A 30-Minute Skip Button
Who's got a fan on over there?
Is that you, Casey?
Yes.
It's October.
You still need a fan.
This is how you can tell you're in the south.
Yeah, he lives in like a swamp down there.
Oh, that is so not true.
It was so humid in July.
Yeah, in July.
No, actually, all kidding aside, we're going through a little bit of a heat wave.
Although I will say, and this is just between us and whoever's listening on the live stream, I definitely sweat to death and turn my fan off when I record any other podcasts because I don't have confidence that any of them will be able to pull out my fan.
like you can that might have sounded naughty this is like when the guests get to sit on the good furniture but the family doesn't right exactly our podcast turn off the fan for our podcast put it on everyone else's make their podcast worse how about that well no but because i know that marco can strip it without issue i had to edit out john's crickets a few episodes ago yeah that i can't actually help you can't turn the crickets off for the show no i wish i could turn the crickets off but they do not have off switches and they're very hard to find how's the review john
Just Andy.
Did you see the rumor that they're gearing up for a late October release of Mavericks?
I was so excited when I saw the Apple Insider post that said that there was a new build-out that wasn't developer preview, but it was typical Apple Insider.
Sounding exciting, but really nothing there.
So it was sad.
I thought today might have been the GM.
Nah.
I mean, what do you think will get the GM?
Like a week ahead of time, maybe?
If that?
Probably.
Probably.
I don't know.
I mean, the GM, like, that matters for developers, and it matters a little bit for me, but at this point, I don't think they're changing anything.
They're just fixing bugs.
That's good.
I mean, if they're aiming for a release, quote, this fall, well, as we record this, it's October 3rd, so we're getting into fall pretty significantly, and they shouldn't be making any noticeable changes at this point.
They should just be fixing things.
We will see.
Yeah, I mean, like you would expect at a certain point they're going to announce the date for the iPad event too, right?
And whether those are – they could do that Maverick stuff at the same time, they could do the Mac Pro stuff, or they could just do an iPad event and then do a separate announcement.
But anyway, those are all coming this month, right, I would imagine.
Did you see, I don't know when this was posted.
It might have been more than a week ago.
But here, I'll paste this in the chat.
And this is a Geekbench result from what appears to be the new Mac Pro.
running a CPU that I didn't even think to look at, the E5-1 series.
So it's the 1680 V2.
And this is it.
This link is it compared to my Mac Pro, the 2010 3.33 GHz, which is the fastest at a lot of things that aren't extremely parallelizable.
And...
And it does substantially better.
What's interesting, though, is... And I looked around... I tried to find earlier... I tried to find other Geekbench results from the other Xeon entries that are probably going to be in the Mac Pro.
And...
This was by far overall the best with single-threaded stuff, and it came very close to the best with multi-core.
It looks like a really, really nice CPU, and it's about $1,000 from Intel, so it's probably going to be... I don't think this would be the base CPU, but this might be like a plus $500 or plus $1,000 option, so this could be good.
Now, if you two... Well, when you two buy the new Mac Pro, are you planning on just going...
I don't know, full ornament on it and just maxing this thing out?
What did you do with your current boxes?
Well, what's interesting about this one, and this, I believe, was a little bit of the case in the last generation, but not nearly as much, Intel is really hitting thermal walls here.
They've shrunk their process a lot, but they haven't really been able to really destroy single-threaded performance compared to previous generations.
So that's why they just keep adding cores.
However, with these new Xeons, the whole new E5 V2 line, which is what the Mac Pro is probably going to be exclusively using.
Actually, I think it has to be exclusively using.
That whole line...
if you look at the core counts and the clock speeds, as the core count goes up, the clock speeds go down because they're limited by thermal capacities of the surrounding enclosure and everything.
So these all have the same TDP.
And they can all do this turbo boost thing, but with reduced capacities as the core count goes up and with reduced benefit.
So what you have basically...
is a whole bunch of CPUs where there's five different top-of-the-line models that all have different characteristics.
So if you're doing more single-threaded stuff, MP3 encoding, or hey, everything Adobe makes.
If you're doing a lot of single-threaded stuff...
you'll be better off with a higher clocked CPU, even if that means fewer cores.
Whereas the top-of-the-line one is going to be this 12-core model that's only 2.7 GHz.
And that, if you do the multi-core test, it does...
substantially better than this cpu like this one is scoring like a 24 000 on the new geek bench and the the 12 core one is like a i believe 29 000 so it's it's not like twice as fast but it's it's certainly faster so if you're doing things like video encoding all day then that that will be uh noticeable but for most things the top core model is actually not going to be fastest it'll be better off going with something like this where it has fewer cores but it can boost them up higher what about you john
Well, I would get it maxed out if I could afford it, but I'm imagining that the top end one of these, just like the top end of most macros, is going to be silly pricing.
Even if you can afford it, you feel like you don't want to buy it because you're like, come on, I'm going to spend as much money as a car on this little black trash can on my desk.
So yeah, I'm looking for that sweet spot of...
Like, you know, maybe I'll splurge in one particular area, but I basically want some kind of balance of performance.
So normally I was forced to buy something close to the top of the line because I always wanted the best video card they had.
But with BTO, they usually let you configure that.
And I don't think the only time I ever got the fastest, fastest CPU was when the original Power Mac G5 came out and I got the top of the line one of those.
because it was reasonably priced.
And so, you know, get the fastest one you can get.
You know, it was 2 gigahertz or whatever it was.
And, you know, 3 gigahertz was coming in a year, they said.
So here we are in 2013, and we're looking at the Geekbench score of a 3 gigahertz Apple processor.
So yay, IBM finally didn't ever deliver, ever.
Yeah.
Uh, but no, I'll be looking at the same thing Marco is like, I'm probably going to pick a system with a higher clock speed and fewer cores, because I think that will be better for the things I do on the computer.
I mean, at this point, it's not like it used to be where it's like, well, you get a single CPU or a double CPU and you have to worry if you need that second one.
Like,
the one with fewer cores has eight cores in it and 16 threads because of hyper-threading.
So it's not like, you know, because that was, I usually tended to go multi-core in the old days because I'm like, look, this, you know, in Unix operating system, there's tons of processes running all the time
I don't want all these little background demons and stuff and even just in a single processor multithreader waiting around for cores if I if I could get some with more cores, let them grind away plus as multiple processes and running all the time I want to have multiple cores so there's less waiting for CPUs and even though they're not stressing the CPUs just hey, more cores to pass around.
But everything has tons of cores now.
So the only reason to go to the super multi core ones is I guess if you have an application that uses them like some kind of application that's massively takes advantage of every core you have like you get, you know, almost linear scaling if you double the number of cores, but I don't use any of those applications.
So I'm going to be looking for
Maybe I won't buy the fastest, fastest, like, low number of cores processor because they might charge a premium for that, too.
This has a lot to do with how Apple prices things.
But until I see the prices, maybe I'm getting the cheapest one because the cheapest one is going to be $5,000.
And then, you know...
That's what's going to happen.
Right, yeah.
The pricing is still such a big question mark on these.
We have no idea what the entry price will be, what the CPU upgrades will cost, anything.
I mean, we don't even have a ballpark, except that we can assume that it's probably not going to be that much different than the previous Mac Pro.
Maybe a little more to cover those graphics cards, but I'm still betting entry price of $3,500.
which is higher than the current ones because I think they do have to cover those graphics cards with a healthy margin.
And certainly the U.S.
assembly is going to increase their cost a little bit, but I don't think it's going to be enough relative to the profit margin of this product to make any difference in the retail price.
But I don't know.
I still think that they can put the bottom of the line pretty cheaply.
I mean, you know, Intel charges, you know, 500 retail or whatever for their thing.
Apple's not getting that price.
And that's probably the most expensive component in the system.
Maybe the video card gives it a run for its money.
There's not that much else in the system, just in terms of physical goods and the amount of stuff in there.
If you were to build your own PC...
with this processor, the processor would definitely be the most expensive thing in the system.
And then you'd buy a retail gaming video card and a motherboard and a case, and you'd slap it together, and you'd do that good old PC-Mac price comparison.
You could see, what is the real price of this stuff?
Take that home-built PC cost and then cut a whole bunch off that.
That's Apple's actual price.
So I think there is room for Apple to get a healthy...
45, 50% margin, and still offer this machine entry level under 3K.
Yeah, we'll see.
I mean, really, those GPUs are such a big question mark because at retail, of course, they're very expensive, but they're also now going to be like a half generation or one generation old by the time we actually get them, right?
Yeah, they pre-announced the Mac Pro, and it's like, but no, now the video card is crappy.
AMD announced their next-gen GPUs.
What?
We waited so long for this great machine, and we don't even have it in our hands, and the GPU is already, you know, AMD's already got their next-generation architecture.
I'm like, oh, we've got to buy this previous-generation architecture and my brand-new Mac Pro.
One thing I'm curious, though, and I admit I don't know enough about the various low-level workings of the motherboard and the bus and the chipset and everything.
Is there much of a chipset or is it all in the CPU now?
Anyway, one thing I noticed, though, comparing...
looking on Geekbench, looking at the scores, comparing the Mac Pro to other CPUs that should have similar scores, the Mac Pro does a lot better.
And I'm wondering, you know, we know that the new Mac Pro is designed in this crazy way to have, to basically use every possible PCI Express lane, to use every possible amount of bandwidth through that CPU and through the chipset.
I wonder if...
they've been able to make some tweaks because they can assume there's going to be nothing else on the bus besides what they have in there stuff like that um is there enough headway for them to like tweak that to make their systems like 10 15 faster than you just buying a super micro server and sticking a z on it like it it is that even possible i don't even know i'd love to hear from listeners who know
I would think that they would definitely make it 10% to 15% cheaper because, as you said, they don't have to worry about internal expansion pretty much at all.
They do have to cover the cost of a very custom-designed motherboard.
Yeah, I know, but I don't think it's outside the expertise of the people who make motherboards.
It's not a standard size or shape, but I don't think that's the...
Probably the stupid round case in that triangular piece of metal thing is more expensive than just getting motherboards cut to the – because they're rectangular shapes.
It's not like they're – and they do custom motherboards for all their laptops anyway with those crazy shapes to work around the components.
So this is a much – this is relatively a freer environment.
Look how much room.
Think of what Apple has to stick motherboards into.
laptops where there's not a millimeter to spare and everything is like every every capacitor is laid out so it just barely clears like the little post that's holding the screw that holds the case together the mac mini which is tiny uh phones and ipads forget it there's no room in there to breathe uh the imac which is relatively luxurious but they keep squeezing it thinner and thinner and it's just laptop parts in there anyway and then finally the mac pro you can have actual rectangles
Three of them.
Three actual rectangle printed circuit boards.
But yeah, the lack of any other expansion in there, I would imagine would allow them to just trim every single component that's not absolutely necessary to run what they know will be in the box.
This machine, this new Mac Pro, is designed electrically and physically a lot like a couple generations ago game console.
albeit with much more expensive components right but you know it's got it's try you know one fan you write usually on a game console to have one fan to cool the whole thing uh no internal expansion uh everything's all just like shoved in there there's a cpu a gpu memory uh you know i guess the the the internal hard drive flash replaced with ssds uh it's like a big tubular game console that costs tons of money and probably doesn't run games that well
Probably.
Do you think that the fact that it's going to be made in the U.S.
is going to have any empirical difference on the price?
No, I don't think so.
For U.S.
customers anyway, the extra amount they have to...
It really depends on what's shipped where.
You say, oh, no, they don't have to ship from China to me, but they have to ship probably every component that's in the thing from China to Kentucky or wherever the heck the thing is built and then ship the finished product from Kentucky.
It's being assembled in America, but the places that the components come from.
In terms of assembly, this is probably an easier thing to assemble.
They're not machining aluminum and jamming little pieces in there and everything.
It's just, you know...
a metal frame, slap the printing circuit boards on it, make a plastic case, a fan on top, a little power supply, slap it all together, you're done.
Right, and the tolerances amongst those major components are a lot better.
I mean, obviously the tolerances within a component are just as bad as always, but like you were saying earlier, it's a lot harder to squeeze a bunch of stuff in a phone than it is in the trash can.
Yeah, plenty of room in there.
Although I was having waking nightmares while I was idly thinking earlier today about what will the fans sound like when I'm playing a game on that thing?
Because I know when I play on my current Mac Pro, it's the only time I ever hear the fans, and it's because the fans and like...
Section A9 of the 15 wind sections that are in a Mac Pro start cranking up.
And normally you don't hear them at all because the GPU is doing nothing.
But, you know, start playing a 3D game for an hour or so, and you hear this whine, and it's not the giant CPU fence.
It's the smaller ones that are blowing across the video card area, plus also the actual active cooler that's on the video card itself.
And so I'm like, well, that's kind of noisy.
Will this new one be better because there's only one fan or will it be worse because the only alternative when things get hot in there is just to crank up the one fan that they have to even higher speeds?
Well, the one you have now, is that the 8800 with the stock fan?
Yeah, so I'm very familiar with that fan.
That is by far the loudest part in that computer.
Even at idle speeds, eventually mine got, I guess, a little bit of dust in it somewhere, and so it became a little bit louder.
And even at idle speeds, I would take the lid off and stick my finger on the hub so it would stop that fan.
It was a massive difference in noise, like, you know, not to the point where you'd have to replace it, but to the point where you notice it and you're like, wow, that's kind of inelegant.
The little fan is so loud.
Yeah, I had that on my G5 where that fan, you know, it started to go bad.
And when they start to go bad, you know, it's just like.
Nails on a chuck board, you got to get rid of it.
So I bought an aftermarket cooler to put in there.
It was probably actually noisier than the old one, but so far on this 8800, for many years of service, it has not started to pick up that telltale little scritch that you know is just going to eventually get louder and louder.
And for a video card fan that I assume you leave your computer on most of the time or all the time?
Sleeps at night.
Okay, that's pretty good.
But still, for a video card fan from 2008 until now, that's pretty good.
Because those things always die.
This is a champion machine.
This has had the fewest hardware problems of any Mac I have ever owned, including all of my old classic ones.
Yeah.
Well, I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with the new one.
If it comes out, I'm curious to see benchmarks.
I'm curious to see when Barefeet gets a hold of it and tests it against the other Macs and against other models within itself.
I really wanted to see how these CPUs perform in real-world use or with real benchmarks once we have the retail machines and see what we can do.
What's really going to be telling to me is like whole system performance, like the PCI SSDs.
Are they super fast SSDs or are they just like, well, the SSDs are fine?
Because it's going to feel fast if when you launch the thing and you click on system preferences and it loads all those preference panes or whatever that it's like, wow, I can notice this is faster.
Is it going to feel faster than an existing Mac that's all SSD or will it just feel like, yeah, it's about the same?
You know, what's crazy is like, I don't even think it has a serial ETA controller.
No, why would it?
Exactly.
There's so much stuff that by getting rid of all the internal expansion, there's so much stuff that it just doesn't need to have.
And it can dedicate tons of bandwidth to the stuff it does have, if it can use it, and then just have three Thunderbolt controllers and be like, all right, done.
I don't know.
It could be interesting.
What's up with the JPEG decompress result in this benchmark?
I saw that too.
Oh, yeah, look at that.
I don't know.
I have no idea.
But who knows?
And you see, this is kind of like testing the A7 and text benchmark, where the AES multi-core score is like twice as high.
Yeah, exactly, because it's hardware accelerated.
Because they add a hardware instruction.
That's the best way to win benchmarks.
Oh, yeah.
Add a hardware instruction for whatever it is that they're benchmarking.
Wow, it's 10 times faster.
And one of the reasons why I keep looking at these benchmarks is like, even though my current computer has a three or even probably four year old CPU by this point, this actually isn't that much faster than it in single core stuff.
I don't want to buy a whole new Mac Pro and go through all that expense if there's not going to be a Retina display to go with it and therefore another whole reason to get it.
If there's not going to be the Retina display and there's not going to be a massive upgrade in CPU performance available.
It's kind of stupid to have a three and a half year old CPU that's almost as fast as what you're about to launch today.
But that just shows how little progress Intel has made with the Xeons.
you've already got a PCI Express SSD, a big one, right?
So, like, you should definitely look at, you know, does this, if we put a black sheet over your desk and didn't tell you if you're using your old Mac Pro or your new one and you can't tell the difference, then maybe wait for the second generation.
I kind of wish I could wait for the second generation system, you know, especially, you know, knowing all the things that we know now about, well, maybe the retina displays won't be ready yet and the new GPU architecture from AMD is out and those architectures don't change every year, you know, so it's,
It would be nice if I could wait for a second, but I can't wait.
I mean, I've had this computer wait too long.
Exactly.
Now, John, how old is the one that you have at work?
Because you have a Mac Pro at work as well, don't you?
Yeah, I've got – I don't know.
I think it's around five years old, but it was the first – it was – what do you call it, dude?
intel chip whose name starts with an n that i can't pronounce yeah the first one with integrated memory controller it's the single uh cpu socket version of those with the stupid one with triple channel memory and four ram slots yeah and i got it because it was the cheapest mac pro that was available at the time and so i you know give work break and um you know instead of getting a 300 dell crap box they're gonna buy me this
super expensive, you know, whatever it was, $2,000 Mac.
But the replacement cycle for machines at work, I think now is like 18 months or something for the crappy Dell laptops that everybody gets.
And I've had this machine for five years.
So I feel like I really, they got their money's worth.
Oh, and that's what I was going to ask is, are you replacing both home and work?
Or do you think you're going to do one and not the other?
I don't have any control over what happens at work.
I have put an SSD in the one at work, so I kind of got a new machine when I put in that.
It was like a 500 gig SSD or something, so I'm not hurting at work for a CPU, but I'll definitely get one at home and see how it goes and then see how much.
At work, I might even just ask for an iMac next or something.
I don't know if I really need to have the Mac Pro at work.
Do you want to tell me about something that's awesome?
I would love to.
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Going back a second, before I forget, first of all, there's a good question in the chat room that I want to get to in a second also, but going back to the Mac Pro for a second, the reason I asked earlier what video card you had and everything, I forgot to actually finish this point, but have you heard the fan spin up on the Retina MacBook Pro?
Probably in the office where everything's noisy, but not in terms of I'm using one and I hear it because I've never really used one for an extended period.
So that was the one where they first did their asymmetrical blade thing.
And it's actually really, really good.
Like, it's very quiet, even when you'd expect it not to be.
And then when it does ramp up to full speed, you can hear it, but it almost sounds like white noise, or like pink noise, one of those various expensive office noises.
Like, it sounds kind of like air whooshing, not as much like a whirring high-pitched noise.
It's hard to describe it.
You really have to hear it.
But...
It sounds better, and it is less noticeable than a fan of a regular design spinning at roughly the same speed.
So I think the new Mac Pro, it also has that same design.
I believe they mentioned that specifically.
It also has the asymmetrical blades, and it's one giant slow fan.
You sure about that?
I think so.
I'll have to double check.
Chatroom can go look it up for us.
Yes, please do.
Anyway, but if they do the same thing, I would imagine that having one giant fan that has the capacity to cool two cranking GPUs and one cranking Xeon up to 12 cores plus the power supply to the whole thing, that's a lot of capacity.
So if you're distressing part of it, like just the CPU, I would imagine it doesn't have to spin that fast to cool that adequately.
And so I would guess...
it would probably be pretty quiet.
Now, was it the Retina MacBook Pro that you and I, well, really you stole from Jason Snell and ran?
Yes, that was it.
Okay, because that I heard, I was there with you, this was WWDC last year, and you're absolutely right.
You can hear them for sure, but it sounds a lot less offensive, which is weird.
And if I was listening to this and hadn't heard the fans on a Retina MacBook Pro, I'd think that we were all crazy.
But it really is different, and it really does make a difference.
Yeah.
Oh, and John Solo in the chat has just confirmed from Apple's Mac Pro promo site that it does have asymmetrical spaced blades.
They're impellers, not propellers.
Yeah, it's this weird giant thing.
Anyway, so yeah.
And then the question that I wanted to get to from a few minutes ago is from Brad hyphen hyphen colon in the chat room.
He said, are you, the letter U, supposed to put the Mac Pro on top of the desk or on the floor?
The new one.
So what do you think?
That's actually a good question.
You're supposed to put it on top of the desk.
Right, but everyone who's had a Mac Pro up until now puts it on the floor.
Right, because the Mac Pro is supposed to go on the floor.
This is another thing I was thinking about when I was thinking about a Mac Pro.
As I reach down to plug in my podcast microphone, I plug it into the front of my Mac Pro, and I say, well, I'm not going to be doing that anymore.
Yeah, there's no more front ports.
Right, but that's why it rotates, but that makes for an interesting demo, but...
You can't really rotate the thing with cables sticking out of it.
They're all yank.
I don't know.
All the dust comes forward.
It's like the diagram of Mac Pro 2010 where it shows our big tower and then it says Mac Pro 2013 and it shows the little trash can with a million peripherals hanging off of it with a bunch of cables.
Please stop sending that to us.
We've seen it a million times.
But anyway, I'm thinking I already have a USB hub attached to my Mac Pro.
I have everything attached to my Mac Pro.
But yeah, I'm going to have to use a USB hub or something because I won't be able to plug something into the front of it anymore.
for putting it on the floor.
If you put it on the floor, it would look like you have like
It would look like a trash can.
I mean, I think it's too small and lonely to be on the floor by itself.
Imagine if you put a Mac Mini on the floor.
Yeah.
That would look ridiculous.
It's like, oh, what's it doing down there?
And also, it's got little vent holes on the bottom.
And so if you put it on – I think it does, right?
Yeah, it does.
And I want to put that on a carpet.
Like, my Mac Pro has got the little feet, and it's up off the carpet.
And I really don't want to put anything that's going to sign a sink into the carpet.
And would it even be steady down there or, like, knock it over with my foot?
Like, it's not –
It's not big.
People haven't seen it in person.
It looks big in the advertising pictures.
It's not a big computer.
I kind of like it on the floor because it gets the noise below the level of the desk and out of earshot for me, but this is probably going to have to go on my desk.
I mean, I guess it won't take up a lot of room, but it'll take up more than zero room, which is what my current microphone is on my desk.
Right, and all the cables have to go into the back of it, and you will hear the fan more than you would if it was on the floor, but then again, the fan is also now the only moving part in the entire computer.
Yeah.
Are we done with Mac Pro?
Because I wanted to... We probably should be.
Yeah.
Can I ask the Arbiter of all things follow-up, will you allow me to do one brief piece of follow-up so we stop getting spammed?
Depends on what it's about.
It's what you got spammed about.
Is it about the scrubber?
Mm-hmm.
Oh, my God.
We've been getting this every hour.
Who's we?
I've been getting it.
Oh, no.
Well, we've been getting our fair share as well.
Yeah.
Do you want to cover this or shall I?
Yeah, sure.
I suggested a feature for Marco's podcast app last week, half jokingly, improving the audio scrubbing experience.
Many, many people wrote in to tell me that I should use the built-in feature of the regular audio scrubber where you slide your finger up.
to uh and change the speed from like half speed scrubbing quarter speed scrubbing or fine scrubbing or whatever a lot of people thought that was actually a new feature in ios 7 it's not it's been around for a very long time i think maybe even back to ios 3 uh and a lot of people ask like doesn't that do what you want uh no it doesn't it doesn't do what i want like what i was trying i did a bad job explaining it because it's you know off the cuff and it's difficult to explain visual stuff like this but
The key thing that that feature is lacking for when you're trying to scrub through a two-hour podcast or something really long is that it doesn't change the visual feedback.
Even though you supposedly have more flying control, like when you move your thumb an inch, it doesn't really move the little thing an inch, it doesn't change how far the little playhead moves.
So in a two-hour podcast, a single retina pixel would be like 10 seconds.
And so how do you fine scrub through 30 seconds of audio when that's represented by three retina pixels?
Yes, you can move your finger and you're not jerking the thumb along, but you don't know how far you've gone.
What I'm looking for, I was trying to express last time with my video game analogy, is you want a connection between what you do with your finger and an immediate, clear visual response showing what you're doing.
And a clear visual response isn't like, playhead doesn't move, playhead doesn't move, playhead moves one retina pixel which represents 10 seconds.
That is not a good connection between thumb and finger, which is why I'm looking for something with zooming or some kind of other thing where it's more like playing a video game and it's, you know, a complete 60 frames per second, very responsive experience of zooming in and zooming out and zooming in when you're doing fine movement and zooming out.
So that the movements, the visual movements are connected directly and always, always, you know, you always see immediate to scale feedback of your finger, but the amount of time that it represents changes because we're zooming in at the time.
It's very difficult to explain.
And the other thing I want to say about this feature is a lot of people are like, oh, that's a cool feature.
I would love that.
Or Marco should do that or shouldn't.
The thing about any features, especially ones you're just like, wouldn't it be cool if... You can't tell until you implement them.
So I'm not saying that this would be the best thing in the world.
It could very well be that if you went and implemented it, it would be terrible.
Or the first three tries would be terrible.
You'd find out this is, you know, a different approach would be better.
Like...
A lot of people think as soon as you just describe an idea or maybe you draw something on an app and you're like, oh, just make that.
I know that will be good.
You don't know until you actually implement it.
And sometimes, especially in this case, implementing it can be very difficult and complicated, especially if you're not like a game programmer used to trying to do responsive control systems.
So you really have to, not that I think Marco was weighing this heavily in his mind, but you really have to know what you're in for in terms of
I'm going to try to implement this really complicated, difficult feature that may not even work out.
I won't know until I get it implemented.
I've already wasted a week trying to get it done.
So that's the calculus for doing this.
And that's why, despite the fact that people are like, oh, I would totally buy this program.
Remember I said there'd be like five people who would buy this program if you added this feature?
I was off by a factor of two of, I think, ten people.
So they would do it.
But each one of them thought like, man, I bet you're getting a lot of replies.
Yeah, I got like ten.
And so, yeah, 10 people would do it.
But they don't know if they'd like it either because you can't, you cannot tell, you can't even tell if like an app like, you know, Twitterific or something is going to be good that uses more or less simple scrolling and gestures.
You can't even tell if that's going to be good until you implement it, let alone this thing.
Not that I'm saying nobody should do this, and I think it would be a cool feature if someone's got to be in their bonnet about making this really cool, but I am under no illusions about whether the thing I described would actually be awesome and how difficult it would be to get it to be awesome.
There's a reason making awesome games is difficult, because you can get something working in a game engine, even that's hard enough, but then it's probably terrible until you tweak it to death to try to get it just so.
Oh, yeah.
There have been so many things.
When I was making Instapaper, there were so many things that I tried and threw away because I couldn't get them right.
Or they sounded cool in theory.
Here, I dug up this link.
I paced it in the chat now.
Where it sounds cool in theory.
Oh, let me use the accelerometer to do anti-shake on the screen.
Because whenever I was riding the subway in New York, trying to read on my phone, you get jostled so much on the train that it's kind of hard to keep your eyes on the screen.
So I tried, oh, let me do this anti-shake thing.
And I just...
I just could not get it right.
And if you don't get it exactly right, it actually makes it worse and gives you motion sickness.
You have to get it exactly right.
It has to be extremely responsive.
And I just couldn't do it.
As far as I could tell, I don't think the hardware was accurate enough to really nail it.
That's the other thing you might find out.
Maybe this feature I have in my head isn't actually possible on the hardware.
Or maybe it's only possible on a 5S but not possible on most of the phones people have, right?
Yeah.
Exactly.
And so I'll have to see.
I mean, that's the kind of thing, I'll tell you right now, I'm probably not going to make it into version 1.
But I have wanted to play with the scrubbers for a while.
And so I do want to attack that problem sometime, but it's probably not important enough to put it in 1.0.
If that was going to be a 1.0 feature, it would be the flagship feature of an app.
Like an app that includes that kind of thing as a 1.0 feature, that would be what the app is known for.
Because that's the type of thing where like you would sink all your time into this.
Like I'm going to make whatever it is you're going to make and it's going to have a scrubber.
And like my whole experience is going to be focused around the scrubber.
It's going to be what my app is known for, the app with the awesome scrubber.
You know what I mean?
And that's not really what you're making.
Well, it might be.
I talked last week, I think, a little bit about how it's challenging to make the now playing screen.
It's challenging to design that because the whole rest of the app, honestly, I don't care about the design.
I'll make it work.
I'll make it look good.
But the whole rest of the app, any kind of navigation structural thing,
It doesn't really matter.
It's probably going to be a bunch of table views because it doesn't really matter.
What matters to me the most by far is the playing experience.
When you're using the controls on the playback screen and doing the most common actions that you're likely to do when you interact with your podcast app.
And that's not navigation and it's not adding or moving shows.
It's playback controls and seeking and stuff like that.
So that is the kind of thing that I do want to get really right.
And is there anything else that's going on with Overcast that you'd like to share?
Anything from last week?
What am I forgetting?
You're asking that as if you have something in mind.
No, no, no, no.
Not at all.
No, I'm rewriting half of my sync protocol tonight.
How?
You haven't even released it.
You're already chucking it all?
No, no.
The ideas are the same, but I was using... Okay, so I have to figure out...
So the server – it has server-side crawling.
I'm pretty sure I've said that before, so I don't think I'm revealing anything new here.
It has server-side crawling, of course, because that's the obvious way to do it in this day and age, and there's a lot of benefits to it.
So I have to figure out when the server tells the client what episodes should be in this person's account –
Does it include, like, obviously there's the list of feeds that you are subscribed to, but does it include every episode that's in those feeds?
Or just the ones that are new to you?
Like, just the unplayed ones to you?
So in other words, do you include all the back episodes?
And if you do, you can do some cool things.
You can instantly toggle over to the list of all episodes and add certain ones back.
It makes certain things faster in navigation and management.
Right after I tell you that I don't care about navigation and management.
It improves things there.
The downside, though, is that there's then a lot of objects for the sync engine to manage.
You have to somehow keep track and keep in sync this much larger...
set of items as you're communicating between these two things.
And so I didn't want it to take up a whole lot of bandwidth.
So I made the first sync protocol totally binary on the way up.
So when the device communicates to the server, as the request body, it sent a binary stream of a whole bunch of integers, basically.
And it worked fine, and it was really, really small.
It used very little bandwidth to communicate information for a lot of items because I really did fairly intelligent packing work there.
And this is, by the way, I tweeted a couple weeks ago that I hit my 64-bit bug where I had a struct align issue.
That's what it was.
It was in that binary protocol.
Are you just taking native C structures and sending them over the wire?
No, I was packing them into an NSData, but otherwise, yes.
Which I learned is terrible.
You should use protocol buffers or something.
Google's got them sitting there waiting for you to use them.
I bet they work in 64-bit.
Anyway, so...
As I was designing the system and as I was using it, it became increasingly clear that it was going to be very hard to expand.
It was fairly error-prone, and it was just being a pain in the butt.
And so I figured, you know what?
This is 2013.
I don't need to be using a binary protocol.
So tonight I'm changing it to just a JSON dictionary that I run through gzip.
And that gets it most of the way down to the original size because the dictionary is just, you know, like the same few keys followed by the same few, you know, followed by digits 0 through 10.
It Huffman codes pretty well.
And so it actually compresses fairly well.
So I'm changing that part of it to just be a little bit less technically cool and a little bit more functional and less fragile and, you know, less...
prone to things like NDN changes being a problem.
All this stupid stuff I was doing on the server to interpret this that I really didn't need to be doing.
I think you made it more technically cool, not less.
It is uncool to send binary data over the wire.
So, anyway.
Oh, you know what?
If you guys don't mind, do you see Greg Mitten's question?
I would like to address that.
Yeah, I actually had just added that in the show notes tonight, but I didn't know if you would want to address that or not.
Yeah, sure, I'll address that.
All right, so...
Greg Mitten's question is, and he asked us via the contact form.
He said, do you anticipate any conflicts of interest between ATP and Overcast?
For example, would you feel resistance towards implementing a potentially cool feature like a more seamless ad skip button out of fear that it would devalue ATP's ads?
Okay, so...
Out of all possible conflicts of interest, I can't think of them all right now.
Maybe something might come up someday.
I don't know.
But I will address that one in particular because I have thought it would be really cool, since I'm going to have server-side infrastructure, it would be really cool to do basically the Amazon Kindle popular highlights feature.
for things that are skipped in podcasts and that would be an easy way to build like kind of an automatic ad skipper or an automatic like skip merlin's comic book section thing i love merlin sorry so you know it would be it would be interesting for that however
I love podcasts, and I love podcast creators, and I am a podcast creator.
And so I wouldn't want to... Because I know in reality what that would do if this got popular.
Honestly, even just the existence of this in an app that any sponsor had heard of, that would to some degree devalue podcast ads.
And...
Even if I didn't have my own show, just caring about the ecosystem as much as I do, I don't think I'd want to do that.
I think I would feel bad doing that.
If you want to skip ads on your own, that's fine.
I've skipped ads before.
It's not the end of the world if a few people skip ads.
But to enable it to make it much better en masse like that...
would do some damage.
And I don't want to do that.
The last thing I want, this medium is not very big.
It's mostly very small producers, often single people or small groups of people like us.
It's very small producers.
We're not talking about ripping off NBC here.
We're talking about ripping off small people like us.
And so I just would not feel good doing that.
And
Yeah, that probably has something to do with me having my own show, but the reality is if I thought about it at all, even if I didn't have my own show, it would still feel a little bit wrong to do.
So that's the kind of feature that I'm going to almost definitely not do.
Now, but there's a gray area there, is there not?
And what I mean by that is you could have a 30-second skip button, but you could avoid the cool kid coalescing of all this data to get the communal skip button.
Does that make sense?
Right.
I do have a 30-second skip button.
I think that's an important feature to have for any client.
And that mostly comes back to Merlin's comics, right?
Oh, entirely.
30 seconds doesn't put a dent in the comic section.
Are you kidding?
You're a 30-minute skip button.
Right.
But so, yeah, I mean, you know, it's important to have things like that.
But I'd rather like leave that to the user, you know, leave it to them to skip what they want to skip and don't massively enable automatic ad skipping at scale.
You know, that's that would just be kind of a dick move for the whole industry.
The highlights feature is still a good idea, though.
I would like to know which sections... It's kind of like only allowing upvotes on comments instead of downvotes, where instead of people marking the sections that they want to skip, how many... Or even just having the equivalent of dropping a marker of people, when they're listening, if they think this part is particularly good, hit a star or something.
Yeah, like a like button.
It expands out in a minute in either direction and makes a centrally located little point.
And then you can see where the points cluster of like, oh, this is the funny part or this is the part with the most likes and stuff.
That sounds like a good idea.
Yeah, that's the kind of thing I could do.
And I thought about, too, whether I want to go into this whole area of detailed stats tracking.
Because that would probably anger some people if I just snuck it in.
That like, oh, by the way, I'm recording the sections that you skip on my server to accumulate with other people's data and present this to people in some anonymous but accumulated way.
Or even just like what they listen to and when.
Right.
Like I do want to start tracking that and get into things like, you know, like I want to be able to tell publishers how many people who use Overcast subscribe to your feed.
How many people of those listen to this episode?
And how many of those people started it but didn't finish it?
Or, you know, how far did they get on that?
I want to be able to tell publishers that.
First of all, as a publisher, it'd be interesting to know that.
And second of all, if you're in a position where you have a bunch of people using a client and you control the server side of it, why not have that data and look at it and try to gain some kind of insight and try to share that with the world?
There's not a lot of reason not to do that except that it will anger some people to be collecting that.
So if I do choose to do that, I don't even know if it will make it into 1.0, probably not.
But if I do choose to do that, I'm going to be very upfront about that happening because that would be weird if I wasn't.
Now, would you, as a means to make Overcast have a different income channel, would you consider not selling the data, but perhaps selling access to that data?
So, I don't know, either other podcast owners, I mean, I guess you kind of, maybe you already answered that.
in a moment ago but would you would that be free if I had a different podcast and I wanted to know all the detailed statistics about what overcast users were doing with my podcast how do you how do you envision spreading that
Well, I kind of want to be the anti-Stitcher here.
Stitcher basically, if you want your podcast to be on their network or if they somehow add it without ever telling you, all your hits go to them because they cache the file and they transcode it and everything.
So...
So all those hits don't go back to your server.
So there's a bunch of people listening to your show that you can't track unless you work with Stitcher, which means signing up with them and then agreeing to all their crazy terms, and some of them are pretty crazy, and all this stuff.
It doesn't make me feel good to even think about working with them ever.
And so the last thing I want to do is, if I am collecting these stats, even though I'm not going to be transcoding people's files, but if I collect any stats about shows, I think I just make them public, just on the site, just here, you know, on the page that shows the show, just here's, you know, all the stats about it that I know of.
I would feel better about doing that, I think.
But is that dicey in the sense that, to some degree, listener numbers are kind of like a salary?
And oftentimes, podcasts...
producers don't like to share that kind of data?
Oh, certainly.
But the reality is my one client on this one platform of iOS is very unlikely to ever get big enough that these numbers represent the entire market or even a uniform subset of it.
That's very unlikely to ever be the case.
So I don't think it would cause that kind of problems.
You can look at
You can already look at things like our friend underscore David Smith, his Podwrangler thing.
He's told us about how our show ranks in his app relative to other shows.
But that's just his app, and that's a very different ranking than the iTunes top podcast chart.
And you look at things like Instacast and Pocket Cast that today already have directories, and they will list their most popular shows among people using their apps.
And it's all a pretty different set.
The tech podcasts rank pretty well in all of them,
It's all very different from the iTunes top podcast directory and things like that.
So obviously we're not looking at a uniform random subset of the overall market with any of these clients.
Yeah, because tech nerds listen to tech nerd podcasts and buy podcast apps.
But, like, I mean, on David Smith's stuff, I think, like, This American Life was, like, mid-pack.
And, like, tech podcast.
And in the reality, This American Life gets slightly more than all the tech podcasts in the universe combined.
So, yeah, it's not a representative example.
And that's why I think I don't think it's probably a big deal to, you know, because it's like –
any show that that you are on is going to probably have a disproportionate number of listeners in your podcast app right exactly you talk about on your show so it's like you know it's not good it's you think the information would be interesting but you certainly don't want to sell you just like look here it is take it for what it is you know it's kind of like when this is the same thing happens with websites when they show like oh uh you know ios 7 adoption numbers and they show like the hits to their website it's like that's
That's not iOS 7 adoption numbers.
That's people who go to your website's iOS 7 adoption numbers, and your website is about iOS and Apple stuff.
It's very difficult to pick any single website that would be representative of iOS adoption as a whole.
But certainly it's not going to be some Apple tech news site that is going to be representative.
Right.
And to answer COLAFF underscore in the chat, he's saying listing rankings is very different from listing numbers of subscribers.
And that's true.
However, I think if I did list numbers and not just relative ranks –
The worst that would show... Because I'm not going to be taking over half the market or anything.
The most this is going to show is how few people use my app.
That's the most likely outcome.
Wow, your app... You only have 500 people who listen to This American Life in your app?
Wow, you have nobody using your app.
That would be the bigger risk there.
It's not that I would...
become so huge that all of a sudden you'd be able to tell how everyone's doing just based on my my stats so i don't know it's it's a tricky thing i probably won't even do it in version one just because it's not worth the time but i would like to look into that in the future anyway let's move on to anything else except all me because this isn't the marco show
You want to do another sponsor before we move on?
Yeah, might as well.
Let's do that.
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So I wanted to ask you, Marco, since you, well, the world conspired against me and you got your 5S just before the show last week, not that I'm still bitter about that.
Now that you've had a week with it, any new and interesting thoughts?
To be honest, I really don't have anything new and interesting.
I still love the thing, but you only had brief moments with it before the show, so I didn't know if you had anything interesting to add.
I don't really.
No, it's my new iPhone.
It works.
I like it.
Have you given up on Touch ID?
Yes, I have.
I'm going to Singleton with you, actually.
All of us except John are going to Singleton next week.
Indeed.
And I'm probably going to turn it on there just to try it out with a conference setting.
Like I said earlier, like, oh, maybe I should lock my phone when I'm at a conference.
But the reality is I don't really leave my phone anywhere.
I never take it out of my pocket.
I never leave it on a table.
My phone is either in my pocket or in my hand.
That's it.
So I've never really had the need.
No one's ever picked up my phone and messed with it.
Not once.
So the only reason I would really need it would be if somebody actually stole my phone out of my hand, which does happen, but that's a lot less common than people tweeting pooping when you get up from the bar and leave your phone there.
So it's...
I really am not sure that I'm ever going to stick with it, but we'll see.
Oh, and to answer colf underscore again in the chat room, how do you charge it?
I charge it next to me at night.
So somebody would have to break into my house or my hotel room when I'm traveling and come up next to my head and take my phone off of its charger or cable to get it when it's charging.
So again, it's really not... I'm not one of those people who always has a dead battery and has to be plugging it in at parties and stuff.
I'm never that person.
I'm never in that situation.
So, there's just really very rarely a time when anybody could get my phone without me knowing.
Without me knowing immediately and being able to react immediately.
So, I don't know.
I don't think it's much of a problem.
And, you know, the worst case scenario is, you know, they get into my email or something.
I mean, what are they going to do?
Like, read the stuff I have saved in Instapaper?
Like, that's... Okay, you know, fine.
Just, you know, don't delete it, please.
You know, like, that's...
What else are they really going to do on my phone besides read my email or try to do a password reset and get the email from that?
The email is really the big security there.
But how long would they have my phone without me knowing about it before I could start doing something about it?
And to answer head lead in the chat, are we seeing, are you or I seeing any issues with the accelerometers or gyroscopes since that was making the rounds today?
I have not, but I'm not really sure that I've been in a position that I would have noticed it.
I don't know if you've noticed anything.
No, I'm the same way.
I mean, as I said last show, I think, and multiple shows, I've never had the Compass work properly in any of my iPhones ever since they added the Compass, which was in, I believe, the 3G.
I've never – or no, it was in the 4, I think, or the 3GS.
Anyway, I've never had it work properly, not once.
And so I haven't tried it with the 5S yet.
I've only had it for a week.
But I'm guessing it still works about the same, which is it works sometimes, which for a compass isn't good enough.
So I'll probably never rely on it.
The accelerometer has always been accurate enough that it'll work okay, but inaccurate enough that I'm never going to use it for anything particularly sensitive.
So again, I haven't noticed.
Right.
Now, John, forgive me.
You said Tina is getting one, but not yet.
Is that right?
She kept she couldn't decide which color she wanted.
It comes down to and kept fretting and asking me, what do you think I should get?
I don't know.
She'd like the gold and she was afraid I was going to make fun.
I was like, just get the phone.
Just get the phone that you want, whatever you want.
Get the one that you want.
Don't worry about what I think.
And then she kept pressing me.
I was like, if it was up to me, I would tell you to get space gray.
And she's like, no, I don't like that.
You know, something like eventually she finally decided and she ended up getting a silver one.
Thank you.
Oh, so it is in the house.
Well, no, she didn't buy it.
She ordered it online.
She went to the Apple store once after work one day, and they didn't have any.
They only had Sprint or something or whatever.
And so she didn't want to keep going back to the store.
And I was telling her, I heard on the latest talk show that Gruber was talking about how nice it is to be able to order it from your phone.
And you could tell it replaced the phone that I'm currently ordering from.
So when the new one comes in the mail, it'll be all set to replace that other one.
You don't have to enter all your information, which I thought was neat.
And so I told her to do that, and she did.
uh it was a little bit tricky in that when you order from your phone you are logged into the apple store application with your itunes apple id and we share an itunes apple id for like the households for the apps that we buy so had to sign her out of her itunes apple id and into her own apple id that she uses on her mac and stuff then buy the thing and then sign back and so it's a little bit cumbersome it would be nice like apple's usually pretty good about
giving you a separate Apple ID for each thing that you use.
Like, this is the Apple ID I want to use to, you know, do my iCloud syncing.
And this is the Apple ID I want to use for the App Store.
And this is, you know, especially on the phone.
But on the phone, apparently, the iTunes and App Store Apple ID is shared with the Apple Store application.
But anyway, she ordered it.
It says delivery in October, kind of like Mavericks is due in fall.
So we don't know what that means.
And she picks over because, in the end,
I think she decided that her color coordination options are best with a more neutral color like silver.
Even though when you put the gold in a case, it is really hard to tell that it's gold, especially depending on the color temperature of the lighting.
To tell, you know, is that silver or is that gold or is it just warm lighting in this room?
It's really hard to tell.
So she got silver and she got the red leather case with it.
And she got the 64 because apparently I convinced her with my talking on the past show about how you'll regret it if you get the smaller size.
Nice.
Yeah, I'm curious to see what the leather case is like.
So I had a stock bumper on my 4S.
This is so boring, but I'm already committed.
I got a stock bumper on my 4S, and I liked it a lot until I destroyed it over the course of a year.
And then I rolled without a case for about a year and I didn't like shatter anything.
But by the end of the year, the second year with my 4S, it was looking a little rough.
And so I got this literally $3.50 mono price bumper for the 5S, which is okay.
But I handled the leather case for literally five or 10 seconds when I was in line on launch day.
And my recollection of it after having been up since 5, and this was like 8 or 9 in the morning, was that it was really nice, but $40 darn.
And so I want to go back to the store and see if maybe that's worth it and a little bit nicer than this cheap bumper that I didn't realize says Monoprice across the side on one side until it was already here.
But I don't know.
We'll see what happens.
So in summary, I'm curious to hear what you guys think of it once you have it.
I've played with the leather case on other people's phones, and the slams I heard against the case was that it's hard to get off, which I don't really care about because it's not like I'm ever going to take it on and off, and I doubt my wife would either, and that it made the buttons hard to press.
And so that was the first thing I tested when I saw someone's phone with a leather case.
What it does do is it's kind of like if you have wood detailing in your house and you put lots of layers of paint over it, the detailing kind of goes away.
That's what it does to the buttons.
They used to be prominent and easy to find and feel.
With the leather over it, they become less prominent, stick out less or whatever.
But the actual pressing of them, it felt fine to me.
I don't know what they have inside there, but it's not.
I've had plenty of crappy cases for my iPod Touches over the years, and some of them it's like,
you feel like you're squishing your way through just like this big jello blob and somewhere under there's a button.
It felt, it felt pretty positive.
The connection between I press here, the button goes in and there was, you know, the little click of the actual buttons could be felt through the leather thing.
And my main thing is like, she said, yeah, but you said, they said the buttons are hard to press.
I'm like, look, I've tried.
It's not that bad, but,
How often do you hit the volume up, down buttons?
I don't hit them that often on my iPod Touch.
I don't know if she hits them that often.
And the power button, like, when do you ever use the power button?
I've long since switched to using the home button to wake my thing up, and especially with the Touch ID thing.
Like, do you guys ever touch the power button on the top of your iOS devices?
All the time.
Yep.
I always wake it up with the home button.
That's what I hit when I'm, like, taking it out to check the time or something.
Yep, and if I ever want it to sleep, you know, because I'm done using it, then I won't let it time out.
I'll just turn it off.
Yeah, I guess maybe I do grab it for when I turn the thing off.
I don't do it when I'm waking it up, but maybe when I put it down.
I don't know.
But anyway, the buttons seemed like they were good enough to hit, and, you know, whatever.
Yeah.
Yes, it's expensive, but all I can think back to is the leather iPad cases, which I think were like $70 or something.
It's all ridiculous.
Like, you can imagine what the margins are on that thing.
And the worst part about the leather case is they don't even feel like leather.
Like, if you're going to use real, genuine leather, it should feel like leather.
But it doesn't.
It doesn't even smell like leather.
It smells like something else.
Someone was saying it smelled like original NES manuals, but that person may have been having a stroke, so it's hard to say.
Wow.
All right.
I'm good on the 5S.
Anything else, though?
No, I think I'm good.
All right.
So, John, tell me about how to charge a battery.
Oh, no, not this again.
Yeah, it's not about charging.
This is another thing we got a lot of replies about.
I was thinking that someone at Macworld was talking to me about what features do you want to see?
Or maybe it was ours.
I don't remember.
What features do you want to see in Mavericks or something?
This was before Mavericks had been announced.
It was like, what features do you want to see in 10.9 or whatever?
And one of the ones I suggested that's been bothering me for a long time is if you, like my wife, have a laptop but keep it plugged in pretty much all the time,
That's terrible for your battery, and it would be nice if the OS took care of that and extended the battery life.
Why is it terrible for your battery to be plugged in all the time?
Well, it's not the fact that it's plugged in that's terrible.
It's the fact that the battery is charged to full capacity all the time.
It's very bad to keep a lithium-ion battery charged to 100% capacity all the time.
and that will shorten the life of your battery so that when you do unplug it, say it's been plugged in for two years straight, and you unplug it and you want to use it, you don't get the kind of battery life that you would, you know, if you had just taken it out of the box on day one and charged it to full and then gone to a cafe or something.
Oh, look, there.
In the new Mac Pro, what would we like to see?
I didn't think that was it.
Anyway, someone put a link in the chat room to...
That article that I was thinking of that I tried to Google for but couldn't find.
So this came up again in a Wired article.
And it's always the same guys from like battery university, a bunch of battery scientists promoting this idea that, hey, it's really bad for lithium ion batteries in particular to be kept at full charge all the time.
And it would be nice if OS took care of this and kept it at a lower charge level.
And they say that the optimum charge level, the optimum charge level for storing lithium ion batteries is 40%.
So if you're going to put it on a shelf and let it sit there, don't charge it to full capacity and put it on a shelf.
And don't drain it to nothing and put it on a shelf.
Charge it to 40% and put it on a shelf.
And their suggestion for active use things is charge it to 80%, discharge to 40%.
That is the best way to extend the life of the battery.
The current macOS doesn't do any of these things, but it does, in more recent versions, as everyone has been telling me, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, it does make it oscillate between 100% and 95%.
So it doesn't just leave it capped off at 100%, because that would be terrible.
It does kind of, I think they call it conditioning the battery, where it lets it discharge to 95, then charges it back to 100, then lets it discharge to 95.
And what I'm suggesting is a feature...
that would let it discharge all the way down to 40% while it's plugged in, and then either keep it at 40% or bring it back up to 80, whichever one is actually better for the life of the battery, I'm not sure.
The problem with this feature and the reason it hasn't been implemented is not a technological problem.
It's a user experience problem.
Because if you do that, then when you need to take your laptop, you're like, oh, well, now the stupid thing's at 40%.
And now, like, my battery, the battery life I was supposed to have in my laptop because it was in this middle of this crazy cycle where it always drains it down to 40% or charges it back to 80% or maybe keeps it at 40%.
Now, oh, I got to run.
I got to go out.
Let me take my laptop with me.
It's at 40%.
And people would hate that.
And it would be terrible.
So...
I kind of understand why they haven't implemented it as a feature, and I kind of understand why when they chose to do it, they just had it oscillate between 100% and 95%.
But at the same time, for people like me who know that this computer, it just sits there on that desk plugged in day after day after day after day.
It's like it's behind the 27-inch cinema display.
You have to reach around behind it to even get it.
We don't even look at the screen even though it is open for cooling reasons.
It would be nice if the OS, at least just APIs or something, where you could tell it, don't cycle between 90 and 95.
Go down lower.
Don't even charge past 90.
And as many people who are tweeting back and forth have been either telling me or asking me,
Isn't that what electric cars do?
And yes, it is what electric cars do because they are optimizing for the life of the battery because you don't want to buy a $90,000 Tesla and two years later the battery is fried like it would be on a laptop that you use constantly.
But if you do the math, then if you count these tax credits and if you count the time that you would spend getting gas and repairs for your other car, then it ends up being only $1 a month.
Yeah, but then you're out $90,000 for the car when you've got to get a new one because the cost of the battery is like half the cost of the car.
But yeah, those batteries charge to full capacity, and most of those batteries, they don't let you go past 80 in most – I don't know if Tesla's exact policy, but the same thing as the Prius and any car with a battery –
They pretty much don't let you charge that battery to 100% capacity because it's terrible for the battery.
They let you charge to 80 and they don't let you discharge all the way either.
So you're kind of using this middle band of power in the battery.
And when they give you the power ratings for the battery and they tell you how much mileage you got, they're telling you how much that middle is worth because they want you to avoid...
pushing the thing to a hundred percent capacity, unless you do some big override and say like, I need super duper range for this one time.
And the same thing for draining down, they don't let it go down to zero if they can possibly help, but they want you to recharge it before it gets up to there.
And you know, zero isn't really zero.
And Apple's laptops are just starting to do that now.
Like when you have it plugged in, uh,
Even if the battery, you know, it'll lie to you.
It'll say, oh, battery is full.
Like, you know, and it'll show the little whatever the plug symbol that shows that the battery isn't charging.
But maybe it's like 96%, right?
It's just trying to tell you, you know, we're not going to charge it anymore because we're in the middle of this conditioning cycle or whatever.
Uh, so I kind of understand why this feature doesn't exist, but I think at this point, especially in like an energy saving release, like Mavericks, that would have been the time to say either provide APIs or provide some optional mode for like, click this checkbox that says, yes, I'm always plugged in and accept the fact that if you need to leave in a hurry and grab your laptop, it might not be a hundred percent capacity.
Uh, but I don't think that's coming.
Now, I've seen some of this feedback fly by, and I know a lot of people have pointed to Fruit Juice, which is apparently an app.
And do I have this right?
So what it does is it tells you to unplug to kind of force you to take charge of this whole situation.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's, that's not what I'm looking for.
Like that's the, I've tried to do that manually.
And every time I've tried to do that manually, accidentally leave the computer unplugged and come back and find it has like gone into hibernation mode.
Right.
It's just not like the whole point is I do not, you can't trust me to plug and unplug.
I will forget.
Like I want to leave the little MagSafe thing connected all the time and then have the computer say, I'm not accepting power now because I'm in this, you know,
Like it does with conditioning between, you know, 100 and 95.
But for a much bigger range, treating the battery inside this plugged-in thing more like the battery in a car.
Or the battery in a car that never goes anywhere.
So, again, maybe keep it at 40%.
Well, one thing they're doing with iOS 7, which we can now talk about finally, is that they have... In iOS 7, they have this background fetch thing, which is awesome.
And they talked in WBDC about how...
One of the ways it works is your app says, here's how often I'd like to be woken up for background updates.
And the system actually decides when to actually do it.
And what it does is it actually measures, it keeps track of when you tend to launch certain apps or when the phone tends to be completely idle for a long time.
And then it tries to predict when you're going to launch the app next.
and do the update shortly before that time during a time when you're likely to be on Wi-Fi and have power.
Like if you're charging overnight and you wake up in the morning and you launch your apps, it'll background refresh it shortly before that so it has fresh data.
If they brought something similar to that over to the Mac...
Which they probably can do pretty easily.
Then they can do things like automatically do a charge cycle down to 40% and then back up to 80% every third day in the middle of the night when you aren't using your computer.
Because you never use your computer during that time.
Or you've used it once in the last year during that time, so it'd be worth it.
They could offer a feature like that based on heuristics and analysis of how you actually use your computer so that it could be doing this stuff when you don't even notice because you're asleep.
exactly that's what i was the next thing i was going to say like if you were going to do this that's the way you would try to do it and with the heuristics of background apps on ios it's not the end of the world if it doesn't like it didn't get my rss subscriptions because it hasn't learned my it's kind of like the nest thermostat where you want it to learn but the consequences of it not learning aren't that big in the case of charging your laptop battery the negative consequences are a little bit more severe in terms of user experience where like i guess nest if it makes your house the wrong temperature pisses you off too but like
oh, the new MacBook Pros and the new Apple operating system will learn your habits and keep your battery life longer or whatever.
I still think it would have to be opt-in because there's going to be, especially during a learning period and even outside the learning period, like that time when you need to grab your laptop and go and it's at half capacity and now you're pissed and you're like, I paid all this money for this laptop with 12-hour battery life and I get six because I picked it up at the wrong time.
And the final thing is that Apple probably is the only one that knows how many of their laptops spend their time plugged in all the time.
Maybe I'm an outlier and maybe that's why, you know, they don't care because most people who buy a laptop use it.
I mean, like our laptop is plugged in 99.9% of the time, but occasionally the reason we got a laptop and not an iMac is because when we go on vacation, we just grab a little 13 inch air and it's much easier than, you know, trying to lug an iMac.
And even like when I'm podcasting in here and my wife wants to use her computer, she unplugs the laptop and brings it into the other room so she can use her computer with all her stuff on it, uh, in a little portable form.
So yeah,
We'd have to see what the numbers on that are, and it could be if there's not enough people do it.
Certainly iOS would get that type of thing first, and it has with the background updates, but eventually they'll get around to bringing that back to the Mac, and that's definitely a future I'd like to see.
All right.
Anything else?
Are we good for today?
Yeah, let's keep it there for today.
We're pretty good.
This might actually be a little bit shorter.
Is it safe to say that over an hour in?
No.
All right.
Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, Squarespace and Igloo, and we will see you next week.
See ya.
Accidental, accidental.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-D-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
So long.
People in the chat room are still obsessing about this battery thing.
Why don't they just stop sending energy to the battery once it's fully charged?
They do.
They do.
This is a problem.
We should get an electrical engineer on, even though my major was electrical computer engineering.
Somebody who works with electricity every day to give whatever is the current best analogy.
Because the way people think electricity works and the way it actually works are not...
the same like i think people visualize probably because this is one of the metaphors they use in school like they visualize electricity like water going through a hose and somehow it's bad because the water is always pressing into your battery like puffing it up like a water balloon and that's not that's not why it's bad you know it's bad to keep a battery at full charge with no electricity going into it just charge it up to full disconnect it from everything and suspend it in a vacuum tube it's still bad you know like and
The analogies of water flowing into things and, like, what is the normal one they use?
Like, the current is the volume of water and the voltage is, like, the speed of the water.
Like, all those analogies lead people astray and make people think about their electrical components in ways that are not healthy.
So, yeah.
Don't worry, people.
The electricity is not pushing into your battery really hard and causing it to bulge out.