A Rotation You Can’t Complete
Marco:
I got to say, I'm a little bit scared of Skype right now.
Marco:
Right now?
Marco:
More than usual, because for the last, I don't know, three, four weeks, Skype has popped up the box about every few hours when it's open saying, Skype will need to install a helper tool.
Marco:
Enter your password to allow this.
Marco:
And normally my rule with Skype is it's going to do whatever it wants anyway, so just let it do it right.
Casey:
Just embrace it.
Marco:
Yeah, because I depend on Skype.
Marco:
I need it to work.
Marco:
So normally I just let it do what it needs to do.
Marco:
So the first couple of times I actually entered my password, you know, it's the system dialog.
Marco:
I actually enter my password and let it install whatever helper tool it thinks it needs.
Marco:
The problem is that that box just kept coming up.
Marco:
And so eventually I got tired of entering my password and just started hitting cancel on it.
Marco:
And it's coming up at the same frequency as when I was entering the password.
Marco:
And nothing seems to be different or broken.
Marco:
Nothing seems to be happening.
Marco:
And everything seems to be working fine.
Marco:
But I feel like something's going to explode at any moment.
Casey:
Yeah, this is ominous.
Marco:
Or Skype has given me a virus, and there's no good outcome.
Casey:
Well, now you've given it to me.
Marco:
Does that work that way?
Casey:
Yeah, by virtue of the Skype call.
Casey:
Now I have your virus.
Casey:
Thanks a lot.
John:
It's like a Microsoft Office prompts me to turn on auto-updates, and the choices in the notification are turn on and not now.
John:
And I get these on other people's accounts on the shared 5K iMac.
John:
And no matter what you hit, it doesn't matter.
John:
You'll be seeing that notification again in a day or two.
John:
Wonderful.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Cause like your only option is like, I want to do it later.
John:
No, but you can say, turn on.
John:
I do want auto updates on.
John:
I hit turn on.
John:
It doesn't matter what you hit.
John:
It's still going to come back later.
John:
And it's going to say, you want to, you know, you just, it doesn't matter.
John:
It seems to do nothing.
John:
I,
John:
On a shared computer, I always think it's because like some weird ownership things because the person who installed the app is not the person who's getting prompted.
John:
And what does it mean for every individual user to have auto updates on?
John:
And can those users even auto update an app that was installed by another user?
John:
But you're on your own Mac and I'm assuming you installed Skype yourself.
John:
So I don't know if that's the problem.
John:
You know, I didn't think of a multi-user.
Marco:
Tiff has a profile on this Mac with Skype for when we're at the beach and she's doing her podcasts.
John:
But did she install Skype or maybe did she update it last time she ran it?
John:
Just see it on the Skype app to Marco and see if that works.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
I cannot believe we're actually doing this on the air.
Marco:
Skype.app.
John:
It's root wheel.
John:
That seems wrong.
John:
Cool.
John:
Very, very wrong.
John:
It should be Marco staff.
Marco:
First of all, I've never seen a staff group on macOS.
John:
What?
John:
Or you can do Marco admin.
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
Whatever.
Marco:
Let me list my home directory.
Marco:
Oh, no, there it is.
Marco:
Yeah, there's staff.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So I guess staff is the default group.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, that is true.
Casey:
What is wheel?
Casey:
I thought you were crazy.
Casey:
What the hell is wheel?
Casey:
That's the group for root.
John:
Don't worry about it.
Marco:
I'm actually kind of curious.
Marco:
I've seen that like on servers and stuff.
John:
I have no idea where does that come from?
John:
Why is it called wheel?
John:
That's a bit of unique history.
John:
I don't actually know, but it is called wheel.
Casey:
Wheel.
Casey:
Noun.
Casey:
From slang, big wheel for a powerful person.
Casey:
A person who has an active wheel bit.
Casey:
The traditional name of security group 0 and BSD to which the major system internal users like group belong is wheel.
Marco:
That is a terrible origin story.
Marco:
I was hoping it was something more interesting.
Casey:
Origins.
Casey:
The term wheel was first applied to computer user privilege levels after the introduction of the 10x operating system.
Casey:
It's pronounced 1010.
Casey:
I can't even tell if you're messing with me right now.
Casey:
In the early 60s and early 70s, the term was derived from the slang phrase big wheel, referring to a person with great power or influence.
Casey:
See, Stack Exchange was right.
John:
Yeah, those same websites say that slash USR stands for like Unix system resources or some stuff, and it does not.
John:
It's short for user.
Marco:
Yeah, this wheel thing, this is a terrible story.
Marco:
I was hoping maybe it was like WHeal and there was something more interesting about it or something.
Marco:
Who knows, right?
John:
That's too bad.
John:
WHeal.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Oh, I just got the box again.
Marco:
What should I do?
Marco:
I'm going to hit cancel.
Marco:
I'm doing it.
Marco:
I'm doing it.
Marco:
Cancel.
Marco:
This is my life.
Marco:
It's very exciting.
Casey:
So why don't we switch into FaceTime audio for this thing?
Marco:
Never.
Marco:
As soon as we switch to iCloud Drive and their new shared folder support instead of Dropbox.
Casey:
Yeah, I haven't knowingly seen this new further ruin Dropbox yet, but I'm already dreading it.
Marco:
Dropbox is really making people mad.
Marco:
I mean, Dropbox has always been an incredibly hellish client app that happened to achieve good functionality, so we tolerated it.
Marco:
But the client Dropbox app has always been a total piece of garbage from a technical level.
Marco:
and it's always been amazingly wasteful of system resources and it seems like not only did they just raise their prices which everyone's mad about but also now they have this additional problem of the app is now like bundling all of kermium taking like half a gig extra hey have i told you about work chat work chat is excellent you don't have a job anymore what are you talking about you don't need this stuff no i'm talking about evernote because evernote has gone down this road as well and it's just it's just not good not good
Marco:
Remember, I don't know, maybe a year ago, I tried to drop Dropbox and looked into what that would take.
Marco:
And one of the things was, one of the reasons I picked it back up is that there was no shared folder support on iCloud Drive.
Marco:
And so many people like you guys who I deal with, the way we deal with each other and pass files around is through Dropbox shared folders.
Marco:
So it seemed almost impossible to totally get off Dropbox until iCloud Drive had shared folders.
Marco:
Now it will, I guess.
Marco:
I mean, I'm not running the beta yet, but once everyone's on the new versions like this fall, we will have shared folders.
Marco:
They might even work.
Marco:
And so if they actually work acceptably, I think a lot of us could drop Dropbox finally.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
There's so much network lock-in.
Marco:
I have a feeling it's going to be really hard for some people to totally get rid of it.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
There's some vaguely Dropbox related stuff in the topic list today.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I'm excited.
John:
I'm a little scared.
John:
That's a tiny item.
John:
Lots of small items today.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Speaking of small items, I'm finally actually diving in more in Swift.
Casey:
Yeah, and?
Marco:
How's that a small item?
Casey:
Yeah, right.
John:
It's a big, big item.
Marco:
I keep running into things that remind me just how much of a dick Swift is.
Marco:
It's such a dick.
Marco:
But I think what I've come around to is that, you know, some people are dicks and I don't want to associate with them.
Marco:
I'm also friends with a lot of people who are dicks.
Marco:
And the ones that are my friends, I have chosen to be like, you know what?
Marco:
I recognize you're a dick, but I like you for other reasons and you're my friend.
Marco:
And so I will tolerate your dickishness because you're my friend.
Marco:
You know I'm on the call with you, right?
Marco:
That's the kind of relationship that I think I need to have with Swift now.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
Swift is a dick, but I have to be its friend for lots of other reasons.
Marco:
And there are parts of it I like.
Marco:
Even your dicky friends can be nice sometimes.
Marco:
And so there are parts of it I like.
Marco:
And so I have to get over that and just embrace it for its full dickitude and just be 100% okay with, you know what?
Marco:
Swift is my friend now.
Marco:
And yes, it's a dick a lot of the time, but it's still my friend.
Marco:
And so I have to stand up for it.
Marco:
I have to support it and I have to use it.
John:
You're spending all this time complaining about Swift.
John:
And while you were doing that, I wrote a Mac app in Swift.
John:
So I don't know what's taking you so long.
John:
Swift didn't bother me at all.
Casey:
What is your Mac app?
Casey:
Are you talking about the extension?
John:
Safari extensions have to be in apps now.
John:
So I have to make an app to wrap around the one line of code that constitutes my reload extension.
John:
That is the code of my application.
John:
I just read it on the air.
John:
It's open source now.
John:
The whole rest of it is how do you make a notarized Mac application starting from zero?
John:
And that is a surprising amount of work if you've never done it before, which I haven't.
Casey:
So you enlisted Marco to fix all your problems?
John:
No, I just read webpages.
John:
It's not difficult, but Xcode sure doesn't help you.
John:
I was saying in Slack that I think it needs more wizards.
John:
It needs more like, you're going to make an app.
John:
Here are the 9,000 things you're going to need.
John:
Don't make me go keychain access and make a certificate signing request.
John:
You can do all that.
John:
You're the computer.
John:
Just do it all.
John:
like you know what i need like just do all the things and you know i'm going to the website i'm going to keychain access i'm going to xcode and in every step of the way there's like you know one wrong turn like it could lead you into a dead end that's not going to get you anywhere one of the web instructions was like this thing is going to pop up this dialogue box is going to pop up hit cancel like the dialogue is offering to do something that sounds useful and normally you just say okay but no you have to hit cancel if you hit okay that you just anyway
John:
Yeah, so you build this Mac app that does nothing, and inside it you bury this other little extension that does one simple thing.
John:
Yeah, the most difficult part was getting us code working and signing working, and the second most difficult part was making PDF graphic because my 2x bitmap graphic from the old reload button is no longer acceptable.
Casey:
The struggle.
Casey:
You know, I can't... It's hard for me to wrap my head around...
John:
anyone but particularly you john being this set in your ways that you can't just hit command r like is it that hard i can't command r all the time then why do you need a button every once in a while i hit the reload button with my mouse because i sometimes use the mouse have you ever used the mouse when you use a computer nope never not not once sometimes my hand is on the mouse and my pointer is near that section of the screen or i'm doing something else and i hit the reload button sometimes i command r i
John:
I don't think I ever even click anywhere near the address bar.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You're a command L person for life?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Wait, but hold on a second.
Casey:
Why do you not hit the button in the, what do you call them, the URL field?
John:
Because it's in the wrong place and my cursor is never over there.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
So you have two buttons just to hit reload?
John:
I can't get rid of the other reload button.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
It's also because I've always had back forward reload.
John:
Chrome has back forward reload.
John:
Every version of Safari until they shoved it into the address bar has had back forward reload.
John:
I'm just used to the buttons being over there.
Casey:
If this were me, if this were me, and God help me, I hope this gets released.
Casey:
Can I just put it on record?
Casey:
I'm actually in a very good mood.
Casey:
But I would also like to put on record that if this were me saying these things, the whole of the ATP listenership would say, what is wrong with you, Casey?
Casey:
Get over it and embrace 2016.
Casey:
No.
John:
this reload button is not a new thing and every time i mentioned people like oh thank god i hate that reload button in the address bar people thank me profusely for this one line application that reloads web pages badly that's it and why is i'm not in this case i'm not the only one if you don't want it then you don't have to use it
John:
Well, because you can do no wrong.
John:
It's just, I mean, there is a method to the madness.
John:
Like, backboard reload is the standard way.
John:
If you use multiple browsers, if you're used to the buttons being over there and you wish the button was back there, you can do that.
John:
It's the whole point of the toolbar and extensions and why you can customize it.
John:
So you can make the toolbar the way you want it.
John:
I don't know what your toolbar looks like.
John:
Whatever.
Casey:
It's certainly within your rights.
Casey:
I'm not trying to, like, say that you're not allowed to do this.
John:
And it's not ridiculous.
John:
It's not a ridiculous notion.
John:
I mean, there is a reload button.
John:
I'll say it.
John:
You aren't allowed to do this.
John:
This is a terrible idea.
Casey:
I mean, it is a terrible idea, but you do you, man.
Casey:
I just can't fathom that you of all people would look at two reload buttons in the same window.
Casey:
How is that okay?
John:
The other one isn't a button.
John:
The other one is a tiny glyph way in the other side of the address bar that you don't even notice.
Marco:
John, I love you so much, but you are out of your damn mind.
Marco:
I'm just like, how often are you reloading pages and your hands aren't near the keyboard?
John:
If you do web development, a surprising amount of time, apparently.
John:
It's not like I don't use Command-R.
John:
I'm sure I use Command-R more than the reload button.
John:
But when I do use the reload button, I want it to be where I want it to be.
Marco:
And having it where you want it to be resulting in this hilariously complex setup.
Marco:
And also, then you have two reload buttons on screen.
Marco:
Isn't that worse?
Marco:
Doesn't that bother you on a fundamental level?
Marco:
Right!
Marco:
Like I said, the other one isn't a button.
John:
It's a tiny little glyph.
John:
It is not a tiny little glyph!
John:
It's a tiny little glyph.
John:
It's like smaller than the little lock symbol.
John:
I don't even see it.
John:
It is invisible.
Casey:
Let me start Xscope and let's see how small this tiny little glyph is.
John:
It's certainly not a button.
John:
It's not like it has its own outline.
John:
It is just tucked into the corner of the address bar.
John:
Anyway, it broke in Safari 12 or whatever because you had to load it manually.
John:
Remember we talked about it on the show?
John:
And I was like, well, whatever.
John:
I'm not going to bother with it.
John:
But then when it became clear that I actually can resurrect it if I go through this pain...
John:
I was waiting and waiting, and then finally, like, Safari 13 isn't going to support the old ones at all, right?
John:
So I figured I would bite the bullet and resurrect it.
John:
And many people have thanked me for resurrecting it because they, too, want to move over the reload button for whatever reason.
Oh, my God.
John:
i remember i did i didn't originally kind of as a joke when safari extensions came out it's like what is the simplest extension you could possibly make and like well reload button i think it was their example or something like uh and it was actually more complicated before the app extensions you just you get an sf safari page whatever view and you just call reload on the old way you had to inject a script and the script had to uh remember the scroll position reload the page and reset the scroll position so it's a little bit silly
Casey:
This is 22 points wide by 26 points tall.
John:
It's not a button, though, is it?
John:
Can you click it?
John:
Then it's a button.
John:
You can click all sorts of things.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
You can click a checkbox.
John:
Checkbox isn't a button.
Casey:
In a manner of speaking, it is.
John:
You can click a text field.
John:
Text field isn't a button.
Marco:
Aren't some of these actually buttons at the AppKit level?
Casey:
Well, where's the accessibility inspector?
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Where's accessibility inspector?
Casey:
How do I start that bad boy up?
Casey:
Let me see what this says.
John:
Oh, I need to add a tooltip because I already have a tooltip.
John:
Never mind.
Casey:
Reload this page.
Casey:
Button.
Casey:
Label.
Casey:
Reload this page.
Casey:
Title.
Casey:
Reload this page.
Casey:
Value nil.
Casey:
Type.
Casey:
Button.
John:
For accessibility purposes, sure, it's a button.
John:
How else are you going to describe it?
Casey:
Oh, God, John.
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
Are you trying to get me out of technicality on this?
John:
Did you remember the this is a button thing that Nevin Mergen made that I concluded in one of my OS X reviews?
John:
How buttony are your buttons?
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
What color is your parachute?
Casey:
Can we move on to follow-up?
Casey:
I never thought I'd be this excited to get to follow-up.
Casey:
I'm going to need to get a drink or start some follow-up, one or the other.
Casey:
I love you, John.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
By the way, I've just verified that in the app kit, checkboxes are indeed NS button instances.
Ha!
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
Score one for me.
John:
Yeah, well, that's just a base class.
Casey:
That's not a... Oh, God, you were going... Technicality's all the way down.
John:
Go look in the Apple Human Interface Guidelines.
John:
It will say buttons, checkboxes,
John:
pop-up whatever they call them.
John:
You know what I mean.
John:
That's the technical term, of course.
Casey:
Oh, God, John.
Casey:
I love you so much.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
And it starts with some ASCII art apps.
Casey:
And I thought we talked about at least one of these in the past.
Casey:
Did we not?
Casey:
Maybe not.
Casey:
I don't know.
Marco:
No, I think I got bumped for the live show.
Casey:
Oh, is that what it was?
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So in any case, there are two ASCII art apps that were called to our attention.
Casey:
The context here is doing ASCII art in comments, which I find to be delightful.
Casey:
Not everyone does, but I do.
Casey:
And there's two options that we have been turned on to from various people, one of which is Monodraw, which is a Mac app.
Casey:
It's specifically for the Mac, and it looks extremely full-featured.
Casey:
I think it's...
Casey:
Shareware.
Casey:
It's a free trial by license sort of situation.
Casey:
I haven't tried it, to be honest, but it looks really and truly incredible.
Marco:
I have.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Marco:
There you go.
Marco:
I think it's only $10.
Marco:
I immediately bought it once I saw it because it's actually it feels very similar to paint code and like a lot of like the basic design structure of it.
Marco:
which I guess is kind of just like Mac standard.
Marco:
It is delightful.
Marco:
Like to be able to just draw out ASCII art like as if it's a drawing tool and it behaves a lot like a drawing tool.
Marco:
There's like a fill tool.
Marco:
There's like different shapes and different like line strokes and everything all generating this ASCII stuff.
Marco:
It's kind of amazing.
Marco:
I don't really have so much use for this kind of app that I really needed to buy it, but I bought it because it's just delightful.
Marco:
It just makes me smile.
Marco:
As a nerd and as a Mac user and as a programmer, all three of those things, this app makes me smile.
Marco:
And so it was definitely worth the $10.
Marco:
And even if I never launch it again, which is unlikely, honestly, I think I will probably try to find reasons to use it.
Marco:
But like, even if I never launched again, I'm just so happy this app exists.
Marco:
I'm so happy to give them 10 bucks.
Marco:
Like it's it's delightful.
John:
Yeah, this is like the good old days of Mac apps where there would be a high quality native Mac app that someone sweated over every detail of for insert ridiculous purpose here.
John:
Whatever it was, whatever you wanted it to be, whether it was like software for dealing with a dentist's office or thing to track your workouts or just a thing to explore old maps.
John:
Some person somewhere loved that thing so much and was a Mac developer and made this amazing app.
John:
Not like just a junky thing that someone threw together that sort of works, but like a polished application that they sold on their websites for a reasonable fee.
John:
This is totally a throwback to those days.
Casey:
It is very, very cool looking, having not even tried it.
Casey:
And then additionally, there's a web-based tool called ASCII Flow, and we will have both these links in the show notes.
Casey:
I was just trying it, and Marco will fix it in post, but I dropped my Apple Pencil on my desk because I was trying to use this.
Casey:
I was trying to use this with the Pencil, and it is slow.
Casey:
Slightly clunky, but it is workable on the iPad.
Casey:
But anyway, this is obviously a free app.
Casey:
It looks a lot less fancy than Monodraw is, but if you favor something free and less fancy and less good, this is also an option.
Casey:
So this is called ASCII Flow Infinity.
Casey:
Also very cool, and it's cool to see that done on the web.
Casey:
So two very, very neat apps if you wanted to be an ASCII artist.
John:
Yeah, this is the flip side of that.
John:
The beauty of the web is you might need something, but you don't have time to or don't want to install software and something like, well, this is simple enough.
John:
Can I just do this somewhere in the web right now?
John:
You just go to asktheflow.com.
John:
Instantly, you're in the app and you can start using it.
John:
I'm sure it's less powerful than the native app, but it's nice to have the best of both worlds.
John:
The web is available everywhere, accessible to everybody and often free.
John:
And then if it's something you really care about, having a polished native app is great.
Casey:
excellent we have more information about the thing that marco and i are still skeptical is called the blending stump but a video from landon epps indicates that it's also a lasso tool because why not i don't know if it's also a lasso tool it might only be a lasso tool like
John:
i don't know what it's called i've never heard anyone from apple name it i asked somebody i remember when you were there with me i asked someone in the mac pro demo room what is that tool called they had no idea but it's it just looks like a lasso tool i don't know if it does blending at all i'm very confused by this tool it is a fairly faithful rendition of a blending stump but in this video that we will link in the show notes in someone's tweet you can see that all does is sort of a magic selection type thing and you get little crawling ant borders around the thing that you've selected
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Marco:
And of course, they have lots of things above that, including things like dedicated CPU plans, high memory plans, all sorts of specialty plans for whatever you might need.
Marco:
Once again, linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
And promo code ATP2019 gets you a $20 credit.
Marco:
Once again, linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Promo code ATP2019 for a $20 credit.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Can we use this moment now a week on?
Casey:
What are you guys most excited about?
Casey:
I know we're going to talk about some of these things later.
Casey:
There'll be some file system talk later.
Casey:
Don't you worry.
Casey:
But what are you guys most excited about?
Casey:
Because I've started digging into Combine, which, as I think I said last week at the live show, I keep trying to call Combine.
Casey:
But anyway, I've dug into that some, and I'm still very excited about it, although I'm in the this is not meeting all my hopes and dreams stage of learning it, which is fine.
Casey:
That's part of the process.
Casey:
But SwiftUI, I have also dabbled with a little bit.
Casey:
And again, it's not meeting all my hopes and dreams, but it is very shiny and very cool.
Casey:
So I think my two favorite... Oh, and actually, I need a third favorite.
Casey:
The new CollectionView layout stuff.
Casey:
What is it called?
Casey:
CollectionView...
Casey:
compositional layout or something like that i forget exactly what it's called but that looks incredible uh so i think those are my top three i i probably could come up with a four if we wanted to stay on brand but i mean i guess staying on brand is not coming up with all four of them um anyway marco what are your favorite you know one two three or four things a week on that you that you heard about
Marco:
Honestly, I haven't had a lot of time to actually dive into the technical side of this, so I could change my mind once I find some of these things might be not what I thought they were, or they might not be ready yet, or they might be more limited than I think.
Marco:
But at the moment, I am super into the idea of using SwiftUI, especially on the watch.
Marco:
The SwiftUI project, formerly rumored as the name Amber, started on the watch, and it shows.
Marco:
The watch is what needed it most badly,
Marco:
And it shines clearly so much on the watch.
Marco:
And it's just so much better than WatchKit.
Marco:
And so even if, like, you know, right now, SwiftUI, it's very early days for it.
Marco:
It's very limited, probably, in what it can do.
Marco:
You're still going to have to be calling out a lot to, like, you know, UIKit views or controllers to do certain things.
Marco:
But on the watch, it's such a small problem space that it's like an even better fit for something that is so new and probably is going to start out so basic.
Marco:
So I'm very much looking forward to using that and replacing my watch app.
Marco:
Every May, I tell myself, I hope I don't have to rewrite my watch app this summer.
Marco:
because i hate working on my watch app and whatever and then june comes around and i get some awesome new thing in the sdk and i'm like i should really rewrite the watch app because it can be so much better now and this is the biggest year for that that there has ever been uh it can now be way better than even it was like you know last year i was able to add offline playback that actually worked reliably uh
Marco:
but it the files didn't transfer reliably so like the audio part was there last year but i couldn't do streaming and i i might still not be able to do it i don't know yet uh depending on what the api is but uh there is just so much more now that i can do in the ui and so much more easily and just so much nicer like
Marco:
I've never been happy with the interface of my watch app.
Marco:
It's always been crap, and it's different degrees of crap, and it's always been very limiting with what I could do because it was all this very small set of watch kid tools that you were actually allowed to use, and they weren't very good, and they had weird behaviors and weird bugs and weird things you had to do to make them work at all.
Marco:
And so having a big reset switch on that is huge for me.
Marco:
And it's also...
Marco:
It's also just going to be a nice small attack surface on which I can learn Swift and Swift UI a lot better before I bring it into my big app.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
John, I know it may or may not be as directly applicable to you, but what are you still excited for or maybe newly excited for?
John:
I'm still excited for the Mac Pro.
John:
That's my number one.
John:
Of course.
John:
My number two is SwiftUI, which I also haven't really dug into, but not so much for what SwiftUI is, but what it will become.
John:
I'm finally getting a chance to...
John:
See how it was implemented under the covers, which I'm subscribed to.
John:
I was subscribed to Swift Evolution 1 as a mailing list, and I do stop by the forums these days and try to keep track of the various Swift Evolution proposals.
John:
If I had to been on top of them more, I could have better predicted what Swift UI would be, and I'm sure people who were.
John:
on top of Swift Evolution more, probably did predict what Swift UI would be, but suffice it to say that it uses a bunch of features that landed in Swift in the past year, year and a half, that are essential for making it work.
John:
And it's those features that I'm most interested in to see how other people can make APIs like this and to see how Swift UI is going to evolve.
John:
And then...
John:
Third place?
John:
I don't even know.
John:
My head is entirely filled with Mac Pro and SwiftUI at this point.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
So let's carry on where we left off last week, carry on my wayward son.
Casey:
Let's talk about everyone's favorite topic, APFS.
John:
You're going to complain that Marco and I didn't know that was a reference?
John:
Because we totally did.
John:
We don't tell you the obvious ones, just so you know.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Usually that doesn't happen until well after the show, like a few days later.
John:
I'm going to nip it in the bud so I don't have to be a hundred people saying, he's carrying my wayward son.
Casey:
You didn't say anything.
John:
That means you didn't know it.
John:
No, that's not what it means.
John:
I love that I've trained you over the years to have... No, I feel like the audience needs to know where the bar is.
John:
The bar is higher than that.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I have a lot of ranting and raving and complaining to do about installing Catalina.
Casey:
But before I put a sour note on everything, why don't you tell us, John, about what's going on with APFS and Catalina?
John:
Yeah, but Catalina is quite an adventure too, kind of like iOS 13.
John:
Maybe wait for later builds if you want to actually use it for something useful.
John:
But this is about one of my favorite sessions every year at WWDC, the file system session.
John:
Sometimes there's no multiple ones this year.
John:
There was just one.
John:
I love me a good file system session.
John:
I went into this one only with the expectation that I'm going to hear about the read-only system partition, which was something we discussed before at WWDC.
John:
And in fact, it is a thing in Catalina.
John:
And I did, and I'll talk about that first, but there was another announcement that I was very excited about in that session, which I can understand why it was kind of buried, but I'm still excited about it anyway.
John:
So as for Catalina and the read-only system partition, if you're envisioning that as like...
John:
there'll be a separate volume for your operating system that is mounted read-only, and then a second volume that has all your stuff on it.
John:
That's not what you'll see in Catalina.
John:
They added some file system features to APFS to make this possible.
John:
First, they added a thing they call volume groups, which is, as far as I can tell, not really groups.
John:
It's like volume pairs.
John:
There are weird limitations to it, but anyway.
John:
It's sufficient to take two volumes, your...
John:
Catalina operating system volume and your everything else volume and merge them with each other So they appear to be one volume even though they are two volumes The Catalina volume is read-only because that's your read-only system partition and the volume with your stuff is read-write and the way they merge them is a little bit weird So they you know Apple and its links, right?
John:
So Unix had some links and hard links Apple didn't invent but
John:
uh popularized or pioneered or certainly made the largest number of hard links to directories which is not a thing in traditional unix most of the time hard links are just for files but they made hard links for directories to make time machine possible now they have a thing they call firm links and firm links are kind of like sim links
John:
You can imagine how you can weave two volumes together with symlinks, or even with hardlinks and directories, but the... Oh, you can't do hardlinks and directories across volumes.
John:
Anyway, you cross volumes with symlinks, but symlinks have the property that if you change directory into a symlink, and you go into that directory, you went into a directory called A, right?
John:
When you're in the directory, you're not actually in a directory called A. You can name the symlink anything.
John:
The symlink was called A, but now you're in some totally other directory because the symlink has transported you to wherever the directory is.
John:
It's a different directory and a different volume of the directory.
John:
It's not called A. If you back up a directory from there, cd dot dot, you will not find yourself where you were before.
John:
You'll find yourself one directory up from the target of the symlink.
John:
And that can confuse lots of programs and can confuse shell scripts and other programs people write that don't understand that sometimes you're in a symlink and paths.
John:
Anyway, canonicalizing paths is a thing.
John:
So firm links make it that if you go down one of these links and you go back up, you end up right back where you started.
John:
Like they're bidirectional and reversible.
John:
All this is to say that when you're on Catalina, it just looks like a disk to you, but it's actually two volumes merged together with firm links.
John:
And as far as I can tell from the session, the top volume, like the main one, is your read-only system partition.
John:
And then the slash users directory and a few other things are firm links to your read-write data partition.
John:
So you will only see a single disk.
John:
It is a merging of two volumes.
John:
And it uses this weird feature called firm links.
John:
I'm sure there's going to be weird edge cases and lots of fun.
John:
But it's nice from a user interface perspective because people might not, you know, who don't listen to this program or don't care about read-only system partitions, will have no idea this took place.
John:
And by the way, it's not optional.
John:
You install Catalina, it will do this to your system.
John:
And it makes it very easy, as Marco found out.
John:
APFS makes it very easy to make new volumes because it's all shared space.
John:
You don't have to, like, squish all your data into a little section.
John:
to free up a big continuous block of, you know, storage area on your disk to put a second volume.
John:
You can make second, third, fourth, fifth volume.
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
Just throw it all in the same container.
John:
APFS handles it.
John:
So this is going to happen during your upgrade, and you might not know it, but actually you've got two things merged together, which is kind of neat.
John:
So, Casey, before we move on to the one new interesting feature in the FossilSim session, how was your experience going through the Catalina installer that does all this stuff to your disk?
Yeah.
Casey:
So my thought was having, so let me back up a half step.
Casey:
I never installed a Mac, a beta version of Mac OS ever to the best of my recollection.
Casey:
I've just never had any desire to.
Casey:
I'm not a Mac OS developer, never wanted it, et cetera.
Casey:
But Apple dangled the carrot of Swift UI.
Casey:
Now Swift UI does work on Mojave, except that if you want the fancy schmancy live preview where everything is being updated as you're typing it, you must be on Catalina.
Casey:
Okay, fine.
Casey:
So I'll install Catalina.
Casey:
And what I did was I bought myself an external SSD, a half-terabyte external SSD.
Casey:
The particular one I got is a SanDisk, and I like it quite a lot.
Casey:
It has USB-C in, but it comes with a USB-C to USB-C cord, and then it also has a USB-C to USB-A adapter, if that makes sense.
Casey:
So basically, I can use it with my old iMac.
Casey:
I can use it with my MacBook.
Casey:
It's fine.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I started on my MacBook, which was probably a mistake, and I thought, okay, I will use my little Apple, my $80 Apple dongle so I can plug in power and a USB-B device, or I'm sorry, an A device into my USB-C, my single USB-C port.
Casey:
And many hours later and many reboots later, it just did not work.
Casey:
I just could not get it to work on the external.
Casey:
So then I go to the iMac and I do basically the same thing, work no problem, runs reasonably fast, everything's good.
Casey:
So I thought, all right, fine.
Casey:
Well, APFS is supposed to be good, and I have enough space on this MacBook.
Casey:
So I actually, I'm going to say repartition, but that's ultimately not what I did.
Casey:
But I basically made space for Catalina to run adjacent to Mojave on my internal SSD on my MacBook, and that actually worked no problem.
Casey:
But I thought I was doing the right thing, where I've got my external, I'm not going to mess at all with the internal drive on the MacBook, and I just could not get it to work.
Casey:
It very well could have been
Casey:
user error.
Casey:
I don't know how it was, but it could have been.
Casey:
But I remain somewhat frustrated that my poor little two-year-old MacBook that admittedly is slower than dirt just could not do it over the USB drive.
Casey:
And I don't think that's a Catalina problem.
Casey:
I think, if anything, it's a MacBook problem.
Casey:
But I was sad, you guys.
Casey:
That being said, one, I finally got the
Casey:
these things installed.
Casey:
The installation was fairly easy.
Casey:
I don't remember anything particularly remarkable about it.
Casey:
And holy cow, SwiftUI on Catalina is good stuff.
Casey:
It's not perfect, but it is good stuff.
Casey:
So if you are adventurous, and especially if you have an external drive and not a MacBook, I cannot recommend it enough.
Casey:
It is excellent.
Casey:
And Marco, for you doing watch kit stuff, or I'm sorry, not watch kit, for you doing SwiftUI on the watch,
Casey:
I honestly don't know if you've installed Catalina or not yet, but I cannot recommend it enough because it is way better on Catalina doing SwiftUI than it is on Mojave.
Marco:
I did the thing where I installed it on the second partition, and that worked fine for me.
Marco:
So for listeners, the way to do this basically is make the second partition.
Marco:
You can make an APFS space-sharing one, so you're not actually losing any space on your main disk.
Marco:
And there's two ways to do it.
Marco:
Way number one is install a copy of Mojave on the second partition, log into that, and then download the beta profile on that and have it update itself, making sure that the updater is actually going to run on that volume, which is clumsy, but a little bit safe and isolated.
Marco:
The other way to do it, and I've done one of each of these now, is to...
Marco:
install the beta profile on your main installation of Mojave, download the installer, and then when it says what volume to install on, pick your new one, and then let it install, and then remove the beta profile from your main Mojave one.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I did.
Marco:
In both cases, if you use FileVault on your main Mojave installation, when the second installation of Catalina, when that boots up, it won't see the Mojave disk, and it'll prompt you to enter the password for it, but you don't have to enter.
Marco:
If you just hit cancel,
Marco:
then the Catalina instance will be able to see none of the files on your Mojave instance, which is actually kind of convenient for keeping things isolated and making sure the beta doesn't mess up your main disk.
Marco:
So I did the Mojave then Catalina reinstallation thing on my laptop, and I did the beta and then removed the beta direct installation on my desktop, and both worked totally fine.
Marco:
So I have seen it, and I...
Marco:
unfortunately like i've never really run mac betas because i've never wanted to because that's crazy you know this is like my production machine i have to have everything working right but this summer that's going to be different because i have to do a lot of development on catalina because you also can't do any catalyst development on mojave oh
Casey:
Oh, true.
Marco:
So for most of the Xcode work I'm going to be doing this summer, I'm probably going to want to or need to be doing it on Catalina.
Marco:
So I have a feeling I'm going to be spending a lot of time booted into that.
Marco:
And at some point, if the beta has become stable enough, I think I'm just going to migrate my main installation to it just to make things simpler.
John:
John, have you touched it at all?
John:
I haven't installed it yet.
John:
I've been busily doing other computer maintenance stuff.
John:
I don't plan on installing the betas, although when I was writing my quote-unquote Mac app in Swift and it had the language version pop up, it maxed out at 4.2, and that was kind of disappointing.
John:
I couldn't use any of the neat features that were demonstrated in a...
John:
or that are demonstrated by SwiftUI.
John:
Not that I had reason to, but I just wanted to, like, I don't know, write something.
John:
But, yeah, so that's a fact of life with Mac development.
John:
You do need the latest OS and the latest version to do that, and where you get the latest version of Xcode to do development for it.
John:
Although you can probably install the beta of Xcode back on Mojave, I'm assuming.
Casey:
Yeah, that's what I did at first to play with SwiftUI, and then that's when I realized, wait a second, the canvas...
Casey:
I think Xcode thinks it's showing the canvas, but it's not showing the canvas and the canvas being the live preview thing.
Casey:
And so you're exactly right.
Casey:
You can do all of this on, well, by all of this, I mean, you can use SwiftUI and Swift 5, et cetera, or 5.1.
Casey:
On Mojave, it's just that you don't get any of the new hotness with the don't call it a simulator simulator in the canvas.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And you can't run, like Marco said, the Catalyst apps because I guess those libraries all aren't there.
John:
So no, I don't think I'll install the beta, although Mojave has been fighting me and doing weird things lately.
John:
So maybe, I don't know.
John:
I haven't installed betas in a long time.
John:
Like for years and years, I had to have the betas installed all the time, and it's just nice to be able to be running the release version.
John:
But the release version of Mojave has not been friendly to this 5K iMac.
John:
So maybe I'll upgrade it sooner rather than later.
John:
We'll see.
Casey:
All right, tell me about volume replication.
John:
Yeah, so this is the new feature.
John:
So they started off in the file system session after they did all the Catalina read-only system partitions saying, oh, volume replication.
John:
I'm like, oh, this is great because, I mean, it's a feature that existed for the HFS+, but they hadn't updated it for APFS.
John:
So the Apple System Restore ASR command line now replicates APFS volumes, which is nice.
John:
And also you can point it to a particular snapshot.
John:
So you can say copy from volume A snapshot 2.
John:
You can copy that over to another volume so you don't have to copy from
John:
the volume, uh, the, the head of the volume, so to speak.
John:
Um, and that'll be useful for backup programs.
John:
Uh, time machine already does this time machine already takes a snapshot and in APFS and backs up from that.
John:
So it has a single point in time, uh, you know, consistent view of the file system as opposed to an HFS plus days, but it would, you know, painting the golden gate bridge style.
John:
It would start the time machine backup and it would slowly work its way through your files and an hour later would complete.
John:
And what you would have a copy of is like, uh,
John:
the files spread over that hour i think it went back it would go back again and try to catch up but like it's a again you know you just you're chasing your own tail at a certain point if changes are constantly being made to the source volume you're never going to be quote unquote caught up whereas a snapshot takes a point in time snapshot and says here's the state of the whole volume and it's cheap to do so it's been doing that for years so now uh apple system restore utility can copy from a snapshot onto a target volume but now here's the exciting new feature and also why they didn't talk about it this year
John:
So if you copy snapshot number, you know, from volume A snapshot number one over to volume B, and then a day later, you take a new snapshot of volume A and you say, I want to copy this new snapshot over to volume B. Well, you already copied snapshot one yesterday.
John:
And it would be wasteful for it to copy all of snapshot two over because probably mostly between snapshot one and two, not that much has changed.
John:
Well, APFS and ASR in Catalina can tell what has changed between snapshot one and snapshot two.
John:
And it will only send the changed data over in an efficient manner.
John:
Rather than the, again, the old time machine one was like,
John:
it would try to keep track of like what directories have changed but it would end up having to scan a bunch of files and figure out okay well this directory has changed since then according to the fs events log what files in this directory have changed do i need to copy them all this other stuff this is probably not as fancy and efficient as zfs block deltas between snapshots but maybe a little bit more flexible
John:
This obviously would be ideal for Time Machine.
John:
But as far as I'm aware, Time Machine and Catalina does not use this technology because I think if it did, they would have said so in the session.
John:
They would have said, and this is what the new version of Time Machine Catalina uses to be so much more fast and efficient.
John:
They didn't say that.
John:
I haven't installed Catalina, so I don't know.
John:
But if this is not implemented in Catalina Time Machine, then I think next year, finally, will be what we've all been waiting for.
John:
What I've been waiting for, which is APFS, this great new file system.
John:
A lot of its features are an ideal fit for Time Machine.
John:
And yet, up until the, you know, well, I don't know.
John:
I don't know about Catalina, but you couldn't even use APFS as a Time Machine volume.
John:
in mojave and earlier you could have the source volume bapfs but you couldn't have the target volume of a time machine backup so now finally in either catalina or on the operating system that comes after it next year time machine should get a lot faster a lot more efficient and a lot uh a lot less you know
John:
So I'm excited.
John:
The advantages of APFS, we just described a bunch of advantages, how easy it is to quote-unquote repartition, which is not a thing anymore.
John:
Just make a new volume right on top of all your other volumes, how easy that is, how it's so easy that Apple is going to do it without an option to do otherwise.
John:
When you install Catalina, it is going to quote-unquote repartition everyone's disks, and soon it will make time machine more efficient.
John:
So this has been a banner year for...
John:
you know, file system advances, improving all of our quality of life.
John:
And maybe next year will be the big banner year when Time Machine probably gets the update.
Casey:
Man, everything's coming up Syracuse.
John:
Yeah, it's a good year.
John:
It's good to have you know what he's saying.
Casey:
All right, tell me about user space drivers.
Casey:
Why do I care about this?
John:
More file system stuff.
John:
Oh, my goodness.
John:
They talked about this in the keynote, right?
Marco:
Craig mentioned it at the talk show live about how moving the mass storage drivers and file system drivers out of the kernel and into user space was why the iPad got USB drive support.
John:
Maybe they talked about instead of the union, too.
John:
So anyway, this is not just file system stuff.
John:
It's user space drivers in general.
John:
So basically, kernel extensions, as we know them, pieces of code that that Apple and third parties could write that would literally run inside the kernel in the address space of the kernel.
John:
Those are essentially deprecated.
John:
Yeah.
John:
What it takes to be able to write a kernel extension that can be loaded by Mac users with a default security setting.
John:
So first of all, like Apple has to sign them and then it's like they can only be loaded if people have settings a certain way.
John:
So you couldn't just be like, I'm going to make a kernel extension.
John:
I'm going to put it up on my website.
John:
Anyone can download it.
John:
They could.
John:
But if you didn't go through Apple with the whole signing thing.
John:
it wouldn't be able to load unless someone changed the gatekeeper settings to be like load everything and turned off system integrity.
John:
Anyway, this long road has been leading to the point where they say, you know what, just don't write those anymore because there's no real way to make them safe.
John:
If you do something wrong in your kernel extension, you can take, you can and will take out the entire system.
John:
And it's just, you know, it's something we want to, we prefer if that wasn't a possibility at all.
John:
So user space drivers lets you,
John:
Write a driver for whatever it is, a piece of hardware, something you would normally make a kernel extension for, but do it in user space.
John:
And historically, that hasn't been done because it's less efficient to switch from user space to kernel space and back and forth in a rapid manner.
John:
I'm not sure how they're mitigating that.
John:
I don't think I've seen any session that has explained how they're able to do this and make it more efficient.
John:
But the bottom line is that they are doing it.
John:
And the interesting thing in the user space driver session that I saw was this may be the last time that anybody at WWDC gets to do the equivalent of the classic bomb app demo back when the Mac operating system did not have protected memory.
John:
And we were all waiting for whatever the next generation operating system would be from Apple.
John:
And they, you know, almost bought B and were thinking of getting the Windows NT kernel and had seven internal projects.
John:
Several of them were announced, but then canceled publicly.
John:
And it was just an embarrassing time when Apple finally had a next generation OS strategy.
John:
I think it was maybe Rhapsody even before Mac OS X. But either way, I think they did a Mac OS X as well.
John:
they didn't they would do a demo at their developer conference where they would say here is an application that's going to like dereference a null pointer like an application meant to crash and it would have a window and in the window would be the classic mac like cannonball black bomb icon like a huge version of the bomb icon i think sometimes the little uh fuse was sparking or whatever and the app would run for a second and you'd like click on it or something and it would crash
John:
And they would launch that app and they'd say, and here we go, crash.
John:
And the app would crash and the window would disappear.
John:
And then the presenter would say, and look, the operating system is still running.
John:
And the audience would cheer.
John:
They would cheer so loud you would think they were announcing PS4 controller support.
Yeah.
John:
It was the most crowd-pleasing demo ever.
John:
Anyone who was using Unix or even Windows NT would be like, boy, these poor suckers.
John:
They're cheering for memory protection.
John:
You don't get to do the demo anymore.
John:
We just assume that if an app crashes, of course it doesn't take out your operating system.
John:
What century is this?
John:
well the user space driver uh session they said here i'm going to make a driver and in this driver uh they said i'm going to add an infinite loop which would be very bad if you're an infinite loop inside the kernel very very bad indeed um and also right after the infinite loop uh which you're like how are you ever going to reach out anyway right after the infinite root loop i will add a null pointer dereference so they use the driver and they plugged in some piece of hardware that activated the driver
John:
And the driver, you know, went along and went into its infinite loop.
John:
And basically they showed, look, the operating system is still working, even though that driver is just spinning in an infinite loop, right?
John:
And then he attached to it with the LDB and like modified the loop condition to get it out of the infinite loop.
John:
And it immediately had the next line, which was no pointer dereverence.
John:
And it crashed the driver.
John:
And the driver crashed.
John:
And the operating system was fine.
John:
And the driver auto relaunched itself.
John:
And that was an exciting demo.
John:
And I think this is the last time we're going to have to have that exciting.
John:
Didn't have as much applause as the mom app, but it was still pretty neat.
John:
And as Marco said before, why do we care about this?
John:
A couple of reasons.
John:
One, if you've ever had some piece of hardware or some application that installed a kernel extension and you started getting kernel panics.
John:
Now just your application will crash, but at least the rest of your operating system will be fine.
John:
And two, I don't know if this is the reason they didn't have mass storage support in the files app, but it was stated as one of the things that helped bring about mass storage access in iOS was that now...
John:
They don't have to worry about a bug in the driver or something, because Apple's going to write these drivers.
John:
It's not like they're letting people distribute kernel extensions for iOS.
John:
If there's some sort of bug in the driver that you're able to exploit by plugging in some malicious USB key or something that could suddenly corrupt the kernel or jailbreak or whatever, they don't have to worry about that because file system drivers in iOS and in macOS now exist in user space.
John:
So there's no way they can, in theory, there's no way they can get kernel memory and start doing nasty stuff.
John:
And the way this is related to Dropbox and OneDrive and other stuff like that, that – where was this?
John:
In a teaching interview with Craig Federighi, he mentioned that these user space sort of file system driver mechanism –
John:
They also have APIs that can be used by companies like Dropbox and OneDrive where they, Dropbox has a thing, I'm not sure what the OneDrive equivalent is, where they give you what looks like a view of the file system, but the files actually aren't there.
John:
Like it doesn't put all the files on your disk as the traditional Dropbox did.
John:
The files are over on the server.
John:
And when you access those files behind the scenes, it goes and fetches the bytes from the server as you need them.
John:
That's all done with weird file system driver magic.
John:
These user space file system drivers can be used, and I'm sure Apple wants these companies to use, by companies like Dropbox to add this functionality in a way that doesn't screw with your kernel and that has less chance of messing up your system.
John:
there's always been the fuse system.
John:
What is it?
John:
File system and user space, whatever there's, uh, I've used SSHFS, uh, and similar, you know, user space file system drivers.
John:
And they're great because they may be buggy and might not work, but it's not going to affect the stability of your system.
John:
So I am excited to,
John:
For all the drivers that aren't super performance critical to go into user space, I'm excited for Dropbox to be a better behaved application that has less of a chance of hosing my system.
John:
And I also hope somewhere, somehow, I can learn how they've implemented the user space fast system drivers in a way that is efficient.
John:
So if anyone knows where I can get that information, please send me the link or the WWDC session details.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
Well, that sounds good to me.
Casey:
I mean, I don't know if I'm quite as jazzed about it as you are, but it sounds good to me.
John:
You'll be happy when your stuff doesn't crash.
John:
I mean, that's the thing with crashes.
John:
I get kernel panics on my laptop, as we've discussed, every once in a while.
John:
I've always attributed them to my weird Thunderbolt dock thing, but honestly, I don't know.
John:
The more stuff, the more third-party software we can get out of the kernel, the better.
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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Bye.
Casey:
All right, so that's it for me for this episode.
Casey:
It's been great being with you guys.
Casey:
All right, I'm going to go to sleep.
Casey:
Tell me about the Mac Pro.
Marco:
One thing I loved that we didn't know last time, I know you have this later down, but I'm going to talk about it now.
Marco:
I love that the Mac Pro kind of, asterisk, has hard drive bays inside of it.
Marco:
Wait, it does?
Marco:
Oh, you mean the SSD things?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
No, no.
Marco:
I mean 3.5-inch hard drive bays.
Marco:
It does?
Marco:
Sort of.
Marco:
Asterisk.
Marco:
So here's how this works.
Marco:
So on the inside of it, we mentioned – we had seen in the little hands-on thing and we mentioned in the live show that there are two –
Marco:
sata ports on the inside right next to that usba port on the inside to put like the drm dongles for for pro apps uh so there's inside like near the top of the case there is a usba port next to it is two sata ports and a power header for them and above them is like or like in front of them is basically a big empty space
Marco:
And so it turns out this is kind of like when Apple like outsources things it doesn't feel like making to Belkin or Logitech or LG.
Marco:
Apple has basically outsourced the Mac Pro's drive bays to Pegasus.
Marco:
so pegasus sells two modules for the mac pro one of them i think we saw already one of them is the r4i and this is a full-size mpx module so this is one of those like full-length three slot wide pci express things that seems to mount in in some kind of firm way that one takes four hard drives and has a built-in raid controller so that's and that's they i don't think they've announced pricing of either of these things yet but that's probably going to be fairly expensive
Marco:
And I also kind of think it's hilarious to mount four hard drives in a PCI Express slot, even though, yes, I know that they have all these like screw mount points and it's probably going to be really secure in there.
Marco:
That still seems comically heavy to put in a PCI slot.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
I'm not sure how comfortable I'd feel with that, even though I'm sure they thought of it and I'm sure it's safe and everything.
Marco:
But it just seems wrong.
John:
Yeah, the vibrations alone, right?
John:
Like the spinning disk, are they going to slowly work the contacts out of their slots?
I know.
Marco:
Like, it shouldn't be... Like, the MPX modules, it just feels like the wrong place to put four three-and-a-half-inch hard drives.
Marco:
But... So that's the Pegasus R4i, the big four-slot RAID one that goes in the main slots.
Marco:
But then the Pegasus J2i appears to have no circuitry at all.
Marco:
It appears to be just like a mount for two disks that plug directly into those two SATA ports and the power header next to them in the top open space of the Mac Pro.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Really, the Mac Pro has two 3.5-inch hard drive bays in that top space.
Marco:
They're just optional and sold by Pegasus.
Marco:
That, I think, is kind of fun.
Marco:
I'm not sure I would use them, but I'm really happy to have the option.
Marco:
Because one thing that we've lost...
Marco:
in the move away from cheese creator Mac Pros for the last X years, we've lost the ability to have a whole bunch of internal storage.
Marco:
Because this is corresponding with the SSD revolution, which is wonderful for speed and everything, and I still love an all-SSD computer, but...
Marco:
As a result, we have to have external drives or NAS boxes or other complex, external, expensive things in order to get large, bulk storage for archive storage or for videos or for media servers or for Time Machine.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I always loved, when I had the Tower Mac Pros, I always loved just having four hard drives in there, and just having all of my storage internal.
Marco:
So it was a cleaner setup, it was way cheaper to get big storage, and although nothing about this new Mac Pro is cheaper, really, but it's all relative, I guess.
Marco:
I'm actually really happy to see this, because...
Marco:
back when we were discussing what we thought would be the next Mac Pro, none of us would have guessed that there would be any 3.5-inch drive bays.
Marco:
And while there technically aren't in a stock configuration, the fact that they clearly designed it with that in mind and basically allowed for these modules to exist, and honestly, Apple probably designed them and handed the design to Pegasus, the fact that these exist and were made for it and it was designed with them in mind is awesome.
Marco:
So now, you can theoretically, I mean, heck,
Marco:
you can i think you can fit up to three mpx modules right no it's just it's just two oh okay so well you could theoretically have two pegasus r4 eyes one pegasus j2i and a regular pci express video card that isn't an mpx module to have it to be your video card and you could then theoretically have uh 10 three and a half inch hard drives inside your mac pro oh my word
Marco:
That's a lot of terabytes.
John:
So that's really cool.
John:
This whole topic was under the idea of the question that came up during the live show.
John:
Are third parties allowed to make MPX modules?
John:
Answer, yes.
John:
And Apple seems to love Pegasus.
John:
They're always promoting Pegasus as the maker of their RAID and other storage stuff.
John:
The main thing I'm interested in is I do want internal drives.
John:
Probably not spinning disks because if I wanted to buy humongous spinning disks, I would just shove them in a NAS somewhere.
John:
But I'll probably use one of my old SSDs as like a boot camp thing.
John:
And if I want to have internal time machine storage and I get like a four terabyte SATA SSD, it's fine for time machine backup purposes.
John:
Although it might be kind of expensive.
John:
Anyway, I like the idea of having room for internal storage, no matter what it happens to be in whatever slots, because there are so many slots.
John:
I'm not going to fill all the slots.
John:
There's so much room inside that case.
John:
I may actually be interested maybe in this, you know, J2I thing just because why not?
John:
Like I have big hard drives laying around and it's better than trying to find an external enclosure and having these wires dangling out of the thing and plugging up some of your ports and having to deal with the extra power.
John:
Like,
John:
It's all inside the case.
John:
This is one of the many advantages to having a Mac Pro.
Marco:
Yeah, and the limitation of SATA as the bus instead of Direct Connect, NVMe, whatever, for something like Time Machine or for a big archive files drive or the drive you store all your iTunes media on or whatever, that doesn't matter.
Marco:
It's fast enough for that, and so it would be such a cool setup even if you never put a spinning disk in it for noise or heat or whatever reasons.
Marco:
like for me it would be noise but like you can get mounts that that mount a two and a half inch ssd into a three and a half inch hard drive sized box and so just get two of those for like 12 bucks each stick it in the pegasus j2i and you can mount two sata ssds which these days don't cost very much anymore so that's pretty cool
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the heat and noise, like I'm doing this right now, like I'm on my 2008 Mac Pro that's still chugging along down there.
John:
I boot off a one terabyte Samsung SSD and the spinning disks are all unmounted or otherwise asleep.
John:
And when the thing wakes up at 3 a.m.
John:
to do a super duper backup, it will mount the disk, do the super duper backup and unmount it.
John:
Like so during the day, it's not on and not spinning.
John:
and therefore makes no noise and no heat.
John:
That's cool.
John:
But I have the advantage that I have cheap spinning disk storage to do a super-duper backup or a time machine or whatever.
John:
This is all pre-NAS.
John:
I did this.
John:
And this only has four internal drives, the one SSD and the three spinning disks.
John:
My boot camp disk in this very machine is a spinning disk with, I think, Windows XP on it or something.
John:
Anyway...
John:
i'm i'm excited about uh my boot camp future i did confirm that with the the apple folks that the mac pro does indeed support boot camp how well we'll see but at least that's the official party line that it supports it that's step one yeah um so details about the macro not not too much stuff but just little stuff that mostly we knew probably the day after the live show but since the live show is on keynote day there's a lot we don't know
John:
Um, so we discussed never knows the sort of lift off case where rather than a door opening on the side or the back or something, you lift the entire case off vertically.
John:
Um, and that's cool in the demos and it lets you do, you know, has a cool handle on top and, um,
John:
You reveal the naked robotic core underneath.
John:
And shortly after the intro, I got to thinking, if I put this under a desk, I can't lift the case off to get at the RAM or anything because it will hit the desk.
John:
So again, wheels would come in handy here.
John:
I'd have to slide it out from the desk to get the vertical space to lift the top of the thing off.
John:
The second thing that I learned from the folks in the Come Look at a Live Mac Pro thing is that
John:
If you lift the case off, the computer will turn off.
John:
The computer cannot be on when the case is lifted off.
John:
There's an interlock mechanism in that locking thing where if it was on and you tried to twist that handle, it just cuts power to the whole thing.
John:
You cannot take the case off with the computer still on, which is unlike...
John:
All the Power Mac G5 and the Mac Pro, I frequently take the door off my Mac Pro while it's still running to look around in there or to blow some dust while it's still going or to check on some weird fan noise that I think I hear to see what the deal is.
John:
Not in this computer.
John:
When the case is off, the computer is off.
John:
And the final thing that's made me think about, which I didn't think to ask when I was there, but now I'm kind of curious about, is the Mac Pro has ports on top of the case.
John:
But when you lift the case off, the ports come with it.
John:
So how do the ports connect to the rest of the computer?
John:
There must be some really cool like, you know, interconnect, custom interconnect mechanism that like plugs the Thunderbolt ports and the power button and all the other sort of circuitry into the computer.
John:
And I would love to see what that looks like.
John:
You couldn't.
John:
see it at the the live thing because they just had sort of the naked robotic core with nothing in it and enclosed mac pros they didn't have at least in any of the meetings that i was in they didn't have a place where you could actually look in the inside of the case so as soon as someone as soon as i fix it gets this thing that'll be fun to see how all that stuff works that's pretty cool yeah and speaking of the case and the holes that everybody loves or everybody loves to hate i guess there's two items about this one i've seen a lot of people
John:
speculating about how the holes are made some person took some wood in their wood shop and tried to make the same hole pattern but by using like a drill bit it came pretty close it looked very similar uh but i think and i heard it described on another podcast as like one set of circles and another set of circles behind it that are offset they're just like they're circular holes but they're offset from each other and that's not actually what it is
John:
Again, I can't, we haven't seen the inside of it, but from the outside, I'm pretty sure the way this is machined is that the holes or the, if you can imagine the tool that makes this, I think the tool basically makes hemispherical dents, right?
John:
So they're not, it's not just making cylindrical cuts.
John:
It's cutting little, like the dimples on a golf ball, little hemispherical dents, right?
Marco:
Yeah, that explains the shape.
Marco:
That's why the wood mock-up wasn't quite the same because it was more of a cylinder.
Marco:
It does seem like the tool that is milling out these holes, although we don't know anything about manufacturing, but it seems like it has a rounded end as opposed to a flat end.
John:
Yeah, who knows?
John:
It could just be some single thing that's like 3D printed or not 3D printed, but you know what I mean?
John:
Like a single tiny pointy tool that makes hemispherical shapes.
John:
But anyway, my impression is that
John:
There are hemispherical divots cut on the front, and there is a series of offset hemispherical divots cut on the back.
John:
So again, I'd love to see this thing and take a look at it.
John:
And the reason we're talking about these little holes is, I forget where I heard this.
John:
Someone was saying, oh, the design for these holes actually has been around Apple for a long time.
John:
And
John:
Marco, when he was hanging out in the Let's Look at the Mac Pro room with Tim Cook and Johnny Ive, the discussion they were having about this happens all the time.
John:
If you see Tim Cook and Johnny Ive in a demo room after a press thing, no matter what it is, they're always talking to each other.
John:
Johnny is always telling Tim about things.
John:
i've always thought like is that like theater or is johnny telling tim things that he doesn't know like you would think like johnny saying well we decide to make the like does tim not know has he not been in the meeting did someone not review said by the way we're releasing a mac pro let me tell you about it tim always is like he's hearing about it for the very first time oh tell me more about the case why did you make it like this anyway they were having one of those conversations legitimate or not i don't know i think it's a little bit of theater yeah i'm honest it has to be
John:
I don't know.
John:
But in that conversation that Marco was standing near, someone was filming it on their phone and they uploaded a video.
John:
And you can kind of hear, kind of make out Tim and Johnny's conversation as far as I can tell and as far as other people on the Internet can tell by trying to decipher what they're saying in this noisy room.
John:
Johnny is telling Tim that the lattice pattern on the front of the of the new Mac Pro was originally developed for the G4 Cube developed for but not released on the G4 Cubes like they they were trying to come up with this the G4 Cube was like a chimney.
John:
uh, heat remover thing.
John:
Like there's no fans, but there was like cold air comes in the bottom and then, and then the hot air rises, right?
John:
That was like a convection type system.
John:
And I assume they were going to use this for either the top or the bottom of the convection.
John:
They ended up using something a lot simpler with little slots or whatever.
John:
Um,
John:
But I think that's what they said.
John:
So if you're wondering how Apple came up with this strange, some people think ugly, some people think upsetting design for the front of their Mac Pro, the answer is apparently that they came up with it for the G4 Cube, which was what, 2001?
John:
So, you know, 18 years ago.
John:
And now it sees the light of day on the front and back of their amazing new computer and the back of their monitor.
Marco:
Yeah, and I'm guessing, I mean, part of the reason why they might not have used it before is that, like, people were telling us, you know, about manufacturing, that, like, in order to manufacture that, in order to have, like, the tool that drills out all those holes, it's basically just really expensive.
Marco:
Like, it's going to be a very expensive type of pattern and material to make.
Marco:
And so they might have decided back in the G4 Cube days, we don't need to do this, it's too expensive, and, you know, we'll just use a simpler pattern instead.
Marco:
But with this product...
Marco:
I think they have... Price is less of an object to them for this product now, these days.
Marco:
And also, they, I think, want... The design of it is more important to them than it used to be.
Marco:
Like, the physical design of the metal is more important now to modern-day Apple than it was in 2001.
John:
Yeah, they did some attempts to justify it during the keynote and in a little videos of saying like that it allows lots of air to go through and that is incredibly structurally strong.
John:
Structurally strong.
John:
I'm sure that's true, but it's pointless because I said in the live show, who cares?
John:
It's not a it's not a load bearing part.
John:
Like there's no there doesn't need to be strong.
John:
And as for air going through, I would imagine that there is more open space on the front of the old cheese grater.
John:
like cumulatively than there is in this one the bottom line they just did it because it looks cool like they're just fine it's the fine reason to do it uh you know it may be upsetting to some people i think uh after seeing it in person i find it a lot less upsetting in person than i did in pictures yeah still probably not my cup of tea but it does look better when you see one in person
Marco:
Yeah, like when you see the pictures of it, they're doing this very like perfectly evenly lit, perfectly straight on flat view of it, which it looks really weird that way.
Marco:
And that's why I'm going to refuse to ever use that whole pattern as part of our podcast artwork because it's really weird looking from the front.
Marco:
But when you see it in person, you're not seeing it in that exact perfection, even lighting it.
Marco:
You're seeing it as a 3D object in space.
Marco:
And anyone can do that by downloading the AR model from the website on your phone or your iPad.
Marco:
And you can see for yourself, when you actually see it in 3D space, it doesn't look as upsetting.
Marco:
I wouldn't say it looks good, honestly, but it doesn't look upsetting.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I think they also like – I think you're right.
Marco:
They did it now in part because they could, in part because I think they have more price profit margin with which to use to do fancy machining.
Marco:
But also I think they were going back to a cheese grater basically.
Marco:
I don't think they wanted it to look that similar to the old one.
Marco:
And so if they would have done a simpler whole pattern, maybe it would have looked too similar.
Marco:
And maybe they wanted to make a really big statement that this wasn't like a retreat.
Marco:
This wasn't like they got defeated by their fancy cylinder design and they had to go back to the cheese grater.
Marco:
They wanted this to look like a new thing, a separate thing, and to have it look striking and radically different from what was there in the old one.
Marco:
So from that point of view, if that was one of their goals, I think they succeeded because this really does look very different than the cheese grater, even though...
Marco:
It basically is a cheese grater.
John:
Yeah, and they could have gone with the vertical slats or horizontal slats or all sorts of other patterns, but they did go with fairly circular holes.
John:
But here's the thing.
John:
I think this pulls off the thing that good Apple hardware always pulls off.
John:
When I came home and looked at my 2008 Mac Pro under my desk, it looked old.
John:
I mean, to be fair, it is really old.
John:
True.
John:
Very, very old.
John:
It looked much older than it did before I left, the week before when I left for WWC.
John:
Mostly because you see that like, oh, this is just like, you know, kind of not too thick aluminum bent in a C shape with a door on the side and then some even thinner aluminum bent around the front with holes drilled in it.
John:
It's not as impressive a piece of sculpture.
John:
And you mentioned showing the computer from the front.
John:
I took some pictures myself.
John:
I tweeted them the other day of the Mac Pros.
John:
And I think even in my own, directly from the front with Apple's sort of glamour lighting on it,
John:
I think even that looks good.
John:
It looks like a more impressive thing.
John:
It doesn't look like most things.
John:
Most products you see look the way they do partly because it is efficient and or inexpensive to manufacture in that way.
John:
And so when you see something that is not efficient to manufacture and that is expensive to manufacture, it stands out to you because you're not used to seeing products that are like that.
John:
It's true of some of the exteriors and interiors of very, very fancy cars, and it's also true of the best Apple hardware.
John:
And this new tower, even though it's like, oh, it's just just another cheese grater standing next to an old style cheese grater.
John:
It looks much more expensive.
John:
It just does.
John:
Like it looks like a an object that should cost more based on pure manufacturing alone.
John:
And I'm sure it does.
John:
So in that respect, it is fulfilling that of like it does not look like a retreat.
John:
It looks like an advancement.
John:
It looks like a it looks like a fancier product than the old cheese grater Mac Pro.
Marco:
and and i mean it it is like you know price and segmentation wise like the old mac pro when that was i mean first of all it was basically a g5 you know with slight modifications to the exterior but the like the original mac pro in 2006 you could get one they had a as john would say a stripper configuration for like 1700 or 1600 it was it was actually below 2000 if you like went to only one cpu and and there were there were a couple other options you could do
Marco:
So that computer had to be sold for $1,600.
Marco:
So the minimum price of what the case and power supply and everything had to cost was much lower than when your base configuration is $6,000.
Marco:
Even after inflation, it doesn't come close to being a similar price range.
Marco:
It's not even close.
Marco:
And so they have the flexibility by having this only be a high-end thing.
Marco:
Actually, I want to talk about that in a minute.
Marco:
But by having this only be a high-end thing,
Marco:
they gave themselves the flexibility in manufacturing to say, you know what, if the case ends up costing $700 to manufacture instead of a more simple one that you get or might have cost like $200 to manufacture, like, they have the room for that in the budget.
Marco:
Now, that being said, I did want to talk about, like, there has been, you know, when we did our show mere hours after this thing was unveiled, we were, you know, we were all, like, still in, like, the high of this and everybody was amazed by it and talking about the ridiculous pricing on the monitor stand.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Since then, I've seen – there's actually been a lot of criticism of the Mac Pro itself being such an expensive thing and starting at $6,000 and everything else.
Marco:
And I did want to talk about that briefly.
Marco:
And I said a little bit of this last week of like –
Marco:
When the original Tower Mac Pro came out in 2006, back then you needed a desktop more than you do now.
Marco:
More types of Pro work needed a big desktop because CPUs weren't that fast yet, there weren't that many cores available in laptops, and SSDs hadn't happened yet.
Marco:
And so the difference between a desktop and a laptop was significantly greater in many common tasks that many people do, not just the highest end of the high-end use cases like video encoding, which is always the example.
Marco:
Video editors and people doing super big data sets like 3D modeling or scientific research computing –
Marco:
huge things like that, those can always justify the biggest and biggest and biggest hardware.
Marco:
But there's a whole lot of more common use cases where you don't necessarily need that.
Marco:
And over time, the number of people or the percentage of types of work that need that highest end of high-end hardware keeps going down because...
Marco:
The hardware that is more mainstream, that's available across all sizes and prices and everything, is more and more capable for more and more people's actual needs than it was in 2006.
Marco:
And so right now, people always say, I need to get the greatest thing to do video editing.
Marco:
When you started doing video editing, like when 4K video first came out, people were editing 4K video on big towers and everything.
Marco:
Well, now you can get that exact same power in a laptop.
Marco:
And you don't even necessarily need the biggest laptop.
Marco:
Now a 13-inch MacBook Pro can edit video just fine.
Marco:
It might not be as fast as the 15, but it can do it.
Marco:
And for most people who are creating video and editing video, that's actually enough.
Marco:
Anything above that is a luxury, but it's not actually that necessary.
Marco:
For me as a developer, my iMac Pro, I have a 10-core iMac Pro.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
It is, in my tests, faster than a 4-core MacBook Pro, but not two and a half times faster as you'd think.
Marco:
And looking at the Mac Pro, now, like, I don't need the Mac Pro.
Marco:
I actually, honestly, I'm having extreme skepticism about whether I'll even get one, which I know you'll make fun of me.
Marco:
But, like, the Mac Pro is so, like, stratified above everything else, not just in price, although it is, you know, to be fair, it is very much stratified in price, but...
Marco:
in in who even needs this thing it's a very small market of people who actually need this thing and people who want to have their own upgradable pcs as more of like just like a value thing or or a long-term upgradability and maintenance thing or a hobbyist thing people who want that that's that really upsets them that like apple's only solution to an upgradable tower starts at six thousand dollars
Marco:
And let's be honest, that $6,000 configuration is kind of crappy, and it's probably going to cost more like $8,000 or $9,000 for one we're actually going to want.
Marco:
That angers a lot of people, and that's a totally valid thing to be angry about, but it's never going to change.
Marco:
People have been wanting Apple to make the, quote, XMac forever.
Marco:
They're never going to do it.
Marco:
They're never going to make basically an iMac's components in a Mac Pro style case.
Marco:
That's never going to happen.
Marco:
That's not a market they want to address.
Marco:
And increasingly over time, that isn't a market that exists much anymore.
Marco:
There's not a lot of people who are even buying those from manufacturers who do offer them.
Marco:
By far, most consumers these days buy laptops.
Marco:
The only people who really want an upgradable desktop most of the time are either super value-conscious buyers, like people who are managing large fleets of desktop towers for office buildings or whatever else, in which case they want the cheapest stuff possible with service contracts from Dell and everything.
Marco:
Apple doesn't really play in that market.
Marco:
Or they're gamers.
Marco:
Apple doesn't really play in that market either.
Marco:
Or they're high-end workstation users.
Marco:
Or they're like PC hobbyist builders who want to build their own thing, which Apple doesn't play in that market either.
Marco:
So there's very few markets that Apple is willing to play in and would succeed in that still need a significantly upgradable desktop.
Marco:
And while it would be wonderful, I would love if they would bring back the $1,600 configuration of a configurable tower that you could upgrade later.
Marco:
That would be great.
Marco:
But the number of people that affects is just shrinking over time, radically shrinking.
Marco:
It isn't ideal to have this thing start so incredibly expensive.
Marco:
But the reality is most people who are going to be that price conscious about it aren't in the market for this kind of thing at all these days.
Marco:
They buy other things.
Marco:
They buy laptops.
Marco:
They buy iMacs or they buy PCs.
Marco:
And so I think it's fine.
Marco:
It's not great, but it's fine.
John:
Yeah, the sub-2000 Mac Pro was very close to being an XMac because it was cheap.
John:
It had all the expansion you want.
John:
The only thing stopping it from being an XMac was it was so darn big, right?
John:
Because, like, an XMac, like, why do I need all this space?
John:
It's only got one CPU.
John:
Like, it's just a waste.
John:
It's this huge hulking tower.
John:
But it was close.
John:
And I think, as you mentioned, the main market for the kind of computer you described is gaming PCs, which...
John:
is you know it's not a huge market but it's not tiny either like pre-assembled you didn't build it yourself gaming pcs they're very expensive they're thousands of dollars they have glowy lights in them and they're filled with high-end hardware but they're not workstations um for apple's re-entry into the quote-unquote pro desktop market as i said last week
John:
they have gone all the way to the extreme which i think is appropriate it would like you can do this two ways like it would be like you know getting with more car analogies if a car company stops making sports cars and says we're going to re-enter the sports car after a many year absence like we decided it's important to us to make really fast cars right they could come out with an extremely inexpensive affordable you know every person's sports car kind of like what mazza did with the miata like they kind of made their name with that it's like
John:
It's not a particularly fast car, but it shows that they like the spirit of driving.
John:
Very inexpensive, small, sporty thing.
John:
But what most car companies do is they make their halo car, they make a super car, they make a really high-end sports car that they know most people don't need.
John:
But it shows we're serious about high performance.
John:
We're back in the game, and then they will sell a bunch of other cars below that.
John:
So for the very first re-entry pro desktop computer, I'm glad that Apple didn't hold anything back and went for the highest of the high-end.
John:
As high as you can possibly go.
John:
Doesn't preclude them doing other things in the future, but it's clear where they were going.
John:
And if you hear how Apple talks about the new Mac Pro, they don't think they're competing with desktop computers or gaming PCs.
John:
They're competing for people who buy what Apple calls internally workstations, which is a word from decades ago.
John:
You usually don't hear bounced around that much these days, but it is still a thing.
John:
Even though it seems like a very small number of people, the workstation market has actually been growing in recent years.
John:
While the PC market has been shrinking, the workstation market has been growing.
John:
I don't know if it's been growing in terms of unit sales.
John:
in terms of overall revenue, but it is actually growing.
John:
And Apple used to have significant market share in the workstation market.
John:
And that share has dwindled and almost disappeared over the last decade or so.
John:
So their re-entry into the space is, we want to reclaim the workstation space.
John:
We want those people who are currently buying
John:
eight thousand dollar hp computers right those are the people we want to sell to so our six thousand dollar entry price mac pro is actually coming in under a lot of the competition the competition is not a gaming pc the competition is not i built a pc myself the competition is not shuttle pc it is eight thousand dollar hp workstations um
John:
Can Apple make, to your point earlier, Marco, can they sell a computer in this case with this power supply and this number of slots for less than $6,000?
John:
Yes, but probably not that much less.
John:
And honestly, as I think I tried to emphasize last week, in this grand scheme of things, it's not the Mac Pro that is cripplingly expensive.
John:
It's expensive, but not out of bounds.
John:
What is cripplingly expensive is that the monitor is the same amount, right?
John:
So lots of people are playing, oh, the Mac Pro is so expensive.
John:
If the Mac Pro was $6,000 in change or $7,000 plus a $1,000 monitor...
John:
we wouldn't be having the same conversation.
John:
We'd be having the conversation that we usually have, which is like, look what you can do in the configurator.
John:
I can make the Mac Pro $100,000 by adding a terabyte and a half RAM.
John:
Haha, isn't that funny?
John:
But no one thinks that that means the Mac Pro is overpriced.
John:
Just don't configure it that way.
John:
It's ridiculous, right?
John:
It has that capacity, which is great.
John:
But if I think of how much I spent total on my Mac Pro system that I'm sitting in front of now, it was probably inflation-adjusted around $6,000 or $7,000 for the monitor and the PC.
John:
That's about what my iMac Pro cost.
John:
Yeah, so I don't think the Mac Pro itself is out of bounds.
John:
The monitor is, and we'll talk about that more, I'm sure, for different reasons.
John:
But the Mac Pro itself, I think, is coming at the high end for sure, but I feel like they can actually...
John:
If they decided to go down market and not, you know, and address anything other than the workstation market, they could.
John:
There is, as I said last week, there is that space there.
John:
If they ever will, I don't know.
John:
But like, if you're wondering, why does Apple even make a machine like this?
John:
The workstation market is a good place to be selling computers.
John:
Apple used to sell much more computers there than it does now for obvious reasons.
John:
See all the previous Mac Pro years without a change.
John:
They want that market back.
John:
It's a good market to be in.
John:
And so they're in it.
Marco:
Let's talk about that monitor for a minute.
Marco:
I think you're right.
Marco:
The monitor really hurt the optics and the pricing discussion of this announcement.
Marco:
Because while everyone has been quick to...
Marco:
get the nice bullet points from PR about how this is much better than other reference monitors in this class and much cheaper than these $40,000 monitors.
Marco:
That suck.
Marco:
That's all true, but that doesn't help a conference of 5,000 developers and thousands more watching at home feel like this is within their reach anymore because developers don't need all the stuff this monitor provides.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
Having this be an option that you can buy is one thing.
Marco:
But I think the bigger problem is that this is basically the only option for a good monitor that is currently still for sale that has the right retina density for a Mac.
Marco:
That is anywhere like there's almost no other options.
Marco:
The LG 5K is discontinued.
Marco:
Dell discontinued their pretty similar monitor like a year ago.
Marco:
As far as I can tell, I don't think there's any left on the market.
Marco:
Like I don't think you can buy a 27 inch 5K monitor from anybody right now.
Marco:
except for the few remaining LGs that are still in stock in various places before they all sell out.
Marco:
But I don't think anyone is currently producing 5K 27-inch monitors.
Marco:
You can get a 4K 27-inch, which is the wrong density for retina use as a Mac.
Marco:
You can get 5K 33-inch, which is also the wrong density.
Marco:
No one's making this, as far as I can tell.
Marco:
Or at least there are very few, if anyone is.
Marco:
And so, by releasing the Mac Pro and having the only monitor from Apple be a $6,000 monitor,
Marco:
The monitor really hurts this story badly because then we're all saying, well, they made the computer we finally want.
Marco:
It's more money than we wanted to spend.
Marco:
And also, the only monitor choice that's any good is $6,000.
John:
Yeah, the monitor is many times more than we... The Mac Pro is a small percentage more than maybe we wanted to pay, but the monitor is many times more than we would have expected, like two or three times the price we would have expected because...
John:
If you're not in the market for a reference monitor, why would you be considering the features that it offers?
John:
When Apple said back at the Mac roundtable, two years ago, we're going to make a Mac Pro and we're going to make a monitor for it, I had that whole big rant about
John:
back on the show when they said they were not going to make monitors anymore, about how I wanted to have an Apple monitor.
John:
Mostly just because I knew it would be high quality and calibrated well, and the case would match the system and it would look nice.
John:
And that's an important part of my computing.
John:
That's part of the reason why I buy Macs.
John:
I like that they look nice.
John:
I like that the whole thing matches.
John:
But this new monitor is much more in line with the Apple philosophy that we don't enter a market unless we can make a significant contribution.
John:
How do you make a significant contribution to monitors?
John:
Well, our pro workflows often have to involve the use of a reference monitor.
John:
They're incredibly expensive and you can only have a few of them in the studio.
John:
So most of the people working on the video pipeline don't get to see their stuff the way it's actually going to look.
John:
The way we can make a significant contribution to the market to sort of make a dent is we can offer a reference monitor for much less money that will also be an amazing all-around display.
John:
And that's exactly what they did.
John:
But they weren't on the same page with me, it seems, of the idea of like another thing we can do is just offer you a very nice monitor in a matching case, which is essentially what they do with the iMac.
John:
They offer you a very nice monitor in the 5K iMac and the iMac Pro in a nice case that also happens to have the computer in it.
John:
And unfortunately, they removed the ability to use an iMac as an external monitor a long time ago, or I bet people would be considering that, because honestly, it's way cheaper to get an entire 5K iMac and just use it as a monitor than it is to buy the Pro Display XDR.
John:
But alas, that's not even an option until someone figures out how to...
Marco:
hack a ribbon cable into the t-con or something and snake it out one of the vents or something yeah because like because like right now they sell the imax panel with a free computer behind it for eighteen hundred dollars like the cheapest 27 inch 5k imac has the same panel as all the rest of them it's eighteen hundred dollars they could release that as a monitor with almost the same enclosure we just were like a thunderbolt 3 input and change almost nothing about it take out the free computer and
Marco:
And they could literally charge the exact same price.
Marco:
They could literally charge $1,800, and we would buy it.
Marco:
Because the LG was $1,300, and it was a crappy enclosure and everything.
Marco:
They could really just make the Apple version of that LG, which is basically an iMac with a computer.
Marco:
And that, I think, would have...
Marco:
really improved the optics of this story because right now what what they have shown is here's a mac pro that's that's more expensive than you want here's the only display that's any good on the market that will go with it that's significantly more expensive than what you expected and we made it for people who aren't you
Marco:
If you are a professional video editor or colorist or one of the relatively few industries that actually would use those reference monitors before, that's great news for you.
Marco:
For everybody else, that's a hard pill to swallow.
Marco:
For every other kind of pro that every other type of user who wants to buy a high-end desktop or a high-end workstation or have a MacBook Pro and connect it to an external monitor, which is very common, for all those other kinds of users,
Marco:
Apple has offered no solution, really, or no solution anybody wants or likes.
Marco:
This is one of the reasons why I'm having serious doubts on whether I'm going to buy a Mac Pro yet, because if I'm honest with myself, the iMac Pro is the better solution for me overall.
Marco:
I could spend what would probably be...
Marco:
I don't know, $16,000 on a Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR setup that would be significantly better than my Mac Pro.
Marco:
But that's $16,000 for mostly, like, you know, a good chunk of that cost would be for the benefits of this monitor that I will never use.
Marco:
that I would rather not buy if I don't have to.
Marco:
I don't want a monitor that is $6,000 and has fans in it that can go to brightnesses that I will never set it to, that has accurate color for applications I would never do with it.
Marco:
I don't need all that.
Marco:
I want the empty iMac case.
Marco:
Like, that's what I want.
Marco:
Like, I want that to be my monitor.
Marco:
Although you'd like it to be 6K, which maybe the next iMac will be.
Marco:
And sure.
Marco:
And yeah, because you know what?
Marco:
When I sat down at my iMac coming back from WBC, you know, your computer looked old.
Marco:
My 27-inch iMac looked small.
Marco:
But the reality is it didn't look $6,000 small.
Marco:
That's for sure.
Marco:
So I just – I don't –
Marco:
I'm going to have a really hard time justifying this.
Marco:
And I think most developers would have a really hard time justifying this because of the monitor situation.
Marco:
And so what I'm hoping will happen, I'm hoping that there will be a pro display without the XDR after it, just a pro display.
Marco:
It would probably be the IMAX 5K panel.
Marco:
It probably wouldn't be 6K yet, maybe down the road, but probably not yet.
Marco:
So I'm hoping that maybe this winter, when they maybe release that 16-inch, maybe they release it along with the Pro Display that's a 5K external display for somewhere between $1,500 and $2,000.
Marco:
I hope that happens.
Marco:
It seems unlikely, honestly.
Marco:
If I'm honest with myself, that seems like maybe a down-the-road thing, if ever.
Marco:
But right now...
Marco:
Apple is depending on this market to exist that no longer exists.
Marco:
No one is making these displays anymore.
Marco:
Even their partner LG stopped making theirs.
Marco:
And even it was pretty mediocre.
Marco:
So it's another one of these situations where the whole reason Apple had to make a monitor at all
Marco:
is because no one was making good ones.
Marco:
I think this is one of those times where they have to... There's this giant hole in the market where tons of their customers depend on external monitors all the time for their MacBook Pros or for their Mac Pros or for their Mac Minis, for that matter, or their iPads.
Marco:
The iPad has external monitor support
Marco:
what monitors you supposed to plug into it honest question like what are you supposed to answer that there's so few monitors that even work with it so like i think apple needs to make this as simple as that the only question that i think is when yeah i think in general people are probably less precious about their monitors than we are i mean like i work in an office filled with monitors none of which except for mine are apple monitors right
John:
uh people just don't care that much like and it's it's what i thought of like when we were in the the big mac pro room dazzled by all the amazing things i wasn't thinking about this but once i had left i realized that one of the demos was this amazing hundred thousand dollar audio board filled with cool buttons and knobs and sliders and this person demonstrating like the score to a movie on
John:
a mac pro that was doing this amazing thing that used to take multiple computers to be able to process all the sound for but now this one can hold six of these hdx cards and it was this amazing demo and only after leaving did i realize why does an audio editor need a reference monitor right
John:
So you can see those Logic tracks in exactly the color they're intended to be shown in.
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
It absolutely doesn't matter.
John:
Maybe they want a big monitor to see lots of tracks, but I'm not even sure Retina matters.
John:
Depending on how good your eyes are and how dim the room is and how far you're sitting away from it, maybe one of those 4K monitors that's too big or the 5K, 33-inch would be better for audio editors for the purpose they have.
John:
Like...
John:
I just don't think people are that precious about monitors.
John:
I am, obviously, and there is a market for it.
John:
And I think Apple absolutely should make one for the same reason they make all sorts of stuff.
John:
Why does Apple make a keyboard and a mouse?
John:
Plenty of people make keyboard and mouse.
John:
Why does Apple make one?
John:
They could just say, you buy your own keyboard and mouse and add it to it.
John:
There's plenty of options.
John:
They would partner with somebody.
John:
LG makes a great, you know, keyboard and mouse.
John:
Like, this is the equivalent, right?
John:
What Apple chooses to make and doesn't choose to make is just baffling to me at this point because they absolutely need to make
John:
a non-reference monitor monitor for their computers i don't i don't understand why they're not doing it it's it's uh it could just be a timing thing again it right now the narrative of come in at the very high end and let it stew because it's not like you can even buy this computer that we're talking about it's going to come out in the fall sometime so before you can even buy this computer
John:
they may release a monitor that you know a normal monitor a quote-unquote normal monitor uh but maybe not we'll see uh one more one more tidbit before we leave uh the mac pro xdr for this week why why does the stand cost a thousand dollars my goodness uh there are lots of angles to this but one i think marco did you tell me about this the the rotation thing
Marco:
uh yeah so like the way it rotates is like i mean first of all this doesn't say a thousand dollars to me but no but it's an interesting tidbit that you might not know about if you weren't there so it does it does the rotation and but also like if you ever had a monitor a really big monitor that rotates uh like some of the big dells and stuff they they will often have a problem where if you rotate them at in the wrong way or at the wrong angle they will crash their corner into the desk and
Marco:
And so with a monitor this big, that is a concern.
Marco:
So Apple has engineered the stand such that it will not rotate unless the monitor is in its furthest up position.
Marco:
And during rotation, it locks itself there.
Marco:
You can't begin a rotation that you can't complete.
Marco:
So that's the cost of $1,000.
John:
Yeah, it's more fun mechanical stuff that's inside that little arm.
John:
This is entirely a mechanical thing that makes this happen.
John:
So it's pretty neat.
John:
I'm sure it's really cool in practice.
John:
But the other people pondering the $1,000 monitor stand, if you're in the market, we were just describing, the market that buys workstations, the market that does professional video editing or just...
John:
or that buys $40,000 reference monitors.
John:
That market is weird.
John:
I'm not entirely sure why it's weird.
John:
I'm not entirely sure how the supply and demand works and how the economics work.
John:
But the fact is, this monitor looks different than you would expect.
John:
And I got lots of examples from people who are in that market to say, here's what stuff costs in that market.
John:
One of the best ones I saw was, so like lots of these companies that sell you things sell you these modular systems and
John:
it's kind of like uh porsche with the with the options on their car you can just buy the thing but then you're going to spend so much money on options right so i think this was like the red camera company where you like you buy the brain of your camera which is like as much as a car and it's just this box that does nothing then you have to buy the thing that like actually lets light into it and then you have to buy the lenses for and then you have to buy the thing that records stuff and it's like it's like build your own camera and each part costs 10 grand right um
John:
they also sell a handle for their camera, which is a metal thing that goes in your hand.
John:
It's like maybe six inches long, and it bends down in an L shape and connects to the camera so you can hold it.
John:
And that handle, I think, was like $500.
John:
And that handle has way fewer parts, no mechanisms whatsoever, less raw materials than this stand.
John:
But if you're in the kind of... And I mentioned Pelican cases in the show last.
John:
If you're in this market...
John:
Buying an inert metal handle for your bajillion dollar camera for $500 is like, that's just how much the handle costs.
John:
I'm sure it's a good handle.
John:
I'm sure this is a good stand.
John:
Why does the stand cost $1,000?
John:
Why is the handle $500?
John:
Like, apparently, it's what the market will bear in this particular market.
John:
If you are not in this market, the prices seem ridiculous.
John:
But if you are in the market, they don't seem ridiculous.
John:
Like, tons of stuff in this market, you look at it and you're like, guess how much this costs?
John:
And you would never guess because it's quote-unquote pro gear or whatever.
John:
Not that this justifies or explains it, but it does sort of make...
John:
the pricing of that stuff makes sense all that said i think apple knows that their audience is not is not familiar with that market for the most part and i did i checked this uh after coming back from the show uh because it seemed quick when i was in the room if you watch the wc keynote presentation video the 999 price for the stand is on screen in the video for 56 frames so
John:
Which is about 1.9 seconds.
John:
They press the button and it animates onto the slide.
John:
And then they press the button less than two seconds later to get it off of the slide.
John:
So they were not dwelling on that.
John:
So regardless of what market it fits into and how it makes perfect sense in a market with $500 handles for your $20,000 camera thing, Apple knows.
John:
That is a shocking price for most developers, and that's what the room is filled with.
John:
So I think Apple understands that there is a gap here.
John:
I really just hope they fill it.
Marco:
What took longer for them to go through the 99 slide price or when Tim Cook said the Apple Watch Edition was going to start at $15,000?
Marco:
Was it on a slide?
John:
I think it was just verbal.
John:
Yeah, this is stuff to say with timings and that because obviously you say it and it's out of your mouth and then you move on.
John:
I guess maybe the time between he says it and when he says the next thing.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But yeah, I mean, it's still less expensive than a fully operational red camera.
John:
But, you know, it's not made of gold, right?
John:
Or was at one time.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
What you need is a distributed Wi-Fi system.
Marco:
Offices have done this for years, but usually they were very complex and expensive.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Eero also lets you manage everything right from that app in the palm of your hand.
Marco:
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Marco:
You can set up a guest network.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And this is really state-of-the-art hardware, making a multi-point mesh network that
Marco:
That just blankets your entire house in amazing fast coverage.
Marco:
They also have amazing support if you need it, although honestly I don't think you will because it's super easy to use.
Marco:
And they also now offer Eero Plus.
Marco:
This is designed to provide simple, reliable security to defend all your home's devices against a growing number of threats and as well as improve performance.
Marco:
This includes the ability to block malicious and unwanted content.
Marco:
You can check your sites you're visiting across a database of millions of known threats and automatically block them without slowing anything down.
Marco:
You can do content blocking selectively.
Marco:
So you can, for example, say, on my kids' devices, I don't want them to look at violent, illegal, or adult content.
Marco:
They also have built-in ad blocking with Eero Plus to get rid of annoying ads and pop-ups on all of your devices, all without slowing anything down, and so much more.
Marco:
So check it out today at Eero.com.
Marco:
That's E-E-R-O.com.
Marco:
And if you use promo code ATP at checkout, you can get $100 off the package.
Marco:
It includes the Eero base unit, two beacons, and one year of Eero+.
Marco:
So once again, Eero.com slash ATP and code ATP for $100 off the package with the Eero base unit, two beacons, and one year of Eero+.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Eero for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I'm back, everybody.
John:
Hi.
Casey:
You're still here.
Casey:
Turns out.
John:
Are you excited about your new Mac Pro, Casey?
John:
Are you getting excited to buy one now?
Casey:
Yeah, totally.
Casey:
You know, it's funny.
Casey:
For a fleeting moment before we knew anything about it, I was like, you know what?
Casey:
I might be able to use a Mac Pro.
Casey:
It sounds nice.
Casey:
Maybe I'll keep it for a long time.
Casey:
It may not be so bad.
Casey:
You should buy one because you don't care about monitors.
Casey:
I wouldn't say I don't care about monitors.
Casey:
I'm just not nearly as picky.
Marco:
You don't care like we do.
Casey:
So I think, you know, I have this 2015, I think it's a late 2015 iMac, 5K iMac that I bought.
Casey:
Yes, it is late 2015 that I bought in early, early, early 2016.
Casey:
And so far, I mean, now that it's not crashing periodically for funsies, it's mostly good.
Casey:
And I don't often long for more speed.
Casey:
You know, it's not often that I'm like, oh, my God, this thing's so slow.
Casey:
And so I've been thinking about, you know, I think I'm coming up on time to replace both my computers, truth be told, which is going to be very expensive.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I don't know what I would do.
Casey:
Like, if I was going to pull the trigger today, I guess I would get an iMac Pro or maybe just even a brand new, well-loaded iMac.
John:
You have to get an iMac Pro.
John:
You have to.
John:
And not because of the performance, just for the quiet.
John:
That's it.
John:
Until they fix the cooling system on the regular iMac, iMac Pro is all you're allowed to get.
John:
Sorry, Casey.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
I think the iMac Pro remains overall the best computer for developers to get.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like, it's simple as that.
Marco:
Like, the Mac Pro would be better in some ways, but it would also be worse in some ways.
Marco:
Like, you know, an all-in-one actually is kind of nice.
Marco:
Like, if you get a Mac Pro, no matter what monitor you pair with it, like, we'll ignore the monitor conversation for a moment, you get a Mac Pro,
Marco:
It's a much larger thing to have in your office in addition to it starting out very expensive.
Marco:
So you're going to pay more.
Marco:
It's not going to come with a monitor.
Marco:
You have to figure that out on your own.
Marco:
It's significantly larger than an iMac Pro.
Marco:
It actually has fewer ports than an iMac Pro by default.
Marco:
And if you add a bunch of GPUs, you can get more ports.
Marco:
But starting out, it's going to have fewer.
Marco:
It's going to have...
Marco:
probably more expensive expansion because you're starting out with the iMac Pro you're starting out from a base level that's much higher configured than the base level of the Mac Pro the iMac Pro is also going to include a camera a microphone better speakers that are built in like the Mac Pro has a built-in speaker but it's a crappy one so like the iMac Pro gives you quite a lot and you have all the ports for that available right on your desk which is a plus and a minus like
Marco:
If you have external things like drive enclosures, they're harder to hide in a nice way with an iMac.
Marco:
But you are still like – when you have the iMac, everything is right up top.
Marco:
One problem I have with my stupid Microsoft keyboards is the dongle for the keyboard can't be too far from the keyboard.
Marco:
Otherwise, the reception isn't good enough and it doesn't reliably work.
Marco:
The iMac, the port's right there.
Marco:
It's right on top of the desk.
Marco:
If the desktop is down below the desk somewhere, you might have less convenient cable routing options, less convenient port access, stuff like that.
Marco:
There's no SD card slot in the desktop.
Marco:
You've got to work that in somewhere else.
Marco:
Actually, an iMac is better in a lot of ways than a Mac Pro, even if you ignore the monitor question, which you shouldn't.
Marco:
and you know performance wise there is rarely a time when i am saturating the power of my 10 core iMac pro for more than a few seconds like you know developer workflows and workloads are we need a lot of horsepower but we need it in short bursts and so as you as you add cores you very quickly hit diminishing returns of like on my laptop i can max out all the cores for like 30 seconds straight easy if i'm doing something something significant like a big compile or something and that's that's annoying you know you got to wait around for that
Marco:
But on my iMac Pro, the time that the cores are maxed out might be like four seconds at most, and most times like one second.
Marco:
So if I double my cores, if I got like a 20 core Mac Pro, that's going to go from like two seconds to one second.
Marco:
That's a significantly less severe improvement to my life than going from a laptop to an iMac Pro, say.
Marco:
And so for most developers, your workflow is going to fall somewhere in that range where the iMac Pro is going to be
Marco:
the the upper end of what you actually can really make use of on a regular basis and it's more than what most people need actually and it's really really nice you know long term it's like it's it isn't going to last as long as a mac pro you know even if it doesn't last john's 10 years and even if the arm transition doesn't happen as soon as we think it will and you won't want to get rid of it
Marco:
you know a mac pro can still be serviced more easily it can still like you're not tying it to the screen you're using so like if the screen dies and in four years like out of warranty it's not going to kill the value of a mac pro stuff like that like there are still reasons that the mac pro wins but there's a lot fewer than these days than there used to be because the iMac pro is so good
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.
Casey:
I'm probably not going to pull the trigger on any new computer anytime soon.
Marco:
You're going to want to set that laptop on fire when you start using SwiftUI.
Casey:
Probably.
Marco:
SwiftUI is incredibly demanding to generate those live previews.
Marco:
My 13-inch felt incredibly inadequate.
Marco:
I can't even imagine how it is on your ancient 12-inch.
Marco:
It's going to melt.
Marco:
You're going to melt your computer.
Casey:
Yeah, I think, truth be told, I am in more pressing need of a laptop than a desktop.
Casey:
It's just that the desktop is older than
Casey:
And with regard to the laptop, sitting here today, I don't know if I would get an Air or more likely a 13-inch Pro, which is very light and very portable.
Marco:
I'll sell you mine when the 16-inch comes out.
Casey:
Yeah, there you go.
Casey:
The 13-inch Pro is very light and very portable, but if you've not held a MacBook, the Adorable, you will doubt me, but the Adorable is considerably lighter and more portable than the 13-inch Pro.
Marco:
Oh, you're right.
Marco:
It's 50% lighter or whatever, 30%.
Marco:
Yeah, it's two pounds versus three and significantly smaller.
Marco:
No question, the 12-inch is significantly more portable, but it's a question of whether it can do the work you need to do or not without you wanting to set it on fire or it literally melting.
Marco:
And I think you're going to have a hard time with modern Swift development.
Marco:
as Swift continues to get even more aggressive with all the stuff it's doing in the background as you code, you're going to have a hard time continuing to get a lot of use out of that computer.
Marco:
And you might literally kill it.
Marco:
It has no fan, and you're maxing out its CPU for a long time, because it's real slow, so it takes a while to do all these things in its CPU.
Marco:
So you're maxing out a fanless CPU that is just barely fanless for a very long time to have it do constant work in the background, like
Marco:
That's not going to be good for it.
Marco:
You're going to kill it.
Casey:
Right, which is why I think the plan is let's wait until the 16 comes out.
Casey:
Not to say that I want a 16.
Casey:
I want something considerably smaller and lighter.
Casey:
But if there is a commensurate refresh for anything else, which I'm not saying there will be, but if there is...
Casey:
then I might just pull the trigger then.
Casey:
If there's not, then I'll probably just keep limping along until there is a refresh of either the MacBook Adorable or the 13s with this phantom new keyboard or what have you.
Casey:
We shall see.
Casey:
But anyway, I digressed on the Ask ATP.
Casey:
So let's begin with Colton Belfills, who writes...
Casey:
I want to rent a macro lens for a camping trip, which at the rate we answer Ask ATP probably already happened, but hey, that's all right.
Casey:
What focal length is the best, and what else should I take into consideration choosing a lens?
Casey:
I have a Nikon and would like to spend around $40.
Marco:
I've been in this world not recently, so my information might be out of date, but there are some general things to keep in mind with macro lenses.
Marco:
First of all, for choosing a focal length,
Marco:
I recommend... There's this wonderful site I used to visit all the time when looking at lenses to buy.
Marco:
It was called The Digital Picture, and it's a guy who reviews lenses really well, mostly in the Canon system, so I don't think he's going to have a lot of Nikon-specific info, but there's this article, we'll put the link in the show notes here, where you can see direct comparisons for macro lenses of how the different focal lens look
Marco:
for macro lens and the various trade-offs there.
Marco:
The biggest thing to keep in mind with macro lenses are you need way more light and way more like steadying assistance than you think you will for any other kind of photography.
Marco:
Because as you get closer, like as the magnification gets bigger on a macro lens,
Marco:
You just need a ton of light to get enough light to the sensor, and also you need to step down the aperture way down to f8 or f16, really far down, because the field of view is so incredibly shallow when you're at such short distances.
Marco:
That's why most macro pictures you see from people, you know, like from hobbyists like me who like rent a macro lens, most pictures you see have like a sliver of something in focus and not really the whole subject is actually in focus.
Marco:
So things like image stabilization are incredibly helpful.
Marco:
Any kind of like, you know, if you're choosing a camera for this purpose, like the biggest, most sensitive sensor you can find because you're going to have to crank the ISO way up because you just need to capture so much light with such an arrow aperture to get anything to be sharp.
Marco:
with a macro lens.
Marco:
And that's also why frequent accessories for macro lenses are things like ring lights.
Marco:
Any kind of like accessory lighting to help you get a lot of light very close to the lens will help you a lot here.
Marco:
As for specific rentals, I don't know the Nikon system enough to actually say for sure, but macro lenses are really fun, you know, if you can get past that thing.
Marco:
So I would definitely say if you can get anything image stabilized, get it image stabilized and make that more important than the focal length.
Marco:
also like the maximum aperture you know like whether it's like f 2.8 or f 2.0 or whatever doesn't matter so much because you're not going to be using it wide open for actual macro work uh there is one other thing to consider though and that is that most macro lenses tend to be between 60 and 180 and 180 millimeters in focal length if you intend to use it to use the same lens for anything else either during the rental or for a standalone purchase i love
Marco:
prime lenses that are around 135 millimeters.
Marco:
And so like 100 millimeter macro lens is kind of close to that.
Marco:
A 135 prime shoots amazing portrait photos.
Marco:
It is like the 135 Canon prime is by far our favorite lens for like for people shots.
Marco:
And so you can actually use a macro lens like dual purpose as a portraiture lens if you want to.
Marco:
So if you think you might want to do that, something in the 100 millimeter range is better than something like in the 60 millimeter range for that purpose.
Marco:
100 millimeter-ish primes are just so great for portraits.
Marco:
And so a macro can totally serve that function.
Marco:
Usually not quite as narrow aperture as like a 135 prime.
Marco:
I think macros tend to start at 2.8 usually, whereas a 135 prime, you can get f2.0 usually, which those are awesome.
Marco:
But for a macro rental, yeah, just keep that in mind.
Marco:
You want image stabilization.
Marco:
I would go for around 100 millimeters, but it matters less than you think and get a lot of light.
Casey:
James Andrews writes, I have a bunch of old Commodore computers and by bunch, I mean all in my loft slash attic, which are all at risk of battery and capacitor leak due to age.
Casey:
I've removed batteries on most.
Casey:
What are you doing, John, with your old machines?
Casey:
Is this a concern?
John:
It's absolutely a concern.
John:
What I have done with my own machines is almost nothing.
John:
I removed the alkaline batteries from the Macs that had them.
John:
If you bought an original Mac and many, many Macs after that, they actually had removable.
John:
I guess it's not many Macs, but some Macs after that, they had a removable AA battery.
John:
to run the clock for you, which is nice in that you can actually remove it, because if you don't remove it, if you have a lot of electronics laying around, maybe you already know this, if you leave an alkaline battery in a device, it eventually will...
John:
I'm not sure what's happening.
John:
Is it outgassing?
John:
Is it leaking liquid that then dries and leaves?
John:
Anyway, you'll open it up and you'll find a bunch of white fuzzy deposits all over everything and it's gross and it's a pain to clean and it's really impossible to get back to like new condition when you do that.
John:
So do not leave batteries in your devices.
John:
But that said, and as James points out, batteries are the least of your concerns, right?
John:
Capacitors.
John:
Capacitors are going to go bad and bloat and explode and just destroy your stuff.
John:
I'm sure probably more than half of the computer hardware in my attic has...
John:
blown burst bloated capacitors what did i do about that absolutely nothing honestly i don't know if there's anything you can do other than checking them all periodically and desoldering the ones that look like they're going bad and replacing them with the equivalent uh things but that's not my cup of tea on the other hand the last time i took out my sc30 which was only you know a handful of years ago it's still booted so you might get lucky it's like the capacitor lottery will you have ones that just
John:
considered an attic going from freezing temperatures to blasting heat uh year after year and still work maybe or maybe all your stuff will be totally destroyed i don't have any good advice how to prevent it but do definitely take out any batteries that can be removed
Casey:
All righty.
Casey:
And then finally, Christian writes, in the light of another, and this is a few weeks old now, in the light of another fatality involving Tesla's autopilot, does Marco use autopilot mode in his Tesla or not?
Casey:
Christian disclaims that they are not trying to be inflammatory, just curious about what your experiences are with autopilot.
Marco:
So I do still use autopilot, but I treat it the way I think the only responsible way you can treat it, and that is as basically cruise control.
Marco:
It is a nice, fancy cruise control.
Marco:
It is a cruise control that helps keep you in the lane as well.
Marco:
that's all it is.
Marco:
It is not a substitute for paying any attention.
Marco:
It is occasion.
Marco:
I will occasionally take both hands off the wheel for a second.
Marco:
If I have to like open a bottle of water, it's kind of, you know, it's nice to have the option to like quickly take both hands off and then put, you know, and then put it back on.
Marco:
It's like, that's cool.
Marco:
But for the most part, like it's cruise control.
Marco:
So I'm still looking at the road.
Marco:
My hands are still on the wheel.
Marco:
I'm still paying attention.
Marco:
It's just a convenience, you know, in the same way cruise control is.
Marco:
And yeah,
Marco:
that's all I think it will be for a long time.
Marco:
It is still kind of dumb.
Marco:
They're constantly talking about... Elon Musk's always bragging about how close they are for full self-driving.
Marco:
They even sell a full self-driving option for a future software update for, I think, $5,000 at the time of purchase.
Marco:
And I think anybody who buys that is a fool, honestly, because I don't think they're anywhere near it.
Marco:
Regular autopilot, which is just fancy cruise control, is still...
Marco:
kind of dumb sometimes it still makes the wrong choice sometimes like where it'll like follow the wrong lane markings or it'll just totally give up in rain it's like you know it rains in the real world a lot i don't know like the system is a very nice cruise control system as long as that's all you use it for then that's all you depend on it for
Marco:
then I think you're being normal and safe.
Marco:
But when people start doing stupid things like watching movies while their cars on autopilot are like leaving the front seat, this is, I know it sounds crazy.
Marco:
People have done this.
Marco:
My word.
Marco:
That's just, that's literally like that's suicide.
Marco:
To try to do that, not only can you kill yourself, you can kill someone else on the road.
Marco:
And so that, like people who do that kind of stuff, that is horrendous and reprehensible and incredibly dangerous.
Marco:
But if you just treat it as the fancy cruise control that it really is, that's just as safe slash dangerous as regular cruise control, in my opinion.
John:
So drivers definitely have some responsibility, but I think car makers, and it's not just Tesla, many car makers have very similar abilities, like basically that it will do automated cruise control, following distance, and also lane keeping.
John:
That's essentially what Tesla has, right?
John:
That's 100% what it is.
John:
Right.
John:
And it's not, you know, self-driving and there can be arguments that how it's advertised.
John:
But the bottom line is that once they added essentially lane keeping, basically steering for you, behaving the way Marco described is the correct move.
John:
But I think it's also not responsible for car makers to sell products like that because
John:
human nature being what it is, people will realize that the car steers for you.
John:
It's a selling point of the car.
John:
The salesman will probably tell you.
John:
If not, the owner's manual will tell you.
John:
If not, you'll notice when you engage it.
John:
Once people are aware that they don't have to steer all the time,
John:
It is now a battle between their little monkey brain and all the devices the car manufacturer has added to try to make sure they're paying attention.
John:
It beeps if you take your hands off the steering wheel.
John:
It notices if your eyeline has gone a certain way.
John:
If your head nods, it gives you an electric shock.
John:
There's all sorts of things to try to keep you paying attention.
John:
My word.
John:
And those things have existed before, you know, autopilot type things as well.
John:
But human nature is that, like, I don't...
John:
have to be you know the car is basically steering for me and if you're if you're in an environment where you've been on the highway for a long time and the car has been steering for you for you the whole time it's human nature for your attention to drift like asking any human being to be 100 vigilant
John:
while being asked to do nothing, that is incompatible with humans.
John:
There is no amount of discipline, like monk-like discipline that you can train yourself to say, I'm going to be vigilant so that at a moment's notice, I can take over driving
John:
for six hours during that six hours i will never be asked to do this but i will be ever vigilant right and that's what these cars are setting people up for to be putting you in a situation where you're set up to fail there is nothing you can do there's no amount of discipline that you can do that will help you there the only thing you can do is convince yourself that the car doesn't really steer for me that it's basically just fancy
John:
Cruise control.
John:
And I'm still driving the car for the most part.
John:
If you do that, and if you can convince yourself of that and actually behave in that way, then you can use it safely.
John:
But I feel like we are in a very uncomfortable point here where cars demand constant vigilance.
John:
but do not require it at all, like at all times.
John:
Like you would need to be ready to leap into that mode instantly, but most of the time you don't need to.
John:
And that's, that's the formula for badness.
John:
So I really hope we leave this phase in one direction or another, uh, as soon as possible.
John:
I really don't want a car that has this feature.
John:
Um,
John:
You could have said the same thing about cruise control, but I feel like the steering is the final stroke.
John:
Because basically, if you don't have a car that steers for you, and you stop paying attention to the road, even for a few seconds in the road curves, you know, like, you learn, like, you have to pay attention.
John:
You just have to.
John:
You can glance away for a second, right?
John:
And if you're on a straight highway, you can maybe glance away for more than a second.
John:
But you basically have to steer.
John:
Once that's taken away, what are you even doing?
John:
What you're doing is, you're like...
John:
any second any second any second i might need to i might need to drive and you can't you can't be in that tense mode you can't you know you'll relax you'll be like oh i don't know that's why people are leaving the seat because they're like i've been in this car for for an hour and a half and i've done nothing i don't even need to be in the seat and so they go on the back and take a nap and then they'll die uh and that's obviously that's their fault for being dumb but it's also the car maker's fault for making a car that will lead people through the you know the foibles of human nature into that type of scenario
Casey:
please see the long ago episode where i predicted uh that self-driving cars would be much more difficult to make than people thought all right thanks for sponsors this week eero away and linode and we will talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental oh it was accidental
Marco:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, it was accidental, and you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else going on?
Casey:
How was your birthday yesterday?
Casey:
Happy birthday.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
All good.
Marco:
Good talk.
Marco:
It's funny.
Marco:
So I actually like in my head, I just turned 37.
Marco:
37.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
But it's funny, like in my old, I'm 37.
Marco:
In my head, I actually had been doing the math wrong for like most of the last year.
Marco:
I thought I already was 37.
Marco:
And so actually, I feel like I kind of got this one for free.
Marco:
That's one way of looking at it.
John:
I forgot I was 44, and you pondering about your age had reminded me to do the math, so now I'm 44 again.
Casey:
Now I'm 44.
John:
Did you think you were 43?
John:
Oh, I'm sorry.
John:
I was 43 for all this year, and now all of a sudden I know that I'm not.
Marco:
I'm sorry.
Marco:
I'm sure it'll get me the other direction sometime soon, but for now I feel like I kind of lived for six months for free.
Marco:
I don't think that's how time works.
Casey:
I'm not sure that's how it works.