Mechanical Disadvantage
Casey:
Before we do anything else, the rules of Syracuse-involved podcasting state, dictate even, that you shall start with – did you ever – did we talk about that on this show, the shall versus will versus whatever?
Casey:
When I was doing government contracting, whenever we wrote requirements documents, you knew a requirement because it said the software shall –
Marco:
do x y or z if will was not enough the software shall do x y and z and that's how you knew well i guess that makes sense because will means like a prediction of what it will do where a shall is like a dictation of what it needs to do but yes yeah can you not just substitute the word must for the word shall like how how do those different maybe
John:
You got to look at the internet, RFCs, you know, those things, those big documents, right?
John:
I believe they have a formal definition of will, shall, and must, and all that stuff.
John:
I don't know if it's the same as the ones that you had to deal with, Casey, but it's definitely a thing.
Casey:
I probably was.
Casey:
This was when I was working at a big, big, big government contractor.
Casey:
We were doing stuff for the Navy, so it was all of that happy horse manure.
Casey:
But anyway, I digress.
Marco:
So I just searched for must versus shall.
Marco:
The first result is a page on the FAA website, weirdly.
Marco:
But basically it says must and must not are words of obligation.
Marco:
must imposes a legal obligation that something is mandatory must not is prohibited but apparently shall used to mean must but these days shall shall is kind of understood now to mean may oh interesting
Marco:
And they advise that you go through and replace shall with must, wherever you use shall to mean that.
Marco:
Because must is unambiguous.
John:
I put a link in the show.
John:
It's the IETF one, the RFC one.
John:
It's got must, must not, should, should not, may.
John:
Required, recommended, optional.
John:
It makes more sense than the one you were just reading, but it is the place where programmers are most likely to come across these particular important words because you'll be looking up something in some spec, like the HTTP spec or the TCP spec or something, and you'll run across one of these documents, and it will have these words in all caps, and this is what they mean.
Casey:
I read the show notes several days ago as I was looking at something, and the very first item of follow-up, our show notes read as follows, John's cheese grater broke.
Casey:
And because I'm a turd, I saw this and just cackled in excitement because I was like, oh, man, it finally, oh, wait, this literally means a cheese grater, doesn't it?
Casey:
So, John, tell us about your 10-year-old computer that's still chugging along and your silly cheese grater that I have used once and got shamed for it, by the way.
Casey:
I'm assuming this is the same one.
Casey:
Tell me about your cheese grater.
John:
It's a little learning curve for the cheese grater.
John:
Yeah, my computer's fine.
John:
We talked about my kitchen stuff last show, and I said I was like my cheese grater was on its last legs.
John:
I didn't know how many I had in reserve.
John:
It really was on its last legs because between that show and now it finally did.
John:
The last little bit of plastic that was holding the little flappy thing on broke and it just came off.
John:
It's the same way.
John:
They always fail.
John:
They fail, you know, like a crack starts forming.
John:
It just creeps its way up.
John:
I nursed this one for a really long time being very careful with the cracked plastic, but eventually it was dead.
John:
So now I know how many I have left.
John:
I unboxed a new one and I'm using that one now and I have one in reserve.
John:
So I had two left before this one broke.
John:
Now I'm on my second to last one.
John:
oh no yeah and i think i'm gonna i gotta put a thing on the calendar um i guess recording this podcast is one way to do it because i want to know how long do they last like i don't really pay attention but now i have a recorded version so when this next one breaks i'll be able to do the date math between now and then and know roughly how long these things last
Marco:
The real question that everyone wants to know is, did you purchase for $75 a replacement to your favorite spatula?
John:
I did not.
John:
It was black only.
John:
I couldn't overcome that.
John:
And I don't think I would have gotten it.
John:
Like I said, unlike the cheese grater, the spatulas continue to function seemingly perfectly.
John:
There is nothing wrong with them other than slight discoloration from food sticking to it.
John:
But other than that, I don't foresee them breaking in any way.
John:
So I don't need to have a giant supply.
John:
Unlike, for example, Apple Extended Keyboard 2s or whatever.
John:
If you're using something that's going to wear out, keyboards wear out, albeit slowly.
John:
These cheese graters wear out way too quickly.
John:
Spatulas, they just last forever.
John:
Kind of like this Mac Pro.
Marco:
They just slowly leak plastic into your food forever.
Casey:
we were we established this i found the uh post on instagram that i put up uh 289 weeks ago on december 21st of 2013 where i attempted to shred some mozzarella which i'm sure i've butchered that pronunciation i tried to be italian but anyway i shredded some mozzarella and john absolutely mercilessly shamed me for it and so this is a different cheese grater this is the box grater this was like pizza cheese geez casey what are you doing
John:
Yeah, that's a totally different thing.
John:
Totally different.
John:
How would I break that thing?
John:
That one we still have.
John:
And again, unlike the cheese grater I'm talking about, I don't foresee it breaking.
John:
It's just a – Wait, what cheese grater did I use for this then if not a box grater?
John:
A box grater, a metal box grater.
Casey:
Oh, so what are you talking about then?
John:
I'm talking about the thing I use to grate Parmesan cheese, which I do frequently because it's a staple in the household.
John:
And it is an OXO.
Casey:
Is that like a sword?
John:
No, it's an OXO model.
John:
They don't make any more, probably because it has a fatal flaw and it breaks that for a couple of years.
John:
But it's so much better than the model they ship now.
John:
The model they ship now is like...
John:
i don't just just google for like oxo uh rotary cheese grater you'll see the current model and then the current model is terrible this old model was genius other than the fact that it breaks eventually oh is this oh this is the thing that they bring around at like olive garden isn't it uh no not quite i mean are you looking at the current one i mean put a link in the chat this is one of the options and this looks to me like what i would find at an olive garden
John:
Yeah, so that is the current model, and it is no good.
John:
Because if you grate a lot of cheese and you try using that, your hands will hurt.
John:
It is not good.
John:
You don't have good mechanical advantage.
John:
Because as you squeeze that handle, the pressure on the part that is pressing down on the cheese is less than your hand.
John:
Like, you're using a lever, but in reverse, right?
John:
It's like squeezing way down at the end.
John:
The force at the tip of that lever is less than you're squeezing down there.
John:
So it is a mechanical disadvantage.
Yeah.
John:
No good.
John:
And what is yours?
Casey:
Can you link to yours?
Casey:
I just put something in the chat.
Casey:
Is that the correct thing?
John:
Yep, so that's mine.
John:
So that one, you can't really see in the picture, but that cylinder, it opens up along that hinge.
John:
Do you see the hinge thing there?
John:
It opens up along the hinge, and the thing that is...
John:
you know it's got a very very thin curved piece of plastic that sort of keeps the cheese in so you open it up and then you can slide the cheese down like the the metal cylinder is going up and down you you slide the cheese down next to the metal cylinder and you squeeze the cheese against the cylinder with your entire hand like you are directly pressing it against the cylinder and then you rotate the thing so you basically you put one hand around the cylinder and then the crank on top you turn it's still kind of difficult to do
John:
But it is pretty much as good as you can get in terms of, I mean, there's no mechanical advantage to squeezing, but there's no mechanical disadvantage.
John:
And the turning thing is good.
John:
Inside it is a cylinder with very, very small, widely spaced holes to get a good, you know, permanent energy is great going there.
Casey:
So why couldn't you find a reasonable facsimile of this?
Casey:
So, for example, I put a $13 item in the chat room, which seems to me like it is roughly the same thing you're discussing.
Casey:
It's totally different.
Casey:
What are you talking about?
Casey:
Why is it totally different?
Casey:
It's a vertical thing.
John:
Look at this little knob.
John:
Look at this little plastic, uncomfortable knob.
John:
It has to be big, round, grippy, oxo, rubberized.
John:
That's the whole point of the thing.
John:
and i don't even know how where the cheese goes in this thing or how the gripping would be and like that big protrusion coming out of it you can't grip it from multiple angles look at the second picture it shows exactly what happens yeah no that's that's no good like i don't understand what that big uh orange thing is sticking out there now you can't grip it like you can't grip it from any angle because it's not a cylinder it's a big protrusion thing and also the uh the holes that's not the right the metal cylinder that's not the right shape for the grating the holes in this thing are very small
John:
I just buy pre-graded Parmesan cheese, and it's awesome.
Casey:
That is the most Marco answer I've ever heard.
John:
Well, so here's the thing.
John:
Pre-graded costs even more money, first of all.
John:
But second of all, whatever machine they have, like in Whole Foods, that grates it for you, grates it too fine for my taste.
John:
It's like tiny pieces of hair.
John:
It's too wispy.
John:
I want one step up from that.
John:
I like the texture the Oxo makes.
Yeah.
John:
I don't know what I'm going to do.
John:
I mean, technically, when I'm saving the bodies of these things... Wait, what?
John:
So when they all die, in theory, I will have the raw materials to make some kind of Frankenstein cordless drill-powered... I want an electric one.
John:
I don't know how to do this by hand at all.
John:
I like just an electric one.
John:
All I need is something that can turn with lots of torque, but not too quickly, and then I can just shove the cheese down into.
John:
So I might go all steampunk on this eventually, but...
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
We have the technology?
Casey:
We can build it?
Casey:
Something like that?
John:
Yeah, for the next, let's say, three and a half to six years, I think I'm good on my... I'm assuming these last maybe three years.
John:
Maybe I'm really wrong about that.
John:
Anyway, we'll find out.
Marco:
Can you commission somebody to custom mold you a replacement?
Casey:
Yeah, like 3D printed.
Casey:
You can do anything with a 3D printer.
Marco:
Yeah, can you hire, like, a maker?
John:
I mean, I should show you this.
John:
Like, I look at it.
John:
It's amazing how unrepairable it is because it's a tiny, flat piece of plastic connected.
John:
It's, like, glued in.
John:
And you can't fasten it any other way because for the cheese grater to work, it has to close completely.
John:
Like, you have to be able to close that thing down completely for, like, the last little bit of cheese.
John:
You have to basically get that cylinder so that it is... Basically, the plastic is basically touching the metal thing.
John:
Otherwise, you end up with that part of cheese that you can never press against the grater, right?
John:
So it has to close completely, completely, which means that it has to be, like, a perfect... You know, it has to be just the little C-shaped thing with a flat plastic flap coming directly out of it.
John:
If you tried to attach it with any kind of glue or fastener or anything to strengthen it, it wouldn't close all the way, and now you've got...
John:
Basically a non-functional grater where you can never grate that last little bit of cheese.
John:
So it's not a good design.
John:
They kind of messed up, but what they replaced it with is worse.
John:
So I might just have to go and look on eBay and see if I can find some more of these.
Casey:
I just did, and I didn't come up with anything in the first research.
John:
I think I bought like five or six back when I bought them, and maybe that wasn't enough.
John:
You cornered the market.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And none of them were $75.
John:
Let me tell you, they were all like $12 each.
Yeah.
Casey:
I just can't wait for some listener of this show, either now or in like four years, goes digging through their junk pile and realizing they too have a cache of vertically oriented oxo.
Casey:
They're going to have a cache.
John:
They're going to have one and it'll be broken.
John:
Because they break.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
I am very happy that I am not this particular about my tools.
Casey:
Remember this when we have a two-hour conversation about my computer.
John:
I'm sure I wouldn't be as particular, A, if it didn't have RSI, and B, if it didn't eat quite so much Parmesan cheese.
John:
But unfortunately, both of those things I'm afflicted with.
John:
I'm so sorry.
Marco:
Can you get a mechanical grader or an electric grader of some kind?
Marco:
Do those exist for home use?
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
I would like to get something that is...
John:
Not powered by something other than my hands, but I haven't found one that does the job.
John:
Lots of people recommend food processors.
John:
I have many food processors.
John:
I have big ones and small ones.
John:
The problem with most electric things is they go too fast and or the holes are the wrong size.
John:
Going too fast is bad because then you get heat and friction.
John:
You can't have any heat.
John:
You have to basically turn it.
John:
Like at hand speed, you don't want to produce any heat.
John:
You just want to, you know, grate the cheese slowly.
John:
And then the hole size, like the holes on this thing are very, very small, like smaller than the smallest size of the side of a box grater.
John:
But the same shape as the big side of a box grater, like the little, I don't know, crater, inverted crater.
John:
What do places like Whole Foods, what do they use?
John:
Just a big thing?
John:
Yeah, they must have a machine.
John:
Obviously, there's probably not someone back there doing it by hand.
John:
Or if they do have a machine, it's probably with a really big crank, like a meat grinder-sized machine.
John:
I don't know what they use, but it's way too fine for me.
John:
They might use, like, you know the...
John:
the puckered side of a box grader where it's like a cross is cut in the metal and then the four triangles are pushed out a little bit i think so where it's like a slicing edge no it's like it's uh like i said make a picture a piece of metal and now cut a plus sign in it right and now press on the plus sign from the inside so that the four little triangles formed by like the plus sign bend outward into like a little pyramid
John:
I've never seen this.
Casey:
Oh, are you talking about like the handheld like swordy looking thing?
John:
Oh my God.
John:
Chat room, tell me I did not describe this exactly correctly.
Marco:
Are there just one of those on the side or are there like a whole bunch?
John:
A whole bunch.
John:
I think I know what you mean, but I've never used that before.
John:
Anyway, I think they might be using something like that, but whatever they use, it makes it incredibly fine.
John:
I mean, you know, it's like, it's just, it's very wispy.
John:
It's not, it's not bad.
John:
It's just not particularly to my taste.
John:
So I prefer it a little bit, a little bit bigger than that.
John:
Just use more.
John:
It's not, that's not, it's, it's a texture thing.
John:
A microplane.
John:
That's what I'm thinking of.
John:
I'm thinking of a microplane.
John:
Microplanes are awesome.
John:
No, it's not a microplane.
John:
The cost of like pre, pre grated Parmesan cheese is so expensive.
John:
Like, like pre cut anything at Whole Foods.
Marco:
Well, yeah.
Marco:
So, so since everyone will tell us, is there a reason you don't use a microplane style grater?
John:
It doesn't make the right shavings.
John:
I have a microplane grader.
John:
It doesn't make it the right – it's not how I like it.
John:
I guess you're stuck.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I'll say.
John:
I've got a couple years on the clock yet.
Marco:
We hope.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
You know, just earlier today, I think it was, I listened to 99PI, and they were talking about how we're going to eventually run out of sand.
Casey:
And I don't think that I personally have to worry about that.
Casey:
But I am very worried, John, about when you run out of cheese graters.
John:
Speaking of the ambiguity, this cheese grater computer has outlived many of those plastic actual cheese graters.
John:
So it's clearly the king of all cheese graters.
Casey:
Something like that.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Also in the show notes, for follow-up, deviation from the Ive design philosophy.
Casey:
This sounds like a John thing to me.
Casey:
Tell me what's going on here.
John:
I was thinking more about our discussion of Johnny Ive from last week and with his sort of philosophy potentially exiting the company with him.
John:
We'll see.
John:
We'll see what changes in the design of stuff that comes out.
John:
But one way his...
John:
uh, design has, uh, made itself known is like it extends everywhere.
John:
So I was thinking of the Apple mouse that I think Marco is using right now.
John:
And maybe you too, Casey, like the mouse.
John:
And I was thinking about it because it's magic mouse.
John:
Yep.
John:
I was thinking about it because I was having dark thoughts about like,
John:
Who was that?
John:
It was because someone, Marco, someone sent both of us that third-party monitor, right?
Marco:
Yeah, the planer, iX, whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, we've seen it before.
Marco:
I don't think Macs can easily drive it.
Marco:
I don't know, it has those giant bezels and everything.
Marco:
Who cares?
John:
Yeah, someone was saying it's basically like a 5K display right from an iMac, complete with the little hole for the camera, but there's no actual camera there in the glass bonnet surface.
John:
Anyway, I was having dark thoughts about it like...
John:
I can't believe Apple's going to sell you a computer, and then the only option is a $7,000 monitor or whatever, and they don't sell monitors.
John:
It would be like if they didn't sell a mouse and a keyboard, but they do sell mice and keyboards, and you can buy them with your computer.
John:
You can even pick which one you want, and they continue to make them despite the fact that it's much easier to find a reasonable replacement mouse or keyboard than it is to find a reasonable replacement monitor.
John:
And so I was thinking about their peripherals, like obviously the keyboard at this point, like all of the margins are tucked in on the thing.
John:
Like it's basically just a bunch of keys floating in space.
John:
Like how are those keys even there?
John:
Is there any space around them and between them?
John:
It's just keys, right?
John:
It's really boiled down to its essence again, the Johnny I philosophy.
John:
But the mouse I was thinking about, like,
John:
It is a very... You know, it fits with the Johnny Ive era design aesthetic.
John:
Because there are different ways a mouse could be designed.
John:
I think we had a show in the past where we had that diagram of all different ways people can hold a mouse.
John:
And...
John:
It's not like the Apple mouse is, you know, designed badly, but it is designed for a particular way of using it.
John:
Like, it's a very low mouse, right?
John:
And some people like a sort of low-profile mouse, and some people like a bigger thing that sort of fills your palm, right?
John:
Microsoft has always made very large mice, and logic for that matter.
John:
Like, they're sort of made for you to grip under your entire hand, and it's going to be...
John:
pressing against the back of your palm, you know, gripping.
John:
Whereas the Apple one is very slim and very low and very minimalist.
John:
And it fits with, if you put it next to Apple's computer, it looks like it fits.
John:
It's next to that keyboard.
John:
It makes sense.
John:
You know, obviously there's no cord on it.
John:
It's almost featureless.
John:
It looks like a flattened piece of sushi, right?
John:
I mean, you look at it and it looks like a little piece of art.
John:
And I was thinking with I've gone, if Apple's design philosophy changes a little bit,
John:
How far would be too far?
John:
And I was thinking even in terms of the mouse, because if Apple came out with a new mouse, which they do once every... What are they on a decade plan?
John:
Once every decade and a half, they come out with a new mouse, which is not unheard of.
John:
Apple does traditionally come out with new mice.
John:
Imagine if it was...
John:
it's more of the shape of like a microsoft mouse or a logic mouse not in terms of the details but in terms of like it's no longer a super low profile mouse like i would say you know for my style of mousing it would be more ergonomic for me i don't like them to be that low because that's not how i hold the mouse right and you know if you make a low one the people who want a high mouse aren't going to like it and vice versa so it's not like it's an incorrect or correct choice but say apple did make one it was still beautiful and apple detailed and
John:
Like, it still looked like an elegant piece of art, but it was basically fatter.
John:
Like, it was the fat mouse to go with, like, the fat nano.
John:
It was bigger and fatter, and it filled your hand.
John:
It would be less elegant and less minimalist and less simple because, like, if you could make a mouse slim and low, why would you make it big and fat?
John:
And kind of the same way with the remote.
John:
If I can make a remote the size of a piece of chewing gum, why would I make it bigger?
John:
And the answer is, obviously, because people, human hands are big and chewing gum is small.
John:
And anyway, setting aside the remote for now.
John:
there's an argument to be made in the mouse that if you made it bigger, it might be easier for people to grip and find and use and manipulate, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But if Apple did that, people would look at that fat mouse kind of like the fat Nano and go, boy, Apple really needed Johnny Ive because he left and they made this disgusting...
John:
mouse that looks like a Microsoft mouse.
John:
It looks like a Logitech mouse.
John:
It doesn't look like an Apple mouse at all.
John:
And what I'm driving at is like the design philosophy evidenced by Apple's product during the Johnny Ive era has become so synonymous with Apple because he's been here so long and is such an important influence on so many important products that
John:
that that's what people think of as Apple-like.
John:
So even if Apple, the company, makes a Microsoft-style mouse, and even if it's a great mouse and people love it, they're going to look at it and say, ugh, that's not like, it was better when Johnny Ive was here because look how inelegant this looks.
John:
Look how bloated it looks.
John:
Look how silly and comically large it looks.
John:
Like, you know, the Ive mouse was elegant and this is not.
John:
And I think that would be a shame because although the design philosophy embodied by Apple's current products and its past products for many years is a great one, it is not the only reasonable design philosophy, especially when it comes to peripherals.
John:
So I feel like our hope for the remote and maybe external keyboards and possibly mice, depending on how you feel about the current one,
John:
hinges on the public's willingness to accept anything that is not in line with the Johnny Ive minimalist essentialism design aesthetic.
John:
And I'm afraid that even if Apple makes a great product, but it's not a, you know, sort of a Zen garden sculpture, beautiful Ive style thing, that they're going to get backlash for it.
John:
And I think that would be a shame.
Marco:
Well, we do see bits and pieces of pragmatism over appearance peeking through here and there.
Marco:
One of the greatest examples in recent years are the iPhone smart battery cases, which by all objective accounts are kind of ugly.
Marco:
They have that weird hump on the back.
Marco:
The first generation had the weird centered mid-hump, and the current generation has the weird bottom hump, which I think is even uglier.
Marco:
but they do that for a few highly functional reasons.
Marco:
And we all did make fun of it when it came out, but it's actually a pretty reasonably successful product as far as I can tell.
Marco:
We've owned a couple in our household, and they're good products.
Marco:
And Apple, it seems, was willing to make that tradeoff of like, look, we can't make this...
Marco:
you know beautiful and have it still function the way it needs to function so they just didn't make it beautiful they did you know they kind of did the best they could with what they had to work with and and it came out and it's a very useful utilitarian product i think looking at the new mac pro case and
Marco:
It is not attractive.
Marco:
It's worse in pictures, but it's also not attractive in person.
Marco:
It's very much a utilitarian design.
Marco:
This is a big tower with a bunch of weird holes in the front.
Marco:
It's giant.
Marco:
It's heavy.
Marco:
It's bulky.
Marco:
It's weird looking.
Marco:
But it's all those things for utilitarian reasons.
Marco:
And for the customers who need that and who buy that, the utility of it is more important than the aesthetics.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
Clearly, like Apple, even before I've officially left, Apple is able to occasionally let that peek through.
Marco:
And it seems like maybe in recent years, they're regaining their, what I would describe as confidence.
Marco:
to ship something that doesn't look incredibly pretty, but is that way for functional reasons.
Marco:
It takes a certain degree of confidence to do that.
Marco:
They have to be able to ship something with a straight face that they know many of us are going to say, ooh, that's ugly, because they have to be confident enough in their design to be like, no, look, we know it's ugly, but it is this way for reasons.
Marco:
It was a trade-off, and this is what came out.
Marco:
And so I don't think it's that unreasonable.
Marco:
to predict that maybe they'll be doing more of that.
Marco:
Maybe they have kind of seen the light and have gotten enough customer feedback and enough sales data and everything over the last few years to be able to revert certain decisions.
Marco:
It's clear that Mac Pro is one of the biggest examples of that.
Marco:
We'll see and we'll talk about later what might be happening with the laptops in that department.
Marco:
But I think...
Marco:
I think Apple had a really rough period where a whole lot of decisions were being made for aesthetics over utility.
Marco:
And we told them about it over and over and over again, and their customers told them about it over and over and over again.
Marco:
In some of these cases, their repair data told them about it.
Marco:
And I think there was a bad period that we are clearly on our way out of, that we're already partially out of it, and there seems like there's more to come.
Marco:
So I don't think it's that unreasonable to expect that...
Marco:
it actually would we actually would have a chance of something like a more ergonomic mouse although honestly i like the mouse just fine but i recognize a lot of people don't um so we actually i think we do have a chance of stuff like that i think we do have a chance that the next apple tv remote might be more ergonomic for instance uh you know i think we we were in a dark period but apple has clearly shown recently that they are willing to put utility first with some of their new designs sometimes
John:
that's why i was entertaining the possibility because it seems like it is a possibility but i think they'll get backlash and i guess now that i think about it actually is mostly focused on on you know you're thinking of you know cheese graters and oxo and all this stuff on things that you grab with your hand which there aren't many of them obviously the phone itself is a thing that you grab but there are limitations there where you don't you can't really make it strange and knobbly because it does have to fit in pockets and there are other concerns about it right but
John:
but for peripherals, like for remote controls, for keyboards and for mice, for things that, like, it's your interface to the computer, you know, indirect controls that you grab, kind of like controls in cars, the steering wheel, the shift lever, the turn stocks, all that other stuff.
John:
Like, anything that you manipulate with your hands to make the stuff work, it's the place of highest tension between...
John:
making something look beautiful, so it looks nice in your product shots, and so when it's in a museum 50 years from now, we're going to ooze and ahs, and making something that's good to use with your hands.
John:
And there's not much of an intersection there.
John:
Like, it's why OXO products tend to look so ugly, right?
John:
Because, you know, the things that are easy and good to grip and manipulate tend not to be beautiful, minimalist sculptures.
John:
Like, those are slippery or slim or pointy or...
John:
don't match the negative space created by a gripping hand because the negative space created by a gripping hand is ugly.
John:
As you know, if you grab a lump of clay and squeeze it real hard and then open your hand and look what's left, it's not a beautiful sculpture.
John:
But that's the inside of your hand.
John:
So I'm not saying a mouse has to look like a giant snail turd like many of them do, but there are multiple styles of mice.
John:
You could make a fairly elegant mouse in a different style that is more of the hand-filling kind
John:
But I feel like if Apple did that, there would be a surprising amount of backlash, especially given that people would get used to it and everyone used mice like that and it would be fine.
John:
It would be better for the half of the population likes it one way and worse for the people like it the other way.
John:
But all you would hear about is how Apple made an ugly mouse.
Casey:
I do think it's worth noting, though, that – and I think I speak for both of you – that we're not going to see, you know, like a pendulum swing dramatically the other direction.
Casey:
I mean, this design department has certainly been under Ives' leadership for, what, 20 years or something like that?
Casey:
A long time.
Casey:
And so I would certainly not expect – and I don't think you guys are trying to imply that you do expect –
Casey:
I don't think any of us expect that there's going to be some dramatic turn where you're going to see like the back of a snail for a mouse and things like that.
Casey:
But I do concur that it is certainly going to be interesting watching how often we see function over form going forward.
Casey:
Because one of the things that I think the three of us agree on is, especially when it comes to things like the thickness of devices, it seemed that it was form over function.
Casey:
And
Marco:
And so I'm curious to see how that changes going forward.
Marco:
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Casey:
You have somehow fallen upon.
Casey:
It just happened to you, Marco.
Casey:
You have fallen upon a new iPhone and a new watch.
Casey:
Question mark.
Casey:
What's going on here?
Marco:
As you know, I'm running the betas on my main devices.
Marco:
I'm also working on a good mid-cycle update for Overcast for iOS 12 and watchOS 5, the existing non-beta versions.
Marco:
And there's been a bug that I've been trying to replicate that people keep reporting where when you're doing watch local playback, sometimes the seek back or seek forward buttons will skip instead to the next episode and will lose your position in the one you were in.
Marco:
which is a pretty serious bug.
Marco:
And I was trying to replicate it on my beta devices, and I just couldn't.
Marco:
Now, it is impossible to downgrade an Apple Watch from the beta.
Marco:
And theoretically, maybe I could bring it to an Apple store and have them send it out and have them do it.
Marco:
But I'm nowhere near an Apple store.
Marco:
That would be a big pain, etc.
Marco:
So that wasn't really an option for me.
Marco:
I also didn't want to go that long without it for various testing reasons.
Marco:
I also have this other problem.
Marco:
that I only have my one iPhone here with me at the beach, and I'm doing a lot of development, and I don't have an iOS 12 test device.
Marco:
So I briefly decided to borrow Tiff's phone and Tiff's Apple Watch to try to run a test.
Marco:
She did not appreciate this at all.
Marco:
So I really needed something.
Marco:
I needed test devices that I could test the regular GM version and the beta.
Marco:
So I have my regular ones that I could test the betas on, but I really needed another test device.
Marco:
I needed another Apple Watch running watchOS 5 that I wouldn't put on the beta, and I needed a phone running iOS 12 to pair it to.
Marco:
What would you do in this situation?
Casey:
Well, what I would do because I'm cheap is that I would go back to my house and go get ones that I already had.
Casey:
But I'm cheap.
Casey:
If I'm Marco, I would next day air myself some new devices.
John:
I think that's what most developers do is they keep their old phones to use as test devices instead of immediately selling them.
Marco:
I do keep a lot of my old phones, not all of them, but a lot of them.
Marco:
I, however, didn't keep any old Apple watches.
Marco:
Like I have my Series Zero for just like nostalgia's sake in a drawer that I haven't powered on and the battery is probably deeply discharged and totally unusable now.
Marco:
It probably won't even boot anymore.
Marco:
But that happens with Apple Watches.
Marco:
If you leave them in a drawer for a few years and don't charge them, you will never be able to charge them again.
Marco:
They'll never power on again in all likelihood.
Marco:
The battery totally dies.
Marco:
I also have this other problem.
Marco:
I never got an iPhone SE.
Marco:
For the last few years, my 4-inch test device was my old iPhone 5S.
Marco:
And that worked fine, except that now the 5S no longer works on the new version of the OS.
Marco:
So my 4-inch test device, which I left at home.
Marco:
I didn't bring to the beach.
Marco:
My 4-inch test device is no longer going to be a useful test device once iOS 13 ships, and I have to run that on it.
Marco:
So I actually kind of wanted an iPhone SE.
Marco:
So I know it's discontinued, but I went on Amazon.
Marco:
I'm like, you know, what do they actually cost?
Marco:
And it turns out you can get an iPhone SE, not refurbished, because that means more, but renewed, which means very little.
Marco:
It's basically very used.
Marco:
You can get a renewed iPhone SE unlocked on Amazon for about $120.
Marco:
And that's really pretty good, I thought.
Marco:
So I put one of those in my cart and I thought, okay, now I got to have an Apple Watch to pair to it.
Marco:
What do you use Apple Watches cost?
Marco:
And I didn't want to go super low end for the Apple Watch because the build and run cycle on Apple Watches improves drastically as you go more and more recent.
Marco:
But I thought, you know, I'm probably going to have to, if I want something cheap, I'm probably going to have to go Series 2.
Marco:
But it turns out you can get Series 3 Apple Watches, which is only, you know, last year's model, basically.
Marco:
You can get a Series 3 Apple Watch.
Marco:
I got Series 3 42mm cellular in stainless steel.
Marco:
for 240 dollars wow that's pretty cheap you know i the only reason i got the stainless steel and cellular was it was only 20 bucks more to get steel and cellular i'm like all right sure and so i got both these in they came in the you know the kind of packaging if you if you sell your phone or watch to apple or gazelle or one of those companies they send you basically a sheet of cardboard with shrink wrap over it and you just kind of shove your device into that you know those things
John:
yeah yeah yeah amazon ships a lot of stuff in that it's like we put it's like when you're injured and they put you on one of those stiff backboard things and then just like wrap you with saran wrap so you're stuck to it that's how your products come exactly so both the watch and the phone which came from different companies they both came in those kind of just like you know plastic hold like sticking it to a piece of cardboard that's how apple intended them to be presented to the customers i believe they spent a lot of time working on that presentation but
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
It's a piece of brown corrugated cardboard and then saran wrap.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
When you have an entire iPhone for $120, you don't get such luxuries as genuine Apple chargers.
Marco:
It was shipped with a generic, definitely not MFI, lightning cable and little USB power brick.
Yeah.
John:
It comes with a wire code hanger that's already been unwound for you, so you can just shove one end to the lightning connector and shove the other end into an outlet.
John:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
And the Apple Watch has clearly been put on a generic knockoff sport band.
Marco:
It looks very similar to the Apple white sport band.
Marco:
And if I didn't own many white Apple sport bands, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference, maybe.
Marco:
But because I own them and I have one right here, right next to it, I can tell there's very much a difference.
Marco:
You would tell when it starts to melt on your wrist.
Marco:
yeah but still you know i it's still an apple watch and the apple watch it did appear to come with a genuine apple uh charging cable because i don't think it's as easy to come by generic apple watch charging cables as it is for other other things did you look on the back of the apple watch to make sure it doesn't say a p p e l or anything like that
John:
I mean, no, it's real.
Marco:
And it's stainless steel.
Marco:
Is it filled with sawdust?
Marco:
Does it turn on?
Marco:
The thing is, it works.
Marco:
So both of these things, I plugged them in, and they both work fine.
Marco:
There's a few dings on the cases.
Marco:
The iPhone especially has a corner dent on one corner.
Marco:
But everything works.
Marco:
There were no scratches on the screens.
Marco:
Everything is fine.
Marco:
They charged up.
Marco:
The battery seemed to be totally fine.
Marco:
There were a couple of interesting takeaways for me using this phone for the last couple of days.
Marco:
I haven't been using it full-time.
Marco:
I didn't put my SIM in it, but I have been playing with it a lot in the house, leaving my big iPhone XS behind on a countertop and just taking the SE with me and playing with it for a while.
Marco:
And a couple of things jump out at me from this thing.
Marco:
So number one, first of all, I think it's hilarious that the Apple Watch costs a lot more than the phone.
Marco:
But I still think that $240 for last year's model of stainless steel cellular 42mm Apple Watch is a really good deal.
Marco:
And it kind of struck me like...
Marco:
If you're willing to not have the latest and greatest, and if you're willing to go used, you can get surprising discounts on Apple stuff.
Marco:
If you would have just asked me before I looked how much I thought these things would cost, I would have guessed substantially higher than what they actually do.
Marco:
So that's number one.
Marco:
It's kind of cool that this is available, and like...
Marco:
for 120 bucks, this is a lot of phone, actually.
Marco:
Like, it's not a bad deal at all.
Marco:
I would imagine, like, if I was, if I really wanted to get something a little more versatile, I would probably go for an old iPhone 7, which probably isn't that much, you know, maybe those might be like 200 bucks or something, I don't know, I haven't looked that up, but like,
Marco:
I was surprised like how nice it was for that price and the watch, especially, you know, $240 to get what was a year ago, I think a $700 configuration is pretty awesome.
Marco:
So a few other things out of me just for, you know, fun discussion sake, um, the, when you've had a series for Apple watch, uh,
Marco:
And you've had the pulled-in corners, like the more rounded corners, the shrunk bezels, and the Apple Watch faces that go more edge-to-edge.
Marco:
The old Apple Watch looks incredibly old when you see the screen turn on.
Sigh.
Marco:
Thanks, buddy.
Marco:
You're welcome.
Casey:
Still on the Series 3.
Marco:
But see, you haven't gotten used to it.
Marco:
When you go to the Series 4, it really is, especially using my favorite face, the utility one, the basic round clock with all the good stuff, that face looks comical on the old one when you're used to the new one because it just gets this massive black border around it.
Marco:
So Series 4 was actually a surprising upgrade in a lot of ways.
Marco:
But I will say otherwise, it's fine.
Marco:
It performs well and it's just as buggy as the Apple Watch always is.
Marco:
The iPhone SE has actually been pleasantly nice.
Marco:
I haven't used this size phone for more than five minutes of testing since it was new, since I owned the iPhone 5S.
Marco:
And it's actually a really good size in a lot of ways.
Marco:
I'm surprised how well certain things still work on it.
Marco:
Like, I'm surprised certain things, you know, first of all, you pick it up, it looks awesome, and it feels awesome.
Marco:
And I heard on one of our friend's podcasts, I forget which one, I apologize, but I heard recently there was a discussion of, like, what do you think is Johnny Ives, like, what do you think are Johnny Ives' greatest designs?
Marco:
And I would put very high on the list the iPhone 5S.
Marco:
I remember when John Gruber reviewed the iPhone 5, he said in his review that it was such a nice object.
Marco:
It was the nicest object he owned.
Marco:
The iPhone 5S, I think, refined a lot of it.
Marco:
And the SE took away the polished chamfered edge, which made it less nice.
Marco:
So that's why I think from a design perspective, the iPhone 5S was kind of the peak of it.
Marco:
And it is just such a great device.
Marco:
It is timeless looking.
Marco:
I still think it looks good.
Marco:
Even, you know, holding this SE in my hand, it's an old phone now, very old now, and it's based on the even older 5S.
Marco:
But it is this wonderful, like, the space gray with the black, you know, little cellular windows on top and bottom.
Marco:
This is a fantastic, timeless, really nice design.
Marco:
And if you consider design to be the combination of how it looks and how it works...
Marco:
I think the iPhone 5S really was the peak of that entire class of iPhone before they got big.
Marco:
I really, really enjoy this device as a physical object.
Marco:
And secondly, using it.
Marco:
Now, I'm accustomed to the bigger phones now, so certain things like typing are really hard.
Marco:
Once you're accustomed to the big phone, it's really hard to go down a size for typing.
Marco:
I made so many errors just typing my passcode and stuff.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Once you get past that or once you get accustomed to that, the interface actually scales down fairly well on most things.
Marco:
There were a few screens here and there that like something would fall off the bottom because nobody tested it.
Marco:
But it actually scales really well.
Marco:
And certain things like deleting a mail message by swiping.
Marco:
I know it's a stupid thing, but it's something I'm going to do all day long.
Marco:
It feels much smoother and better on the 5S than it does on my 10S.
Marco:
Or, I'm sorry, on the SE, on my 10S.
Marco:
And I don't know if it's because it has fewer pixels, maybe it's running things at a higher frame rate because it has so many fewer pixels to drive, or if it's something about the digitizer that's different, or that it's just my fingers moving less distance because it's a smaller screen.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But certain things about this size just feel really good.
Marco:
And it's, like, feelings that I've missed since I used this size on a regular basis.
Marco:
So, I mean, I don't really have any conclusion here.
Marco:
I'm not suggesting anybody go back and use this, because it is, you know, it's an iPhone 6S internals, so it is kind of the bottom of what's supported by iOS 13, and I would expect iOS 14 probably won't support it.
Marco:
But it was kind of nice going back to the size just to play around with and to see, like...
Marco:
In certain ways, it feels like the past.
Marco:
When you view certain things and you see quite how narrow your text column is, or Instagram looks hilarious by comparison, but it is actually a really nice-feeling phone.
Marco:
And for $120, surprisingly usable.
Marco:
So that's it.
Marco:
That's all I had on this segment.
John:
I feel like this we've talked so much about phone sizes on this show, but it's it's an issue that's never going to go away if phones continue to be things with screens on that you hold in your hands, because there's always that tension between there's the size of your hand and the motions that are most comfortable for adults.
John:
hands and fingers to make and there's a range there obviously because people have different size hands but still it's you know you could define that range and then there's the screen where we want to see more stuff all the time and you have to find the sweet spot between how much stuff do you want to see and how comfortable is it to hold in your hand to manipulate to stick in your pocket and
John:
those two things will never meet.
John:
There is no perfect compromise.
John:
It will always kind of be oscillating.
John:
So at any point, if we're in a big phone error or a small phone error or somewhere in between, you pick another extreme, you will find things about it that are better than whatever size phone you're using because those two things are always in conflict with each other.
John:
There is no point where...
John:
They'll, you know, find each other exactly in the middle and will be like, I will never notice any benefit by going smaller or larger.
John:
You will notice benefits going larger and you'll notice benefits going smaller and disadvantages.
John:
And, you know, it's it's a constant compromise until we get Apple glasses or whatever, where we can sort of divorce the go back to an indirect interface, divorce the I want to see as much information as possible, but I don't want to have something the size of a brick in my pocket.
John:
And, you know, I can't put an iPad there.
Marco:
in my inside jacket pocket because i'm not david smith that's another thing like it feels this thing feels like nothing in my pocket because now i'm because i'm used to the 10s and before that the 10 the 5 or the se feels like nothing it feels like it's smaller than my wallet i mean it's like it's really very small and it's it's very lightweight compared you know the new phones are surprisingly heavy like when you feel the old ones you realize quite how light the old ones were
Marco:
And the five generation was an especially light generation of phone because it didn't have the glass back.
Marco:
And it feels so good in so many ways.
Marco:
Like the sleep-wake button's in a good spot.
Marco:
There's a headphone jack on the bottom.
Marco:
The volume up and down buttons feel great.
Marco:
There was that rumor that came out, I think, last week.
Marco:
We didn't have time to cover it in our show, but there was a rumor, I think, from Ming-Chi Kuo that either this year's or I think next year's iPhones, the one that I use, the XS line, the screen was going to get a little bit smaller, and in the Max line, the screen was going to get a little bit bigger.
Marco:
At first, I thought, that's such a slap in the face for XS owners.
Marco:
Here, you get to either have a smaller thing or pay even more and get a much bigger thing.
Marco:
But actually, I think I might take that trade off because it turns out like if you can take what you already have and get most of that for a little bit smaller, it's kind of nice.
Marco:
I really like the way this tiny phone feels.
Marco:
And you know what?
Marco:
The XS is a little bit big.
Marco:
So I think maybe I would enjoy going a little bit smaller than that.
John:
That's sort of the bouncing around I was talking about where, you know, you're sort of – there are extremes and you're trying to find a sweet spot, but you're always oscillating back and forth.
John:
Those oscillations let you from generation to generation or maybe two-year or three-year gap or whatever let you get a phone.
John:
And no matter which direction you're going, you'll be like –
John:
oh, there's some aspect of this that I find agreeable where it's like the other screen felt too cramped or this feels better in my pocket.
John:
There's always an advantage for you, but then also a disadvantage so that when they oscillate slightly back, you know, maybe the oscillations are getting smaller or narrowing down on a compromise that's reasonable.
John:
But I think the oscillations are an important part of the product line.
John:
Like there should never come a time where Apple feels like they have exactly correctly struck the balance between...
John:
size weights green real estate all of those things like they always they should always oscillate because the oscillation will make a any new phone in any any oscillation any direction feel good and interesting and make people not regret their purchase and then you know eventually when what the negative assets get annoying in two years they'll buy another phone
Casey:
Declan, well, both the kids use a some iPhone app.
Casey:
I don't even remember what it's called as like a little noise machine while they're sleeping.
Casey:
And Declan's using a 5S as his noise machine has for like four years now or whatever it's been.
Casey:
And and I don't often pick it up.
Casey:
Usually I just leave it on his bedside table and just interact with it on the on the
Casey:
table but when i do pick it up every time i do i'm just gobsmacked by how perfectly it fits in my hand and maybe your hand is bigger than mine maybe your hand is smaller than mine but for me the the five almost at the se the five s just fits perfectly in my hand and so for a fleeting moment i think to myself why the hell am i carrying this tremendous like
Casey:
phablet, which it really isn't, but it feels like a phablet by comparison of an iPhone 10 in my pocket every day.
Casey:
But then if I ever open any app but the sleep machine app or the noisemaker app, and I can see like six words of text on screen, then suddenly I remember why I have this comparatively enormous phone in my pocket.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And yeah, I think you're right, John, that, you know, I don't think we've struck the exact right balance.
Casey:
I do think the 10 is a little bit big for my taste, but, you know, at least I'm not one of those, you know, plus or max monsters, you know, like Mike Hurley is.
Casey:
I don't know how that guy survives.
Marco:
It's funny, like, you know, when I first started using it, I think the same thing, like, wow, what a tiny little window that I'm seeing all this content in.
Marco:
But as I play with it, it's so damn fast.
Marco:
For the phone that is the lowest-end supported phone for the new OS, it sure is fast on iOS 12.
Marco:
It is...
Marco:
It's surprising how fast it is, and it just – I'm not benchmarking, but just the way it feels to do things.
Marco:
Like I mentioned the mail thing earlier.
Marco:
And again, I don't know whether it's just that my fingers need to travel less distance, so it's just faster in wall clock time to do certain things or not.
Marco:
But it just feels – it's almost like I've been driving an SUV for the last five years, and then I get into a Miata.
Marco:
It just feels so nimble because you can just fly around it so fast because you're not spending any time adjusting your grip at all or reaching across long distances at all.
Marco:
It's just really, really nice and surprisingly fast in basic operation for such an old device.
Marco:
So I actually like, I mean, you know, I don't think I could ever switch to one, you know, that's this small full time again, just because I do so often use things that really want a bigger screen.
Marco:
But boy, is it nice to play around with this sometime.
Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Boosted for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So you have new toys.
Casey:
I want a new toy, guys.
Casey:
What was it, yesterday that Apple announced that they have done me some good things and they have done me some bad things.
Casey:
So Apple has refreshed the MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
Sort of.
Casey:
Sort of.
Casey:
But they have killed my beloved adorable.
Casey:
The MacBook One, also known as the MacBook Adorable, also known as just plain MacBook.
Marco:
The 12-inch MacBook.
Casey:
It's dead, you guys.
Casey:
Mine is fine.
Casey:
I mean, it's still slower than shit, but it's dead.
Casey:
Officially, it's dead.
Casey:
And so I don't know what to do.
Casey:
I would like to talk about what I should do from here.
Casey:
But before we get to that, we should probably run through the changes that have come from Apple over the last 24 hours.
Casey:
So the MacBook Air now has True Tone.
Casey:
It is now down $100.
Casey:
So instead of being $1,200, it is now $1,100.
Casey:
And importantly, $999 for students.
Casey:
So that's a big deal.
Casey:
The 13-inch MacBook Pro is now on 8th generation quad-core CPUs.
Casey:
It is $1,299 to $1,300, which is the same price as the Escape once was.
Casey:
And like I said, the MacBook Adorable is dead.
Casey:
The MacBook Escape also dead.
Casey:
Apparently, Apple just really hates our nicknames almost as much as Stephen Hackett does.
Marco:
I will say, though, there is a significant reframing going on here about what happened to the Escape.
Marco:
The Escape is not dead.
Marco:
There are still two very different 13-inch MacBook Pro models, one of which uses 15-watt TDP CPUs, one of which uses 28-watt CPUs.
Marco:
The 15-watt one still has only two ports.
Marco:
The 28-watt has four ports.
Marco:
What happened is not that the Escape went away.
Marco:
What happened is that the Escape got a touch bar.
John:
Well, it's not the escape anymore.
John:
Exactly.
John:
You lost the escape.
John:
The escape is definitely dead.
John:
Because the MacBook escape was, yes, the computer with all the slow stuff inside it, but it was the one with the escape key.
John:
And so that one's dead.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
Well, the name is dead, but the computer lives on.
Marco:
They're still selling two very different computers as kind of the same thing.
Marco:
it just had two different price points but it's like oh this one has only two ports and this one has four ports and the cpu clock speeds are very different uh the internals are completely differently laid out like it's a very different machine so the escape is not dead we just can't call it that anymore because it got a touch bar but it is still what do we call it the touch bar escape our names are our names are getting as unwieldy as apple's actual names i know right touch bar escape late 2019
Casey:
I like what Style Dash suggested in the chat, which is MacBook unescaped.
Marco:
Actually, I'll answer that later during Ask A2P.
Marco:
But anyway, so these are some really odd updates.
Marco:
I mean, so first of all, the MacBook Air got, quote, updated.
Marco:
But the only changes are the display got true tone, which is very minor.
Marco:
The price got lowered.
Marco:
And I've also heard that the SSD is slower, which might accommodate for the price lowering.
John:
Oh, interesting.
John:
I mean, the MacBook Air is...
John:
a pretty recent computer.
John:
Like, it's not overdue for an update, so I'm surprised it got any updates at all.
Marco:
Right, and what's extra weird about this is that there is the Ming-Chi Kuo thing last week.
Marco:
He says that the MacBook Air, with the new scissor keyboard, is coming out this fall.
Marco:
So, this to me...
Marco:
I hesitate to call this an update.
Marco:
I think this is more like when last fall or last winter, whenever it was like December, whenever it was, when Apple slightly revised the 2018 15-inch MacBook Pro by simply adding a new Vega GPU option to it.
Marco:
So it wasn't really a full-blown update.
Marco:
It was just like a new, a slight adjustment to what was available for it.
Marco:
I think this is kind of like that.
Marco:
I think they've taken the 2018 MacBook Air and they've finally given it by default the new revised third-gen butterfly keyboard with the new materials.
Marco:
So that's one change that has definitely happened here.
Marco:
We got that confirmed somewhere.
Marco:
It has True Tone, which is very, very minor.
Marco:
And it has apparently possibly a slower SSD, which probably allowed it to drop that price down a little bit.
Marco:
It seems more like a slight revision that was timed specifically to capture the back-to-school market, which for the MacBook Air is a pretty substantial buying period.
Marco:
I think they saw a whole lot of these for students in the summertime.
Marco:
So I think this is being presented PR-wise as a refresh to the MacBook Air, but I don't think it really is one.
Marco:
I think it's a very slight mid-cycle tweak that is mostly a price drop and a few very small modifications to achieve that.
Marco:
But I think that's about it.
Marco:
The escape change is more substantial because that one got...
Marco:
completely new cpus that are now quad core before it was dual core at the 15 watt level so the escape now got the quad core cpus a t2 and the touch bar it didn't have any of those things before and it got the new keyboard or you know the new old keyboard um before it it the last the escape before this had the 2017 keyboard it didn't even have the membrane from summer 2018 it didn't like it missed that cycle completely so
Marco:
the escape or what is now the artist formerly known as the escape uh got a an actual real genuine update that it is like a real like nice 12 to 18 month style update uh but the air i i wouldn't call what happened to the air an update and that's why i think that the mingxi quo rumor about a new air coming out this fall with the new keyboard
Marco:
I don't think this quote update invalidates that or makes that much less likely.
Marco:
I think these can both be true.
Marco:
That the MacBook Air got this small revision this summer to make it a little bit cheaper, but that it might also be getting replaced this fall.
Marco:
Because Apple's been updating things more frequently.
Marco:
They went through the bad period of the 2016 era, updating things on a very slow cycle and making everything worse with every update that they did do.
Marco:
But now, in the last couple of years, they have shown a pattern of updating the laptops whenever, or at least updating the laptops that matter to them.
Marco:
I should definitely add that.
Marco:
Updating laptops that matter to them whenever they can.
Marco:
Basically, whenever there is something new to update to, they do it.
Marco:
They did the mid-cycle GPU update.
Marco:
They did this 2018 revision this spring and did brand new things as soon as they could.
Marco:
So I'm guessing that whatever rumor stuff is coming out with the new keyboard this fall slash this winter slash next spring, whenever all that stuff happens,
Marco:
I think that's still going to happen.
Marco:
I don't think these updates necessarily preclude that, simply because that would only be six months from now.
John:
I know I'm not the biggest laptop fan, but I continue to look at these various revisions, new materials, reshuffling of the line.
John:
Who cares until they get a new keyboard?
John:
My brain is just turned off to the notion of Apple laptops until they deal with the keyboard.
John:
It's kind of like with the Mac Pro.
John:
It's like...
John:
you know are you going to come out with a mac pro until it comes out like i don't i don't care like don't you know only they keep shipping products i'm like i like the mac pro which was never actually updated they keep shipping products but it's like okay fine but you know i can't recommend these to people without a big long explanation about the keyboards like we're still kind of in that halting pattern so i think it's great that they're updating them and
John:
and simplifying the line and all that other stuff.
John:
But it's like, it doesn't matter.
John:
It's not deck chairs on the Titanic because it's not going down.
John:
They are going to make computers with a new keyboard that presumably will be better.
John:
And honestly, we haven't even heard, at least I haven't, whether the new materials have solved the problem.
John:
Maybe they have.
John:
Maybe the new materials actually solved the reliability problem and we're just left with the key layout and typing feel, which is a thing that some people may like and some people may not like.
John:
But I've just given up on this whole line.
John:
It was like, revise them all you want.
John:
I'm just waiting for the new laptops.
John:
And it'll be great if they come out with the Air and the other one.
John:
But then we'll be like, okay, well, who's left?
John:
Who's left still with the old keyboard, right?
John:
Until we can wholeheartedly recommend it.
John:
Because I would almost wholeheartedly recommend the new Air if it had a different keyboard.
John:
You know, a couple minor tweaks here and there.
John:
But, like, I can't get excited about these revisions.
John:
And, you know...
John:
getting rid of the escape makes sense to me because that computer never really made much sense and, you know, sort of folding it in to be a sheep in wolf's clothing, so to speak.
John:
It's got a touch bar and everything, but it's half the ports and half the number of cores and everything.
John:
I think the only...
John:
the only part of this that i'm interested in is the the macbook one uh getting canned because i kind of loved that machine that it existed i didn't love that it was slow i always hoped that it would travel the same path as the original air where it started off as an oddity pushing the boundaries of technology and then eventually got its feet under it and it became a really great computer and it seems like the macbook one never really got that chance like it
John:
It was an oddity and it pushed the boundaries of technology and it got like one foot under it and then it just was thrown in the garbage can.
John:
So, I mean, obviously it is the most awesome and obvious candidate for a revision to have an ARM CPU, to have even better battery life and even less power.
John:
I do wonder if there's room in that form factor for the scissor switch keyboards with double travel.
John:
Again, maybe with an ARM CPU there'll be more room inside there.
John:
show everything out of the way of the keyboard and there'll still be enough room for the battery for that tiny little arm cpu so if when the arm max come out i'll really be looking forward to the resurrection of we're gonna have to call it the adorable that was uh cgp gray came out with adorable yep yeah um i think we're gonna have to call it that because i really hope that if they do resurrect this computer as an arm computer it will have more than one port but who knows apple is stubborn uh they could stick stick to one port um
John:
But yeah, it just seems like the MacBook One was too thin to live, right?
John:
I would imagine you can't put in the current MacBook One, you can't swap out that keyboard for one with more travel because of all the computers Apple sells, this is the one where you need a low-travel keyboard because it is so thin.
John:
Um, and I really, I really think that what would have made that product great is to have a really, really good, powerful CPU in there.
John:
And there's nothing from Intel apparently that fits the bill to be able to fit in a fanless enclosure that is, you know, way faster.
John:
But there are a bunch of CPUs in fanless enclosures and products made by Apple that are really fast, much faster than the MacBook one that would really make that machine kick butt.
John:
So I really hope it comes back to us later in the, uh, the arm era.
John:
But yeah, until then, wake me up when there's a new keyboard.
Marco:
Yeah, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that.
Marco:
I mean, I think that pretty much everybody in this racket would guess, like, yeah, if anything's going to come out with an ARM version, the tiniest little 12-inch MacBook was one of the top candidates to have at first.
Marco:
But I think in general, like...
Marco:
I was very surprised that it was canceled.
Marco:
I have since heard from a number of different people, apparently sales of it were very low, that it didn't sell well.
Marco:
And I can't say I'm surprised by that.
Marco:
I think what we've seen in the laptop line over the last while now, remember the MD-whatever-whatever-101?
Marco:
It was the 13-inch non-retina MacBook Pro with the DVD drive.
Marco:
That was kept in the lineup forever.
Marco:
I think it was a 2011 model, I think.
Marco:
Or a 2012 model, maybe.
Marco:
And it was kept in the lineup until 2016 or something.
Marco:
Because people just kept buying the thing.
Marco:
No matter what else Apple released, they sold a ton of those MD-101s.
Marco:
because it was a roughly $1,100 computer.
Marco:
So it was an inexpensive, by Apple standards, an inexpensive laptop.
Marco:
You could replace the hard drive and the RAM easily down the road.
Marco:
So it was serviceable long-term.
Marco:
It was cheap to spec up.
Marco:
You could put a spinning disk in there back when everything else Apple sold used SSDs only.
Marco:
So it was much cheaper to spec up.
Marco:
It had a DVD drive, so that was one less thing people had to worry about, one less limitation that they had with the computer.
Marco:
And yeah, it was non-retina, but everyone mostly didn't care.
Marco:
And so they sold a ton of those one-on-ones because it was just like a very practical, cheap, very versatile computer as long as you were willing to take something that wasn't particularly new.
Marco:
And when they eventually discontinued that...
Marco:
What replaced it in that role was the 13-inch MacBook Air, the old one.
Marco:
Again, like, by that time, that was actually a pretty old computer as well.
Marco:
It was also, like, you know, non-retna, also 13 inches, also about $1,100.
Marco:
It was, like...
Marco:
You can see a lot of parallels here.
Marco:
It didn't have the replaceable RAM or hard drive, or it didn't have the DVD drive, but it was a very similar thing of, like, Apple had lots of other computers that were nicer and newer and above it in the line, but people kept buying that thing in droves because it was a great value and it was highly versatile.
Marco:
It would satisfy almost anyone's needs.
Marco:
So if you look at the 12-inch in this context...
Marco:
It never could reach that point.
Marco:
It was not anywhere near versatile enough.
Marco:
And they either couldn't or wouldn't make it cheap enough to ever take that role.
Marco:
And so if you were a person going into an Apple store wanting to buy a laptop for yourself and you wanted something at the lower end –
Marco:
Why would you get the 12-inch when you could get, you know, until recently, the crappy old 13-inch MacBook Air, which was actually a pretty great computer if you didn't care about Retina.
Marco:
Like, you could get that for the same or less money and have better specs as long as you didn't care about Retina.
Marco:
And it wasn't... It was bigger and heavier, but, you know, most people didn't care that much compared to what they got for that money.
Marco:
And so, really...
Marco:
what apple needs in in that range of the lineup is better value and more versatility and that's something that 12 inch macbook just couldn't get i you know the 12 inch had it had a lot of fans and what had no fan but you know what i mean it it had a lot of satisfied or it had a lot of customers and
Marco:
almost everyone i knew who had one you included casey almost everyone i knew who had one had a bit of a love-hate relationship with it like i don't i know very few people who bought only one usually you'd buy one and it was slow as hell and then they would revise it and it would be five percent faster and you'd be like okay take my money i need every every drop of performance i can get because it's still so slow i'll take the five percent faster and it was just so slow and so limited that
Marco:
And using that one port was so annoying because if you wanted to plug in power and anything else, you would need a dongle.
Marco:
So it was like laughably annoying to own this computer.
Marco:
But a lot of people did enjoy it anyway because it was so damn small and so damn light.
Marco:
And so I see there is a role for that.
Marco:
But I think what this probably confirms, first the going almost two years without an update and then being quietly killed, I think what this kind of confirms is just not enough people are willing to tolerate all those trade-offs.
Marco:
The 12-inch, a lot of people try to compare it to the MacBook Air, but it really is a very different computer because it takes way more trade-offs to get it to where it is than the MacBook Air did.
Marco:
Even the old 11-inch MacBook Air needed fewer trade-offs than what the 12-inch MacBook needed.
Marco:
The 12-inch MacBook was a massive pile of massive trade-offs to get a little bit smaller, a little bit lighter.
Marco:
And most people just weren't willing to make those trade-offs.
John:
Like the original Air, like I said, a huge amount of tradeoffs to get a little bit thinner.
John:
You know, it can fit them in an envelope, but honestly, it was basically just like take an existing Apple laptop and make it have a taper.
John:
But if the Air had not, imagine if the original Air, like the next one that came out was 5% better.
John:
And then, like, it wouldn't be, you know, you needed that big jump with the 2011 model or whatever when they did the revised one.
John:
It's like, finally, this is a really good computer now.
John:
And so suddenly it, you know, all the attractive attributes are still attractive, and they got rid of all the downsides.
John:
And I just felt like they couldn't do that with the One.
John:
Like, there was, if they could have made the MacBook One, they could have taken it in two directions.
John:
One is it could have become like the Air, where it's the computer that's good enough for everybody and it's inexpensive and super light.
John:
And the other direction they could have taken it if they couldn't do that is...
John:
make it the the luxury model if they could have made the the macbook one three times faster and add hundreds of dollars to the price it would have been like oh if you have tons of money you can get this amazing computer it's super fast and it's incredibly small but there was no option to do that like there is no cpu they could put in there that could do that right so with arm i feel like they have both options on the table they can make this a good enough for everybody computer that also happens to be
John:
ridiculously thin basically a resurrection of the 2011 MacBook Air the one we say why would you not get this one if you need unless you need more than three ports I'm getting greedy right more than two ports maybe get this model because it's fast enough for you and it's so thin and you know it's got a new keyboard and you'll love it and it's great right
John:
um or they could put you know the fastest of the fast ipad cpu in there and say like this is expensive but boy is it thin and it's super fast and it's got four ports on it or something so i i think we'll be seeing a computer like this again in our future but it's they just it could never get out of its own way it spent its entire time with the uh
John:
What the hell was that?
John:
The spinning disk in the original MacBook Air?
John:
Like 120 gig?
John:
Yeah, or 80 gig.
John:
It was like the iPod hard drive in there, right?
John:
Yeah, it was literally an iPod hard drive.
John:
It's no good.
Casey:
So as someone who has lived with one and only one MacBook Adorable slash MacBook One, I did only purchase one.
Casey:
I think that's because...
Casey:
I got the most recent one, and then they killed it.
Casey:
And so I agree with what you had said earlier, Marco.
Casey:
I would have taken the underscore approach where if they had revved this today, I probably would have already placed an order.
Casey:
Not definitely, but probably.
Casey:
And having lived with this computer for two years...
Casey:
Especially when I was in my anti-iPad days, which was basically up until the new iPad Pros last fall, it was amazing.
Casey:
Yeah, it was a little bit slow, but it was rare, usually, up until Vignette, it was rare that I was doing anything that really required a whole lot of oomph on it.
Casey:
And so it was this, it was basically an iPad that was an actual computer.
Casey:
Haha, yes, I know.
Casey:
I'm not trying to start that fight.
Casey:
I'm just saying, like, it was an iPad that ran OS X or Mac OS.
Casey:
And that was amazing.
Casey:
That was so amazing.
Casey:
And I loved that.
Casey:
So much.
Casey:
And I still do love this computer.
Casey:
But as I'm doing ever more development on it, I am finding that I am ever more annoyed with how slow it really is.
Casey:
And so a couple people lit me up on Twitter saying, how could you need to replace a two-year-old computer?
Casey:
I haven't needed to replace a two-year-old computer in a decade or something like that.
Casey:
And yeah, that's true.
Marco:
They weren't buying the 12 inch.
Casey:
But yeah, buy the 12 inch MacBook, which was underpowered the moment I bought it.
Casey:
And I knew that.
Casey:
I knew it.
Casey:
And I did it anyway.
Casey:
And the reason I did it anyway was because I wanted something ultra hyper portable.
Casey:
And that was the number one priority to me.
Casey:
And in that, this thing has succeeded tremendously because it is unbelievably portable.
Casey:
However, it is dog slow.
Casey:
And the other problem I have with it is that it only has one port.
Casey:
And it is not often that I want to plug in two things, but it is also not rare.
Casey:
And so just earlier tonight, it has decided that the time machine backup on my Synology is somehow corrupt and it would like to start over and make a new one.
Casey:
And so I thought, okay, I'm probably going to have to plug in Ethernet.
Casey:
Do you remember the days when Ethernet was just in the computer?
Casey:
But anyway, I'm going to have to plug in an Ethernet adapter.
Casey:
Oh, wait, that means I need to go get my dongle.
Casey:
Oh, and the Ethernet adapter and the dongle are across the room, and I'm recording right now, so I guess I'm not doing that, am I?
Casey:
um and that just gets frustrating or hey i would really like to plug in my phone to debug and also be plugged into power yes it's dongle time it's just stuff like that is very frustrating so i really wonder and i based on zero empirical evidence other than my own experience but i can't help but wonder if this thing had two ports would it have sold twice as well or you know or considerably better and and there's no way for us to know but
Casey:
The one port thing was very, very frustrating, particularly once I started developing with it when I really would want to plug in a phone and not have to do it via a dongle.
Casey:
So, you know, I have a USB-C to lightning cable, which works great.
Casey:
But then I can't power the thing.
Casey:
And so then, especially now, now I'm asking this dog slow CPU to do something that requires a lot of CPU power.
Casey:
So now I'm murdering my battery and I'm charging my phone off of the laptop battery.
Casey:
So I'm murdering it twice over.
Marco:
And it's getting hot because it's fanless.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So it's like the perfect storm of awful for this computer.
Casey:
And I still love this computer.
Casey:
And I will always love this computer because it is such an unbelievably cool piece of technology.
Casey:
But I don't think it's the right one for me anymore.
Casey:
And so that's why I said I would have probably bought a revved version earlier today if such a thing existed.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I've gotten to the point that I really think that I need more power.
Casey:
And we are skipping a little bit ahead, but this is a perfect segue to the field trip I took today to the Apple Store.
Casey:
And I went to the Apple Store today because I thought to myself, we're going to talk about this tonight.
Casey:
And I want to handle a 13-inch Air and a 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
Because the last 13-inch Air I've handled is Aaron's, which not only has it been underwater several times,
Casey:
but you're still allowed to handle it yeah that's true but i don't even remember how old that thing is but it's easily four or five years old it is not young at this point uh it might even be older than that i don't recall i don't even know what version of mac os is on it it might even be a version of os 10 that's how old it is but anyway you get my point and that thing is big and it's heavy compared to my adorable it is enormous and
Casey:
compared to my Adorable.
Casey:
And I don't really have experiences with 13-inch Pros or 13-inch Airs other than that one.
Casey:
So I went to the Apple Store today and I went looking at the Escape because it was still an Escape in my store at this point.
Casey:
And I went looking at the Pro and then I went looking at the Air as well.
Casey:
And as it turns out, these things have gotten crazy light over the last few years.
Casey:
Who knew?
Casey:
So I was looking at them.
Marco:
You've been working out.
Casey:
And I'm looking at these things, and I actually brought my computer, you know, I brought my computer bag with me with my laptop in it.
Casey:
And, of course, I feel like I'm looking as though I'm preparing to steal these things.
Casey:
But be that as it may, I'm trying to look confident.
Casey:
And if you look confident, that's halfway to getting away with anything.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I pull my adorable out of my laptop bag, and I have that in my right hand, and I'm closing and picking up these display units in my left hand.
Casey:
And I went and did a little bit of research, because my name is not John Syracuse, and I'm allowed to.
Casey:
And in 2017...
Casey:
So I paid $1,744.82 for my loaded MacBook Adorable.
Casey:
It was as loaded as I could get it.
Casey:
Which, by the way, I thought I paid like over $2,000 for that.
Casey:
So it was cheaper than I remember it being.
Casey:
But anyway, it is listed as 2.03 pounds.
Casey:
So for all intents and purposes, 2 pounds.
Casey:
The 13-inch Air, as I looked at Apple's website earlier tonight, is 2.75 pounds.
Casey:
So that's effectively three-quarters of a pound heavier.
Casey:
It is also the way I would configure it.
Casey:
It is $1,900.
Casey:
That is not the base config, as we've said before.
Casey:
This is the way I would configure it, which is the 1.6 gigahertz Core i5, the 16 gigs of memory, one terabyte SSD.
Casey:
And that, of course, has two Thunderbolt 3 ports.
Casey:
How amazing would that be, ladies and gentlemen?
Casey:
It has two ports.
Casey:
Imagine that.
Casey:
And so I'm handling this MacBook Air, and I'm handling my MacBook Adorable, and I realize there's really not a lot of difference here.
Casey:
There is certainly a difference in surface area.
Casey:
There's certainly a difference in weight.
Casey:
But there's really not that much difference here.
Casey:
I could do the Air.
Right.
Casey:
So then I go over to the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and I start looking at the Escape, and then I'm, you know, boinging back and forth between the Escape and the real, quote-unquote, real MacBook Pro.
Casey:
Come to find out that's three pounds, 3.02 pounds.
Casey:
So it is almost exactly one pound heavier than my adorable.
Casey:
I got to tell you, I understand that that's, you know, what another 150% heavier than my adorable, but it doesn't feel like it, man.
Casey:
It really doesn't feel like it.
Marco:
You're saving three quarters of a pound of dongles.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So I couldn't believe how small and light that felt in my hand.
Casey:
And maybe I'm just trying to convince myself.
Casey:
Maybe I'm just trying to justify a purchase Marco style, but yeah,
Casey:
it really felt unbelievably small and light.
Casey:
And the way I think I would configure it is $2,400.
Casey:
So it is nearly $1,000 more than I spent on my MacBook Adorable, which again, $1,700 versus $2,400.
Casey:
But I think the way I would configure it is a 2.4 gigahertz Core i5, 16 gigs of RAM, a terabyte hard drive,
Casey:
And then I would think about going up to the next CPU, which is $300 more.
Casey:
And I would think about, and I think that's an i7, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
And I would think about going to an additional terabyte, so a total of two terabytes for an additional $400 more.
Casey:
So if I did both of those things, it would be just over $3,000, which is more than I'd like to spend, but I'd at least consider it.
Casey:
But if I were to buy a new computer today, I really think I would get the 13-inch MacBook Pro because it really isn't that much heavier.
Casey:
And I don't think I need the ultimate in portability anymore because if I do, that's why I have my iPad Pro, which I also really, really love.
John:
Well, it's too bad you're forbidden from buying a new computer until they have new keyboards.
John:
So we don't have to worry about this.
Casey:
Well, that's the thing.
Casey:
That's the thing.
Casey:
Hearing you talk earlier, I was like, oh, John's right.
Casey:
I really do have to wait a little bit longer.
John:
This is the wrong time to be buying a new laptop.
John:
Yeah, it really is.
John:
Just wait.
Marco:
Just wait.
Marco:
And I'm going to say the exact same thing.
Marco:
Like, if your MacBook 12 inch was totally dead and you really needed a laptop very badly.
Marco:
then i would say all right you know do what you got to do you know if you need one that badly marco would tell you you could get a stainless steel macbook one with cellular for like 300 on amazon it's been refreshed it comes it comes wrapped in in styrofoam peanuts but it's fine yeah so if you really were in a bond you had to get something today i agree with you the 13 inch macbook pro and i would say get the one with four ports it's nicer like you
Marco:
You've served your time in one port purgatory.
Marco:
Just get the one with all the ports next.
Marco:
You've earned it.
Marco:
Yeah, that's the right move if you had to buy today.
Marco:
But because you don't have to buy today, you are looking at, right now, the ones that were updated now and the ones that were updated in May, you are looking at what are likely to be the very last butterfly keyboard laptops.
Marco:
Chances are the butterfly keyboard era will come to an end within the next year.
Marco:
Possibly even faster than that.
Marco:
But I bet one year from now, in July 2020, make a calendar, mark my words, I bet...
Marco:
that in July 2020, there will either be zero butterfly keyboards for sale from Apple, or it'll only be, like, old models they're still selling, but, like, all the new ones will have scissor keyboards.
Marco:
That's my guess.
Marco:
And I think that's one of the reasons why they killed the 12-inch, because they can't do it for that one.
Marco:
It won't fit.
Marco:
But I think there's enough room in the other ones, especially if they're willing to revise them slightly or make them slightly thicker or slightly change the taper or whatever else.
Marco:
I think there's enough room in the other ones where they probably could do it, including the 13-inch Air.
Marco:
But I bet a year from now, you will be able to get a range of multiple Apple laptops with scissor cues.
Marco:
And if you get the very last butterfly laptop just out of impatience,
Marco:
or out of, you know, Fantasy Discus is new, as soon as the new ones come out, you know, six months later, you're going to regret that decision.
Casey:
So I'm sorry, so state your bet one more time.
Casey:
So you're saying that there will be no new models with Butterfly Switches?
Marco:
My bet is in one year, the vast majority of laptops Apple sells model-wise, not volume-wise.
Marco:
The vast majority of models they sell, possibly all of them, but I'm not that confident of that.
Marco:
I think within a year that most of the models for sale will have scissor keys.
Casey:
Got it.
Casey:
It is N-D-U-E.
Marco:
I'm not willing to bet any money on that.
Marco:
I'm not that confident in this, but it's just a feeling I have.
Marco:
I think this is the end of the butterfly.
Marco:
This is such a weak bet.
Marco:
You're not even willing to say they'll all have it?
Marco:
The vast majority?
Marco:
Are you willing to bet that Apple doesn't sell an old model Apple for a long time these days?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
No.
John:
You're sounding so confident.
John:
Then you're like, I think there'll be some models with new keyboards.
John:
Of course there will be models with new keyboards.
Marco:
But not just the 16-inch.
Marco:
I think it's going to be all of them, or most of them at least.
John:
You said the vast majority, so there's only like four models, so that means you'd have to have like...
Marco:
three of them well because like what they might do is like you know make make the new macbook air that ming chi quo predicted and have that be two hundred dollars more and keep this old one around at 999 for a while like it could be something like that right so i don't that's why i don't want to say all of them but i think most of them a year from now will have scissor keys it
John:
I think maybe you could have... Would you agree that they're not going to make any new computers with butterfly keyboards, as in it's a new case design, a new form factor?
John:
That's the easier bet to say.
John:
100%.
John:
These are the last ones that they're going to make with butterfly keyboards.
Marco:
I would even go as far as to say that the computers that they revised yesterday are the last revisions, even, that I think will have butterfly keyboards.
Marco:
You just think they might keep selling them?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
tim cook like like yeah i think like the air that they slightly touched like they're probably going to keep selling that as their cheapest computer for a while because that's just how they do things but i bet i bet all revisions that will occur after yesterday will be scissor keys
Casey:
I don't think you're wrong, but I am interested to see how this turns out.
Marco:
And you're going to so regret it if you bought the last... Not even I bought the last butterfly keyboard.
Marco:
I haven't bought one since last year.
Casey:
But remember that I actually do like the butterfly keyboard.
Casey:
And truth be told, I have not yet had a bigger issue than something that I needed compressed air for with my Adorable in two years.
Marco:
Hold on.
Marco:
Didn't you have to bring your computer to your dad's automotive power...
Casey:
air compressor no no no i didn't have to it just so happened i know what you're thinking of it just so happened that i was at it it happened to me marco it just so happened that i was at his house when i had an issue and i was like hey do you have any compressed air and he just like looked at me it was about the same look i got when i once asked a friend of mine from college if his twin sister was identical or not but anyway um he my dad just kind of looked at me and said yes yes i have compressed hair and so we went out to the garage just because it was easy and
Marco:
I don't have compressed air.
Marco:
I do have this jet engine.
Marco:
Just put your laptop behind this.
Casey:
You've met my dad.
Casey:
That would be his style.
Casey:
But no, I've never had to have the thing serviced more seriously than me or dad taking compressed air to it.
Casey:
But yet I fear the thought that if I were to get another one, that I would not be so lucky.
Casey:
And so when, like I said, when John was talking earlier saying, how could you possibly buy a laptop right now if you don't need to?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, you're right.
Casey:
Why would I be buying a laptop right now?
Marco:
I feel like we're so close.
Marco:
There are multiple rumors from multiple directions that the scissor keyboards are coming this fall or this winter.
John:
That's not that far away.
John:
And imagine if the new Air is made with the design philosophy embodied by the iMac Pro, the Mac Mini, and the Mac Pro, and it comes out and it's got four ports on the side of it and a better CPU and a new keyboard.
John:
and an sd card slot that you you buy that instantly you'd be like thank god i didn't buy another laptop this is finally a good macbook air again you know that's not gonna have an sd card slot but anyway like just just imagine that it has more ports like imagine that i don't even think it'll have four ports honestly there is some embodiment of more boards i probably won't have more ports too but i'm saying this is what i'm thinking like again with the design philosophy if they just took the existing macbook air and just put a
John:
freaking scissor keyboard in it like that would be a great computer it's better but like honestly i'm i'm done with the bargaining it's like okay why don't you just make your laptops good again all right so they're all gonna have just usbc can you put more of those on the answer is yes you could but don't stubbornly refuse to like don't go for that minimalism make a macbook air with more than two ports you can do it it will work people will like it they'll buy it they'll like it better than if it just had two
John:
or put an sd card slot two two ports an sd card slot or more than two ports this is the line i'm drawing for the the macbook air that was finished being designed a year and a half ago which is the other problem with expecting something new to come out of apple we have to wait you know anyway uh yeah don't buy these they have bad keyboards
Casey:
So one other thing we do have to cover quickly is that Apple has fairly dramatically lowered their SSD prices.
Casey:
And so from 9 to 5 Mac, the 4 terabyte SSD of the 512 gig 15-inch MacBook Pro used to cost $2,800.
Casey:
$2,800.
Casey:
Now it costs half that at $1,400.
John:
And that is the price, the amount that you add to the price of your computer.
John:
It's not the price of the computer with that.
John:
It's like, take the price of your computer that comes with an SSD of some size that is less than four terabytes, throw out that SSD, and then add $2,800 more.
John:
And now it's half price at merely $1,400.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And I think that's actually really great.
Casey:
And I haven't been quite as bitter at Apple RAM and SSD pricing as I was probably five to 10 years ago, maybe less than 10.
Casey:
But a while ago, it used to be that they would absolutely gouge you on, well, at that time I was spinning disks and also RAM.
Casey:
But I feel like this is, to me, within the realm of, okay, yeah, you have to make your money and it's convenient, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And okay, that makes sense.
Casey:
$2,800, that does not make sense.
Casey:
$1,400 doesn't make sense to me, but I feel like it's at least reasonable.
Marco:
The reality is, this isn't just Apple.
Marco:
If you spec up a machine from anyone else who sells you complete computers, from Dell, from HP, from Alienware, whatever it is, whoever you're buying from...
Marco:
Any kind of RAM or hard drive upgrade at the time of purchase from the OEM is always more expensive than what you can go to Amazon or Newegg or whatever and buy your own for.
Marco:
It's always done that way.
Marco:
It's a profit center for them.
Marco:
That's just the business.
Marco:
That's the reality.
Marco:
So I know that SSD storage can be had way more cheaply outside of Apple than it can from Apple.
Marco:
SSD storage has gone through a massive price collapse over the last few months.
Marco:
It's awesome.
Marco:
You can get cheap, very, very cheap third-party SSDs now from other companies that are very big and very inexpensive compared to where they were even one year ago, let alone before that.
Marco:
so it's great to be in the market for storage and you know what apple did lower these by a large amount and yeah they are still way more expensive than what you could buy for on amazon or whatever but the fact is like in this business like you're never going to get that price from the oems from apple from dell from hp so the fact that lower the prices is great news even though they are not the bargain basement that you that we always want them to be
John:
It just shows how out of whack they were.
John:
It's not like they reduced them by 10% or something.
John:
Like, cutting the price in half and still having it be ridiculous, as Ben Holmes tweeted, like, the prices have gone from absurd to ridiculous.
John:
Although, I guess this is saying absurd is worse than ridiculous.
John:
I'm not sure I agree with it.
John:
Anyway, like, so this, another example is on the MacBook Air with a one-terabyte SSD, you know, at $400, right?
John:
And this is the thing people know.
John:
It's another one of the...
John:
That's why I highlighted when I described the other thing.
John:
Another one of the effects of a configurator is you're like, oh, if you want the terabyte one, it's $400.
John:
It's like, no, what you're doing is you're removing 512 gigabyte SSD.
John:
And then...
John:
You're replacing it with a 1TB, and you're paying $400 for that additional 512.
John:
It's not like a $400 1TB SSD costs $400.
John:
It's like, oh, well, I can buy a 1TB.
John:
You're not buying a 1TB.
John:
You're buying half of a 1TB because you threw away a 512, right?
John:
So their prices are still completely out of whack.
John:
Like Ben Holmes cites a price of $100 for a one terabyte NVMe SSD stick.
John:
I'm not sure where he's getting that price from.
John:
But yeah, like it's because you are removing an existing part or replacing it with a better part and then looking at the price as if you're just buying the better part, not accounting for the price that you should be gaining by removing the other one.
John:
They're like Porsche car options.
John:
They're just ridiculous.
John:
It makes sense that's where they make their money, but if you price them too high, no one will ever pick that option.
John:
Honestly, Apple's probably not making as much profit as it could be to just be reasonable.
John:
The storage... It used to be like this with memory.
John:
Now Apple is reasonable with memory.
John:
In some respects, maybe that's the better thing to do, but
John:
In other respects, if Apple doesn't eventually get its iCloud Act together, either in terms of pricing or transparency or both, running out of storage on your Mac is one of the things that hurts the user experience and the satisfaction with the computer the most.
John:
Because it's the thing that users are least able to deal with.
John:
and rather than motivating them to buy a new computer it will just make them angry just be like i just bought this computer three and a half years ago and now it's out of room and i as a user have no idea what to do about that my computer is full they just get angry right and so if if we could just get over i think we're close we're we're close to getting over the hump of like having enough storage i think we're probably there on phones like i think most people's phones
John:
have close to enough storage now maybe one more doubling and we'll probably have like enough local storage that even apple's cloud transparency stuff is enough to paper over the difference right but apple laptops specifically especially lightweight ones are not anywhere near getting over the hump of they have enough storage for most people especially if you have a photo library and especially if you use icloud photo library even if you do the quote unquote optimized storage which is terrible
John:
you can fill a default configuration apple laptop ssd because the default configs are way too small and the step up configs are a lot of money and people see even a 400 upgrade to one terabyte and they think it's not worth and they need some nerdy computer friend like me to convince them trust me you will be so happy three years from now uh when for that 400 you spent because you'll still be able to use your computer as opposed to having to chuck it in the ocean because it's full right there's nothing you can do about it
Marco:
Yeah, I've been there.
Marco:
There's a couple laptops I've owned where I just was impulsive.
Marco:
I just wanted to go to the Apple Store and just buy one on day one.
Marco:
So there wasn't time to do a config to order option and customize the storage.
Marco:
And in both of those cases, that laptop ended up being a 256 gig SSD.
Marco:
And in both cases, that limited the useful life of the laptop severely.
Marco:
because I just slammed into that all the time.
Marco:
So now, these days, no matter how impatient I want to be, 512 is the minimum I will buy, and what I actually aim for for a laptop is one terabyte.
John:
Yeah, I feel like that's the thing that makes me like a computer the most, is having it not get full.
John:
The 5K iMac already, I filled the one terabyte SSD.
John:
I bought a big SSD.
John:
I thought I was buying a really big one back when they were really expensive.
Yeah.
John:
I filled it, and I had to move my entire photo library to an external SSD, which isn't the end of the world, but it kind of annoys me.
John:
And one of the things I'm looking forward to the most, slash fearing the most, is when I got my new Mac Pro, I wanted to have a lot of storage.
John:
I mean, it's less of an issue, because as we discussed, you can actually put quote-unquote external drives inside the thing through various mechanisms.
John:
But...
John:
I would prefer it if the super fast internal storage was big enough to hold all my stuff for five years without me hitting limits.
John:
So if I were to get four terabytes, I think that would be fine because it would be four times what I'm just barely able to fit in these days.
John:
So, yeah, it's still kind of a shame that that's where Apple gets most of its money, and especially on the laptops.
John:
Most people buy laptops, first of all, and second of all, laptops, you don't have all the options of external drive and stuff because you just want to carry the laptop.
John:
And if we ever talk about Catalina, we'll get into this some more, but...
John:
uh the mac operating system's handling of uh disk storage or whatever we want to call it these days i mean in some respects it has new features but in other respects it's actually getting worse in terms of how confusing it is uh you know related to the weirdness of apfs how much space do i have how do i free up new space how do i deal with the disk full how does the operating system deal with the disk full how do the applications that claim to deal with the full disk actually deal with it
John:
It's one of the biggest pain points I've seen with Macs.
John:
Less so with phones and iPads, although there was still that ad campaign from Samsung or Google or whoever it was making fun of Apple's phones filling up with photos.
John:
But I feel like with the advent of what is the default config on the good iPhone now?
John:
Is it 64 gigs?
Marco:
I believe so, yeah.
Marco:
That really fixed it.
Marco:
That made it so that we all completely stopped complaining about how the entry-level storage was so bad before.
Marco:
Back when it was 16 gigs, that was terrible.
Marco:
And it stayed 16 gigs for a very long time.
Marco:
And once they went up, they first went to 32, and I think some models might still be in at 32, but for the most part they begin at 64 now.
Marco:
Huge improvement, and it basically takes care of the problem.
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's not like they don't get full.
John:
They still get full.
John:
But I feel like when you have 64, there's enough time for even Apple's sort of iCloud stuff to shift your iCloud, shift some of the photos off and to just have like the low quality ones.
John:
Like Apple does need to keep up with it.
John:
It's not like 64 is enough forever.
John:
Like you have to keep, you know.
John:
Anyway, that's all we're talking about here is Apple keeping pace with the increasing size and decreasing cost of storage.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And they fell way behind, embarrassingly behind, even for Apple, to the point where they're cutting their prices in half.
John:
And now they're slightly less embarrassingly... I don't know.
John:
It still annoys me, but who was honestly...
John:
Who besides businesses?
John:
What individual person was paying an additional $2,800 for the biggest SSD?
John:
It's only businesses.
John:
Because no individual person could probably justify that.
John:
Even if they were like a freelance person or whatever, and they thought they would use this, they were like, honestly, I'll just buy an external drive.
John:
Because you really need to be disconnected from the budget by a lot.
John:
to pay twenty eight hundred dollars and then if you bought one of those yesterday and saw the price cut that's not going to feel good i bet you could get half that money back from apple i paid it yeah well i mean talking about being disconnected from the value of money
Marco:
okay so it's for the reasons you said when i bought the imac pro i i i weighed that decision for a long time and i opted to do it because ultimately like i i was juggling a lot of weird externals with my previous imac because when i ordered my previous imac the the biggest it got was one terabyte like that was the biggest option it had which and then at the time i bought that and that was expensive not that expensive but it was that was expensive at the time like in 2014 and whenever i bought that
Marco:
and so when i bought the mi pro i got the four terabyte because i it was a pain in the butt juggling all these externals and i wanted to start i knew this was a computer i was going to have for a while so i wanted to start at the highest point i could start at knowing that over time i would be happy i did and sure enough here i am about what a year and a half into this computer and i 100 stand by that decision and even though it just got half the price i've still gotten a year and a half of use out of that four terabytes and i'm still happy i did
Marco:
Yeah, it was a ton of money, but so was the rest of the computer, and I decided that was worth it.
John:
This is the MacBook Pro we're talking about, though.
John:
The iMac, was it exactly the same price?
John:
$2,800.
John:
That's why, when you were saying earlier, no one knew what it was.
Marco:
I knew what it was.
John:
If you didn't buy that iMac Pro yesterday, it might feel different if you did.
Marco:
That's true, yeah.
Marco:
But anyway, and I will, before we leave this topic, which you really should do, but before I leave this topic, I will reiterate a trick I learned that I've been extremely happy with.
Marco:
One of the biggest problems when you have limited storage, like almost every laptop,
Marco:
is the way photos doesn't really purge the purgeable space when you have it in only keep small things mode.
Marco:
If you have it, keep your whole photo library.
Marco:
You're on your own.
Marco:
And that's how I do my iMacs.
Marco:
I just have to keep everything because I have the space for it.
Marco:
But if you're on a computer that's a secondary one, like your laptop or something, where you only have Apple Photos keep the small versions and offload things to the cloud...
Marco:
It marks the space that it uses as purgeable, but as John said, the OS doesn't deal with that the way you think it will.
Marco:
It doesn't provide the controls that you need.
Marco:
A lot of times, you try to use the space that is left, and it doesn't purge it, and so you can't use the space or whatever, so it's a bit of a mess.
Marco:
So what I did when I set up my most recent laptop last summer was I put the photos library, which you can move where that is.
Marco:
I put it on a sparse disk image that has a size cap.
Marco:
I think I made it like 30 gigs, something like that.
Marco:
So a size cap of a sparse disk image, put it in login items.
Marco:
So the sparse disk image always mounts on login.
Marco:
That's where my Apple photos library is.
Marco:
And it obeys the disk quota of the sparse image you put it on.
Marco:
So my photos library is capped on my laptop at 30 gigs.
Marco:
No matter what I do, it will make space so it fits in at 30 gigs.
Marco:
And then I don't have to deal with it intruding on the rest of my drive.
Marco:
So that is by far the biggest quality of life improvement that I've discovered for having a modern Apple laptop with limited SSD space.
Marco:
I highly suggest everyone do that.
John:
It's a little bit scary.
John:
I mean, I'm not even sure that's even a supported configuration.
John:
I understand the application can't tell the difference, but I'd be a little bit scared of it.
John:
The other thing, though, is I don't know if this is still true, but I believe at one point and maybe this was just an iOS like the the optimized storage thing.
John:
Maybe I'm doubting whether this was actually true or not, but my impression was that back in the day, what optimized storage would do is it would download lower quality, smaller, not thumbnails, but just lower quality versions of photos to save space and,
John:
The problem that you could run into with that strategy is eventually if your phone fills with the lower quality ones, there is no other strategy.
John:
Like it wasn't as if it would purge the photos entirely and download them on demand.
John:
It always wanted to have a photo on disk, so to speak.
John:
It would just be a lower-quality one.
John:
So if you have a very large library and you put it in a very small, sparse disk image, it is possible that by adding pictures and adding pictures, you may hit the limit of your disk image, and then you'd have to make a second disk image or expand it or copy your stuff over or whatever, which is not the end of the world.
John:
All this is to say I still don't have much faith in the photo library's ability to actually manage the space available to it.
John:
I feel like it's using very naive strategies and never goes sort of full on demand where it's like I'll pull in images as needed and I will purge them as needed.
John:
It's more like I have strategy A, which is keep everything and strategy B, which is keep everything.
John:
But if you run out of space, keep smaller versions of some things.
John:
And that strategy runs out of space eventually.
John:
Unlike the other one, which is just I have a buffer to work with and I will pull in the most recently used images in that buffer and purge them as needed.
John:
And the second thing, of course, with the purgeable space, I think this is actually a way to make it purge.
John:
But the other thing that always gets people is local time machine backups.
John:
So...
John:
uh i mean this is a nerdy thing to do but if you are a nerdy person listening to this and you frequently have space issues or you need to free up some space that you think should be free but some part of the operating system or application thinks it's not and you're running a modern version of mac os uh man tmutil tmutil and look at the local snapshot stuff you can list your local time machine back uh snapshots and you can delete your local time machine snapshots and that will save a surprising amount of space depending on what you've updated recently on your mac
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So once again, fracture me.com slash ATP for a special discount on your first fracture order.
Marco:
Don't forget to tell them you came from ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to fracture for making amazing photo prints on glass and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Ron Olson would like to know, what are your opinions on naming computers?
Casey:
Back when I was in college and even through my first few tech jobs, whimsical names for computers were ubiquitous.
Casey:
In my university, they were named after 50s TV characters.
Casey:
But of late, it seems standard for computers to have names as interesting as a barcode.
Casey:
I'm curious what everyone thinks of giving more memorable names to their machines.
Casey:
I used to do this.
Casey:
I don't even remember the, like...
Casey:
schemes that I used to use.
Casey:
But I cannot remember the last time I have changed the name of a computer other than to maybe take my name out of it.
Casey:
So instead of like Casey's MacBook, it just says MacBook or something like that.
Casey:
And I'm not even sure I did that much.
Casey:
So I haven't done this in forever and a day, and I rarely pay attention to this sort of thing.
Casey:
John, what do you think about this?
John:
You said this was going to be quick.
John:
I could go for 20 minutes and just on naming computers.
John:
I could just do one question.
John:
So...
John:
In thinking about this, I'm not going to say I've always named my computers, because before the internet and before ubiquitous networking, there was not much reason to have a sort of computer world manifestation of what you call your computer.
John:
Because...
John:
it wasn't addressable by its name to other computer things.
John:
And for me at least, I never named my computer in the same way that like you'd name your car, right?
John:
Like there's no reason for your car to have a name.
John:
Other people don't have like, you know, Apple's glasses on and they look at your car, they see your car's name.
John:
Like there's no sort of computerized reason for it to have a name.
John:
If you give your car a name, it's just because you want to give it a name.
John:
So what I would do with all of my Macs though, is I would name the hard drives.
John:
The hard drive singular or the hard drives plural.
John:
Always my hard drives have, you know, the Apple hard drives would come and it's called Macintosh HD.
John:
I think still to this day it says Macintosh, a whole spelled out space, capital H, capital D, even though they're not really hard drives anymore.
John:
I would rename the hard drive.
John:
And that was basically like the computer name, especially when you just had one hard drive or it was your boot hard drive or it was inside the computer.
John:
But I wasn't technically naming the computer.
John:
I was naming the hard drive because if I had a second hard drive, it would have a different name.
John:
So I've always done that.
John:
Usually it's like cartoon characters and I would have a matching icon and all this other stuff like...
John:
I continue to do that to this day.
John:
But in the modern era, when your computers are networked, even if it was just Apple Talk and now a day is like the, you know, Rendezvous or whatever the hell it's called, ZeroConf networking and everything, there are reasons to give your computer a name that you can address it with.
John:
So all the computers in my house, both their boot hard drive and their name of the computer is whatever icon and name their boot hard drive gets.
John:
So again, you know, video game characters and all various other things.
John:
So yeah.
John:
The only thing I've done recently is as I've gotten lots of computers, I got tired of coming up with new names.
John:
So I basically give my computer the same name all the time.
John:
I don't give it a Roman numerals.
John:
It doesn't become the second or third.
John:
It just takes on the mantle of that name.
Marco:
Yeah, it's like Air Force One.
Marco:
It's like whatever's your current computer has that name.
John:
Yeah, more or less.
John:
And I do the same thing with my work computer across many different work computers and many different jobs.
John:
I always give my work computer similar names so I don't have to keep thinking of new names.
John:
And then the only other interesting story I have about this is like the naming of the computer and not the hard drive or whatever began...
John:
Far, you know, before I ever got into it in the world of servers that needed to have names, you know, the Internet, DNS, all that other stuff.
John:
Right.
John:
And at universities where you'd have labs full of computers that weren't in the very old days, they weren't PCs or Macs.
John:
They were Unix machines that were on the Internet via TCP IP and had host names.
John:
Right.
John:
And so there was a challenge.
John:
How do you come up with.
John:
host names for all these computers, and you could have boring host names, or you could just call them, you know, Lab 1, Lab 2, Lab 3, or Computer Lab with all these things, you know, lab3.myschool.edu or whatever.
John:
That's very boring.
John:
And I'm sure I've told this story on ATP before, but people don't listen to the whole back catalog, so I will just reiterate my favorite naming scheme I ever saw was in the Computer Graphics Lab at Boston University.
John:
Whatever system came up with this one, I thought it was very clever and interesting.
John:
The names of the machines were like, uh, scrutable stinked.
John:
Uh, I'm giving it away by the way I pronounced them like a pendant.
John:
Um, lots of things that you'd look at them and you think there was like pendant.
John:
Is that misspelled?
John:
Do they mean like a thing that dangles around your neck?
John:
Scrutable?
John:
Do they mean inscrutable?
Uh,
John:
uh or no scribable they mean like able to be scribed or whatever anyway that it was like a lab full of machines like this uh and they were all uh silicon graphics indie machines so it was all words that began with indie independent indescribable uh yeah i don't remember all the names but you would think you couldn't come up with all the words that begin with the sound indie but they came up with like 12 of them and i thought it was very clever because if you looked at the names it made no sense until you saw the pattern so
John:
kudos to the computer graphics lab at bu where we came up with that naming scheme and yes silicon graphics they that was a modern thing when i was at school when they did that jurassic park thing where like she says this is the unix system i know this they have that weird thing where you're flying through all the buttons that was a real thing on sgi machines and uh when i saw the movie i'm like i do know that that's a real thing
Casey:
That was real?
Casey:
That wasn't just moving BS?
John:
Yeah, it was like a demo thing.
John:
I don't think they expected people to use it, but yeah, it came with SGIs.
John:
It was like a way to navigate the file system through a bunch of weird rotating sort of rectangular solid things.
John:
They didn't write the code for that thing.
John:
You could buy an SGI for $20,000 in 1990, whatever, and it would come with that.
Casey:
Marco, any thoughts?
Marco:
Not really.
Marco:
I have a similar Air Force One situation where I named my computer forever ago and whenever I get a new one, it just inherits the old name.
Marco:
With one notable exception relevant to our conversation earlier, when I got the MacBook Escape, I named it Escape.
Marco:
And then when I later got the 15-inch touch bar to replace it, well, I lost my escape key.
Marco:
So I called it No Escape, which was kind of a play on, you know, not only losing my escape key, but that now I have no escape from these horrible butterfly keyboards.
Marco:
You're stuck with them forever.
Marco:
So my laptop became known as No Escape, and my laptop is still, to this day, even though it's now two laptops later, called No Escape.
Casey:
Only two?
Casey:
Are you sure you didn't drop a zero there?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Pedro Estarque writes, Hi, I'd love to hear John's take on the recent default shell change from Bash to ZSH in Catalina for new installs.
Casey:
Given license issues with Bash, why not Phish since the guy works at Apple and GPL version 2 seems uncontroversial?
Casey:
So I'm not 100% sure that's correct about the creator of Phish working at Apple, but I think that's correct.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But either way, John, how do you feel about Bash to ZSH?
Casey:
Because you usually use ZSH, don't you?
Casey:
Or did I make that up?
John:
You are misremembering.
John:
So we actually have a whole section about Catalina that if we ever get to, we probably will at some point when we have to do like three episodes a week to deal with vacations in the summer.
John:
Anyway, yeah, this is one minor point in it that some of the Unix stuff in Catalina is changing.
John:
So we'll talk about the rest of it later.
John:
But for now, for the shell stuff,
John:
What I heard is that it was a license issue.
John:
I don't know if that's actually true.
John:
It's hard to get this type of answer from Apple because you can, if you're lucky, Apple will tell you what they're doing, but they rarely tell you why, especially for something like this.
John:
Um...
John:
I don't use Bash or ZSH, so this doesn't affect me.
John:
I use TCSH for legacy reasons because it's what the Unix system at my university used, and that's just what I got used to.
John:
I do not recommend it.
John:
Fish, I believe the person who writes Fish does or did work at Apple and he wrote Fish.
John:
I'm not sure if he still does work at Apple.
John:
Apple should not change their default shell to Fish because Fish is a weird shell.
John:
If like Apple is not in a position.
John:
to make something the de facto shell for unix computers like by shipping it that it's not like that everyone will follow them if the whole rest of like the linux world essentially switch to fish then yes by all means apple should start uh shipping fish but if apple is the only one doing it
John:
They shouldn't because then Apple's Unix will get the reputation of like, oh, Apple's got Unix, but it's got this weird shell.
John:
It's like only Unix nerds know you can change your shell, right?
John:
But it won't matter.
John:
It'll just be like Apple, Macs have Unix, but the shell is weird, right?
John:
By going with Bash, because it's what everybody else uses, Apple does not have a weird shell.
John:
ZSH is less weird than Phish.
John:
It is more closely aligned to bash.
John:
It has been around for much longer.
John:
It is less weird.
John:
So if you have to change from bash to something, ZSH is a reasonable alternative.
John:
I don't care because I don't use either one of the shells.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Marco, do you have any thoughts on this?
Marco:
I do care quite a bit because I use Bash heavily in my Mac usage.
Marco:
I have shell scripts that use it.
Marco:
I use it directly.
Marco:
I'm in Terminal a lot.
Marco:
So I do care, but I don't yet know enough about ZSH to know how much of my stuff is this going to break or require relearning.
John:
You don't have to use it.
John:
You can just use Bash.
John:
You can either build your own Bash and install it, and I think they'll still ship Bash.
John:
They're just changing the default shell.
John:
That's a pain in the butt, though.
John:
Yeah, well, I mean, hey, look, I have used the non-default shell for basically the entire life of Mac OS X. It preserves it across installs.
John:
So it's not like a thing you need to do.
John:
It's just when you set up a brand new computer, if you don't do a migration assistant or whatever install, type chsh and you'll be off to the races.
John:
It's just fine.
Casey:
Oh, all right.
Casey:
For what it's worth, I've used Phish for years, and I do not use very many shell scripts.
Casey:
I've not written very many shell scripts, so I'm just using it for just navigating around and doing basic operations, and I love it.
Casey:
I don't argue that it is very weird, though.
Casey:
Finally, Tyler Menard writes, how do you use and take care of your big camera at the beach?
Casey:
Carefully.
Casey:
I don't really have any particularly good answers here.
Casey:
I try to put it in like whatever backpack or bag or what have you that I brought it to the beach in when I'm not actively using it.
Casey:
I also don't go like deep into the surf like John does with his big camera.
Casey:
uh but generally speaking just being careful and trying to keep it away from anything that can hurt it which yes i recognize every grain of sand on that entire beach can hurt it but just doing my best to you know put it inside a towel or put in a backpack like i said and just keeping it as far away from sand as i possibly can marco you occasionally live outside of the beach but generally live on the beach what do you do with this
Marco:
I don't.
Marco:
I don't bring my big camera to the beach almost ever, and so I kind of avoid the issue.
John:
Fair enough.
John:
John?
John:
So I'm on now a 15-year run of bringing quote-unquote big cameras to the beach and haven't lost one yet, which means that I'm well overdue to drop my camera in the ocean this summer.
John:
I know it's going to happen eventually.
John:
My plan is basically I have a separate bag that's just for the camera that I try to keep away from children because children kick sand everywhere.
John:
Like you can't just keep a perimeter, right?
John:
And the camera is either around my neck or it's in that bag.
John:
Um, it gets, it's a fact of life.
John:
It gets sand and salt spray on it.
John:
I clean it between trips, try to get the sand and salt spray off.
John:
The bottom line is some tiny minuscule speck of salt water is going to get inside your camera and it's going to slowly corrode some electrode and then, uh, or some solder joint or something, uh,
John:
or the contacts on the sd card or like there's no stopping it like and my cameras that i've had are not particularly weatherproof but even if you get a quote-unquote weatherproof one unless it's in one of those things that you use to take your camera you know deep sea diving in the beach versus camera beach wins so just be resigned to the fact that by taking your big fancy camera to the beach frequently you are killing your camera and eventually it will die
John:
And as long as you can be okay with that and get good pictures in the meantime, fine.
John:
But there is no real strategy other than be careful and take as much care that you have that will stop eventually the salt water from winning.
John:
The ocean always wins.
Marco:
I would even go as far as to say that applies to pretty much everything that you bring near the ocean.
Marco:
It's a highly corrosive environment.
Marco:
It's full of salty air and moisture and gritty sand.
Marco:
Everything about going near the ocean is amazing for your mind and terrible for anything physical.
Marco:
Anything that is going to be near or on a beach, you are limiting its lifespan and that's just part of the deal.
Marco:
Anyway, thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Fracture, and Boosted Boards.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-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
John:
You know how many tabs I have open in Safari right now?
John:
I do not.
John:
Three.
John:
What?
John:
Are you feeling okay?
John:
It's Chrome.
John:
That's the issue.
John:
I close them when I'm done, and I haven't been doing any major web browsers.
John:
Here's the thing.
John:
This computer is getting far less use as it gets old.
John:
I use it for podcasting now, and during the day, if I need to do something on the computer, I use the iMac.
John:
Everything here has been closed except for the tabs that I always leave open, like Gmail and stats pages.
Marco:
I used to assume when you said three that it was like one of those charts that you see and at the bottom it says like millions.
John:
Just three.
John:
One window, three tabs.
John:
Chrome is one window, one, two, three, four tabs.
John:
Five tabs, sorry.
John:
man times are changing i know no it's not it's if you go because if i go to the other computer that is not true if you go to my work computer very not true it's just because i'm not using this one you know i would i would use it and close out the tabs i would never open new ones like the the biggest source of new tabs is like you know shopping research what are they trying to do my dog's even eating the coasters so we're trying to find new coasters that's a lot of tabs that's a lot of tabs
John:
I need to find a dog-proof coaster.
John:
It has to be acceptable to me, but also not attracted for the dog.
John:
I've never had to solve that particular problem before.
John:
My dog is too low to reach coasters.
John:
I know.
John:
It's tricky.
John:
A lot of ones that are not attracted for the dog are unacceptable to me.
John:
You get stone coasters, but I don't like that.
John:
I don't like the feeling of putting a glass on stone.
John:
The ones that we have, which we got, again, we got when we were married.
John:
We have a lot of things that we got when we were married.
John:
That had lasted until the kids and our pets destroyed them.
John:
These have cork on them.
John:
Like, you put the glass on cork, and I love that feeling.
John:
Like, a glass of water on a little cork coaster.
John:
That is a nice feeling.
John:
But the dog likes wood, so what I want is something that's like...
John:
stone or metal with a cork insert for the glass, but it like has a rim around it.
John:
Cause you also need like the condensation not to leak out onto the thing.
John:
So it has to be slightly cup, you know, there has to be an indentation and in the indentation I want cork, but I want the material to be totally non dog attractive.
John:
Like a dog's not going to bite on a metal or stone thing.
John:
so i'm still working on it anyway a lot of tabs there are a lot of advantages to having a low dog low dog low dog doesn't want to chew my dog wants to chew she's good she doesn't chew most things but uh and she's got a lot of her own chew toys but every once in a while she'll be like coaster