Fuzzy Muppet Felt
Yeah, it's beach setup, so it's like still the iMac Pro.
Did you use your fancy carrying case again?
Not only did I use my fancy carrying case, but I took Underscore's recommendation and added for $35 a wheeled dolly to it, also known as a hand truck.
and because you can get like foldable light duty ones that weigh like six pounds and fold up to be all flat and compact for like 35 bucks in amazon so i got one of those i carried it on the boat with with the dolly like in the pocket when it came time to carry it off the boat and walk it to the house like a half mile away
I just stuck the wheels on.
Did you discover luggage dollies?
Is that what I'm coming in the middle of?
Yes.
Yes.
I discovered dollies.
I use that one.
I think I described using that to take my Thunderbolt 27 inch Thunderbolt display to and from the Apple store like three times.
Remember when I had to do that?
Yeah, if I have to take my iMac in again, because I took my iMac in once before for the image retention stuff that I had for the previous iMac, now I will definitely use this for that as well.
This has now made my ridiculous iMac carrying case a lot more useful.
Because it's just a simple... I didn't even get the big four-wheel kind, just the basic two-wheel kind.
So it would fold up nice and small, and it would be pretty lightweight itself.
I didn't want an extra 13 pounds of metal for just this thing to make it easier for me to carry something.
Something smaller and lighter was good.
But yeah, it made it a million times easier.
So now I'm even more a fan of the solution of bringing my iMac to the beach with wheels now.
And I'm even...
Less leaning in the direction of iMac Pro now because the iMac Pro is proving to be such a good solution.
You didn't even need that fancy case.
I think actually the original box, if you still had it, is even better because it's stiff.
What I would use is the little bungee cords or whatever to wrap over the front of the thing.
Yeah.
Actually, I have the original box.
I didn't bring it, but I do have it.
I also bought a bunch of bungee cords, but I didn't actually need them, and I sent them home with the next bag because the carrying case has straps.
It has a shoulder strap, and I made the shoulder strap as small as it goes, and that was basically a perfect strap to go over the handle of the dolly.
So it was very secure.
It didn't wiggle or try to fall off at all.
Just so we don't get a million corrections, we should say that dollies have four wheels and hand trucks have two.
Okay, so what I have is a hand truck then.
But I think everyone just calls them dollies and we all know what we're talking about.
But the pedants will be out and say, technically, that's a hand truck.
Did you already put a link to your thing?
Because when we're talking about things for luggage size, it's different than the other thing anyway.
So maybe they have a different name when they're small.
It was the one that Amazon said was the best one.
Mine is like super old.
I think mine is from the days before luggage had wheels.
Do you guys remember that?
Were you old enough to remember before luggage had wheels?
Yeah.
I didn't have wheeled luggage until a few years ago.
A few years ago.
I thought that wheeled luggage came in sometime around my childhood.
But before that, we had tons of suitcases that just had one handle on one side of them, and that's it.
Oh, these are very fancy.
Yeah, this is the Magna Cart Personal 150-pound capacity aluminum folding hand truck, black and red, $29.99, and it only weighs about six pounds.
It's great, and it collapses.
It's really nice.
That's way more complicated than the one I have.
The one I have is like,
one half that number of parts but it's the same thing it's a metal frame with with a fold down flap and two wheels so it's not much to it and the wheels are rubberized so like it moves really nicely like it's it's i was surprised how nice it was for how little it weighed and how little it cost
Well, I am glad that you are in paradise on your beloved computer.
You really think you're not going to buy at least one Mac Pro?
I mean, look, never say never.
And some people have suggested what seems like an obvious idea is leave the iMac Pro at the beach and buy a new Mac Pro for home.
and that's like i can you know if if i really want to do that like i i could do that but it just seems wasteful it seems like it's like having two houses only one of which you live in i mean you weren't you worried about the mac the mac having two macs seems wasteful well it's just so wasteful
Touche.
John, I love you.
It seems wasteful to buy something that has such a limited lifespan as a computer and to only use it three months a year.
I think your real problem is the reason it's so great for you to bring it is you take your computer that you were just using yesterday, you put it on a little...
dolly slash hand truck and you set it up and it's like you pick up right where you left off whereas if it was sitting in the other house it would be like well it doesn't like have all my stuff in all my state and you could try to do iCloud syncing and put your project into Dropbox or whatever but like it'll never be the same as like this is the exact computer I was using yesterday and now I just turn it on in a new location and resume my work so there's
the sinking disadvantage because apple has not yet fully embraced the idea that the computer is an empty shell and you log in and all your state gets pulled down from the network they're getting closer to that but they're not there yet exactly and that's like i mean this is why like i mean look this is why everybody uses laptops right because like if you're willing if you're willing to tolerate like it turns out we already have a kind of computer you can bring everywhere you go and it's and it's always the same computer but laptops are garbage we already know that but yes yeah laptops are garbage
Hi.
I was just thinking to myself earlier today, actually, that I wonder, even though I really love my iMac, which is, it's like three years old now.
When was this?
It's a 5K, 27-inch, late 2015, although I think I bought it early, early, early 2016.
Anyways, I was thinking to myself earlier today, I wonder if I should just get myself a brand new laptop because I feel like I really want to replace the Adorable because it was slow when I bought it and it's getting real bad now.
And the iMac is fine, but it's getting a little long in the tooth.
Maybe I should just go back to the laptop with an external display on the desk.
What external display?
Well, that's problem number one, right?
Yes, question number one.
is what external display, and I don't have a good answer for you there.
But I don't know.
I do really like having the iMac here at the desk.
And I feel like with Dropbox and GitHub and so many other online services these days, and Gmail or an equivalent, it's so easy to manage multiple computers in a way that it's never been easy before.
And yet...
I still kind of miss having just the one computer that is everything to – well, not to everyone.
It's just me.
But everything to everyone, so to speak.
And I don't know.
At the moment, I'm not upgrading anything.
But I can't help but wonder.
The laptop-only life is calling to me a little bit.
And I think the thing that's going to stop me from going there is, to your point, the display.
I just don't have a good display.
Yeah.
Also, when you're in that world, I spent a long time using a laptop as my only computer, or at least my primary one for a very long time.
It was great, especially in that way.
I didn't have to worry about syncing and everything, and transferring files, and making sure all my settings were the same, and applications were the same.
All that stuff that's a pain, much of which is still a pain today, I had to worry about none of that.
But then my computer had to go in for service, and I just didn't have a computer for like a week.
Yeah.
There are problems like that that come up, too.
And when you're using a laptop as a desktop, you run into the problems of doing that.
You run into things like the unreliability of external monitor usage.
And if you want to use it in clamshell mode, or things like wake from sleep are frequently unreliable.
And you have issues with noise.
When you're running it really hard, you're going to hear that fan spin up.
And so it's just...
There's just problems with using laptops that way, some of which are better these days, like things like Dropbox and iCloud Sync, some of which are worse.
I think the laptops today are less reliable than ever when it comes to external monitor usage, and the number of good external monitors to buy is lower than ever.
One of the other fun pipe dreams along with the modular Mac that's made of a bunch of stackable components that connect together is the idea.
I think it started or started getting getting steam back in the iPod era.
The idea that you have some small thing that you carry with you today would be a phone back then.
It was an iPod.
You could even imagine it as just like an external SSD or something.
that contains all of your state essentially this is like before cloud computing was popularized just like it's like your hard drive your boot disk all your info and you just go from station to station whether it be a desktop station with a big monitor and a keyboard and a mouse or a laptop or whatever and you plug in your ipod your phone your external drive and there's all your stuff and so
you carry the state with you in this little box but you're able to use whatever the best computing setup is for you it's almost you know dockable laptops are similar to that and hoteling situations and companies and stuff but um that fantasy that like my entire world will be on my phone and i'll just sit down in front of my computer and wirelessly the phone will display onto a giant 27 inch display and all that stuff like that's that's right up there with with the modular uh mac and for various reasons
we're not quite there technologically speaking but you can pull jason snell he posted a picture the other day of like an external drive duct tape to the back of his uh display on his laptop like if you just carried a boot drive with you you could boot an imac from that external drive and hollow all your state like say it's a one terabyte ssd in a very small case and then you could connect it to your laptop when you're on the go and boot from that and have it taped to the back of your display or something so it's not dangling off or whatever and you still have basically a portable computer that is
like marco's iMac pro it's like the quote-unquote the same computer as you had before although of course all your windows will be screwed up by constantly changing screen resolution but that doesn't bother you there you go uh so you can't approximate that with an external drive today can't do it with a phone certainly can't do it with an ipad ipod but
The problem is, okay, well, what if I don't want to tape it to the back of my display?
Do I really want to use a laptop with a thing dangling off of it that I can't disconnect because it is the boot drive?
And, you know, as fast as USB-C is, it's not as fast as an internal SSD, so you're taking a speed hit there, too.
And it would be kind of wasteful to buy an iMac but always boot from some other thing.
You know, so it's... You can do it today, but it's a compromise.
But I think that is one of the dreams.
Obviously, the better version of that is I don't carry anything with me and all my stuff is in the cloud, but...
the realities of data transfer rates and waiting for things to sync and the reliability of that and the fact that it's not really done system-wide on anything except for Chrome OS means that we're still a little bit farther away from that dream.
I think that dream is closer than the crazy modular computer made of building blocks that you snap together, but it may come to pass eventually, and then we will finally be freed from these form factor and state decisions that haunt us, so...
All right, so let's start with some follow-up.
So a friend of the show, Ricky Mondello, had written in with regard to what Marco was talking about last episode with regard to overcast and sign-in and things like that.
So they had some tips with regard to what to do or some thoughts or suggestions.
So Marco, can you recap that for me, please?
Yeah.
So they pointed out what John had said last episode that he suspected was the case.
Ricky clarified that yes, by default, sign in with Apple does not give name and email info.
Apps have to explicitly opt in.
I think the direction I'm going to go is what John recommended towards the end when I said he was frustratingly correct of basically use the current key value store that I'm using.
I'm basically going to make it support multiple entries.
that all that point to multiple anonymous accounts on overcast synced with any apple id could then become multiple and any number of anonymous overcast accounts and then you would just be prompted with them at the login screen and you could pick which one maybe i can show you like this is from the device called marco's iphone that has you know these three podcasts as the top podcast in ours you know somehow make it easy for you to uh to detect which one is the right one maybe like a last logged in date or something like that
Maybe I could use Signing with Apple just on the web and have it associate with these things.
I have no idea.
But I have a lot of options here.
And so I still haven't had time to actually explore these options this summer.
I've been doing a lot of other stuff, server stuff, technical debt stuff, moving my entire life to the beach, etc.
But I'm working on it.
Fair enough.
All right.
And then Hashir Rashad writes, in Catalina, Graffer is gone, along with Dashboard.
Sorry, John.
I blame you guys for reminding Apple of Graffer.
Remote disk and chess are still there.
And somebody who is not supposed to do homework actually did some very helpful homework.
So thank you, John.
Well, Hashir provided the timestamp link of our previous discussion of this.
Well, first of all, he's wrong.
Graffer is actually still there.
So much for that.
But anyway, it was worth revisiting.
It was back in episode 287.
Uh, open face compliment sandwich where we, some, someone asked in an ass ATP question, it was like, which one of these two things you will, you think, do you think will be removed first?
And so we had a couple of pairings here.
And the first one was, which one will go first dashboard or remote disc?
And Casey and I said, dashboard and Marco said, a remote disc.
And it turns out dashboard is gone in Catalina.
so we were right but the reason i did this is because i thought graffer was gone too but i'm like you know what let me double check this let me actually look in catalina and sure enough graffer is still there so we have no decision on chess versus graffer and we have no decision on dvd player versus open gl because dvd player and open gl and chess and graffer are all in catalina but we will keep you posted as new versions come out
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All right, Marco, tell me you have some new toys other than your hand truck that you have been able to play with.
So what's going on there?
I've been going through kind of like the most boring midlife crisis ever, like a midlife self-improvement.
phase basically trying to improve limitations and things about myself that i wasn't happy with i've been exercising more dieting better um i learned to swim last month for the first time ever and that was a big thing you're you're preparing for the ocean that's right yep yep um i taught myself to like seafood oh well slow down tell me more that was last summer we talked about this casey
pay attention oh right right yeah i started it last summer i've been working on it throughout the winter also like i added sushi to to my palate and i still don't like all seafood but i'm working on more this summer because i'm in a place that has a lot of it so getting there because like i just i didn't want there to be anything that i just blanketly didn't like except for windows
well yeah you gotta have standards but like you know but it's it's limiting to not like things it's limiting to say like oh i can't i can't go to the sushi restaurant with you because i don't like anything there like you know that kind of thing so i i guess i wanted to get rid of as many limitations on myself as i possibly could and so damn it i wanted to teach myself to be able to use airpods
airpods have never fit my ears right this is gonna be a story like the binding of your feet you're gonna be like shaping your body with these a series of uh increasingly large airpod shape wedges so go ahead so all right so airpods have two problems for me number one they fall out easily like not immediately but if i go on a dog walk with airpods within about 10 minutes if i haven't pushed them back in they'll fall like at least one of them will fall out
And the second problem is that when they are in, they were painful after a pretty short time.
They would just hurt my ears.
But AirPods are so damn convenient.
You can keep headphones in your pocket all the time.
Yep.
Now, I have never had this luxury because I couldn't wear AirPods.
I also couldn't wear any of the earbuds that came before them.
So I've always wanted that, to have headphones I could keep in my pocket all the time.
There's also the benefits of the W1 and the H1, the Apple Bluetooth pairing stuff.
These benefits are huge when you have multiple devices.
Like right now, every time I go on a plane, I feel like a fool because I have my big Sony headphones that are Bluetooth that are nice, but...
As most Bluetooth devices, like I know there are some that compare to two or three things, but they're pretty rare.
The more common case is most Bluetooth headphones, they can only be paired to one source device at a time.
And so if you are, say, wanting to switch from your iPhone to your iPad on a plane, or like your phone to your laptop, you have to re-pair the Bluetooth headphones to the other device, which sucks.
Like an animal.
Yeah, it's time-consuming and annoying, and it sucks.
And that's no good.
Yeah.
AirPods can easily switch between multiple devices.
And so even though it isn't always a perfect process, I know occasionally it does the wrong thing, but it's way, way better than having to repair every time.
Repairing is so annoying that when I'm on a plane...
I keep my Bluetooth headphones just paired to my phone.
And when I want to use my laptop or my iPad, I get out the wire and I plug in the wire to the headphones and plug the wire into the other device because that's less inconvenient than repairing it both ways.
So anyway, going from regular Bluetooth to AirPods is as big of a jumping convenience as it was going from wired to Bluetooth in the first place.
It's that much of a change to have that multi-device pairing.
So I really wanted to be able to use AirPods for all these reasons.
The convenience, the pocketability, the multi-pairing.
But my ears seemed physically incompatible.
So as part of the self-improvement kick, I figured I'm going to make myself able to wear AirPods, damn it.
So I started just wearing them a little bit every day.
I figured I can train my ears to tolerate them physically.
oh my word you put tiny bits of sandpaper on the thing and just wiggle it around there i'm gonna make these ears the right shape if it kills me uh yeah and so i just started wearing them a little bit every day i thinking you know maybe i could just get my ears accustomed to them but before you before you embarked on this did you have a consultation with someone who can see into your ears to say to say like what is it about the airpods that that you know like is it
a contact point which which dimension is too small which dimension is too large because there may have been something you could do if you if you figured out the answer to that question like what precisely is it that is different about my ear shape that makes air pods fall out and be uncomfortable after a period of time obviously if it's something that's too tight there's maybe not a lot you can do but maybe there's an alternate position that you could put them in where you could add material like add some like putty or whatever to the air pod and put it in in a different arrangement so that it stays like i feel like
You're doing the sort of the blind technique of like, I can't see into my ears.
I know they don't work, but I'm just going to try acclimation.
Just going to stick them in and just like eventually maybe I'll get used to it or maybe it'll stretch out or maybe or whatever.
But I feel like you could have taken a more scientific approach to this and had someone examine your AirPod fit and come up with a strategy for correcting for it.
That didn't happen, I guess.
I think if I would have gone to an ear doctor or an audiologist... I met your wife.
Oh.
I was going to say, I would think I would be laughed out of any doctor's office if I actually would have gone.
I'd be like, can you help me work better with AirPods?
No, no.
I just met another person who can see into your ear.
Your wife is the obvious example.
oh you know i didn't think about asking somebody else but i mean don't you ask her to get your ear hairs maybe you're not at that stage of your midlife crisis yet but you will sorry you will be good good to know what i have to look forward to so no so my approach was simply brute force like blindly poking like just try to get airpods to fit in my ears by just enduring some discomfort every day for a while which honestly is how i started liking seafood so you're bringing endorsement of seafood yeah right the mucus of the sea they call it
All right.
So anyway, so this process of just wearing them a little bit every day actually did improve things.
It actually did kind of work.
And it worked enough that I could now actually wear them, kind of, but it still hurt a little.
And they still fell out regularly if I wasn't constantly pushing them back in every minute or so out of a walk.
Now, people have recommended various add-on things to AirPods ever since I started complaining about this a year ago or whatever.
But almost all add-on things to AirPods are like hooks to help like hook them into your ears so they're supported better.
Or they're like these big like rubber like tips that you can stick on them that protrude out a lot.
And all these things have the same universal problem that make the AirPods no longer fit in the charging case.
And to me, that's a fatal deal killer right there because it seems ridiculous to actually use AirPods in real life if you have to constantly keep pulling off these attachments you have on them and put them back on every time you want to use them just to get them in and out of the case.
Because you have to have the AirPods in the case all the time.
Because you have to put them into charge because their battery life sucks.
And if they aren't in the case, they're on.
And so it's like they're ready to steal the output at any moment and interpret gestures in your pocket and everything.
So you kind of have to have them in the case a lot.
So I don't know why any product could possibly exist that can modify AirPods in such a way that they don't fit in the case anymore and have absolutely anybody want to use that.
fortunately i did find one product and i think there's a couple of clones but they all seem to be the same thing there's one product that does allow you to keep using the case but is one of those like silicone add-on wrapping pads around the airpods uh in typical amazon style it is called fit in the case airpods earpods covers compatible with airpods 2n1 anti-slip silicone soft sports covers accessories apple airpods earbud 2 pairs white
This product name is very close to being a valid shell command line.
Like I looked at it briefly and it's like, you know, two ampersand greater than one for input redirection.
It's got the curly, like who puts curly braces?
Fit in the case.
It's not fits in the case.
It's capital F fit in capital T the case in curly braces.
These have to be generated by a computer.
Anyway, go on.
Yeah.
So I found these and they were like 11 bucks and I figured I'll give it a shot.
they actually do work they really are thin enough to just barely have the airpods still fit in the case uh they don't actually change things that much because they're they're very thin rubber like or silicone and and they're they're hilariously difficult to install too like because like the first time i tried to install one i tore it in half immediately um the good thing is they actually give you an extra one so i think i guess that happens a lot
So I'm like, oh, that was nice.
For a mere $11, you get an extra .001 cent of silicone.
Yeah, it doesn't matter.
It was worth it.
Did you get colors?
No, I stuck with white.
But other colors might be useful.
Like if you if you have like, you know, multiple AirPods in your house, you want to distinguish them or if you want to be able to easily tell when you have these on the AirPods.
But so they they don't do much.
They make the AirPods just a little bit bigger and just a little bit softer.
And that is just enough to make the AirPods not fall out of my ears anymore.
And it makes it a little bit more comfortable too.
So now I can actually use AirPods.
I can actually carry them in my pocket in the case whenever I think I might want headphones and I can actually use them acceptably.
So I have actually pretty much solved my AirPods problem.
I still wish they were more comfortable, but I think these are about as comfortable as they're going to get for me.
I'm actually very satisfied with that.
But because they are still not...
amazingly comfortable.
And I take a lot of long walks with headphones.
So I also wanted to try the new PowerBeats Pro.
This is a product that was harder to get than the original Apple Watch.
Like, the PowerBeats Pro officially launched in, I think, mid-May?
But...
They were backordered like crazy.
Typical like Apple, you know, like a short supply launch.
Like they were backordered for weeks and I had to like keep checking the store.
I refresh the page every morning and like, you know, try to get in.
I finally snagged a pair.
On the morning that I was about to leave for WWDC, I was literally going to the airport in like two hours and I caught it in stock at my local store and I went over there and picked them up.
So I've been using the Power Beats Pro for a few weeks now, I guess, whenever it's been.
I kind of say they're really interesting.
So these are the things that are basically AirPods, but...
for like more active workouts so they are physically larger and they have these the big like hook around things like that hook on top of your ears and then they have the little rubber things that like stick that into your ears from them so they're kind of suspended on your ear and they stick directly in instead of the air pods they go they're kind of like resting there in your ears
so they're they're much better if you if you are doing like a super active kind of workout where airpods might fall out of your ears if you if you were that wore them uh but these these are better and also these are i think more water resistant and everything but otherwise they're basically airpod twos they have the the h1 chip they have the the hey dingus support it takes a good few days at least to
to figure out how to get them into your ears or how to get them back into the case without an embarrassing degree of fumbling around oh my goodness because you gotta like like to get them into your ear you have to you have to kind of like hook it over your ear like twist it in like you're like screwing it into your ear like to get the hooked right it's really weird and then getting it back into the case is similarly like incredibly uh awkward because you have to figure out like how does this fit and if you get the left and the right mixed up you're totally screwed like you'll never figure that out and
It's hilarious.
The controls on them are a mixed bag compared to AirPods or other Bluetooth headphones.
Each of the two earpieces has a volume rocker switch, like volume up and down, and a center button that functions just like the old wired clickers did.
One tap on the center button is play pause, two taps to seek forward, three taps to seek back, just like the old remotes.
and i think it's actually really nice to have actual buttons on these again you know i'm you know i'm a fan of buttons obviously uh so they're they're tactile they are pretty reliable the only problem i've had with the buttons is that the double and triple click seek gestures are actually still as tricky as they've always been like sometimes i double click too fast and it treats it as a pause so i have to like deliberately like remember to wait a second between the two clicks so it really recognizes that it's too and
And similarly, getting three clicks recognized to be seek back is not easy because it often interprets it as two, which is seek forward, which is the opposite of what you want.
So it's tricky to do the seek gestures, but they do work.
And those are things that AirPods just can't do at all unless you map the things differently and everything.
With these, you can't remap the controls on the Power Beats.
They're not customizable the way the AirPod double tap gestures are.
the buttons all do the same thing, uh, always all the time.
And both ear pieces, buttons do the same thing.
So you can't make like, you know, the right one skip forward, the left one skip back or anything like that.
You can use Siri.
Of course.
Uh, I found that to be, you know, the, the, the Hey Dingus support is just as reliable on this as it is on the air pod twos.
Um,
Another downside of the controls here is that the center button that does the play, pause, and seek is directly behind the main driver and the rubber tip protrusion.
So when you push it, you are pushing the rubber tip into your ear more.
And so you're kind of like squishing it into your ear with every push.
And that's not pleasant.
Although I will say it is less unpleasant than tapping AirPods that are in your ear, which I find significantly unpleasant.
So the controls are, you know, they're a mixed bag.
But overall, I find them significantly better than the AirPods in that way.
The case that they go in is comically large if you're accustomed to AirPods.
It's far too large to be pocketable in pretty much anything except maybe the largest of like winter jackets.
And because of the physical controls, you can't just keep them loose in your pocket when you're not wearing them because the play pause button gets accidentally pressed all the time in pockets.
so if you have them with you like with airpods if you have airpods with you and you want to like you know go into a store and not be so rude as to be wearing headphones in a store or you somebody because you want to talk to them or you arrive to you arrive where you're going and you want to take your headphones out with airpods you probably have the case in your pocket so you just take out the airpods and put them in the case
But with the Powerbeats Pro, the case is too big to be in your pocket, so you probably don't have it with you a lot of the time that you're using them.
But because the button on them gets pushed in your pocket accidentally, you also can't put them in your pocket really well either.
So you have to just kind of hold them or leave them in your ear and just hope nobody cares or whatever.
So that's a bit of an inconvenience.
Speaking of that, did you have with your AirPods yet the sort of typical most awful social experience with them, which is you're wearing them, like you said, and maybe someone comes up to you walking your dog, you're taking a long walk, someone comes up to you and wants to say something or like...
wants to tell you that you dropped something.
Or anyway, someone tries to talk to you, but you're listening to something.
So they get your attention, you turn to them, and you immediately tap your AirPods with your finger to stop whatever you're listening to so you can hear the person who just got your attention.
And this gesture, I think I've described this on the show before, and this gesture is interpreted as you...
pointing to your headphones doing a person can't you see that i'm listening to something on my headphones oh no they don't understand that tapping stops the sound they think what you're doing is going uh hello i have things in my ear and so they think oh um you know and they go oh i'm sorry sorry and they start to back away
have you had that happen yet oh no i haven't yet i mean this i think that's that's the biggest argument ever for just using the pull the airpod out to pause feature yes it's a point you pulling out is is the right move right but if you get used to tapping which i'm very used to because that's what i do like in my house or you know or whatever you know it's easier to tap because then you still have both hands free or whatever but my experience is the entire rest of the world thinks that tapping is you being the rudest person ever and
And I feel so bad when it happens.
Then I feel like I have to explain to them.
No, this tapping them makes the sound.
Oh, God, forget it.
This is the most awful thing ever.
I feel like Apple should have special PSAs on television or streaming channels or whatever people watch on YouTube, I guess.
Whatever people watch these days, just so you know, if someone taps their ear, they're not telling you to buzz off by pointing to their expensive headphone and telling you to go away.
They're stopping the sound.
oh man i didn't even think about that with power beats yanking them out might be more difficult because you have to like unhook them from your ear or whatever and i guess the button you don't have to tap as much yeah that's my one question you just you just twist a little and pull it out it's it's real fast that's my question about the button but you already answered it like how hard do you have to hit hit that button because i don't like a physical button i wouldn't want to actually press into my ear but i guess the squishy rubber helps
well and the reality is you don't have to push it very hard at all it pushes very easily which is i think why it gets pushed so accidentally in my pocket and why you can't have it loose in your pockets now yeah like it like i frequently will accidentally push the button as i'm putting it in my ear or taking it out of my ear because it's it's just it's that easily pressed that case looks like it's the size of a baseball i can't be how big it is though that's a i mean it's not round but it's like a baseball with a top and bottom cut off
it's like a it's like if you made a a pillow shape that has the approximate maximum diameter of a baseball yeah that's that's gigantic it and and if you look like it isn't that ridiculous when you see the way they're designed because like the shape of them is sucks that like you kind of can't fit them in anything that was much smaller than that if they had made them so that the two weird shapes if you offset them to each other went into each other's negative space you could have got it down smaller but i guess that's tricky
yeah maybe and then i mean they're hard enough to get into this case as it is like to get them into that it'd be like one of those tavern puzzles yeah right there's like two rings and they look like they can't come off each other but somehow you have to get this one through that one and then it comes off yeah exactly um anyway
So overall, though, where I think the Powerbeats Pro are substantially better, there's a couple of advantages.
Number one, battery life is way better on them than AirPods because the batteries are just much bigger.
Like both the case and the batteries that are actually in the earpieces are substantially larger and longer lasting.
So that's great if you ever run into battery issues with AirPods.
And then comfort.
is significantly upgraded.
Because they have those ear hooks, the ear hooks are kind of suspending them in front of your ears.
And so there is the part that goes into your ear, but that's not bearing the weight of the thing.
Like with AirPods, the AirPods bear the weight of the whole AirPod on the bottom surface, whatever it is, of the inside of your ear.
Whereas the power beats are suspending them kind of nearby in there.
And so a lot of that weight is falling on the top of the ear, which I think is less sensitive to it.
Because it's like, you know, if you wear glasses, like it's going the same place, basically.
I was going to say, the next old person thing you have to encounter is when you eventually get glasses.
my i find it very uncomfortable to have anything pressing against the stems of my glasses so i imagine if i had these hooked over my ears fine all well and good maybe although i find the back of my ear more sensitive than the inside for the most part but then if i also had to have a glasses stem there i'd be like well does that go on the inside of the hook or on the outside and in both things it would i think it would result in something pressing against the the side of my head behind my ear and i hate that feeling
Yeah, honestly, I don't know how well these would play with glasses for that reason.
You'll find out.
Yeah.
But yeah, so comfort-wise, the fact that they're not having all their weight on the bottom thing on the inside of my ear is a huge improvement.
You only feel the fairly light pressure of those rubber tips.
And they come with four different types of rubber tips in different sizes.
They have the regular kind of like bulbous marshmallow kind of
that and that comes in small medium and large and all that's come with it and they also have another one that's like it's like the kind that looks like two scoops of ice cream you know it's like two half circles stacked yeah like it's like the barbed one yeah it goes in but it doesn't come back out yeah right i wow i don't know what that one's for i i tried it and it was just it was like too skinny and it wouldn't seal for me um so i i've been using the the largest and the mediums and and they are great
And so because you have this customizability of those various tips and they're being set there with less pressure to begin with because of the hook setup, comfort is way better.
I can wear these things for a long time and feel no pain whatsoever.
And the sound quality is also – so sound quality normally is pretty much exactly like the AirPod 2 or the AirPod 1.
It's the same thing as the AirPods really, which means that when you have like a loose seal –
You don't really get much bass or anything.
It's fine for podcasts, but if you get a good seal with AirPods, if they really seal well into your ear, if you push them in a little bit, it actually gets pretty decent even for music.
With Powerbeats, that's actually easier to achieve because it's much easier to get a good seal because of the way they're held there and because you have the different size tips to choose from.
So I actually really like them.
They are significantly less convenient than the AirPods in the sense that they are not really pocketable and the case is so clumsy and everything.
But the convenience is really nice.
Now, that being said, they still are not suitable for use on a plane.
They still don't seal well enough.
to make them particularly audible in a very loud place like a plane.
AirPods have the same problem, even slightly worse.
And this is why I am so looking forward to if Apple ever makes the rumored over-ear headphones using the W1 or H1 style pairing and chip and everything.
even if they are terrible sounding and even if they have terrible noise cancellation, I will buy those because a, I don't use noise cancellation on planes.
I just use whatever passive isolation my headphones have.
I turn off the noise cancellations.
I don't like it.
Um, so like the actual like active noise cancellation, I couldn't care less.
Like I just want big, comfortable over your headphones that, that passively isolate sound well.
And to be able to switch those between my phone, my iPad and my computer easily on a plane, um,
would completely negate any possible advantage that sony or bose could come up with with their headphones so i'm very much looking forward to if that if that rumor ends up being true and they end up coming out with over your headphones man i can't wait whatever whatever we call them like head pods or airheads or whatever like they yeah i can't wait
So how long can you reasonably have AirPods with these little sheaths in your ears?
Like, are we talking half an hour, an hour, two hours?
I could, like, walk to the store and back or take, like, a short dog walk and be okay.
I'd rather not.
Like, I'd rather use the Powerbeats Pro or my Aftershocks or, you know, other, like, you know, good portable headphones.
I'd rather use those.
But...
the but the uh the airpods are now usable so like before like suppose like one thing that's happened a lot is like you know i'll walk into town at the beach like with with the family and then i will want to walk home or i'll be asked to walk somewhere else to go get something and the family will stay stay back or like they'll go to a playground and i need to go to the store so i'll like split off from the family i'm now i'm just alone
And I'm bored.
And I have a long walk ahead of me.
So it's like, if I have AirPods in my pocket, I didn't have to plan for that.
I just can always carry them.
And now I have them.
And they're great.
Or something like, if I'm going to the city for the day,
I can just have them in my pocket, and I might need them, and I might not, and it's fine.
I don't have to think about it.
I can't fit my Aftershocks in my pants pocket.
I can fit my AirPods, though.
I can just have them there.
It's just really nice.
Even though they are not my favorite headphones, they're not the most comfortable headphones on me,
There are cases where I'd rather have headphones than not have headphones, even if they're a little uncomfortable after a while.
And it's way better than the way they were before.
I can actually use them and not really regret it now.
So I'm pretty happy.
But then what about the Powerbeats?
How long can those stay in before you get cranky or uncomfortable or whatever?
I would say they are as comfortable as the Aftershocks for me.
So that would be like, I can easily take a two-hour walk with them.
I might be a little hot at the end, but I'd be fine.
Since we're doing headphone reviews, I got new headphones recently, too.
I used them for my flight to WWDC.
I got the Sony, whatever the latest Sony noise-canceling thing.
It's like the WH-whatever Mark III.
Yeah.
And I had been using Bose noise-canceling ones before.
I do use the actual noise-canceling.
so that's what i wanted out of them and i just listen to podcasts so i don't really care what the sound quality is like as long as it's okay um and the reason i was interested in replacing the bose at all is because i find the bose ear cups to be a little bit small for me and a little bit uncomfortable on a six hour flight like they're okay in the beginning but around hour three and a half i'm like these are kind of annoying my ears um so i got the sony's which look like they had bigger ear pads and ear cup things and hopefully that would work better
Um, and people had said that noise canceling is as good as Bose or better or whatever.
So anyway, I got these, they're fancier.
They have all sorts of weird features where they can like optimize their noise canceling based on the atmospheric pressure and other BS.
They tell you they're doing, who knows what they're actually doing.
Um, but anyway, they have their Bluetooth instead of having a wire, like my Bose ones did.
They have a swipey touch pad thing on the outside of the ear cup, which is terrible because it's like the Apple TV remote.
Um,
is this a horizontal swipe is it a vertical swipe did i get it right like am i oriented correctly tapping them is the worst oh god because they have a tap control as bad as it is to tap an airpod imagine tapping the the rigid outside of a giant cup that's like sealed to the side of your head it's like the loudest sound ever i'm trying to tap gently but it's very uncomfortable not uncomfortable physically from like the pressure but uncomfortable noise wise it is
very bad but setting that aside i mean you can always stop in a million other ways you can use your phone to stop or you know but you could uh use one of those little bluetooth controller things you don't anyway uh all that aside the ear cups were more comfortable what surprised me and the thing that was annoying me by like hour two was the band that goes over the top of my head was just like it's like that feeling that casey might be familiar with a marco maybe not as much for multiple reasons
When your hair hits the headliner in a car, right?
Do you know that feeling, Gazy?
I actually, I know of what you speak, but I am not quite tall enough to have ever really had that problem.
Despite my hair also adding an inch or two to my height, but...
if you're a taller person or you have a car with a very low ceiling and like your car has like a you know typical cheap car uh you know sort of fuzzy muppet felt uh stuff on the on the roof if if your hair just hits that you're like well so what your hair is barely swiping a fuzzy muppet felt how can that you how do you even notice that right but it's a strange thing i'm sure there's some word for it or some someone did their phd thesis on it like
that it sort of grips your hair a little bit like it's not like it's like you know vinyl or something slippery so the fuzzy muppet felt grips your hair a little bit and just through like the regular motion of your head of just like driving or whatever your head moves and the hair kind of stays where it's being gripped and it just ends up like moving your hair follicles back and forth and back and forth and it becomes incredibly irritating it's like a kind of
Like, you know, water torture where they drop a drop of water on your forehead.
It's like, who cares?
Drop of water.
That doesn't hurt.
But by 10,000 drop, it feels like a hammer falling and you're ready to go insane.
Well, this felt like the same thing where it's just like the band was just I don't know what it was doing.
Was it moving my hair around?
Was it like it didn't feel like it had much more pressure on top of my head?
It's so weird.
Like, the headphones I'm wearing now that I wear every time when I podcast don't have the sensation at all.
Like, they're touching the top of my head, right?
But they don't feel like they're irritating the hair.
The Sony ones are padded up there.
It feels like the same kind of slippery, fake, vinyl-y material up there.
I have no idea what it is.
I'm thinking maybe it's because of, like...
The shape of the band, because sometimes they make it like out of... It's supposed to look like a nice rigid U shape, but really to get it to fit over your head, you have to adjust the things, and now the nice rigid U becomes like a rigid section, and then this other section that's at a different angle, then the rigid section on top, and then another little section, and then the final rigid section.
And maybe that makes an arc that's actually pressing on my head more.
I don't know, but that band was...
God, it was making me think about returning them.
I kept adjusting it, like if I make it super loose, if I make it so the top doesn't even touch my head, but that doesn't quite work because you do need something up there for support because they can't just stick to your ears from the pressure.
Anyway, it didn't quite agree with my head.
I'm trying to work out what I'm going to do about that.
uh but but overall the ear cup uh comfort was way better and the final thing the noise canceling i think it was better than the bows but the noise canceling had this weird thing during takeoff when the engines are ramping up the noise canceling decided to send out some of these like terrible echolocation bursts of noise into my ears what
It was like, you know, like just during just during takeoff when like the noise levels were changing a lot.
Like, is that is that a bug?
Is that a feature?
Whatever it is, it was uncomfortable and it only happened during takeoff, but it happened during both takeoffs.
So I don't know what the deal with that is, but that was kind of uncomfortable.
But in the for the rest of the time, sound was fine.
Noise canceling was even better than the Bose ear cucumber was better.
I have problems with the headband.
wow yeah because i i mean i i use the previous version of that the the w whatever whatever mark ii and the there aren't many differences between the two like they're they're almost identical um and so i'm actually kind of surprised i haven't i haven't had those issues with the fit with the headband i mean maybe i have a different hairstyle it's different head size like you should look at how much of like how much of the the part that you expose when you adjust it how much do you have exposed maybe you have much more or much less than i do and maybe you're
Maybe the irritability of the hairs on top of my head are different than yours.
Maybe you need a thin silicone wrapper.
I was thinking during the flight, I'm like, what could I put up there?
Is it too slippery or not slippery?
If I put a piece of felt between the headphones in my head or if I coated the band at the top of my head, would I want to make it slipperier or grippier?
Do I need an extra piece of padding?
Again, it's plenty padded up there.
It's not like it's a hard piece of plastic against my head.
It's...
mysterious and it's and the reason it reminded me of the car headliner thing because it's the type of thing it's like how can that even bother you like it's it's like a pillow on top of your head with no weight on it how is that bothering you and yet just the tiny motions like your hair hitting the headliner over the course of many hours eventually feels like the worst thing in the world like a pebble in your shoe another example tiny little rock you know you're walking and like you're building up the size of this thing in your mind so you finally take off your shoe and you look at it and it's like the size of like a grain of sand you know like how did that feel so big in my shoe it's that type of situation
Well, I am glad, Marco, that you can feasibly carry your AirPods with you always.
And that sounds sarcastic, but actually that has changed my life is a bit dramatic.
But it has definitely improved my life to always have headphones in my little change pocket in my jeans pretty much all the time.
And you'd be surprised how often, like you were saying, you peel away from the family or something like that for a perfectly legitimate reason.
And then you think, well...
I could catch up on podcasts right now or I could listen to music right now or whatever the case may be.
Exactly.
I cannot overstate how much I love my AirPods.
And I genuinely think they're the best Apple product of the last five to ten years by a comfortable margin, in my personal opinion.
Like the Mandelbrot set, it changed the world in a tiny way.
I was so sick of catching my headphone cords on things.
So sick of that.
AirPods just rescued me from that life.
Rescued me from the life of untangling the cords and it rescued me from the life of them getting caught on things and being yanked out of my ears.
Love it.
Can never go back.
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We have heard many reports of a new 16-inch MacBook Pro that is supposedly coming.
And there's a report at 9to5Mac from a couple of days ago saying, yeah, this is a thing.
And there are a couple of specific tidbits, including a report of a 3072 by 1920 resolution.
Marco, how excited are you?
I am not excited about that screen resolution.
I'm very excited about everything else.
Everything else about this, the rumors have been pretty strong on this one from multiple different sources over the last couple of months that it really does seem like by the where there's smoke, there's fire thing, there is very likely to be a redesigned MacBook Pro for the first time since 2016 coming out sometime between this fall and next spring.
The last redesign, the 2016 one,
as you know i'm not really a big fan oh really i'm not not not a fan of the touch bar not a fan of the butterfly keyboard and the most recent rumors seem to indicate that the touch bar is actually staying but we might be getting a hardware escape key next to it more importantly we might be getting a new keyboard that uses scissor switches with one millimeter of travel which is about twice the travel of the butterfly keyboard and
Overall, very similar in many ways to the most recent desktop Magic keyboards that Apple has shipped, which have been widely recognized as pretty decent keyboards, pretty agreeable.
Not everyone totally loves them, but most people are pretty big fans.
No one really hates them.
They're fine.
and that's what you need a laptop keyboard to be, and that's what we haven't had for the last few years.
Even if they've solved the reliability problems, which I think is still too early to say, they still failed to make a keyboard last time that everyone was okay with.
Now they have a chance to do that again, and the rumors all suggest that they are probably doing that.
Additionally, as I mentioned, I think last week, this will be the first laptop that has most likely been designed after the formation of the Pro Workflows team.
And the Pro Workflows team has produced such wonderful things as maybe the iMac Pro.
I'm not sure if they were there late enough or early enough for that.
But they were definitely there to influence things like the new Mac Mini.
and the new Mac Pro.
And those are both really, really good products that did things and added things and kept things that we never would have guessed the 2016-era Apple would have done.
Things that customers wanted and needed.
But Apple back then was in the mood of...
taking a lot of things away and pushing things really aggressively quote forward in ways that we didn't all agree were the way forward um but this is the first thing in a new series and i cannot wait to see what it is good or bad i i at least just want to see movement and i think i have faith based on how they've done the last few new releases like this it's probably going to be really good now about that screen resolution
The one thing that's bugged me about the Retina MacBook Pro screens, ever since their introduction in 2012, is that in the last few models of the pre-Retina age, Apple increased the point density of the screens.
You could see this in the original MacBook Air, which was, I think, 1366x768, something like that, the 13-inch version.
And then right before they went Retina, the 15-inch could be had with a 1680x1050 screen, and the 17-inch could be had with a 1920x1200 screen.
The horizontal resolution of the 15-inch was 1680 points across.
When they went retina in 2012, the effective... The number of pixels went up because it went retina, but the effective point width went down from 1680 back down to 1440, where it was a few years earlier in the regular non-retina lineup.
And...
And as the rest of the lineup went Retina, that same step back happened.
It happened on the 13-inch.
It eventually happened even to the Air when that went Retina.
That didn't happen on the desktops, mind you.
When the iMac 5K came out, and later the iMac 4K, that same step back did not happen.
They went exactly double the number of points they were pre-Retina.
So we know that it's possible not to do that on the desktop, and they didn't.
On the laptops, they made that step backwards.
At the time, like, you know, 2012 was three years before or two years before it ever came to the desktop.
And two and a half years before it came to the desktop.
And so, you know, it kind of made sense back then.
Like, well, you know, it's still really new technology.
Maybe there are concerns about economics of the screen panels or quality of the colors or battery concerns of having more pixels to drive or whatever else.
Battery concerns is what Apple cited, by the way, that when we asked that question at the introduction of the red, it was like, well,
oh, there's just so many more transistors, battery is why we did this and everyone basically accepted it.
Right.
And they also, they introduced these scaling modes at the same time where you could, for the first time ever in their laptops, you could simulate higher resolutions than what the panel actually supported using these new GPU accelerated scaling modes that it would basically render the image to a, I think like a 4X or 3X buffer, like it rendered it to a higher buffer and
and then scaled it back to the physical pixels of the screen.
It's the same technique that was used later in the iPhone 6 Plus.
And the 6, 7, and 8 Plus all used it until we finally got True 3X in the iPhone X series.
But anyway, they did this pixel scaling mode where...
The native pixel resolution for the 15-inch was indeed step back to the 1440 points at 2x density, but you could set it to the way the old ones used to look at 1680, and it would just kind of like blur the pixels to fit the panels to make it look kind of like that.
But it never looked as good as when you were running it in the true native 2X format.
They never had it exactly as sharp and as nice looking as when you were running it at 1440 at the native 2X scale.
when the 2016 era models came out, starting with actually the 2015 MacBook one, like with the MacBook one, and then following in 2016, the touch bar generation of MacBook pros and later the MacBook air, they actually set the one step up scaling mode as the default screen resolution, the way they shipped.
So by default, since 2016, the,
And for every 12-inch MacBook, they have shipped in a mode where the screen is a little bit blurry and not as good as it could be because they just haven't put enough pixels into it to make it have true 2x retina clarity without using blurry scaling modes at the default resolutions they've been shipping, which to me is a crime.
On the 12-inch, you can kind of forgive it because regardless of what they charge for it, that's a budget machine.
It has budget parts.
It's a low-end machine in lots of ways.
So it kind of makes sense on that.
It kind of makes sense on the Air because the Air is also there to hit a low price point.
But on the MacBook Pro, the 13-inch and 15-inch Pro, I don't think we need to be doing that anymore.
And the desktops prove that we don't have to do it.
Like the 5K iMac and later the 4K iMac proved it isn't like just like, oh, we won't notice.
We can get away with it or nobody wants it.
No, we want it.
And we do notice, you know, they didn't like do the scaling mode by default on the desktops because it's better not to.
So on the laptops, you know, we're sitting here and we're enduring this like 2012 era screen density all this time.
in the next generation surely it's time now surely now we whatever factors are at play we can afford to step up the pixels by whatever it be like 20 in each dimension it isn't even it's not like we're doubling it again like it's it's you know adding like 20 in each dimension or something like that surely we can do that now and the cost is able to be spent on that now in both battery and economics of the panels surely
the only thing i don't like about this new rumor is that it quotes the screen resolution in a way that that almost certainly suggests they haven't done this that that they're sticking with the same thing of just scaling all the time by default and just accepting that the panel is just going to be blurry and i i i'm not okay with that like after all this time i mean yeah i'm gonna buy this thing anyway because i just can't wait to get a new keyboard
But that was like one little nitpick that I've had since 2012 that I thought they would have solved by now.
And they put so much effort and marketing and promotion into having these really awesome screens in these other ways, like in color and contrast and HDR and color profiles and wide gamut.
They do all this amazing stuff with the screen, but...
But now they're just a little bit blurry all the time because we can't have all the pixels that they actually are kind of BSE claiming that they have by having it be the default mode.
That's not okay.
And they can do better than that, and they should do better than that.
So I think the iMac is not... I mean, the iMac is a different scenario because you don't have battery power and you have more depth.
So I'm not sure.
If you were to ask Apple, I bet their answer would still be the same as it was in 2013, which is...
In a very, very thin screen like this with battery constraints, if we put all those transistors behind there for the actual 2x scaling of the resolution you want, it would hurt us in battery life.
Of course, our answer would be make the damn thing one millimeter thicker and be quiet.
But, you know, Apple.
So...
When I saw this rumor, I was at least glad that it wasn't going to be 1440 by 900 points, right?
Just larger?
Yeah, it is a larger physical screen.
And it has more pixels than the smaller one, which made me hope that if I was ever forced to use one of these for work, which is the only way I would probably ever have one of these.
that I would be able to put it at native 2X and not feel like I don't have enough room.
Obviously, this at 2X would not be the same as the resolution you wanted, you know, 1680 by 1050 points, right?
It's not quite the same, but it's better than the current 15-inch if you put it at native 2X.
And so I'm hoping that...
if I go into the store and set this one to native two X and I look at it and go like, I think I can live with that.
It's reasonable.
Um, especially as I get older, like the fact that everything would be slightly larger at that two X resolution, but there would be a more screen that maybe you would, it would be worthwhile.
But I agree.
I think there, the fact that there hasn't been a Apple laptop, uh,
with native a native point uh you know at when the lcd is running at native res has a point resolution that matches the previous 15 inch little on the 17 inch 17 inch by the way was 1920 by 1200 native pixels i did there hasn't been a display with that number of points point dimensions
it at native res since 2013 and that's not that's not a good streak and i and you know power is honestly the only thing i can think of because we know they can make a display like this and i imagine they can make it just as thin it's just a question of how much more battery power would take and people would pay i mean maybe does this mean they need to bring back the 17 inch right and then make it maybe they'll feel okay about making that one thicker or maybe they won't have to make it thicker because it'll have more you know just have more surface area to put battery in
I don't know, but I think it's another gap in their lineup, and hopefully they'll fill it somehow.
It seems, too, like this could be a nice differentiator for the Pro line.
And you would think the Pro workflow team would bring this up at some point.
You know what the fact is?
These screens being scaled does kind of suck.
Also, like...
the scaling is not free the scaling has a computational cost on the gpu to achieve and so like at some point surely like the cost of driving the more pixels has to like you know outweigh that right i don't know it's just it's much cheaper to do that computation and some dedicated hardware on the gpu and some little dinky thing than to actually uh
do the transition i have to imagine that that's the power thing and and honestly i think that's their their explanation would be both the power and also the idea that yeah it's blurrier but like most people can't tell just like no one could tell that the six plus was not at native res just because everything was so small um
that I imagine that the number of people who can tell the difference between the native 2X and the one step down from it is also probably very small and will eventually not include you as your eyes get worse with age.
So I can kind of see where they're coming from.
But to your other point, it's like,
Well, then why not do that on everything?
Why not make the $7,000 display non-native?
Why not make the iMac 5K non-native?
It's like you don't because it is actually better this way.
So there should be one model that Apple sells that, again, can match the point density at native res of the old 15-inch.
Right.
we're not even saying there has to be one model that matches the 17 if there's any model that should do it it should be this one so i i hope this rumor is wrong i don't have i mean honestly my confidence isn't high because usually when ming chi quo quotes a screen resolution it's usually correct so that's i'm not i don't have high hopes here but i i really am hoping that this rumor is wrong and that they actually have increased it to be
what it should be and kind of what they're selling like the fact that it's the default mode surely suggests to people that this is what the screen is actually pulling off and the fact that it's not i find bse you know and and i i'm not comfortable with them selling it in scaling mode by default and saying here look at how great the screen is and it's like they're intentionally hobbling it you know just to achieve a faked increase in screen real estate really and
And I want it to be real.
I think they might sell this one at native 2X, though, because it's 1536 points across, which is not 1680, but maybe they'll actually sell it.
Maybe the default will be 2X.
I mean, maybe, but that would make it look significantly different and less advanced than all the ones next to it in the Apple Store.
Well, it would make the screen look clearer, and it would make everything on it look bigger.
And clearer and bigger is actually a selling point for a lot of customers when it comes to displays on laptops.
that's true although most of those customers probably aren't buying the highest ed model in the store i don't know i mean yeah i don't see like scaling modes like i i only apple has these stats but i wonder how many people run their phones at like the the bigger mode you know during setup when it asks you do you want this to be bigger yeah the display zoom like if you ever watched anyone go through that process with no input from you and just like letting them pick what they want
they look at the two and as far as they're concerned they want the one where the pictures are bigger like like the nuances of what that means like here's one showing a bunch of apps and here's one showing a bunch of apps but each app is bigger it's like oh i want the one where they're bigger that is their only concern they the nuances of nativeness don't factor into it nor does the idea that if they're bigger you can see fewer of them like it's just an obvious choice oh bigger why would anyone pick the smaller one
and so it's a it's a different different set of values leads those decisions so i really do wonder if native 2x where everything's slightly bigger would actually be seen as a benefit of the 16 inch i mean you know the screen itself is bigger and doesn't make sense that things on the screen are also bigger and also it seems a little bit sharper for some reason so maybe that's that's a selling point
I'm interested to see what this laptop brings.
Like I said earlier, I am casually in the market for a MacBook Adorable replacement, and to go all the way to a 16-inch is probably not going to be the answer.
But I at least want to see what this brings, and if it's the sort of thing where this is the halo car of the MacBook Pro family.
has something that I'm really interested in, say a new keyboard, which I'm not as angry about as Marco is, but still a more reliable keyboard sounds good to me.
If that arrives in the 16 in the fall, then maybe I would wait until the spring to get what would hopefully be a new adorable or maybe even a 13-inch MacBook Pro at that point that has the same keyboard and a similar setup.
I don't know.
I'm curious to see this for sure, though.
And like you had said, Marco, this is something new, and new is always exciting.
So I'm very curious to see it.
Speaking of Halo car, and given our recent Mac Pro musings, this opens, remembering that the non-Retina 15-inch that Marco was talking about, that higher point, higher resolution screen was an option.
It wasn't the default screen.
So Apple could offer this laptop with this screen at this exact resolution and then have as an option, an upgrade option, a native 2X display with a higher point density.
And that upgrade option could be $7,000.
And there you go.
There's your Halo car laptop.
yeah the funny thing like the option back then the two things about those that are interesting the option back then was actually very inexpensive i think it was like 150 it was it was very inexpensive to go from the 1440 screen to the 1680 screen and more interestingly the 1680 screen came in two finishes matte or glossy and the finishes weren't an extra cost the matte one didn't cost an extra thousand dollars weird
and the total upgrade cost was like $150 or $200 it was in that ballpark and yeah but man if they offered this with a higher resolution screen and a matte option I mean $7,000 would be excessive but like what do you think would actually be a reasonable price for that that Apple would actually also charge like so both reasonable and also like realistic for Apple these days I think $400 extra
Yeah, $500.
That's what I was going to say.
Yeah, same.
I was going to say $500.
And I'm just saying for the resolution, like for the nanotexture, I would say $500 and up.
Maybe $600.
I don't know about the nanotexture.
I feel like the nanotexture is all about people in a particular environment where they really need to see what it looks like and they want to really take down.
I mean, I guess it's more important on a laptop than a desktop, but I feel like the things that motivated the weird nanotexture for the Mac Pro display or the XDR or whatever,
maybe aren't at play because those same people would say i don't care what you do with your laptops and it's not like i'm going to use one of those to do my work on my future film or whatever because i'll be in the studio and i'll be staring at a much larger screen but who knows now that they have the nanotechnology uh the nanotexture technology in their toolbox maybe they'll just apply it to everything and add astronomical markup to all their products
Although, on one hand, you need it for the laptop more than ever because you are in environments with varied lighting with laptops.
On the other hand, I would imagine the nanotexture is going to have a problem with cleaning and fingerprints.
Yeah, if you're not supposed to touch it.
Now, I don't know the answer to that.
Do any of you know?
I didn't actually ask the people in the room of like...
I had heard lots of people saying, oh, you're really, really not supposed to touch the nanotexture.
But then I can't tell if that's just saying, like, since it costs $1,000, ha ha, keep people's grubby fingers away from your $1,000 finish.
Or if there's an actual issue in that if you get grease in it, cleaning it is difficult because you're not supposed to, like, rub it or something.
I have no idea what's the truth there.
Actually, they provide a cleaning cloth in the box, and it isn't $1,000.
They don't provide the stand.
But everything comes with a cleaning cloth.
My Thunderbolt display came with a cleaning cloth.
That's fine.
I just want to know, if someone does touch your screen, is it any harder to clean than just a regular glass screen?
Well, you have to hold it at a 70-degree angle.
Speaking of touching laptop screens like this, so I have the Air in the house that is technically the homework laptop.
I think it's called like homework laptop or something.
So the kids use it.
For the most part, I'm pretty sure none of them are touching the screen accidentally or habitually because they think it's a touchscreen because they're not really habituated to use touchscreen laptops.
Granted, they use their iPads all the time, but I don't think they're actually touching it like, oh, I thought I could hit the OK button, right?
But the entire frame of the display is covered in fingerprints.
It looks worse than any of their iPads because...
They, like, I don't know, they have grubby hands, and for some reason, like, well, I know my daughter picks up the laptop by the screen, which is how she destroyed it.
She picks up the screen all the time, and that's how she destroyed the 2011 laptop.
She destroyed the 2011 laptop by dropping it, but also by repeatedly picking it up by the screen.
So the hinge became incredibly loose, but then the dropping is what eventually cracked the screen.
But yeah, like...
a huge amount of grease and i think about cleaning it sometimes i'm like why bother like in a week it's gonna look like that again but now it's getting to the point where like have i waited too long has this screen gone over like is it now impossible to remove the finger grease that is accumulated on the screen like if i were to try to to try to clean it would i be removing like whatever sort of anti-glare finishes on these the the screen i think that the grease is now a structural element of the of the screen and i can never i can never remove it oh god oh my lord
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Alrighty, Jack Friday.
I hope I have that right.
Do you think Apple would or could re-implement target display mode on the iMac maybe this fall in order to make a lower-end display available for the Mac Pro?
Would that be a solution for you?
I mean, I guess anything is possible, but I don't personally see them coming back to target display mode possibly ever on an iMac.
Yeah, I don't think they would either for a number of reasons.
I mean, so this was kind of a big deal because when the 27-inch iMac first came up, non-retina, the regular 27-inch iMac, this was at the time when there were no 27-inch, 2560 by 1440 or 1680 monitors on the market.
Like, the only ones you can get that had the 2560 pixels across were the 30-inch class monitors that Apple and a few other companies like HP sold.
The 27-inch iMac had that same resolution in a smaller panel,
Actually, it lopped at the bottom a little bit.
It went to 16.9 instead of 16.10, or whatever it is.
But anyway, so it was 2560 across by 1440, and it was an awesome panel.
It was way brighter, better contrast, and whatever else, than a 30-inch.
And when it came out, the iMac with this panel in it cost less than the 30-inch monitor did alone.
And it included this with a, quote, free computer behind it, basically.
So...
There was actually strong demand for people who wanted this kind of monitor and all these amazing specs on it, and this was before Apple sold it separately as what later became the Thunderbolt display.
They had this target display mode where you could, I think, hold down a certain key combination or something, and you could plug a computer into the iMac and just use the iMac screen as that computer's monitor.
So because there was this kind of demand for this, I know I heard a few people who tried it,
But it wasn't actually very good because, first of all, it was kind of wasteful conceptually in the sense that you were buying a computer to not use the computer part of it ever, really, and to plug some other computer into it.
If you wanted to use both, like to have the iMac and maybe have a laptop, you couldn't leave the iMac booted in this mode.
You'd have to reboot it into target display mode, I think.
So that was kind of weird.
And also...
If the computer part of it broke, or somehow went wrong, target display mode wouldn't work either.
And so you kind of had to rely on that computer working forever.
And this was also before SSD, so there was a spinning hard drive back there, just spinning around, doing nothing.
It was kind of a crappy solution.
It wasn't a great way to get a 27-inch display.
And it lasted until Retina came.
And when Retina came, it went away.
And there were lots of good reasons for that.
Like, at the time that the 5K Retina iMac launched in 2014, there was no cable standard that could drive it to full resolution.
Like, Thunderbolt 2, I don't think, could do it.
These days, a Thunderbolt 3 cable could do it.
So, theoretically, like, the modern iMacs that have Thunderbolt 3 ports could theoretically offer this.
But...
I think the hardware wiring and support for it would be non-trivial.
And I think just not a lot of people actually ended up using it because it was so clunky to actually use in practice.
So while they maybe could technically do it,
not only do I not think that they will, but I don't think they should.
I think if they want to address the market that I think they, I hope they want to address of people who want an Apple made external 5k display that is not $7,000, uh,
I hope they do address that market.
And if they're going to address that market at all, they should do it properly by actually having a standalone 5K monitor that is like the iMac without any computer attached to it.
Just do that again.
The same way they did in the pre-written days with the cinema display and the Thunderbolt display.
Just do the same thing again because they're really good at that and no one else is.
And there's a huge hole in the market.
Target display mode is a hack that never worked very well and shouldn't be used to solve this problem.
Yeah, the amount of money they would spend getting target display mode to work, sort of doing the plumbing to get a Thunderbolt, one of their Thunderbolt ports or all their Thunderbolt ports to be able to pipe directly into the display controller and all the other internal stuff they have in there would be weird and expensive and so much more difficult than just making them.
display and honestly and we talked about we joked about this wdc show if they just charge the same price as the one that has the computer inside it but this one doesn't have a computer you would still pay it it would be such so high margin and people people will be happy to pay it because you'd have the anchoring of the seven grand xdr making it seem like a bargain obviously you price like the low-end imac and not like the top-end imac pro but
I think people would pay a surprising amount.
And probably up to, honestly, probably up to half the price.
So you could probably charge $3,000 for this thing.
And it would be a ripoff.
But people would be like, well, here are my choices.
Nothing or a $3,000 monitor or a $7,000 monitor that has HDR.
and higher resolution and the 3001 starts to look reasonable you know or i can find an old old lg or i can buy some weird brand that i've never heard of that supposedly has a 5k display you know it's the choices are slim so if apple wants to make money now's the time to do it assuming there will be some future wave of people making 5k displays which maybe will never come and maybe that's why apple feels like they don't have to do it but if i was given the choice between
you can use a 5k iMac some new 5k iMac in target display mode or for the exact same price you can have a 5k monitor i would take the monitor because the reasons marco said i don't have to worry about a whole computer being back there and more things that can break even if the price was the same it's like well wouldn't you want the free computer and you can also use it as a computer i'm like
I'm not going to use it as a computer.
It's going to be attached to a desktop.
It's not like every once in a while I'm going to yank it out of my desktop and use the second computer behind the monitor.
I'd rather just have the monitor.
I don't think they're going to do target display mode.
Unless it's really easy.
Unless it falls out of the new arrangement of the internals of the new 5K iMac.
Like they've simplified everything because now they do have Thunderbolt 3, so they don't have to have that double bit, essentially internal double driving the display through this weird timing controller that they were bragging about that multiplexes it.
You know, once that is simplified internally, if target display mode just falls out of the fact of the internal architecture, sure, by all means, offer it.
It's like it's, you know, good flexibility, but it's not what I'm looking for.
Now, something that I'd forgotten about, but while you guys were talking, I'd remembered, is that you can also do target disk mode, which really doesn't solve the problem we're talking about here.
But one time, or maybe a couple times just for fun, I actually booted my...
work-issued MacBook Pro on my iMac, or I guess strictly speaking, my iMac booted itself off of my work-issued MacBook Pro's hard drive.
So I was using all of my iMac's bits and bobs, except instead of using the onboard SSD, I was using the
SSD in my MacBook Pro, which was very weird and very cool and definitely had some caveats and drawbacks, most especially the keychain lost its ever-loving mind because it was basically a new computer at this point.
But it is something you can do.
And I did a write-up about this three years ago on my website, which we'll link in the show notes.
But it's just something that's a neat party trick for very, very nerdy parties, I guess.
target disk mode has been on the Mac forever and it's an awesome tool for migration or data recovery for that kind of thing I don't think it's intended and was ever intended to be just booted up for fun like I'll just use my iMac like this I don't think it's ever meant for that but yeah for transfers and recovery it's awesome
I mean, it was nice having my work machine on this 20, well, so to speak, on my 27-inch screen.
I mean, ultimately, it was the iMac booting off of the work machine's hard drive, like I said.
But, you know, it was very freeing having a 27-inch screen all of a sudden.
But it was not – that juice was not worth the squeeze, ultimately.
Thank you.
You're bringing back the thing from the beginning of having like a little thing that you carry around that has your data.
Although the thing is very large in the case of the laptop.
Do you recall if when you put your laptop into target disk mode, did it show the FireWire logo on the screen as like a screensaver?
I actually have a picture on my website, and it's a little lightning bolt-y thing.
Yeah, it shows whatever the interface is that you're using.
So like a modern one, it'll show a Thunderbolt icon.
I thought there was some period of time where it continued to show the FireWire logo even when it wasn't using FireWire, like maybe just during the transition.
But I may be wrong about that.
That's why I was curious.
Firewire had a good logo.
Among the connection standard logos that we've had over the years, I think Firewire's was the best one.
It looks a little bit like Destiny logo.
Three-pointed thing, right?
I don't even know.
I can't even judge the reference because I don't even know what Destiny logo looks like.
Can't believe you don't.
Okay, let's move on.
You really can't believe that?
All those videos, all the things that I'm tweeting and retweeting about Destiny, I think you ought to come across it.
You don't think that I muted that 18 years ago?
I should stop using that hashtag.
No.
Sneak past your filters.
Oh, please no.
All right.
Chris Hubbard writes, what software like cPanel does Marco use to manage his servers on Linode?
Chris continues, I use another shared business hosting service.
I had considered Linode, but the price of a cPanel solo license is more than what my entire hosting cost.
I don't use anything like that.
I simply administer my servers manually using command line stuff and setup scripts that I write and things like that.
And there are even tools now that make it even easier.
I can't really recommend any because I'm not really in that market.
I've never used any of the other tools.
But...
Things like cPanel, they came up in the era of bulk shared hosting where you didn't have VPSs or cloud instances, which are basically VPSs.
You didn't have those yet.
You had dedicated servers that you could run 200 small websites on and have to manage all these different websites off of one box.
That's kind of where that software came up.
And there's...
some justification for it in that kind of situation although even then i think you have probably better tools these days for even that kind of thing if you still do that but uh but yeah these days when you're running your own you know vps's or cloud node kind of things like there's i think very little reason to use that kind of stuff um it does help if you're a novice it helps you like you know add domains and stuff like that if you're a novice but
Honestly, it's probably easier to just learn how to do that yourself manually from the command line than it is to deal with any of these packages these days.
And I said on Twitter too, I kind of responded to this on Twitter as well, so many developers or nerds or power users will jump through ridiculous hoops to avoid learning how to use the command line because they think that it's harder than it really is.
The fact is, learning basic Unix command line stuff, things like basic directory management, file management, basic editing with a tool like Vim slash VI, which is available pretty much everywhere on everything, on every server, everywhere.
Learning how to use these things at a basic level is such a critical skill for so many types of advanced computer tasks and power user tasks and system administrative tasks.
And it doesn't change very much over time.
The basics of things like using the command shell and piping commands to each other and things like that, that stuff hardly ever changes.
You can learn it once, and it'll be pretty stable and pretty useful for your entire career in all likelihood.
So it's worth learning, and it's not that hard to learn.
I would say it's easier than things like Swift.
I think it's actually much easier to learn shell stuff than it is to learn Swift.
If you are a nerd enough to want to run your own servers, you have the capacity to learn command line basics, and you really should.
and there's lots of great documentation out there, much of which is published by Linode, but it works on any server.
But, you know, you can get a server for, like, five bucks a month and just try, like, just try setting up a website and, you know, just stumble through with guides and stuff until you figure it out, and you will eventually build up these skills of using command line tools and editing config files and stuff like that.
And these skills really last a lifetime, and they're worth learning.
So...
I would say try not using stuff like cPanel and not using automated setup tools and just try setting up yourself and see how far you get because that skill is worth building.
Another thing I would add is that this, I mean, different people learn in different ways, and I always find this type of learning helps me.
But I think particularly with the command line, because it's such a large problem domain, like you think of it as one thing, like I know, quote unquote, the command line, or even worse, the terminal, right?
But really, it's this entire universe of different operating systems and different shells and different pieces of software that you are manipulating from those shells on those operating systems.
The number of variables is huge.
So I think one good way to get started on this is to find some way to get a basic conceptual understanding of the relationship of the pieces to each other rather than learning.
I know specifically the magic things that I type to make this happen with this particular software on this platform, because then it can just become like sort of cargo culting where it's like, well, I know this command and I know that command.
And like, if you don't understand what the little, you know, greater than signs and ampersands and
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That is conceptual, and if you learn that, then everything else is just details.
It's kind of like learning the basics of programming.
You learn about loops, conditionals, and stuff like that, and functions, and with those basics, a lot of programming language become like, oh, I understand what functions are.
Just tell me how functions work in this language.
I understand what arrays are.
Just tell me how arrays work in this language.
And so that type of basic understanding, no, it won't make you a super-duper expert, and you won't know the esoteric stuff, or esoteric stuff, as people tell me it's pronounced, but it will really help you
uh it'll really help you not feel like you're at sea because it's like oh i i knew how to set up apache but now here's this new thing and i have i don't really understand what those things i was typing for apache to get apache to work actually meant uh so i don't i don't have any sort of ladder to grab onto when i'm trying to set up nginx right
so that's my suggestion unfortunately i don't have any suggestions of like where do i go to get that conceptual understanding but i think if you look at any piece of documentation you can tell is this just telling me how to set up a particular piece of software or is this trying to tell me this is what a shell is this is what unix is this is what files and directories are here are some basics about it like if you see something a guide that starts with that type of information i would dive in and uh make sure you get some of that before you get neck deep in setting up your mysql server
And finally, Joseph Dykstra asks, what are your opinions on people listening to ATP faster than one acts?
Some podcasters dislike their shows being sped up.
As one of the people who does not edit this show, I don't personally have a problem with it.
If you can and want to listen to us faster, then go for it and do what you got to do.
John, as the other person who does not edit the show, do you have opinions about this?
I don't care.
People listen to it however they want to listen to it.
I listen to my podcast at 1x, but I understand why people don't.
So, you know, I mean, the only place it impacts my life at all is people constantly telling us that we sound drunk when they hear us at 1x.
But it's funny that it's always the same thing.
It's always you sound drunk, not you sound tired or slow or groggy.
It's always drunk.
So they always go right to the drinking.
Anyway, other than that one effect, listen to whatever you want.
We're just glad you listened.
Exactly.
Mr. Editor, however, what are your thoughts?
basically the same i mean i make a podcast app and i give people speed controls he's the one who makes the app that does this yeah i make the app that most of our listeners used to listen to the show and i give them the option and it's totally fine i listen faster than one x myself to almost everything there are very few shows i listen to at one x most shows i listen to at about one and a quarter x yep same so it's not like it's not like super fast but it's faster than normal and
there are indeed a lot of podcasters who, who have like almost like a moral objection.
Like, you know, we, you know, it's, or to similar features like, like smart speed of like, we put those silences in there for a reason.
And if you shorten them, you're ruining our editorial choices.
And like, I get why people would think that, but I don't think that I think that we put our podcasts out there for people to listen to.
And once we do that, it's in your hands.
Like we,
A book publisher doesn't tell their readers, like, you aren't allowed to skim any pages in my book.
You have to read every word very carefully.
You can never skim.
You can never look forward.
Like, that's impractical and unreasonable to expected people.
What actually happens is you put your work out there the way you intend for it to be done.
But then once you put it out there, it becomes the audiences to do with what they want.
And they're not going to experience it the way you intend 100% of the time.
And you just got to deal with that.
So we put our podcast out there and you can listen to it however you want.
As John said, we're just glad that you listen.
So thanks.
I feel like the point stands about the skimming type thing.
I think an author would feel like, oh, I don't want people skimming my thing.
And the reason I listen to everything in 1X is because I do want to hear those silences.
But everyone has different priorities.
If...
you know if you don't have time to get through an entire episode in your commute unless you do it at a faster speed or if you find it too boring to listen to people talk at 1x like those outweigh the thing of like oh i you know because you are missing some nuances of timing that you know gaps in silence can be annoying and you're getting rid of the annoyance but
But sometimes the gaps in sounds can make a joke funnier, and you're missing out on that, and it's a tradeoff.
But people understand what the tradeoffs are, and they make the tradeoff that makes sense for them.
If time compression is more important than hearing the pauses in someone's speech, that's the choice they make.
And same thing with skimming.
I think if we did a music show, I think all of us would have a bit more of an objection because they'd be like, but music, it's like it's rhythmic and you're hearing it faster and it's really weird and smarts me might do weird stuff to music.
But other than just that one little song break we have, it's not a music thing.
So because it's speech, I think it is less onerous, but...
everything you said is the reason i do listen at 1x and the skimming thing from authors is the reason people who make content might wish you didn't listen to it sped up because they feel like you're missing something that they worked hard on like oh you skimmed that page and that was actually my best passage but you just really kind of skipped over it but that's that's you know there's nothing you can do about that uh and i bet the author would just be happy that you bought their book and so that's where we're coming from
Yeah, and there are people who watch movies at Faster Than 1X.
This phenomenon is spreading.
We have so much media available to us in the modern world.
We have such a surplus of available media.
Somebody who watches movies at 2X or listens to podcasts at 2X, they don't hate movies.
They don't hate podcasts.
Well, the movie people kind of hate movies.
Well, maybe.
Yeah, maybe.
I haven't tried that.
It's like music.
I feel like speech is the one where it's the most excusable.
uh because we're not singing and you're not listening to the melodic sound of our voices that's not not why presumably not why you're listening to the show it's not an asmr show right it's transference of information and to secondarily emotion which i think still comes through whereas if it was music much less so and i feel like movie because there's a visual element and that gets spit up and everyone walks fast and stuff yeah
I mean, honestly, I don't want to do that to movies, but I kind of get why some people do because it's like the same thing.
And when we have this massive surplus of content available to us, the reason I speed up podcasts by a little bit is because I want to listen to more podcasts.
And I have more podcasts that I want to listen to than I have time.
Sometimes if I get really behind in my queue and I have this massive queue, I'm not going to go delete things I want to listen to.
I will just increase my speed for that week.
And then once I run out of things, I'll slow it back down again.
That's a control I have.
And I'm doing all this so that I don't have to cut things.
I don't have to listen to fewer podcasts.
And I still have room to try new podcasts.
That's why I do this.
And I think that's the reason why most people do it.
Most people I know who listen to podcasts faster than 1x listen to a ton of podcasts.
So if their alternative is just listen to fewer, I feel like kind of everyone loses there.
So yeah, people can listen to whoever they want.
A good example of sped up videos, WWC sessions, I often watch it faster than 1x just because there's lots of – because Apple trains their speakers to take their time and pause between slides, which is great and everything.
But sometimes I more or less know most of the material and I just want to get to the good stuff.
So just letting it run at 1.5x while half paying attention to it is –
the great way to do that and that's that's visual but it's mostly just spoken word and slides so i don't get to see people walking across the stage really fast and making it distracting right and they do occasionally when they're going in and out of demos yeah i do the same thing i usually watch wbc videos at like 1.5x and yeah it does sound a little bit funny and the people do walk funny when you see them coming on and off but it's fine because like that's something like not everything is a masterpiece of art like they're like not every not every video that people watch is
is a handcrafted piece of film that like has been made by experts who every second counts like a lot of what people watch is like stuff on youtube and so to watch some of that at 2x like 2x wouldn't be fast enough for a lot of the stuff i find on youtube like that
Brutal.
But the same thing is true for podcasts.
So many podcasts, like ours, are produced in a casual conversational format where we are not heavily editing this show.
We are not scripting this show.
If you're listening to one of the big publishers' podcasts,
Every line of what you're listening to from almost all the major podcasts that are produced by these big companies, those are scripted.
Almost every single line is scripted.
And then it's edited to an inch of its life.
They have massive production and writing going into them.
Even things that sound off the cuff are usually not on the big shows.
They are almost always scripted.
And so when you're listening to something like that, they can say, oh, we handcrafted all these silences, all these words, all these phrases.
You can't gloss over any of this because it was all made intentionally.
That isn't true for most podcasts.
Most podcasts are done closer to what we're doing here, of just people talking, and they're off the cuff.
Maybe they're going off of an outline.
Maybe they have a few things they want to say, but for the most part, it's more conversational.
That's part of what makes the medium great, I think.
I think people really appreciate the conversational nature of it.
But that is going to also have, by definition, a lot of dead space, a lot of dead air and phrasing that is wasteful and people repeating themselves like I do all the time.
Having something that goes through it faster, you're not missing this marvelous work of art between every single word.
You're just hearing conversation a little bit faster.
And that's totally fine.
Anyway, thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Squarespace, and Fracture, and we'll see you next week.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter.
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Don't install the betas.
Oh my god.
Why is everyone installing the betas?
Why did Apple make this the public beta?
Did you hear that Merlin installed it on his phone and his iPad?
I mean, I did, but that's stupid.
On his main phone?
You installed it on your main phone?
Yeah, I waited until beta 2 and I installed it on my main phone.
And it totally solved my robocall problem.
But it introduced a lot of other problems.
I'm glad you waited until beta 2, which shows that you weren't like, I can't wait, I have to install it.
But I think you just waited for the number to go from 1 to 2 and didn't check.
Hey, is beta 2 actually better than beta 1 in terms of stability?
Like, well, it's one more, so I'm installing it.
And now you found out.
Not really.
It's so bad.
I wouldn't even install beta 2 on my iPad.
i haven't installed it anywhere i wanted beta 2 on my ipad but then i'm like let me just read about this a little bit and i said no i'm gonna skip that yeah wait a little longer i let me let me tell you people it's probably already too late for most of you but if it's not too late if you're still on the fence and you haven't installed the betas yet
Don't install the betas.
The public beta is garbage.
The public beta should not have been released as a public beta.
It is developer beta 2 of everything.
That's what it is.
And developer beta 2 is terrible.
It feels like beta 1 still of an average to poor quality year.
I have tons of beta problems on my developer beta 2 installs of everything.
the ipad is bad the phone is bad uh catalina i'm not really using much i'm only booting into it occasionally so i don't know how bad it is but a lot of people are having problems with these betas these are really rough you should not be running these and i and i do think apple has done a great disservice by releasing suction incredibly rough set of builds as the public betas
Just so Merlin doesn't yell at me four weeks from now when we record our next episode.
Translated from hyperbolic conversational podcast speak, what Marco is saying is that even the very latest builds of the public beta are not particularly stable, and you should be aware of that.
He says it as don't install that, but obviously if you need to install it or if you want to install it and just deal with the bugs, we just want you to know what you're getting into.
So what we're telling you is that they are not stable and tons of crap doesn't work.
If you hear that and say, that's fine, I still want to install it, go for it.
But we just want you to be aware that if you have experiences based on iOS 12 beta and you thought, oh, betas aren't that bad, this is more back to the bad old days of iOS 5 where the beta is barely even functional and basic things don't work.
So just so you're aware of that.
So when people say don't install the beta, and I'm speaking half to Merlin and half to other people, they're not saying literally, I forbid you to install the beta.
By all means, install it if you want to install it.
Just be aware.
We're providing you information and experience that...
We either have done it ourselves foolishly or know other people who have done it and have felt the pain.
And so now you know, is this a pain that you want in your life?
Maybe it is.
Maybe you got a spare device.
Go crazy.
Or maybe not.
Speak for yourself.
I actually mean don't install the betas.
All right.
Well, they're really bad.
It's very extreme.
Margo has banned you from installing the betas, everybody.
That's it.
I'm sorry.
I tried to stop them.
Yeah, and there's a number of good reasons why.
So first of all, and one thing that I didn't even do, that I didn't consider, but that a friend of ours remarked the other day that I think is a really good point.
On iOS, you can always step back from a beta if you do a full restore with these certain steps.
You're able to un-beta something, so you kind of have a way out.
On macOS, I've mentioned how I do this separate install in a separate APFS volume or partition, whatever they call them.
So that way the data stays separate from my Mojave installation.
You do a dual boot scenario or some people would do external disks to do that.
So you're kind of keeping it separate.
But one thing that I didn't consider that I'm always bad at whenever I do this is that
iCloud and your iCloud data, your iCloud account, is your primary data volume in a lot of ways.
And you are logging into a beta with your iCloud account.
You're logging into your main data.
And iCloud is especially risky to do this with because if your iCloud account...
gets messed up by the beta, there is no time machine for iCloud.
There is no recovery for iCloud.
You can't just go and restore your data back to where it was on iCloud.
So in a way, logging into your iCloud account on a beta is the most risky thing you could possibly do to that data.
Because you are putting it at the whims of the beta world, which is often very unreliable, especially in the early betas, especially with iCloud data.
And
you can't step it back.
Once that data is touched by the new installation, that's it.
It isn't in its own little separate sandbox.
You are dealing with your live and permanent iCloud data with beta software.
So if you are going to install the betas, not only should you do it on dedicated hardware, you should also not log into your iCloud account with it.
And so you start to think about what this actually means in practice.
If it's not on your primary devices and you're not going to log into iCloud from it,
What the hell are you going to do with it?
I mean, that's why we had the same conversation with Merlin.
And I, you know, I was surprised that people were just thinking of this now because it's been true as long as iCloud has existed.
And that's why I had all those Apple IDs.
Remember my big Apple ID saga?
All those Apple IDs were the Apple IDs that I would use with beta versions of Mac OS, right?
Because I would never use my real Apple IDs.
It was worse back in the old days.
They would just completely hose your data routinely.
Yeah.
And then there was sort of the middle years where Apple was upgrading the storage format.
Do you remember that?
Like, they changed the storage format of notes.
They moved them from IMAP into, like, their regular stuff.
And sometimes when they, you know, like, there would be a one-way back-end transition that if you, you know, if you did transition, like, your notes on that Apple ID, your other devices could no longer read it or could, you know, couldn't read it correctly.
It's even true today.
It's like I'm sitting in front of LCAP on this Mac.
Yeah.
I can't see some of the notes that I create on newer operating systems on this Mac.
It still works with them, but the notes that are made with newer features just don't show up at all on this Mac.
So if you're going to have beta OSs and you're going to be installing them, have spare Apple IDs.
It's kind of a pain in the butt, as I discovered, especially when you decide you don't need them anymore.
But that's the safe way to do it.
Spare Apple IDs with fake data.
And it's like, well, what are you even doing?
You're basically doing what I would do for my reviews.
You're exploring the operating system in a safe way.
It's on a separate volume.
It's with separate Apple IDs.
You start filling your fake Apple IDs with semi real data so you can see what it's like.
Like it's not fun.
you know opening up notes and seeing no notes you don't know how the sync works until you start adding notes and adding pictures to your notes and all that other stuff but that's that's definitely the safest way to do it now i have to say in recent years apple has hosed your iCloud data far less often um but since i've always been using spare apple ids i can't say that definitively uh you know i usually what i do is i wait until like
the release before the final release and then i'll put my real apple id on a beta system and usually by then it's fairly safe that they're not going to hose your stuff but not always and as for time machine for icloud it's especially true of things of big data sets but for small data sets you do have an out and i've used this out a couple of times for example contacts lets you save i think they still call it an address book archive or whatever lets you save a single archive of all the information
And it's small because, like, how many contacts do you have?
Worst case scenario, if iCloud hoses everything, just wipe all of your contacts, wipe it from every single device, wipe it from, you know, just I have zero contacts, and then just restore from the address book archive.
Can't do that with 100,000 photos and metadata in your iPhoto library.
So...
There is no time machine.
For select sets, there is a way to export or re-import.
But in general, use testing Apple IDs and then just deal with the fact that you're going to have 20 Apple IDs that you have to call Apple about five years from now.
I really want to put 13 on my iPad, and I do have some travel coming up in a couple of months when presumably whatever beta we're on, if not the released version at that point, will be much more stable.
Install the beta right before you get on the plane.
That's the best time to install beta.
That's the right moment.
Traveling with beta software is awesome.
You should be installing it while you're on battery in the airport.
Yeah.
The airport Wi-Fi.
The airport Wi-Fi.
Oh, man, that's funny.
No, but I really want to put it on my iPad really badly.
And I have resisted so far.
And from everything I've heard even before recording this episode, it sounds like I've made the right call.
And usually it's been at least passable by public beta time.
And as you're saying, Marco, everything I've heard is that it is not even passable yet.
And to stay away, which is what I'm going to be doing.
I made that joke about installing your thing in the airport.
But if Casey will remember, I did – I didn't reinstall.
I reset my Apple Watch in line at WWDC.
Yes, indeed.
I do remember that.
Because I left the hotel and didn't realize that it was failing to pair with my phone entirely.
And I talked to the Apple Watch experts in line around me, a.k.a.
Underscore.
Underscore, yeah.
And he said –
Yeah, you just need to reset, you know, erase, erase all day, whatever that option is called where, you know, reset and erase all data on your watch.
And a series zero takes like an hour and a half to do that.
Maybe it was two hours.
And I was looking at him like, is this going to, you know, because I'm not anywhere near a charger.
It's just on my wrist.
I think it was at least an hour watching that.
It was a long time.
But it didn't kill the entire battery.
It did actually reset everything and pair with my phone again.
And I restored a backup from the last time I had worn my watch.
And everything turned out fine.