musing about the timelines associated with the MacBook Air.
John:
So this quandary that I brought up a couple of shows ago about the new Mac Pro coming and Apple ever more strongly signaling that they're going to put ARM chips in Macs because the ARM chips are awesome and they would work really well in Macs as the primary CPU, that is.
John:
the mac pro like okay well the mac pro is coming they said it's coming it's 2019 product uh will this be the last great intel based mac or will it be the first hopefully great arm based mac uh you know and there's me getting nervous about buying it because both cases have upsides and downsides obviously if it was the last great intel mac it's kind of weird to be buying the last of a generation but then it's kind of good to get just one more intel mac and if it's the first arm one it's like well was it going to run all my software how's it you know all sorts of other issues
John:
related to being ARM.
John:
So both of them are exciting and scary for various reasons.
John:
But the ARM thing, a lot of people say, well, how can they be ready to have an ARM Mac?
John:
Yes, I know we've been waiting two years for the Mac Pro, but if they just decided two years ago that they're going to do a Mac Pro at all,
John:
That's not enough time to make a Mac Pro caliber ARM CPU and to make a new Mac and to ship it all.
John:
It's just not, right?
John:
And that makes sense, right?
John:
But in thinking about timelines, you have to remember the butterfly effect alternate timeline where the Mac Pro never existed and Apple never decided to make another one.
John:
And that timeline, which was our timeline for a long time,
John:
The iMac Pro was the only Pro Mac at the top end, the Pro Desktop Mac.
John:
The decision was, you know, two years ago, oh, actually, that's not enough.
John:
We have to make a proper Mac Pro with a separate display and all that other business, right?
John:
But before they made that decision,
John:
It is conceivable that they said we're going to do the ARM transition, and in 2019-ish, 2020-ish, we want to release our first Macs with ARM processors in them, and maybe one of them will be...
John:
at the high end so their plan could have been okay uh in 2019 to 2020 that's when we'll release the iMac pro with an ARM processor and that ARM processor could have been in the planning and design stage five years ago right so I feel like the decision to make a Mac pro is
John:
can be entirely separate from the much more distant past decision that apple made to bring a high-end arm chip out suitable for its high-end desktop computers and that you could you decide to make a mac pro it's not impossible that it could be arm provided that the previous plan was to bring out an arm imac pro so that's got me thinking more seriously about the prospect of the new mac pro being arm
John:
Whereas before, I couldn't think about it seriously at all because there's just not enough time to make it, you know, a Pro Caliber ARM processor.
John:
But if I just think, well, it's just going to use the one they would have otherwise used in the iMac Pro, and that one they started planning five or six years ago.
John:
That at least is conceivable.
John:
Is it true?
John:
Do we have anything to support it?
John:
No, I'm just musing or whatever.
John:
But I thought I would bring that up just because...
John:
It's something that I hadn't heard offered on this show or elsewhere, and it makes me start entertaining for real the idea of an ARM Mac Pro, even though I still think it's a distant second to the much more obvious choice of it just being, you know, the Xeon.
Casey:
Is there a particular preference that you have?
Casey:
You know, if they called you in and said, John, it's up to you.
Casey:
ARM or Intel, what are we doing?
John:
arm would definitely be more exciting and also you have to believe that arm would be faster at this point right like that if they did have a pro caliber you know 16 core arm cpu um but i'm scared about compatibility and i'm as weird as it would be to have like the last one of the last round of intel max uh
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'd probably be okay with it.
John:
I'm okay with either one.
John:
Like, they're both exciting for different reasons.
John:
I wouldn't be super disappointed.
John:
It's not like I wouldn't buy it if, like, Intel Mac Pro comes out and then, like, six months later, the, you know, the ARM MacBook Air comes out and it's amazing.
John:
I'm not going to mind about that.
John:
Like, I don't know.
John:
I don't feel like I have a strong preference.
John:
The ARM one is more technologically exciting, but the Intel one will probably be a more useful machine for longer.
John:
And I don't plan to keep my next computer for 10 years like I've kept this one.
John:
Like, it's never the plan.
John:
Five years, maybe.
John:
Three years, maybe.
John:
Ten years, no.
John:
That is never the plan.
John:
Just things have gone awry.
Marco:
One question I had about... I was thinking the other day, there was some interview... Oh, I think it was the Ars Technica interview of Anand LaShimpy and Phil Schiller talking about the A12X and how awesome it is.
Marco:
And I was wondering...
Marco:
They mention one of the reasons why iOS is able to be so fast is that it has unified memory architecture between the CPU and the GPU.
Marco:
It's just one bank of RAM, and it's very fast... One bank of very fast RAM that is fast enough to be video RAM that also uses the main CPU RAM.
Marco:
And that way, you know, like on...
Marco:
in PCs and Macs, the GPUs have their own separate banks of video RAM and you have to be shuffling data back and forth over these buses to get data from main memory or from the CPU to the GPU texture memory or video memory and vice versa if you do computation back and forth and everything.
Marco:
That shuffling data back and forth between main memory and video memory is a major performance bottleneck.
Marco:
There's a lot of effort that needs to go into optimizing for that when you're designing stuff that uses
Marco:
So I was wondering, in a situation where they go to ARM for Macs, would they go to a unified memory architecture also?
John:
No, like the old term for that, I wouldn't consider it a unified memory.
Marco:
I guess shared memory.
John:
Shared memory architecture is a pejorative term for it.
John:
It's like, oh, well, cheap computers can't afford to have dedicated VRAM, so they just share the RAM.
John:
For many years, that was the slam against the low-end Macs.
John:
It's like, ah, but you don't get dedicated VRAM.
John:
Right, because integrated GPUs usually do that.
John:
Right.
John:
They have to, because where else do they get, they don't have room for a bunch of VRAM, but... Well, some of them have their own RAM packages now, but... At the high end, like, you can buy GPUs with, like, what, 12 gigabytes of RAM of some of them just for the GPU, like, separate from the system memory, and... But those are, like, Mac Pro-level GPUs.
Marco:
Like, what do gamer ones have now, like, three or six?
John:
Yeah, a lot of it.
John:
But the other thing about the RAM that's dedicated next to the GPU is that it is designed differently than just generic memory.
John:
The bus widths are insane, right?
John:
So it can be accessed in parallel by a huge number of things in the GPU.
John:
Now, it's still true that getting information...
John:
to and from the cpu and main memory and stuff like is more of a pain but once you're there the gpu and its dedicated vram have a relationship that cannot be matched by the relationship that most cpus have to their their local ramp because the the vram and gpus and the whole bus architecture around it is specifically designed for gpus only and it doesn't have to uh keep up with all the demands that regular men there just has to be super wide and super high bandwidth and uh you know
John:
I think the simplification for the iOS devices is it's much easier to optimize for energy efficiency and for just in general dealing with bugs and optimizations when you have a single, simple, known architecture and you don't have to deal with, well, sometimes it's over here and sometimes it's over there and sometimes we have to ship between.
John:
But part of the point of metal, there are many purposes to metal, but one of them is
John:
Making more efficient use of the bandwidth between a CPU and a dedicated video card in terms of command sequences and how many times you have to communicate back and forth between the two areas.
John:
So I think on the high end, things are still going to necessarily be more complicated for a long time to come.
John:
On the lower end, obviously, I think, you know, Apple has shown that you can do a quote-unquote integrated GPU better than Intel has done it or better than Intel seems to want to do it because occasionally Apple has pushed Intel to put beefier integrated graphics, the whole Iris graphics architecture around its CPUs.
John:
Because Apple wanted better integrated GPUs that can do more of the stuff that at the time macOS needed to do with GPUs.
John:
Apple can do better still, as it's shown with its iOS devices.
John:
So I think on all but the highest of high end, Apple can do a pretty good job of its quote unquote integrated GPU being sufficient, you know.
John:
certainly through the whole MacBook line in the MacBook Air, maybe even well into the MacBook Pro line, especially with the ability to use external GPUs.
John:
They could just say, look, the new Pro way to do it is we give you a pretty awesome integrated GPU on your ARM MacBook Pro.
John:
And if you need something even beefier, then do eGPU.
John:
I think that is a reasonable position, and we'll have all the wins that you talked about in terms of simplification and optimization and battery life, hopefully, and all that other stuff.
John:
The prospect of an ARM Mac, again, looking at the new iPad Pros, the prospect of an ARM Mac has never been more...
John:
tantalizing and easy to see because if you look what they've been able to do in a completely fanless 5.6 millimeter thin slab it's like what could they do with a full laptop with a huge battery and two fans in it like the power would be unbelievable
Marco:
Well, see, that's why I think, you know, because the ARM designs would most likely – first of all, they would most likely lack Thunderbolt because Thunderbolt is an Intel technology.
Marco:
And I think Intel is now willing to license it, but – Money can fix that problem, like I said before.
Marco:
I believe in the power of money and Intel's need for that money.
Marco:
Well, sure.
Marco:
But, you know, they would lack Thunderbolt probably.
Marco:
at least at first, and they would also probably lack a lot of the huge, high-bandwidth PCI Express lane arrangements.
Marco:
I know internally I think modern iOS devices do have PCI Express, but I don't know if they would have so many lanes of it that they could offer Mac Pro-level bandwidth and throughput to things.
Marco:
That's why I think it is much more likely that the first ARM Macs start at the low end, especially the 12-inch MacBook seems like an obvious
John:
Yeah, I mean, they could have been making them for years already.
John:
You just look at the chips that are in the iOS device.
John:
You could take those and just slap them into a MacBook, and it would be unbelievable.
John:
So that's the obvious thing people expect.
John:
But I think the iPad Pro, the most recent one, showed me that they've got enough grunt now that already, with the things that they've released now today, are within striking distance if you just double the number of cores and increase the clock speed and put a fan and a big cooler on it.
John:
already within striking distance so i like again i'm just i'm just uh suggesting things that make me put it into the realm of possibility not that make me think that they're going to do it instead of you know a laptop because laptop is a much more obvious win what's also interesting to think about to me anyway is that i feel like we're starting to have these multi-headed laptops you know because the t2 chips the
Casey:
They're all ARM, like old A-whatever chips, aren't they?
Casey:
They're all old CPUs from like older Apple devices or very close to them, aren't they?
Marco:
Well, not quite, but they're – I think the T2 is like roughly an A10 in performance.
Marco:
It's not like – they didn't just literally take those chips unmodified, but I think architecturally I think it is roughly A10 class.
John:
Yeah, absolutely.
John:
The CPU cores, that's how they're classifying them.
John:
It's not an A10 system on a chip, but if you look at the CPU core part of it, it looks like the same architecture as the cores that were used in the A10.
Casey:
Yeah, so that has kind of come out of nowhere over the last couple of years, and it seems like the T-chips are taking on more and more and more of a role within Apple laptops.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
do they just kind of, you know, envelop them, you know, white blood cell style?
Casey:
Like all of a sudden there's no Intel chip left or the Intel chip is only for, you know, things that haven't been compiled for ARM, which I know it's not quite that simple, but just for the sake of discussion, you know, over time, does the T2 chip kind of just subsume and consume whatever the needs that Intel was previously serving?
Yeah.
John:
You've got such a big power budget inside a laptop.
John:
You can have the T2 and the regular system on a chip.
John:
You can combine them, but having them both is not entirely insane.
John:
I mean, it's a little bit insane.
John:
The thing is that the T2 is basically running the show in the new Mac architecture.
John:
It's the thing that starts the computer, and it's the thing that starts the Intel CPU.
John:
So it is the computer at this point, and the Intel CPU is basically the co-processor in terms of the
John:
secure a startup process and validating the images and doing all that stuff right so you know a cleaner architecture would be okay well now you go to the big hunkin arm cpu and the intel one is out of there and you just need one of those because you put all the different things that you need inside it whether on a system on a chip or on a you know uh you know a package with multiple uh dies inside it or whatever and there's no reason to have
John:
one dedicated little thing that starts up the computer in a secure way and kicks it off to the other thing you can just combine it into one but for practical reasons in the short term it may be more expedient to go with an arrangement with two arm chips the intel chips though the whole point is you got to get them out of there because they cost a lot of money and they use a lot of power and just they just need to get them out like we're all hoping that they'll be able to emulate uh intel on arm processors in some way that isn't super duper painful because that's kind of essential for the transition
John:
Real-time follow-up is an article.
John:
Someone just put in a link to remind us, and I think we talked about this on the show.
John:
This is from 2017, that Intel is making Thunderbolt 3 royalty-free.
John:
I don't know about the details of it.
John:
I think they mostly just mean in terms of if you want to make devices that use controller chips and stuff like that.
John:
Does it also mean if you're going to make host computers?
John:
Maybe.
John:
Anyway, the point is Intel is already opening up Thunderbolt more than they had in the past,
John:
Which means that they want it to be widely adopted, which means they're even more amenable to any kind of arrangement they might need with Apple.
John:
Again, if Apple says, we're not going to buy CPUs from you anymore, Intel, although they'll be cranky, is probably going to say, well, you'll still buy modems from us, right?
John:
Sell modem chips.
John:
Are you interested in licensing some sort of Thunderbolt controller chip or technology?
John:
Intel still needs to sell things, right?
John:
Once they've failed to change Apple's mind, they're not just going to go away and never have a relationship with Apple again.
John:
They still want to sell Apple stuff so they can make money and stay in business because Apple's got all the money.
John:
So I'm very hopeful about a continuing fruitful relationship between Intel and Apple in areas where it needs to exist.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks again to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So last week, Marco, you had a pre-release iPad Pro or review unit iPad Pro.
Casey:
Since then, John, did you buy any other new Apple hardware other than that MacBook Air?
John:
Nope, just MacBook Air.
John:
I haven't even seen the new iPads.
John:
I need to get to a store and look at them.
Casey:
Man, it's like you don't do homework for this show.
Casey:
Why don't you care about this show like Marco and I do?
John:
I'm busy.
John:
I got things to do.
Casey:
I have also purchased an iPad Pro.
Casey:
I've purchased an iPad for the first time.
Casey:
Well, actually, my most recent iPad Mini was a gift, so I haven't purchased an iPad since, gosh...
Casey:
I think the first Retina Mini, whenever that was, like 18 years ago.
Casey:
But I purchased an 11-inch iPad Pro, 256, cellular, space gray.
Casey:
I did get the smart keyboard folio, and I am glad that I wasn't paying close attention to how much it was because, holy Moses, what was it, $180 or something like that?
Casey:
Yeah, something like that, yeah.
Casey:
Hilariously expensive, actually depressingly expensive.
Casey:
I did not get a pencil because I don't think I really have a need for one and maybe I'll be convinced I'm wrong.
Casey:
Plus, you know, the holidays are coming up and that could be an expensive but useful gift.
Casey:
But I do have this iPad Pro.
Casey:
I did.
Casey:
Did I say it was cellular?
Casey:
It is cellular because even though I was planning not to go cellular this time.
Casey:
Eventually, Marco, amongst others, convinced me.
Casey:
Marco and Jason Snell especially convinced me that that was a poor choice.
Casey:
And certainly my own experience for buying iPads for the first few years is that when I didn't go cellular, I regretted it.
Casey:
So I did go cellular.
Casey:
People in the U.S., interesting tip.
Casey:
If you're cheap like me and don't want to add $10 or $20 monthly to your cell phone bill...
Casey:
T-Mobile actually allows you at least once, I don't know if it's more than once, to buy for $10 one time to buy, I think it's a five gig, five month pass.
Casey:
So it's like one of those, you know, I want it just for today and then it disappears, or I want it just for this week or this month and then it disappears, you know, a prepay plan.
Casey:
But T-Mobile offers you a 5 gig for 5 months for $10, which is, I think, an unbelievably good deal.
Casey:
And I am really excited about that.
Casey:
T-Mobile in the past had offered 200 megs for free every single month.
Casey:
which they don't do anymore, which is too bad.
Casey:
And because everyone will ask, why not tether to your phone?
Casey:
Because even with it being easy enough to just go into settings and say, tether to my own iPhone, please, that is still way more annoying than just having it built into the iPad.
Casey:
And yes, it is possible.
Casey:
And yes, I do still tether this to my phone from time to time, say if I'm watching a video or something like that.
Casey:
But Marco in private conversations with me and Jason Snell in private conversations with me were right.
Casey:
Having cellular is so much nicer.
Casey:
So that's what I bought.
Casey:
And I have some more impressions or some thoughts about it.
Casey:
But Marco, why don't you tell us what you've learned since we spoke last week?
Marco:
uh i honestly i don't really have much else to say about the ipad i i did a whole video review of it um i i like it a lot i mean i've been using it now for you know about a little over a week now and um
Marco:
You know, it's not perfect.
Marco:
There's some things that I, you know, obviously there's some nitpicks I have.
Marco:
The new smart keyboard folio is better in some ways, but worse in others.
Marco:
So I think it's overall kind of a sidestep.
Marco:
Like it's way better on your lap than the previous one, but it's not as good like on countertops.
Marco:
So that's kind of eh.
Marco:
It also is significantly bulkier around the back, which I don't love.
Marco:
But actually using the new iPad, I just think it's awesome.
Marco:
I love using it.
Marco:
I love the way it looks.
Marco:
I love the way it feels.
Marco:
It's just really, really nice.
Marco:
Face ID, just like on the iPhone, Face ID is kind of a mixed bag, but mostly positive.
Marco:
I do frequently cover up the camera with the way I hold it in landscape, but...
Marco:
But it's also way faster than Touch ID in other cases, or it's more convenient in other cases.
Marco:
It's especially more convenient when you are using the iPad and have to authenticate for things like passwords.
Marco:
It's really, really nice for that because you don't even have to move your hands.
Marco:
It just sees you and it's like, oh, hey, it's still you.
Marco:
Okay, cool.
Marco:
Let's you in.
Marco:
That's really nice.
Marco:
It is still a massive fingerprint magnet.
Marco:
The oleophobic coding has not changed at all.
Marco:
So it is still...
Marco:
the same fingerprint magnet that the previous generation was that every iPad Pro has been because they changed their coding to make it pencil compatible.
Marco:
And ever since they did that, it has been a massive fingerprint magnet.
Marco:
So that's incredibly unfortunate.
Marco:
But I'm assuming that Apple, they're not like...
Marco:
unaware of this issue that maybe they just haven't found a better oleophobic coating yet that can work with the pencil otherwise i'm a big fan i like it a lot i love the new size the new 11 inch size it's similar to the 10.5 but nicer i love the new straight edges the flat edges around it i love the curved screen it just it looks really sleek and modern and i really really hope that the new iphones next year follow this this industrial design
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So like I'd said, my most recent iPad that we had in the house was a fourth gen iPad mini.
Casey:
So this was the most recent iPad mini.
Casey:
I think it was from 2015, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
So that was halfway through this show's run roughly, which is kind of bananas.
Casey:
And I still use the iPad mini from time to time, but had mostly abandoned it at this point.
Casey:
And I did get this iPad Pro because the hardware was just too good looking and too sexy to pass up.
Casey:
And so I...
Casey:
I got it on launch day.
Casey:
I just sauntered into the store and made it happen thanks to my business contact there.
Casey:
And anyways, I am really enjoying this thing so far.
Casey:
I did not have any iPad Pro in the past, and so I didn't have a lot of experience with the smart keyboard folio whatever thing from prior years.
Casey:
But I remember always seeing it and seeing how it was kind of stepped in, you know, there was a thick part and a thin part.
Casey:
And that always just made me think that it felt gross.
Casey:
And this one is even the whole way around.
Casey:
It is pretty sturdy in the lap, which my understanding of past years is that that was not the case.
Casey:
On the 11-inch, I don't care for the two angles very much.
Casey:
There are basically two different positions you can put it in.
Casey:
One that's kind of vertical and one that's at a very slight angle.
Casey:
And the vertical one, the only time I've really used that is if...
Casey:
I'm in bed and watching something.
Casey:
So I'm, I'm laying down in bed and the iPad is just like on my chest and that's about it.
Casey:
The other one is for basically any other use.
Casey:
And I wish there was a third one or something with a little bit steeper angle, because if you're sitting up close to it and you know, you're, you're considerably, your head is considerably above the screen.
Casey:
I don't feel like the angle of, of the, of the other position is, is really steep enough, which is a little frustrating, but yeah,
Casey:
Overall, I love this thing.
Casey:
I am really surprised by how much I've enjoyed using it.
Casey:
And I took it with me on a small trip that we went on over this past weekend to watch some dear friends of ours get married.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I brought my MacBook adorable.
Casey:
I brought my 12-inch MacBook.
Casey:
But I attempted to use that 12-inch MacBook as little as possible.
Casey:
And I took some notes on what I couldn't avoid using the MacBook for.
Casey:
And truth be told, it really wasn't that much.
Casey:
I even figured out on the plane to California, I figured out how to post to my blog from just the iPad.
Casey:
Or actually, maybe that was the night before.
Casey:
I might be lying to you.
Casey:
But the point is, I figured out how to post to my blog on my iPad.
Casey:
And that turned out to be the app Working Copy, which is a really powerful Git client for iPad.
Casey:
I find the interface a little bit clunky in a few ways, but...
Casey:
It is extremely powerful, and it even includes a built-in and pretty good markdown editor.
Casey:
And if you recall, or if you were not aware, I wrote my own blogging engine in Node years ago, and the input to that blogging engine is basically just a folder full of markdown files.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
I was able to compose a markdown file in working copy.
Casey:
I was able to push that to GitHub.
Casey:
And then I was able to create – I used Heroku as my particular host of choice.
Casey:
And I was able to create a hook in Heroku to say, hey, when I push to this particular branch of this particular repo in GitHub, go ahead and redeploy my website.
Casey:
And so twice for two different blog posts I wrote on my website, I did that from the plane, all completely on the iPad, which is something that I hadn't really been able to do before and I thought was extremely cool.
Casey:
The only things that really fell down are – and we talked about this actually somewhat recently –
Casey:
The particular app I use to kind of balance our checkbook, if you will, and manage our money is called MoneyWell.
Casey:
I like it a lot, except it is not updated terribly frequently, and they don't really have a sharing story that's been consistently working for sharing between devices.
Casey:
And so I don't really have an equivalent on the iPad.
Casey:
And the best I could do is using screens by some friends of ours, which is a VNC client.
Casey:
I could remote into my iMac and do that, but that's fairly clunky, not because screens is bad.
Casey:
Screens is fantastic.
Casey:
It's just that's always going to be clunkier than doing something on an app on your device.
Yeah.
Casey:
Additionally, there was an instance where I wanted to grab a movie from actually a friend's Plex, and I didn't have the sync permissions on that person's Plex server.
Casey:
But if you know what you're doing and have YouTube DL, which is one of my favorite command line tools in the entire world, you can actually download pretty much anything on a friend's Plex server automatically.
Casey:
via youtube dl and though somebody in just the last week or two or i guess just last few days have has released ish via test flight which is a a ios linux shell in userland which is really interesting uh oh really yes and i tried installing uh youtube dl which did work but the second i tried to run it it was like haha no so um i am very interested in that
Casey:
Yeah, it is very interesting.
Casey:
It reminds me a lot in spirit, and I'm sure this is technically inaccurate, but it reminds me a lot in spirit of Cygwin, C-Y-G-W-I-N, which was basically an interpreter between Bash and the Win32 subsystem.
Casey:
So you could basically run an almost true-to-form Bash shell on Windows.
Casey:
And ISH seems very, very similar.
Casey:
We'll put links in the show notes.
Casey:
So for certain things you can do, if you're doing more basic stuff that the author slash authors have intended or tried, you know, it works okay.
Casey:
So like VI works, but my preferred editor, which happens to be Emacs, please don't at me.
Marco:
That doesn't work.
Casey:
That's what I got used to before I knew what I was doing.
Casey:
And I've got a lot of momentum there and I don't care passionately about it.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
It's just what I'm used to.
Casey:
So anyway.
Marco:
That might be worse than Velveeta.
Casey:
Well, I'm OK with that.
Casey:
So anyway, I'm trying not to get derailed.
Casey:
I couldn't do YouTube DL from my iPad, and I had to do that on my MacBook.
Casey:
And the reason I wanted to do that, not to stream it from Plex, which I absolutely can do on my iPad, is because I wanted to prepare to be able to watch it on the plane.
Casey:
And so this way I would just have the file on my MacBook and be able to just watch it on the plane, you know, disconnected.
Casey:
And then finally, I do have a USB-C SD card reader that does work pretty darn well.
Casey:
However, it does not show the particular flavor of RAW files that my camera generates.
Casey:
And this is important, not because I necessarily want to do any editing of RAW files on my iPad.
Casey:
And frankly, I don't really do any editing of RAW files anyway.
Casey:
But I do shoot in RAW and JPEG.
Casey:
And basically, my workflow is if there's anything I think I might want to blow up or maybe touch up one day in the future, I'll keep the RAW.
Casey:
But generally speaking, I just delete all of them.
Casey:
And what I'd like to be able to do on the iPad is just, you know, tap through and say, that one's garbage, that one's garbage, that one's garbage, that one's garbage.
Casey:
Okay, delete all those off the SD card and move along with your life.
Casey:
And that doesn't seem to be possible because I think because of the particular flavor of raw files that my Olympus camera generates.
Casey:
From what I understand, that is not true of every camera's raw files.
Casey:
I just got unlucky.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
All told, I spent the entire weekend remotely, you know, doing things that you could even call work all on my iPad.
Casey:
And as I got more and more used to the multitasking features in iOS, well, I guess it was like nine or 10 or whatever that these came out, but I hadn't really used them much.
Casey:
It's pretty powerful and I do like it a lot.
Casey:
It is not always as quick as my MacBook is, but especially now that I actually have a keyboard attached to my iPad, because again, I've never had an iPad Pro before.
Casey:
And this is what Marco actually had said just an episode or two back.
Casey:
Once you have a keyboard connected to your iPad Pro, it changes everything and makes it so much better a computer than it was before.
Casey:
So all told...
Casey:
Two thumbs up for this thing, man.
Casey:
I really, really like it.
Casey:
And I can't stress enough, and I think I said this last episode, I am really looking forward to iOS 13 or whatever's coming next year because I just get this sneaking suspicion that a lot of these pain points are either going to go away or be a lot less painful in the future.
John:
I still just want to use my iPad as an iPad and I'm still holding out hope for an iOS laptop.
John:
I understand the utility of having the keyboard.
John:
My wife uses it and I totally get it, but to me, as good as it is and how much it changes how the iPad is, I think it would be better still if it was an actual hinge laptop thing like Jason Snell's beloved bridge keyboard, but made by Apple and not two separate weird things like
John:
not that i have a yearning for that but i feel like that's that's the point at which i will start entertaining putting a keyboard on it because in my life the role of the ipad fills is the role of the tablet where i do stuff that doesn't require typing on a keyboard although i do answer email short emails and stuff and send people messages or whatever and that's fine but the whole point is when i'm using the ipad i'm not in the computing mode now if i was to go somewhere and
John:
You know, only bring my iPad with me.
John:
As I've done... Did I do the past couple of WWCs?
John:
I don't even remember.
John:
I only really use my iPad at WWCs, but I'm not doing any typing anymore at WWC.
John:
I'm mostly just...
John:
reading things and sending random messages or whatever.
John:
So I'm still a little bit down in the whole, this turns your iPad into a heavier iPad with a floppy keyboard.
John:
So that's still not particularly appealing to me.
John:
But I do want to check out this new one because, you know, although as Marco determined that it is heavier, but it's also flatter and not as lumpen.
John:
And maybe I'll change my tune.
John:
But, you know, and I would still love to have one of these.
John:
Just not sure I have a pressing need to buy one quite at this moment.
John:
I do want to see them in the store.
John:
Maybe I'll be convinced otherwise.
John:
Especially since the accessories that I was so excited about, the smart folio case.
John:
It's getting, you know, kind of mixed reviews.
John:
Not the keyboard one, but the non-keyboard one.
John:
Mixed reviews as compared to the old arrangement.
John:
And my current arrangement that I have in the whatever model I have, like the original 9.7-inch iPad Pro, I have the smart cover, plain old, you know, original smart cover that just goes in the front.
John:
And whatever that back shell case is, and they're matched to each other, they're the same color, and they're all this kind of rubberized material.
John:
I really love...
John:
that arrangement um i would love it more if it didn't make the ipad wider and taller because it goes all around the edges so that's why i think i like the uh the protective sandwich as the past episode was called but mixed reviews i'm hearing from people about the the material of the case and how it compares to the old ones and weird issues with the bazillion magnets so i gotta go to the store and check them out but i think i'll be able to hold off buying one
Casey:
You know, I really, really like it.
Casey:
And again, I can't stress enough that I do not have a prior gen to really compare to, but I really like the case.
Casey:
I don't think the materials are bad.
Casey:
I think it works pretty well, again, with my small lamentation about angles, particularly on the 11 inch.
Casey:
However, something that I couldn't put my finger on until I read Jason Snell's review that just came out earlier today as we record.
Casey:
is that it is just this grand expanse of gray.
Casey:
The cover, in fact, when you close it all up and are looking at what would be the front of the iPad if the cover wasn't in the way, it's just nothing but gray.
Casey:
There's no ridges.
Casey:
There's just a slab of gray.
Casey:
And I couldn't figure out why I kept looking at that and thinking I should put a sticker on this because that is not usually my thing.
Casey:
I did on my work laptop because who cares?
Casey:
It's not mine.
Casey:
But I've never stickered up any of my devices.
Casey:
And I'm really thinking about stickering the hell out of this, my curly style, because it is just gray.
Casey:
It's just a slab of gray.
Casey:
And I don't really love it.
Marco:
Yeah, for a device that is so creative-focused and artistic-focused and so fun in so many other ways, the design of the dark gray, flat, bland keyboard cover that doesn't even have an Apple logo on it.
Marco:
There was a good segment on Upgrade about this a few days ago.
Marco:
Yesterday, rather.
Marco:
And also, the new cover design also picks up any crumbs off your counter because it's just this flat rubber I have right here.
Marco:
It just looks so bland.
Marco:
It looks like it is punishing you for wanting nice-looking things.
Marco:
And it's such a contrast to the iPad itself, which is just ridiculously nice-looking.
Marco:
The actual iPad...
Marco:
Looks gorgeous.
Marco:
Like it's so it's such an amazing piece of industrial design.
Marco:
And then you put this ugly keyboard case on it that looks like it's punishing you.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I'm not as I don't know if I would personally describe it as actively ugly, but it is certainly not great looking.
Casey:
And and I think that I will probably end up putting some stickers on mine at some point or another.
Casey:
But all in all, I do love having a keyboard attached to an iPad.
Casey:
And I also do love the industrial design of this iPad.
Casey:
I love having the flat sides.
Casey:
It reminds me of how much I miss the feel and to some degree the look of like the iPhone 5 era with the flat sides.
Casey:
I wish that would come back on new iPhones, and I don't think it will, or if it does, I'll be surprised.
Casey:
But I do love having the flat sides.
Casey:
Occasionally, I stand by what I had said about being a little bit of a pain to pick up off a flat surface, but that's not something I run into often.
Casey:
But no, I love this thing.
Casey:
I've been impressed by it.
Casey:
The sound is pretty darn good.
Casey:
Again, I have a three-year-old Mini to compare to, so all of these comparisons take with a grain of salt.
Casey:
But
Casey:
The sound is good.
Casey:
The screen is good.
Casey:
Face ID is wonderful.
Casey:
Everything about this I've been really, really impressed by.
John:
Speaking of picking it up, I think someone tweeted at us a video of an alternative technique.
John:
If you want to pick up your 11-inch, anyway, iPad Pro,
John:
off the table with one hand if you can manage it you can put one finger on one side and one thing and your thumb on the other side and pinch it and pick it up like that uh i guess if you can palm a basketball you can probably pull that off but if not word yeah no way can you do it not even close so i actually can pick it up with one hand only if the keys part of it is face down
Marco:
So it creates a little bit bigger of a gap.
Marco:
So if the keys on our face are on the bottom side and the keyboard cover is closed and I put my hands around the binding side of it, then I can pick it up with one hand.
Casey:
Oh, actually, you know what?
Casey:
I was looking at the wrong dimension.
Casey:
I was looking landscape like an idiot.
Casey:
No, I can almost get it up.
Casey:
Yeah, you're right.
Casey:
I can almost do it.
Casey:
I can almost do it.
Casey:
It's close.
John:
Yeah, if you have the 12.9 inch, it would take quite a finger span to pull that off, but it's possible.
Casey:
That's nice.
Casey:
But anyway, no, I really like this thing.
Casey:
I've been quite impressed by it.
Casey:
I really, now, the only problem I have with it is now that I see that ISH is a thing, now I'm just like waiting for it to support the just handful of things I really wanted to support, which probably never will, but I would love for that to happen.
Casey:
And certainly in a lot of cases, I can just use, you know, what is Panix thing?
Casey:
Is it Prompt?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Prompt, yeah.
Casey:
I can just use Prompt and SSH into my iMac.
Casey:
But
Casey:
it would be nice to be able to do some of that stuff locally.
Casey:
And I think one of the things that the developer, and this is all open source, one of the things the developer is looking to do is support Node, for example.
Casey:
And I think PHP might have support.
Casey:
I'm not sure about that.
Casey:
But it would be cool to be able to write a little bit of code natively on this device.
Casey:
And so... Write some scripts, too.
Marco:
Put image magic on it and do some scripting.
Marco:
There's all sorts of stuff I could do with this.
John:
Don't you get an incredibly uncomfortable feeling?
John:
Like, you know there's Unix under there that you could be running an actual shell on the actual hardware, but Apple doesn't let you.
John:
So here, to get around all the App Store restrictions, they're running a user-mode x86 emulator so that you can run a shell inside it on a system that is already, like, just...
Casey:
Not a lot of empathy for the machine.
John:
I do.
John:
It's ridiculous.
John:
I know Jason Snell had a rant on the most recent upgrade.
John:
I haven't heard the episode, but I've heard a lot of people talk about it.
John:
Complaining that the iPad hardware, the theme that we've heard many times, the iPad hardware is amazing, but the software doesn't...
John:
the software prevents certain things still uh he was complaining that apple doesn't create its own pro applications for the ipad it just gives you the more cut down versions of it which doesn't make any sense given the incredible power of the ipad pro other than apple's general uh lack of commitment to its pro applications or lack of commitment to them on ios anyway um and this is another one of the areas all the restrictions which make some sense for historic and current security reasons but like that you can't
John:
You can't offer an iOS application that lets you run a shell, even though those capabilities are sitting there completely untapped inside the hardware.
Yeah.
John:
Again, makes sense from a security perspective, but it is entirely within the reason for Apple to provide ability to have sort of a CH-rooted, secure, sandboxed environment where you run a native shell that nevertheless is restricted from doing any damage to the system because it is confined to its little pinned-in world or whatever.
John:
where you don't have to run an x86 emulator on your ARM CPU just so you can get a shell prompt.
John:
Like, you mentioned Sigwin.
John:
I don't think Sigwin was that bad, but it reminds me of, going back even farther, Mac Mint, which was a system that I believe it was like a port of an Atari Unix-y-flavored thing to the 68K classic Mac.
John:
And the whole reason I ran it on my Mac was, was guess what?
John:
It lets you have a TCSH prompt on your Mac that you could, you know, go and wander around your Mac's directories from an actual shell running this weird mutant Atari Unix on top of your Mac.
John:
But, but classic Mac OS didn't have, it wasn't a Unix, didn't have a shell prompt.
John:
Like that's the, you know, same thing with windows.
John:
Like it wasn't on top of something that was already there.
John:
It was adding something that didn't exist at all.
John:
And this, the ISH thing was,
John:
I applaud the developer for making it happen, but it depresses me that this is the extent we have to go to to get this functionality when it's sitting right there, just completely untapped.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I think that's fair.
Casey:
And, but it is cool as hell.
Casey:
And I'm really hopeful now that it's getting some attention, you know, because Steve Sean Smith has been talking about this for the last day or so.
Casey:
I'm hopeful since it's open source that we're going to see a lot of progress on this and, and maybe get a reasonably full featured shell natively on the iPad, which would be cool.
Yeah.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Not only is it a great value, like I can't find a better value on a sustained basis in the hosting industry.
Marco:
So not only is it the best value I've seen, but it's also just really nice to use.
Marco:
They have a really nice control panel.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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On that $5 a month plan, that could be four months free.
Marco:
So that's pretty cool.
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$20 credit when you visit linode.com slash ATP using promo code ATP2018.
Marco:
Thank you to Linode for sponsoring our show.
John:
uh john tell me about your macbook air what else have you learned about it yeah i guess we kind of already covered that i mean i haven't learned that much exciting about it it hasn't yet been dropped kids are using it they don't seem to have any complaints touch id is great kids are already forgetting their passwords oh wonderful also because apparently in a recent user version of i don't know when they started doing this but apple doesn't want you to have the same password for your apple id and for your mac account
John:
For a while, that was the default, I think, maybe, that you'd set up your Apple ID.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Both kids ended up in a situation where their password to get onto the Mac was the same as their Apple ID password, which I understand why Apple doesn't want it.
John:
It's not a good idea.
John:
You shouldn't reuse passwords.
John:
But anyway, now Apple forces you not to do that.
John:
So now they have slightly different passwords for
John:
the mac and for their apple id and but because there's such id they never have to enter the mac one like they just swap back and forth they they come to the computer they don't even need to click on their face or whatever they just put their finger on this fingerprint thing and their fingerprint is only associated with a single account and it just logs them into that account and it's great and yeah so i it's as great as it is though i still it still kind of burns me that we don't have touch id on a mac yet so hopefully that will be on my uh fancy mac pro someday
John:
Other than that, nothing much to report.
John:
Everything going fine.
John:
Oh, I guess one additional thing is MagSafe.
John:
Stupid MagSafe.
John:
Not that anyone's tripped over the cord, but now we have a place for the laptop.
John:
It goes right where the old MacBook Air went.
John:
Two things that are pretty big quality of life downgrades from before, and neither has to do with tripping over the cord.
John:
One, I was using the MagSafe adapter that was designed for the original MacBook Air.
John:
They couldn't accept MagSafe that came in from the side.
John:
It's the kind that looks kind of like a toothbrush.
John:
It comes in from the back.
Casey:
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
John:
Right?
John:
And that was super convenient because the most convenient place for the cord to go away was back behind the desk that the thing is sitting on for me.
John:
It also meant that enough of the cord was on top of the desk that when you disconnected the laptop, the cord just sat right there waiting for you to bring the laptop back and put it on.
John:
It didn't slide off the desk because there was enough of it pulled onto the desk.
Marco:
Yeah, that was a much nicer design to use.
John:
Yeah, so that's totally gone because USB-C, if there's a right-angle USB-C power adapter connector, I haven't found it yet.
John:
I think Monoprice has a couple.
John:
I looked at them, but they're like ugly adapter-y things.
John:
It's not kind of an all-in-one.
John:
It's just not as nice.
John:
Second thing is...
John:
Given that now the plug has to snake up from the side, when you disconnect the laptop, that cord just slides right off and goes back down the side of the desk because there's not enough of it on the desk.
John:
Now, I actually have a little weighted metal thing that you hook the cord into that we're kind of using, but because the cord is so thick and kind of unruly, it doesn't really...
John:
stay in the little thing doesn't grab it it's not like a grippy thing it's more like just a little slot right so it's not easy for the kids to disconnect the cord and put it in the thing so very often the cord just falls down the side of the desk i'm working on something to to uh make that more reasonable maybe something that actually grips the cord the third thing is actually connecting and disconnecting the usbc thing is more of a pain than magsafe was
John:
For me, definitely.
John:
You've got to see where the little thing is, and I'm trying to be careful not to scrape up the side of the computer.
John:
Because it's a new computer and a new power cord, it's still very stiff.
John:
It clicks in, and it's actually kind of hard to plot.
John:
I'm sure that will change as the cable gets looser and looser over time.
John:
It will.
John:
Right now, it's very stiff to get in and out of there, and you have to pull it out straight, because you can't pull it on an angle.
John:
This is not going to come out, and you're just making your life more difficult.
John:
And the kids...
John:
have much more difficulty than i do with it and because they're not as careful as i am and then the holes are very small and you have to be precisely aligned they're just like scrape scrape scrape scrape scrape scrape scrape scrape scrape until it eventually goes in which just puts my teeth on edge so
John:
Big downgrade in terms of the basic experience of, hey, go put the laptop away and plug it in, or hey, go get the laptop.
John:
I'll figure out the cord issues, but the plugging and unplugging I feel like is not going to get any better.
John:
In fact, it's probably going to get worse in that the thing will get looser and looser, so it'll come out more easily than it does right now.
John:
I kind of like the fact that it stays in very well right now because everything's new because I don't have to worry about
Casey:
you know someone moving the laptop around and becoming disconnected but downgrade to that end something i meant to bring up earlier and i completely forgot i haven't really noticed this with usbc charging cables quite as much but when plugging in the apple whatever they call it the apple hdmi adapter i forget what it's called the official name for it the digital av adapter maybe
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, I think that's it.
Casey:
Thanks.
Casey:
And the Monoprice SD card reader, that probably cost me $10 or $15.
Casey:
Plugging those into the iPad Pro, plugging it in was fine, but removing them was actually genuinely difficult.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
The iPad Pro is more grippy than I remember the MacBook Adorable ever having been.
Casey:
And I don't know if it's just me and I'm crazy.
Casey:
I was talking to, I think it was Gruber about this, and he said that he had seen a lot of the same.
Casey:
But I'm curious if the listeners find that the iPad Pros are all so much grippy.
Casey:
You're like, Marco, have you noticed this with things other than power cables, or have you only really plugged in power cables so far?
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, this is just what USB-C feels like.
Marco:
You know, USB-C is, you know, it takes more effort to pull out the cable than lightning and than most cables when the cables are new.
Marco:
Over time, the cable ends, like the pins inside of them, do wear down and get easier to pull out, often to a fault where they stop making good connections and you have to replace the cable, or at least, like, turn it around if it's a C2C cable.
Marco:
But that is a thing that happens, and they do start out really tight.
Casey:
I mean, I haven't ever noticed my Switch, my GoPro, or my MacBook Adorable, all of which are USB-C.
Casey:
I've never noticed them grip onto something nearly as much as the iPad Pro has.
Casey:
And it was striking how much of a difference it was with the same dongles.
Casey:
Because I use that same digital AV adapter with my MacBook.
Casey:
And the MacBooks...
Casey:
barely holding onto it and again it's a year older so your point is fair marco but i i can't verbalize how strong a hold this thing had on my on my dongle this is going nowhere good that's another thing about things being hard to pull out it just encourages kids to pull by the cord even more yeah right because it is hard to pull out and because their kids and have no patience like any chance i had of them
John:
you know, trying to get them to pull any cord out by the stiff part of the connector, which is the correct way you should do it, people who are destroying your cords.
John:
They're like, forget it.
John:
They've just totally abandoned any pretense of ever trying to do that.
John:
And with MagSafe, you could basically yank by the cord because you just learn to just kind of yank on an angle and it disconnects, right?
John:
Like it's, you know, they have not destroyed any MagSafe connector that we've had in the house, which is quite a feat because they've destroyed many, many lightning cables, right?
John:
But I'm not sure how the USB-C cord is going to hold up.
John:
We'll see.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Fracture, Linode, and Change the Terms.
John:
And we'll talk to you next week.
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.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean.
Marco:
So Marco, you have become Mr. YouTube, my friend.
Casey:
What's going on here?
Marco:
Yeah, I decided to get back on YouTube and start making more videos.
Casey:
How's recording audio for YouTube these days?
Marco:
Recording it's not bad.
Marco:
Sinking it was pretty bad the first time.
Marco:
So what happened?
Casey:
What happened?
Marco:
All right, so between the recording of the last episode and this one, I released two YouTube videos.
Marco:
They each had their own issues.
Marco:
The Mac Mini review came first.
Marco:
That one, I had severe audio sync issues, and I'll tell you why in a minute.
Marco:
But for the most part, otherwise, it was fairly decent.
Marco:
I had fewer issues overall than my other videos.
Marco:
Two years ago, when I reviewed the first Touch Bar MacBook Pro, a few technical things that I learned in making these videos.
Marco:
The Mac Mini video, I shot entirely with my iPhone XS.
Marco:
Every bit of video in that is shot on my iPhone, including the main, like, you know, sit down in front of the camera and talk to it video, which involved a teleprompter.
Marco:
Fancy.
Marco:
It's not a fancy teleprompter.
Marco:
It is a very inexpensive bracket with a reflective piece of glass on top of it that you put an iPad under, and the iPad was not included in the price of the teleprompter.
Marco:
And I was using Joe Joplinski's excellent Teleprompt Plus software.
Marco:
to display the prompts and control them and everything.
Marco:
Because the problem I had with my 2016 MacBook Pro video, the biggest problem was that I was basically reading off of a keynote presentation running on a laptop that was next to the camera, down below a bit on a table.
Marco:
And so you can see in that video that I'm constantly looking to stage left, basically, looking down to the left a little bit because that's where my bullet points were that I was reading from.
Marco:
And it was not great, pretty distracting, not particularly useful.
Marco:
And so I bought the teleprompter right after making that video and it sat in the box for two years because I'd never made another video after that until like, you know, last week or whatever.
Marco:
So when it came to make a new video, I decided, you know, great, I will, I'll do it right with teleprompter this time.
Marco:
You know, I'll write out bullet points of what I want to say and have them actually on the screen and be shooting through it.
Marco:
And that way, you know, I'm looking at the camera while reading the text and,
Marco:
And that actually worked fairly well for the Mac mini video.
Marco:
The interesting thing is like behind the teleprompter is basically like a big black nylon bag that like you put the camera into so the camera doesn't see reflections on the back of the teleprompter.
Marco:
And that works fine when it's a camera lens that you're sticking in that black bag.
Marco:
It's really clumsy when it's an iPhone because you have to reach into it to see the screen and to push the buttons on the iPhone and everything.
Marco:
But I wanted to see if I could make the whole video with just my iPhone as the only video camera.
Marco:
And indeed, with the Mac mini video, I did.
Marco:
I didn't with the iPad video.
Marco:
I'll get to that in a second.
Marco:
I also decided I wanted to shoot all the B-roll and everything with my iPhone because it's just easier.
Marco:
And a lot of it was using a stand with a clip on the end of it.
Marco:
Basically, it's like an iPhone holding clip
Marco:
on the end of a, it's actually a microphone stand with a couple of little screw adapters to make that work.
Marco:
You know, I had the stand so I could like, you know, put it on the stand and then I can like hold the thing and move it around and get good B-roll with the camera being steady.
Marco:
And then also with the Mac Mini video, I took a lot of shots where the camera was moving, like panning around something.
Marco:
And I did most of those using my gimbal, which is another thing I bought two years ago and almost never used.
Marco:
I learned a few things in making that first video.
Marco:
Number one, I learned that I really like the app Filmic Pro that we talked about before.
Marco:
um it's it was very very nice to have an app that had all the manual video controls readily accessible and and everything else and i shot all my b-roll using filmic pro for the mac mini review and it was just fantastic and i shot the main video as well one of the things you can do with filmic pro is record video without audio i figured well i'm recording the audio onto my audio recorder i don't need the audio from the video oh marco
Marco:
So the result was that the audio recorder had my audio track, the video had no audio, and therefore Final Cut could not automatically sync the audio to the video.
Marco:
Now I thought, well, I edit podcasts, I know how to sync up audio, it's no big deal.
Marco:
I'll sync it up, it'll take five minutes, and it'll be fine.
Marco:
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I don't know why, there was ridiculous drift.
Marco:
And for anybody who doesn't know, that is basically when the audio basically doesn't match the duration of the video.
Marco:
Even after you line it up, you'll have to realign it at many different points because you can sync it up at one point, but then a minute later, it'll be out of sync.
Marco:
And so you'll have to cut it somewhere and then move it around so it's in sync again.
Marco:
And I had ridiculous drift.
Marco:
Again, I don't know why, but it doesn't matter.
Marco:
And I tried to sync it up so much and I synced up so many things.
Marco:
I think I had in the, I think like eight minute Mac mini video, I think I had like 10 sync positions.
Marco:
It was ridiculous.
Marco:
And I just couldn't quite get it right.
Marco:
And that's why when I published the final video, the audio sync was off.
Marco:
And that's a huge technical problem with it.
Marco:
It is my one major regret with that video is that the audio sync is not good.
Marco:
um now if you happen to record the video on the camera with just like you know recording off the camera mic which sounds like garbage but if you happen to record that with the video and you have an audio track recorded by a nice microphone or audio recorder somewhere final cut will automatically sync that up with like you know your right click on the clips and you say synchronize and it's it's it works seemingly perfectly which i did on on the second video so i know i know now uh but
Marco:
yeah so the audio sync on the mac mini video was a mess and that's why because i didn't record the audio with the video because i was using filmic pro and i didn't record audio for any of the b-roll shots because i didn't you know i wasn't going to use it i was going to use the one continuous take of audio from my like you know stand-up shot even though i was sitting down but i think they call it a stand-up and and then you know the b-roll shots are going to be silent and i just i didn't enable the audio recording for that big long sit down shot and i should have
Casey:
Yep, that is not fun.
Casey:
And I have a pretty bananas set up for when I do car stuff, which actually, coincidentally, I am going to be doing that all day tomorrow if all goes according to plan.
Casey:
But one thing I've learned is that whenever I start recording, this is outside or in a car where there's a lot of noise typically.
Casey:
Whenever I start recording, I start recording the audio.
Casey:
I start recording the video.
Casey:
I walk to wherever I'm supposed to be or sit down in the car, whatever the case may be, and I clap my hands one time very loudly to make sure that every audio recording, both the video audio and the lavalier audio, hears that clap so it gives something for Final Cut to sync against when I go to do the edit.
Casey:
And to your point, when you do have...
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
When you've done the small things you need to do on your end to give Final Cut what it needs, it is like freaking magic how it can put these things together.
Casey:
It is unreal how good a job it can do.
Casey:
But if you don't give it that tool, if you don't give it the audio to sync off of, then you're screwed, as you now know and have lived through.
Casey:
But having been through videos with crappy audio, I'm just glad that I am not alone in this.
Marco:
Welcome to the club.
Marco:
And I had, you know, I really wanted my audio to sound good.
Marco:
I did, you know, my first, my MacBook Pro video two years ago, I was using a lavalier mic.
Marco:
And it was, you know, a decent prosumer one.
Marco:
The Rode...
Marco:
uh road link wireless and whatever might comes with that and i honestly i hate the road link wireless it's it because it's not a pro wireless setup even though it costs almost as much as one um it uses 2.4 gigahertz as the radio uh spectrum instead of like one of the you know tv signal ones the other ones use and so there's just constant interference from everything like it's just not a very good setup
Marco:
so um i didn't want to reuse that although i did try because you know the issue with getting good sound out of a microphone on video the microphone matters to some degree but what matters a lot more is proximity to your mouth and you know i've told you this as you're making videos like yep a crappy microphone close to your mouth almost always will sound better or will be able to sound better uh than a really good microphone like you know five feet away but
Marco:
And so when you're in a video, you know, you basically only have two options.
Marco:
You can, you know, if you don't want some giant mic in the frame, you can either use some kind of lavalier or maybe like some kind of discrete headset thing, which usually is not very discrete.
Marco:
And lavaliers have their own challenges too, like, you know, placement and picking up, you know, if you move your shirt.
Marco:
If you turn your head at all, lavaliers dramatically change the way they sound and dramatically pick you up less or more.
Marco:
So lavaliers have their own issues.
Marco:
And they're also, you know, you can see them.
Marco:
And so if you're trying to have the microphone not be visible, you can pull some tricks with wardrobe to try to hide lavaliers, but you don't always succeed and it's tricky.
Marco:
And so I tried with the lavalier.
Marco:
I also tried with a, I have a Sennheiser MKE something, 600 maybe?
Marco:
I bought it two years ago.
Marco:
It's like a video microphone that's shotgun style.
Marco:
So I tried that up on a boom.
Marco:
I tried it on the camera.
Marco:
It was too far away.
Marco:
The boom got a little closer.
Marco:
The microphone I ended up using for that.
Marco:
Oh, I even tried like my awesome podcasting microphone, just like, you know, basically boomed above my head, slightly out of frame.
Marco:
What ended up being the best was that Sennheiser MKE whatever on a boom, a little bit out of frame, like basically like above my head pointing kind of diagonally down at my mouth.
Marco:
That was by far the best audio, but it still wasn't great audio.
Marco:
And, you know, it was still picking up tons from the room.
Marco:
So I tried like, you know, putting out all my sound dampening panel.
Marco:
Like I have all this acoustic foam because when I bought acoustic foam for the first time like five years ago, you could only buy a certain box size.
Marco:
And so I have a lot of extra that just like normally lives in the basement.
Marco:
So I brought it upstairs and I basically laid acoustic foam all over the floor of the room.
Marco:
The entire room was covered in acoustic foam panels.
Marco:
And so I just, you know, just trying to reduce reflections around the room and make it sound less echoey so that a microphone that is two feet away from my mouth can actually sound like it's closer to my mouth.
Marco:
And I succeeded somewhat.
Marco:
I still ended up post-processing the audio with iZotope to run a little bit of dereverb, which helped a little bit.
Marco:
I can't use too much of it because it starts sounding weird if you use too much of it.
Marco:
It's kind of artifact-y.
Marco:
But I did use a little bit of dereverb
Marco:
a little bit of EQ as well, because I'm an audio nerd for podcasting, and so I'm not going to just leave my voice un-EQ'd like an animal.
Marco:
And the combination of those, plus a little bit of noise removal, just to get a little bit of, you know, lower the noise floor a little bit, made it sound pretty good.
Marco:
I was pretty happy with it.
Marco:
I wasn't incredibly happy with it, but I was pretty happy with it.
Marco:
Even though then, of course, I totally miss-synced it, and the audio became the worst thing about the video.
Marco:
But overall, yeah, overall it was...
Marco:
It was a bit of an audio adventure to get that.
Marco:
And I realized after I was setting this up, and I took a picture and I sent it to you guys of the state of my office to do this video.
Marco:
In order to create the Mac mini video, I basically had to destroy the rest of my office.
Marco:
There was crap everywhere.
Marco:
And part of it's my fault because I had a lot of crap out just because I was working with a lot of crap during that week.
Marco:
And part of it is just because I had to unload all this video stuff, take it all out of the closet, unbox the teleprompter, set it all up, have foam panels all over the floor, have lights sitting on various things to boost up my light a little bit.
Marco:
It was just a mess.
Marco:
and as i was taking it all down and and you know after like the shoot was done and i and i figured i had my take and i reviewed it and looked pretty good and i started started the edit and i'm taking all the stuff down and i'm like you know i don't want to do videos anymore like i this this is just time for another two-year break yeah buy a bunch of stuff right now put it in the closet and two years from now you can make some more videos
Marco:
So I was, this is after the Mac mini video.
Marco:
So this, I still made the iPad video after them.
Marco:
I'll get to that.
Marco:
But so, so after the, so I, I'm like, this is just way too invasive, way too much set up and tear down.
Marco:
It destroys my office.
Marco:
It's just so much overhead to make a video.
Marco:
But then I started editing it, and I'm like, you know, I'm actually kind of happy with how this is turning out.
Marco:
This is actually pretty decent.
Marco:
And then I posted it, and when I released it, and I did the blog post with it, and I released it, and people loved it.
Marco:
It got a very strong reception, way stronger reception than I thought.
Marco:
And this is for the Mac Mini, which kind of is not that interesting of a product to most people, I think.
Marco:
So I was blown away by the positive reaction of the Mac Mini video.
Marco:
And I'm like...
Marco:
damn it, I should really make more videos.
Marco:
But I need to make it easier to make videos.
Marco:
I need some kind of something I can leave set up or at least leave mostly set up.
Marco:
I need to get better at this, to polish my process a little bit, to improve, to fix the issues like the audio sync I had.
Marco:
I need to get something.
Marco:
I need to make this easier because I do actually want to do more of this.
Marco:
And also I think professionally, I think it's a good idea to grow my audience.
Marco:
in an area that I don't have one yet.
Marco:
And that area would be YouTube and video and everything.
Marco:
So I decided, fine, I'm going to make this easier.
Marco:
And I talked to Tiff, my wonderful wife, and she suggested rearranging the office to be more meaningful to video.
Marco:
And so we basically moved the furniture around in the office.
Marco:
And she said, why don't you just leave the camera tripod and everything set up?
Marco:
Like, just leave it up.
Marco:
Like, we'll find a place to put it in the office.
Marco:
And so we did.
Marco:
So we like turned the whole office sideways, rearranged this whole midsection of the room and made myself a video set, basically.
Marco:
And that's what you see in the iPad video.
Marco:
Now I can actually make a video with way less setup and way less disruption to the office and then way less tear down afterwards.
Marco:
What I put in the tripod for the new video setup is one of our Canon 5D Mark IVs.
Marco:
We bought them a couple years ago.
Marco:
Usually TIFF ends up only using one.
Marco:
We bought a pair because the previous 5D Mark IIs we had a pair and TIFF used two frequently for shoots.
Marco:
These days, usually she brings the Sony and one 5D Mark II or Mark IV.
Marco:
So we basically have one 5D Mark IV that we don't use very much.
Marco:
So I mounted that like semi-permanently as my video camera in the tripod.
Marco:
Works way better with a teleprompter.
Marco:
I have a nice lens for it that's good for video, a nice 24-70.
Marco:
So I'm like, all right.
Marco:
Try number two, iPad video.
Marco:
I'm still shooting all the B-roll with my iPhone because it's just better and easier.
Marco:
But now I will set up the Canon.
Marco:
And it's nice too because like the Canon, I have like a little tiny external monitor.
Marco:
A big shout out to the company Neewer.
Marco:
I think it's pronounced N-E-E-W-E-R.
Marco:
Neewer produces a bunch of cheap video gear.
Marco:
And it's not that bad.
Marco:
In some cases, I would even go as far as to say it's good.
Marco:
They make a bunch of gear that is surprisingly cheap.
Marco:
And so one of the things I wanted to do was I want more permanent lights.
Marco:
The lights I used for the iPad, I have two little lights for the iPad mini video, both newer lights, but they are battery-powered only.
Marco:
And batteries are a pain.
Marco:
And charging batteries and managing and swapping batteries is a pain.
Marco:
And so I was like, you know what?
Marco:
I want to just get two lights I can have on sticks, you know, on light stands that can just plug into the wall.
Marco:
And I can just leave them plugged into the wall most of the time.
Marco:
And when I want to do a video, I can turn them on.
Marco:
And Neewer sells a two-pack for like $150 of these wonderful LED light panels that can turn between cool and warm color temperature.
Marco:
You can adjust on the back because basically it's like a panel of alternating white and yellow LEDs.
Marco:
So you're basically adjusting the brightness of either the whites or the yellows, and you can achieve all different color temperatures.
Marco:
They're super bright.
Marco:
And it was only 150 bucks for two of them with stands and AC adapters.
Marco:
And when I looked at pro lights, it was like $400 for that kind of light for just the light without the stand.
Marco:
It's like, okay, so this is, I'm not, I don't need a $400 light yet.
Marco:
I'm not to that point.
Marco:
Hopefully I never get there.
Marco:
So anyway, uh,
Marco:
So I got my new Neewer lights.
Marco:
I got my camera and my fancy video tripod I bought two years ago.
Marco:
And I'm just very, very happy with that setup now.
Marco:
It's easy to turn on.
Marco:
It's easy to set up.
Marco:
I do have a couple of issues with using the Canon as the video camera.
Marco:
And I don't know what I'm going to do about this yet.
Marco:
I probably should just use the Sony because it's a way better video camera.
Marco:
But I don't want the Sony to be always tied up in this setup.
Marco:
So I should probably just tolerate the Canon.
Marco:
But the Canon does have a couple of issues that I ran into with the iPad video.
Marco:
Number one, it only records 4K in 29.97 frames per second, which is the old TV standard.
Marco:
The iPhone records its 30 frames per second as 30 frames per second, exactly 30 frames per second.
Marco:
So I have a slight frame rate difference between my two cameras.
Marco:
So whatever I set the final cut project to, one of them has to be like reinterpolated.
Marco:
And so moving around the final cut timeline, dropping in the clips, previewing them was way slower when I made the iPad video.
Marco:
than when I did all the footage on the phone and therefore nothing was requiring any kind of frame rate conversion or anything like that.
Marco:
So problem number one is the frame rate between my B-roll camera and the Canon can't match up.
Marco:
At least not if I stick with 4K, which I do want to.
Marco:
So it was the Canon that got interpolated, right?
John:
I believe I set the project to 30, but I'm not positive.
John:
So I'm just looking at the iPad video now, and now that you mentioned that one of them has interpolation, I'm like, I think it's when Marco's talking on sitting in the chair.
Marco:
Well, the other thing is the Canon video, like my tripod wasn't perfect level.
Marco:
So the Canon shot in the chair, I actually had to rotate it slightly.
Marco:
So it's like one degree rotated.
Marco:
So don't judge it on that.
Marco:
And then also, I also learned,
Marco:
And movie people are always complaining that things that claim to shoot or display 4K don't actually display 4,000 pixels across.
Marco:
4K encompasses a number of different resolutions, one of which is 4,096 across.
Marco:
That is what the Canon shoots.
Marco:
And the iPhone shoots at 3840 across, which is, I think, more common.
Marco:
And so not only did I have a frame rate difference that was annoying, but then as I'm playing with, it was like the very last clip I inserted, the very last B-roll clip I inserted, I noticed that on the far left and right sides are these thin red strips of the shot behind it showing through.
Marco:
Oh, yep, yep, yep, yep.
Marco:
And I realized, oh, crap.
Yeah.
Marco:
And I looked back and every single one of my B-roll clips didn't quite fill the frame that the Canon made.
Marco:
So I had to go through and basically zoom every B-roll clip by like, you know, 5% or something and then make sure it fit like a, you know, pan it slightly to make sure it fits, you know, make sure nothing's weird because it's getting cut off and everything.
Marco:
And also...
Marco:
the Canon only records video at 4k in motion JPEG, which means that a, you know, like the, like the nine minute or 10 minute raw file of that shot was like 60 gigs and took final cut a very long time to render at full resolution, like in the preview window.
Marco:
And,
Marco:
and it also takes a long time to pull off of sd cards and everything and so it's just like working with the canon as the video camera is cumbersome and i'm going to have to do something about the frame rate issue i think if i want that to uh you know to be a thing i'm going to keep doing so i don't know the camera situation i might change i mean maybe i'll get like a cheap sony to put in there that's not like a super high-end one or something because it doesn't need to be for my purposes i don't know but uh
Marco:
somehow the camera thing might change.
Marco:
Otherwise, I'm otherwise very, very happy with this setup.
Marco:
The iPad video, I had a similar audio setup.
Marco:
People keep asking me about my audio because the iPad one sounds pretty good, actually.
Marco:
What I did for that was very similar.
Marco:
It's a boom mic.
Marco:
So there's this wonderful YouTube channel by a guy called Curtis Judd with two Ds on the end of Judd.
Marco:
And he does all sorts of tutorial videos and reviews of camera, lighting gear, and audio stuff for video.
Marco:
And I've been watching his videos for a while.
Marco:
I've learned a lot from them.
Marco:
And I went and bought his mic that he uses for this purpose, which is the Audio-Technica AT4053B.
Marco:
It's like $600, so this is not something I can recommend to everybody.
Marco:
It's a hypercardioid mic, not a shotgun, which he recommends for indoor dialogue better than a shotgun, which for his reasoning and seeing his videos makes sense.
Marco:
It's a little bit better.
Marco:
I did still have to do post-processing with iZotope to reduce the reverb a little bit and to denoise a little bit because it is still a good foot and a half from my mouth.
Marco:
But one of the good things about using the Canon as the camera instead of using my iPhone is that
Marco:
When I was shooting with the iPhone for the Mac Mini video, I very quickly learned that almost all the video I shot with the 2X lens was just too noisy to use.
Marco:
And if I apply a hell of a lot more light, maybe that could be different, but I was able to use almost none of it because the 2X lens has a narrower aperture and is smaller pixels, and so it's so much noisier than the video I shot with a wide lens.
Marco:
So I ended up, I think the Mac mini video, I think all of the iPhone video I have for that, I think it all was with the wide lens or at least the vast majority of it.
Marco:
And the sit down shot where I'm talking is also using the wide lens as far as I remember.
Marco:
The problem is that if you have a boom mic that needs to be as close to your mouth as possible, so just barely out of frame, if you have a wide perspective, it has to be much further from your head than if you have a zoomed-in perspective with a closer zoom lens.
Marco:
So the closer you're willing to zoom that lens in, the closer you can get the mic to you before it's in the frame.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I, I, I wanted, I, one of the reasons I switched, I switched to the Canon for the next video was this, and I'm not going to switch back to the iPhone because even the 45 millimeter, you know, ish lens on the iPhone, it's so noisy and I, and it's so awkward to use that inside the teleprompter.
Marco:
I'm not a big fan of that.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So I do want to stick with a long perspective here, but somebody pointed out that's one of the reasons the audio was so much better in the iPad video.
Marco:
Not only was it in sync properly, because I recorded on the camera and synced to it, but also the microphone was able to be a lot closer to me, and it was a better microphone.
Marco:
But honestly, the distance made a bigger difference than the microphone did.
Casey:
In ATP tradition, I think John and I need to critique the videos.
Casey:
And I think I'd prefer to focus on the iPad video.
Casey:
And I thought it was really good, but you suffered... Over the course of these two videos, you've suffered the same exact problems that I have, although you have also accelerated probably even quicker than I have in fixing them.
Casey:
In the first video, as you discussed, the audio was not great.
Casey:
In the second video, I...
Casey:
I think the framing is great.
Casey:
I like the way it looks aesthetically.
Casey:
I think you had a lot of B-roll, which was good.
Casey:
I think you and I both need to talk less.
Casey:
But you have not yet solved the problem that I am getting better at solving, but have also not solved, which is being more effusive on camera and being more over the top.
Casey:
And I'm still not great at it by any stretch, but it's taken me, what, four videos to get to the point that I'm not...
Casey:
I don't think it's a problem for me anymore, but I definitely think I have room to grow.
Casey:
And hearing you talk about having a teleprompter and all that, I almost wonder if having the teleprompter, if it is more than bullets, and you had previously said it was just bullets for one of the videos.
Casey:
If it is more than bullets, I wonder if that's kind of letting you down.
Casey:
And if it is just bullets and you just need to crank up the silly or maybe not silly isn't the right word for it, but crank up the emotive.
Marco:
Humanity.
Casey:
Yeah, the humanity.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
You weren't being a robot, but you were way more robotic than I know you to be.
Casey:
And that's because, again, having just been there, it's very awkward.
Casey:
Even in your own house, it's very awkward to be enthusiastic.
Casey:
I mean, look at me when I did my voiceover stuff first.
Casey:
for my first few and actually even the most recent video i think my voiceovers aren't quite as energetic as my other stuff because i am doing it in the house oftentimes at night oftentimes when kids are sleeping your voiceover is like not trying to wake up your kid exactly exactly hey i really love this car
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
You're exactly right.
Casey:
And so the problem is, even if you recognize it, which it sounds like you already did recognize it, it is a hard thing to fix.
Casey:
It just takes time.
Casey:
But that is the only thing that I was let down by.
Casey:
I mean, the audio stuff, whatever.
Casey:
It could be fixed and you did fix it.
Casey:
But just like me, you need to be less of a robot.
Casey:
And it's something I'm working on.
Casey:
And I'm sure it's something that you're going to work on, too.
Marco:
And for clarification, and so what was on the teleprompter, it was some bullet points, but it was also some complete sentences that I wanted to say, just so I'd remember good wording that I wanted to say.
Marco:
One of the key differences between the two is that when I was doing the Mac mini video, I did a lot more takes of that, of my sit-down.
Marco:
Basically, whenever there's a B-roll shot in the Mac mini video, chances are what you're coming back to after that is a different take.
Marco:
because I use the bureau to hide the transition because with the Mac mini video I had more of the sentences fully written out and I had the teleprompter automatically just going at a fixed speed and I couldn't adjust it during the shots
Marco:
And so I ended up having to tweak a lot, like having to add new lines between things or pad things out or slow things down so it would match the rate that I ended up saying it.
Marco:
I adjusted the speed in the app because you can adjust the speed.
Marco:
It's still like a fixed speed if you're doing it that way.
Marco:
For the iPad video, for the second one, I took out of its box.
Marco:
I went in my closet.
Marco:
found the pile of things i bought two years ago and took out of its box the uh bluetooth foot page turner thing it's literally it's like a it's like a rectangle you put on the floor it's kind of like a guitar effects pedal um you know it's a box you put on the floor with two buttons on it and you can map those two buttons to whatever you want them to do in the teleprompter app
Marco:
for the iPad video I had I was only using one of them but I had it basically be play pause for the scrolling of the teleprompter so I could at any point I could just pause it if I needed more time on something and then unpause it and that helped a lot with like being able to deliver things a little more smoothly and you know if I and it allowed me to riff more on certain things because I could just pause it and riff for a second and then unpause it and it would resume instead of having to like try to like keep up with oh I'm about to miss it you know I better keep going
Casey:
For me, I haven't yet really scripted any of my videos.
Casey:
That being said, tomorrow I'm going to attempt to record with actually two cars and basically drive two hours, record with two cars, and then drive home.
Casey:
And I basically have one day to get all this done.
Casey:
And so because of that...
Casey:
I've driven both of these cars a little bit in the past, and so I've put together an actual verbatim intro and conclusion, which I think was useful to get the flow of what I'm trying to say out of my head.
Casey:
But ultimately, I briefly looked into doing a teleprompter kind of thing, and what I think I'm just going to do is just read it right before I record it.
Casey:
and just kind of wing it, which in past videos, I just kind of think about what I want to say.
Casey:
And I do like 15 takes.
Casey:
And eventually I find one that I think is pretty decent the whole way through.
Casey:
And occasionally, you know, like you said, once or twice I've swapped between takes in using B-roll.
Casey:
But generally speaking, if it's, you know, me outside of the car, especially in the intro and conclusion, I'll just do one shot, maybe 15 times, but I'll do one shot start to finish.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And so I'm very interested to see how this goes tomorrow because I've put a lot more planning into this than any of the others I've ever done.
Casey:
But I don't know if that's going to be for the best or for the worst.
Casey:
So we shall see.
Marco:
I would also say, too, I don't think you would have much use for a teleprompter because I can't imagine it would work very well outdoors.
Marco:
And you tend to do all of your stand-ups outdoors.
Marco:
So I can't see that being a thing.
Marco:
You need somebody holding up giant cue cards and flipping them.
Yeah, exactly.
John:
all right john what did you think the same comments i always have on all these videos more b-roll less you i don't need to see you i need to see the ipads and the mac mini that's uh you did have tons of b-roll as compared to your previous one which is good big upgrade especially on the mac mini or whatever like but like when you're talking i don't need to see you talking talk and show me the thing that you're telling me and it was like i had had the moment that i always have in all these videos all cases and all of yours the one that sticks out to me uh the most is when you were talking about how um
John:
Apps don't, like, fill the 12.9-inch iPad.
John:
Like, they look awkward because the screen is so big, right, when you're describing that?
Marco:
That was the one thing.
Marco:
As I was editing, I'm like, you know, I really should have B-roll of this.
John:
You really should.
John:
Like, don't tell me that and don't show me an app.
John:
Show me what you – it's a thing that we can't do on podcasts, right?
John:
You have to describe it with your mouth words, right?
John:
But on video, you can finally – I was like, finally, I'm going to get to see the awkward –
John:
app layouts that he's talking about nope didn't get to see him just got to look at you i think you might have also missed focus on yourself when you're sitting in that chair it seems to really like the high contrasty uh paper dog thing i think i was in focus but i because i i may i was in manual focus mode and i i had tiff sit in the chair first and i focused properly on her i think maybe you're leaning forward or back more but your your eye your eyeballs look soft as compared to the the nose of the the fake dog
Marco:
It could have either been lighting or it could have been a result of the rotation of the video that I had to do and everything.
Marco:
Who knows?
John:
The whole idea of both of you that you have to have a single take stand-up, forget about that.
John:
You don't need that.
John:
You can have cutaways in your stand-up.
John:
You can slice and dice your stand-up into 12 pieces.
John:
It does not need to be one continuous shot.
John:
Don't put this pressure on yourself to perform the soliloquy in a single take and doing it 15 times.
John:
again just watch some other people's videos like yeah we see them we see their face we know it's them we get to know the face but very briefly and then it's off to whatever it is that we're talking about and this person is still talking like maybe they did the full stand-up when they were there but once i get the idea of you're in a chair and you have a dog and you're talking about a thing move on pretty quickly from that um i thought i thought that most of the b-roll work really well like for the most part you were showing me
John:
relevant things that like what i wanted to see um i liked the uh the action shots the here here you are using your ipad doing a thing in various environments whether you're sitting on the couch or typing out in the kitchen or whatever
John:
Where we don't have to hear the audio from that because you're just doing the voiceover.
John:
I like the part where the hops licks your arm.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
That was not planned.
John:
You shouldn't be planned for it because the hops licking you is not an infrequent occurrence.
John:
But that was very cute.
John:
I do wonder if Hopps is getting adequately compensated for his performance work.
John:
Is he part of the Screen Actors Guild?
John:
Hope you're at least paying him scale.
John:
He's a very important star of these shows.
John:
I noticed your little family dolls.
John:
I don't think I've seen them in real life, the little dolls of your family that you've got on the chair.
John:
They've been on that chair for about three years.
John:
That's cute.
John:
I did notice also that you had to rearrange the room.
John:
Like I didn't realize it was for the purposes of the video.
John:
I thought, oh, I guess they just rearranged their room at some point since last time I was there.
John:
But it makes sense now to rearrange it for the video in terms of.
John:
you know you're gonna rearrange it for video uh you sitting in a chair is fine and casual and looks nice but i think there's a reason that most of the little set type things that technology youtubers have involve some kind of a desk or flat surface where you can put down and talk about the things that you're messing with and yeah maybe even like stephen hackett have a camera up above the thing so you can have sort of a it doesn't all have to be b-roll it can be
John:
now switch to the overhead camera and you continue to talk about the thing that you're manipulating your hand but i get to see it from above anyway those are all just vague thoughts but in general uh more b-roll uh oh yeah the audio sync thing that was brutal like i don't know what you can do about it like the ship has sailed but a lesson learned but uh it really makes it very difficult to watch the video because you're like is something wrong with my computer it's it's like is this video lagging is this some sort of problem with the html5 video but it's like no it's just
John:
It's just out of sync.
Marco:
Yeah, and there were a number of good excuses for why some of the things you just mentioned are the way they are or were.
Marco:
With the Mac Mini thing, I had a pretty firm deadline of the Apple review embargo.
Marco:
I wanted to hit it because this is the first time they've given me a review hardware.
Marco:
I wanted to really do it right.
Marco:
Of course, I'd had audio sync issues, but I'm like, I wanted to really make sure... I woke up at 6 in the morning to make sure I hit that embargo, to hit publish and everything.
Marco:
And I really wanted to do it right.
Marco:
So I had that kind of hard deadline there.
Marco:
And then with the iPad one, we were going out of town for the weekend.
Marco:
And we were leaving, like, I literally, like, I hit publish on the video about 15 minutes before we left.
Marco:
And I drove for two hours.
Marco:
So I didn't see any of the feedback for like two hours afterwards.
Marco:
Because we had a trip planned.
Marco:
We were going to Philly for the weekend.
Marco:
And we were like, oh, this is when we're going.
Marco:
And part of the reason why there wasn't B-roll showing how the apps are too wide on the 12.9 is because I had thought of that
Marco:
As I was editing, I'm like, I just don't have time.
Marco:
I wish I would put this B-roll in, but I'm publishing this video in the next hour.
Marco:
I just don't have time for that.
Marco:
And so part of it is like, yeah, I had this deadline.
Marco:
But also, looking back, I'm like, I'm glad I had... Oh, and also, yes, I could have waited and published it maybe yesterday.
Marco:
But I wanted to get this video out while it was still iPad launch week.
Marco:
I wanted to be reasonably current.
Marco:
I thought it ended up being kind of a good thing that I only had a very small amount of time to do it in.
Marco:
Because ultimately, I would have...
Marco:
I probably would have even done a whole different set of takes for the main standup.
Marco:
Cause like there were things in the main standup, like I, like I'm holding the 12 nine iPad upside down, which is very obvious.
Marco:
Like when you watch it and like there's stuff like that, like if I had more time, I would have reshot that whole thing just to fix stuff like that.
Marco:
Uh, but I didn't.
Marco:
And so I'm like, well, I gotta just use what I got and just go with it.
Marco:
And there's some value to having that kind of pressure because otherwise I would be closer to a perfectionist and just try to reshoot everything, do everything exactly perfectly.
Marco:
And it would take way too long.
Marco:
And then I would say, I'm never doing a video again.
Marco:
And then I'd put all this stuff back in the closet for two years.
Marco:
So it's actually kind of nice to have those deadlines and to have something firmly come by and say,
Marco:
Whatever you have now, you just got to ship it.
Marco:
So that was very nice.
Marco:
And then I do agree with you that I don't have the ideal furniture for this.
Marco:
The way we created this video set was basically rearranging the furniture we already had.
Marco:
But long term, I do agree with you that like some kind of desk or table in front of me and maybe I could be at standing height would be probably better.
Marco:
That's a much bigger operation than just moving the stuff in the room around.
Marco:
So that's probably further in the future.
John:
Time constraints are good, but if you have to funnel your perfectionism into something, I wouldn't do it on like, you know, more takes and more perfectioning the shots that you have.
John:
I would concentrate the perfectionism on kind of like the Pixar brain trust type thing where they spend tons and tons of time.
John:
uh when things are in storyboard where it's just a bunch of like sketches up on pieces of paper up on a big board because that's like spending all your time there rearranging that and then and then even if your execution once you finally come out with the way it's going to be done once you have all the shots laid out then if your execution is not great because you don't have a lot of time fine it's much better to invest the time into getting the correct flow of shots and script
John:
And then executing in a mediocre whatever way that you get better at than perfectly executing a series of shots that don't flow the way, you know, you know what I mean?
John:
Like the, the more important, the harder thing to get right is the, the general script and structure of shots.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Less the execution of them because it, you know, especially like we don't care how beautifully framed and how nice we can see you sitting on the chairs are.
John:
And we do want to see the products, but yeah,
John:
You're going to see them enough if you do your job well.
John:
Even the noisy video, it may bother you that it's noisy, but just getting the shot sequence and the script right is so much more important than the individual shot.
John:
If you do end up having more time the next time you do a video, that's where I would invest it.
John:
Because honestly, the audio and video quality is plenty good enough for YouTube already.
John:
You're going to get most of the value of making the video better, figuring out the chunkier stuff than the details of execution.
Marco:
Oh, sure.
Marco:
And the script writing takes way more time than the actual video.
Marco:
Figuring out what to say and how to say it, that took the vast majority of the time of the overall production of these videos.
John:
I wonder if other technology channels even write scripts.
John:
It seems to me that a lot of them are just winging it.
John:
You just kind of get used to it and you just kind of like go in there and you say a bunch of stuff and then you sort of make the video and the edit, right?
John:
Because again, if you're not on camera and not expected to do a continuous take stand up and you're just seeing someone's hands anyway –
John:
Just talk about the thing that you've got.
John:
Say all the stuff you want to say about it.
John:
If there's a particular turn of phrase you want to say, have that on a note card somewhere you can go.
John:
But in general, like, when I watch these technology videos, I'm thinking, nobody scripted this.
John:
They just sat down in front of the camera and they talked about it for a while.
John:
And then they cut it together and cut out the boring parts and spliced it together and maybe did one additional audio recording of a thing they forgot to say, and that's it.
John:
They were done.
John:
Like, it's a high bar.
John:
I mean, I think it's more important, unfortunately, for Casey to script it because it's like car reviews are...
John:
more of a structured thing and you can't really like ramble while you're driving because this you know it's i think it's harder for car reviews but for technology reviews i think you could just i mean you've said all the same things about this stuff you just get up there and talk about it um and then just you know make sure that we're looking at b-roll or your hands manipulating a device and not your face and your mouth moving and you can
John:
turn that into exactly what you want it to say in post.
Marco:
Yeah, that's fair.
Marco:
I do intend to get less scripted as I go.
Marco:
These I scripted simply because I was brand new at it and I wanted to hit certain points, but
Marco:
And I wanted to be careful on how I worded them.
Marco:
And I also didn't want to miss, I didn't want to forget something I wanted to say.
Marco:
I would come up with impressions or comments as I was using these devices and I'd write them down in a big Apple Notes file.
Marco:
And then eventually I'm like, all right, now I need to compose a video so I can arrange them and make an outline and make some actual bullet points and some actual lines I wanted to say and everything.
Marco:
And I didn't want to miss anything.
Marco:
I didn't want to forget to say anything, if that makes sense.
Casey:
Yeah, it does.
Casey:
But in my experience, what ends up happening is there are two or three things like in an intro or a conclusion that I really, really want to say because I think they're clever, they're funny or what have you.
Casey:
And then everything else is a lot more malleable than I think it is.
Casey:
And as long as I nail the two or three things that I'm really, really entranced with, whatever they may be, everything else just kind of works itself out.
Marco:
it's funny like the the part that where i threw the old pencil on the ground that was like that wasn't in my script or outline i'm just like i had nowhere to put it and so i'm like i gotta get rid of this real fast and so i just kind of like came up with that and people love that like that was like a favorite moment for a lot of people in the video so yeah i guess i'll start you know scripting less let me discourage you and stephen hackett please stop throwing things on video you just you're gonna break something it's very upsetting
John:
He's always throwing stuff in his video.
John:
Now you're doing it.
John:
It was a very soft carpet.
John:
Don't throw your hardware.
John:
Yeah, yours was less egregious than us.
John:
He threw like the $300 Apple book.
John:
I remember that.
John:
He's throwing his iPads.
John:
He's throwing everything.
John:
He's throwing devices on top of each other into the frame of the camera.
John:
It's like, stop.
John:
Stop throwing your hardware.
John:
It's expensive.
John:
It's fragile.
Marco:
I think ultimately my furniture setup should probably become some kind of table thing.
Marco:
I like what Chase Reeves does.
Marco:
Our wonderful friend Chase Reeves, he does wonderful backpack reviews and stuff on his YouTube channel.
Marco:
I mentioned last week I've been on a backpack odyssey and I do want to do a couple of videos on my backpack stuff.
Marco:
and it's going to be very hard.
Marco:
Similar to how it's hard for Casey to not just try to be Doug DeMuro, it's going to be very hard for me to not try to be Chase Reeves because I'm not Chase Reeves and I could never be, but I do want to do stuff like that also.
Marco:
It isn't just going to be like, here's the newest Apple thing.
Marco:
I'm not going to do a video on the MacBook Air because I don't have one.
Marco:
Apple didn't give me one, and I'm not going to go buy one just for that, so I'm probably not going to do that, but I do want to do other things like backpack stuff and travel stuff and maybe coffee stuff and other kinds of stuff.
I don't know.
Marco:
You did a Demura intro, you realize, on your iPad Pro review.
Marco:
I've never seen a Demura video, so I have no idea what you're talking about.
Marco:
Every one of his videos starts like this.
Marco:
Ready?
John:
This is the new iPad Pro.
John:
This is the whatever.
John:
They all start with that.
John:
Every single one.
John:
I mean, that's his stick.
John:
He's got a format, and that's the format, but you unknowingly exactly match the format.
John:
Damn it.
Casey:
So now you don't need to watch a Doug Demura video.
Casey:
You can just watch my four videos over and over and over again.
John:
You don't do any Demura intros, do you?
Casey:
I mean, not knowingly.
Casey:
I don't try to.
John:
This is the 2019 Audi A4.
John:
No, certainly not knowingly.
John:
This is a backpack.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know any backpacks.
John:
I can't insert a name.
Casey:
Well, just think of me and wish me luck tomorrow as I try to cover two cars in the span of like six hours.
Casey:
Well, I usually have a week.
John:
DeMiro could do three cars in that amount of time.
Casey:
He could.
Casey:
He could.
Casey:
I'm not Doug DeMiro.
Marco:
Well, but again, like that will probably help you the same way my deadlines helped me.
Marco:
Just don't crash the car, please.
Casey:
Well, the thing, the problem I have with it is that I think it will help me in the broad, like in the, in the, at a macro level, but I'm really scared that I will take all this time and take some time from a friend of mine to do this.
Casey:
and then have nothing good to show for it on the other end.
Casey:
I'll learn a lot about how to make these things quicker, but I'm scared I won't have enough to make one good video out of it.
Casey:
I'm intending for this one video to be both cars.
Casey:
I'm not intending to get two videos worth of stuff out of this, but I'm scared that I'm going to spend six or eight hours doing all this and then have nothing to show for it when it's Final Cut Pro time.
Casey:
So we'll see.
John:
So make a crappy one.
John:
You can always fall back to, I mean, I don't know how much you've done this in other videos, but this seems to me the, the easier route is you got a bunch of footage and maybe you've got a bunch of audio with it and maybe it doesn't come out that well, but it has the moments that you wanted in it that you narrate over footage that already is health has its own audio.
John:
So basically you, you have, you have the video and then you have your commenting on the video and that is the final video because if you just present the video as is, like it's too, like it's not good because the, the,
John:
the shot is blurry or the camera is shaky or the audio is bad.
John:
So the regular car reviews approach of doing things.
John:
Yeah, but then in the video, you can, in front of your podcast microphone, record a voiceover that explains what's going on in the video that you couldn't explain in the moment, but you caught some funny moment or you showed something and you're explaining what is not very apparent on the video and the fact that it's revealing about the cars or whatever.
John:
So you can always do that.
Casey:
And that is something I'm not above doing.
Casey:
It's just a matter of, you know, what can I do with potentially a second shooter, which is both good and bad, because that makes me even more self-conscious about all the stupid things I'm saying.
Casey:
What can I do with a second shooter and a lot more of a plan than I've ever had before, but still kind of shooting from the hip.
Casey:
So we shall see.
Marco:
I will say, dealing with the YouTube backend, it is as bad as everyone says.
Marco:
One of the things, so I decided I wanted to make sure, now that I'm taking this more seriously, I wanted to make sure that youtube.com slash Marco Arment or whatever the custom URL scheme, I wanted to make sure I had that.
Marco:
I know that it's not automatic or at least maybe not always automatic, so I wanted to make sure I want that.
Marco:
I want to get my URL set up.
Marco:
Trying to do that, trying to figure out how to do that even, is its own little adventure.
Marco:
Then, once I found out how, it's like, I can't just be Slash Marco Armas.
Marco:
I have to be Slash Marco Armas and then add some characters afterwards.
Marco:
It wouldn't let me just take my name.
Marco:
And in certain ways, my name already works.
Marco:
Like, in certain URL formulations, it already works.
Marco:
But not all, like the slash channel, whatever ones.
Marco:
And it's like, oh, you can add this.
Marco:
You just register for this here, but you have to only have the thing after your name.
Marco:
I'm like, okay.
Marco:
So I tried searching everywhere to figure out why does it make me add characters to get my name that is not taken in these other places.
Marco:
And it turns out, oh, well, that's because to get just your name, you have to be part of the partner program.
Marco:
which is their euphemism for you have ads in your channel.
Marco:
And that, of course, is documented nowhere.
Marco:
It's like you end up searching and you find like a Usenet posting or something.
Marco:
And so eventually I learn I have to be a partner.
Marco:
So I go, how do I become a partner?
Marco:
So I went and signed up, and it's, oh, I have to sign up for an AdSense account.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
So I can't have a good URL unless I put ads on my channel.
Marco:
Because I'm not going to make money from this in any meaningful way for a long time, if ever.
Marco:
So I'm just like, I'd rather not even have the ads, probably.
Marco:
But I can't be a Class A YouTuber in the features set unless I turn on ads, basically.
Marco:
And so I'm like, all right, fine, I'll turn on ads.
Marco:
So I applied to the AdSense account.
Marco:
I get an email a day later saying, you already have an AdSense account, limit one per person.
Marco:
And the one I had is the old one for like, there was like a six month period where Overcast ran Google AdMob ads.
Marco:
in the app, like little banners.
Marco:
I haven't actually run those ads in the current version of the app for over a year.
Marco:
But there was like $18 in unpaid funds sitting in it.
Marco:
And so I'm like, all right, how do I close that?
Marco:
Because I don't want to reuse that account.
Marco:
That's for Overcast.
Marco:
It's a whole different business.
Marco:
It's a different LLC.
Marco:
I want a separate one for just me as the YouTuber.
Marco:
So okay, how do I do that?
Marco:
I challenge you to try to find how to close an AdSense account.
Casey:
Oh, that's no surprise.
Marco:
There is a help page on YouTube.
Marco:
It says, you know, because in the email that you get that says you have a duplicate account, there's a link to Google help documents that say how to close it.
Marco:
And you can follow every one of those instructions.
Marco:
And the things that it says are there aren't there.
Marco:
So it's like, OK, it says to go here to this page and then click the button.
Marco:
But the button it says will be there isn't there.
Marco:
What now?
Marco:
Where is it?
Marco:
Eventually, I think I found like a Quora post that linked directly to some like customer service form on Google site that you could fill out to request cancellation of your of your account, which is linked to seemingly nowhere else.
Marco:
I did eventually fill that out.
Marco:
After verifying, is this even real?
Marco:
Am I getting phished?
Marco:
What is going on here?
Marco:
But it was real.
Marco:
I filled it out.
Marco:
I got an email a day later saying, okay, we've canceled your old account.
Marco:
We'll be sending you $18 somehow.
Marco:
And then I finally could get my partner program approved to the point where it's now in review.
So
Marco:
sometime in the last it says it will decide quote usually within a month or so so sometime in the next month or so I will be approved I hope for monetization that I don't want so I can just get the URL I want
Casey:
It is a total disaster.
John:
This is a great time to remind everybody that they should go to youtube.com slash Syracuse.
John:
So the spelling is in the theme song for this podcast and you will find my beautiful correct URL for my YouTube channel that I got a long time ago, even though I don't make videos.
John:
because the most important thing you can do with every service is reserve a good url for yourself so let this be a lesson to you marco always reserve a cool url for yourself even when you have no plans to make videos thanks and i put up a new video since we last recorded too by the way oh yeah no audio sync issues to speak of uh it's not in 4k because my ps4 only records at 1080p so sorry about that snipes awakening doesn't features any pictures of me or anything in my house or any products
John:
It's just all Destiny all the time.
John:
Yay.
Marco:
So I'm a little curious, John.
Marco:
Like why – so what are these Destiny videos of?
Marco:
Are these like special events, special achievements you've gotten?
Marco:
And I'm curious like both – Well, you haven't watched my videos.
John:
Why do you have this question?
John:
You should go to my channel and watch all my videos.
Marco:
I'm watching this now and I don't know what's going on.
John:
Your view count will be significant.
Yeah.
John:
yeah you're a single view will be a significant contribution will be lost in the noise in a popular channel but in my channel i'll see your view like oh look marco watched it the number went up by one so so i am curious like you know why because you know you're not much of a public sharer in most forms why are you posting these videos
John:
I'm engaged in the Destiny community.
John:
They're all Destiny videos.
John:
I like Destiny.
John:
So this is part of the genius of the PS4, as many people have noted in the years since the PS4 has come out, when they introduced the PS4 and it showed that one of the buttons on the controller, the precious controller real estate, had been dedicated to a button.
John:
simply have the word share under it like the share button of all the things you're going to put on the controller a button called share how dumb is that what you will come to regret this that you wasted a button on the controller face for share who the heck is going to do that the answer is when you make it
John:
I mean, you put that button on the controller and you make it really easy to share anything cool that has happened.
John:
Ooh, crossfades on your on your console.
John:
People use it all the time.
John:
And so if I do anything fun or cool or interesting, supercharged on my PS4, I hit the share button and it saves the last like configurable amount of video, like the last 15 minutes or whatever that I've done.
John:
and then every once in a while i pull that video off and i cut together into some kind of uh sequence and i throw it up on youtube it's just a way to share cool things that have happened to me or that i've done or that are interesting to me uh in destiny and there's no way i would do it if it was like there was some kind of burden where i had to like get some sort of recording equipment and premeditate and think i'm gonna i'm gonna record some stuff or whatever this is just like i play my playstation all the time i play destiny a ton and
John:
And if something interesting happens, I hit the share button and I save a video.
John:
And then every few months I have all this footage and I can put it together and make something out of it.
Casey:
So everyone, if you like Destiny, go to youtube.com slash Syracuse.
Marco:
I have no idea what I just watched.
Marco:
It just looks like footage of you playing a video game.
John:
You got it.
John:
That's what it is.
John:
Yeah, it's not quite as broadly interesting as stuff about Apple hardware.