Peace in the Battery Kingdom
Marco:
Hello, listeners.
Marco:
We had an audio issue this week that resulted in lower audio quality than usual.
Marco:
We are very sorry about this.
Marco:
Maybe you won't even notice, and the person who made the mistake can get away with it without too much embarrassment.
Marco:
It was an honest mistake, and he feels bad enough already, so I won't even name him.
Casey:
Anyway, hopefully this will work.
Casey:
And God, if you need to use a Skype backup for some crazy f***ed up reason, then blame me.
Casey:
But you shouldn't.
Casey:
You really shouldn't.
Casey:
we need to talk about, for the next to last time, we need to talk about one very important thing, which is the Real AFM fundraiser for St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
Last week, when we recorded the episode, they were at something like $60,000.
Marco:
Yeah, they were somewhere in the 60s.
Casey:
By the time, within a few hours of the episode being released, not only did they cross the $75,000 mark, which was their goal,
Casey:
They crossed the $100,000 mark, I believe the same day that ATP was released.
Casey:
And so thank you from the bottom of all three of our hearts and from all of Relay, even though ATP is not officially on Relay, obviously we are, I guess you could say a sister show to Relay.
Casey:
It means a lot to all three of us, and especially to Relay, that our listeners and everyone else have opened their wallets and sent money to St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
I can't think of a better place to send some of your hard-earned money than St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
If you aren't familiar with them, if you missed it last week, St.
Casey:
Jude is a children's research hospital that is in Memphis, Tennessee, which just so happens to be the hometown of Stephen Hackett, who is one of the founders of RelayFM.
Casey:
St.
Casey:
Jude does incredible work with both research and treatment of childhood cancer.
Casey:
And what St.
Casey:
Jude has decided is, you know, hey, if you have this God awful situation wherein one of your children has cancer, let's do what we can to take away the one thing that we can really and truly control, which is the cost of treatment.
Casey:
And because treatment is so expensive in this country, because our country is so backwards in a lot of ways.
Casey:
It can be millions upon millions of dollars that is spent on one human being.
Casey:
Because St.
Casey:
Jude doesn't charge their families, this money needs to come from somewhere.
Casey:
And guess what, kids?
Casey:
It comes from you and me.
Casey:
And as we've talked about in the last episode, all three of us are spending some absurd amount of money on Apple products this year.
Casey:
As it turns out, we'll talk in the after show about how I'm signing up for spending even more money at Apple than I had originally intended this year.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I actually have not yet made my donation, but before the end of the month, I will be making my donation to, or our donation, I should say, to St.
Casey:
Jude on behalf of the List family.
Casey:
I encourage you, if you just spent $1,000 on a telephone or several hundred dollars on a watch,
Casey:
I bet you can scrape together at least 100 bucks to send St.
Casey:
Jude to help out families who are fighting and battling childhood cancer.
Casey:
I cannot think of a better organization to give your money to.
Casey:
I cannot thank you enough.
Casey:
And I ask you, if you haven't yet contributed, to please think about doing so.
Casey:
Go to stjude.org slash ATP, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP.
Casey:
If you can send any money their way, even five bucks, we'd appreciate it.
Casey:
But
Casey:
If you want to be guilt-free from having spent $1,000 plus on an iPhone 11 Pro Max or whatever you chose to get, maybe spend like $100, maybe even $500 on St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
I think it is absolutely worth it.
Marco:
Yeah, consider it like a consumerism offset credit.
Casey:
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Casey:
I like that a lot.
Casey:
All right, let's move on and let's talk about the follow up that I really wanted to put in last week.
Casey:
I know you've been waiting with bated breath.
John:
Before you continue, I did happen to take a look at that little follow up snippet that you linked in the notes.
John:
Do you want to say anything about that, Casey?
John:
uh i don't know i'd listen to it two or three days ago why you you yelled at me at the time didn't you so it's what it is is you casey saying that you have some follow-up and both me and marco saying hey wait a second we don't do follow-up in apple event shows that's what that's the clip you're putting in it says proof that we had to show all right just anyway you can put the link in people can judge themselves i'm just saying you're it's not it's not really helping your case i'm vindicated i'm telling you i'm vindicated
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
The follow-up from last week that I never got to, I know you've been super excited to hear about it.
Casey:
When we were talking about SiriusXM and how I was trying to...
Casey:
Let's say I was trying to time shift some of the recording.
Marco:
It feels like a lifetime ago.
Casey:
Yeah, it does feel like a lifetime ago.
Casey:
And I'd said, you know, I finally paid for SiriusXM, but I used this thing that Bank of America offers wherein you can make up a fake credit card number.
Casey:
It's a real credit card number, but a one-time use credit card number in order to give to this company.
Casey:
And I had said, oh, they'll probably put me in collections if I, you know, just let the credit card expire, which was the theory I was going to have if I had problems canceling.
Casey:
Well, as it turns out, this feature is called ShopSafe.
Casey:
And within days of that recording, Bank of America sent the following.
Casey:
On September 20th, we are discontinuing our online ShopSafe service.
Casey:
At this date, you will no longer be able to use the service to create new ShopSafe virtual credit card numbers or make purchases online with SafeShopSafe virtual credit card numbers.
Casey:
So my grandiose plan to prevent me from having to have an uncomfortable conversation with SiriusXM if I want to cancel.
Marco:
Which wouldn't have worked in the first place.
Casey:
which wouldn't have worked in the first place, but just go with it, was to use ShopSafe, which now isn't going to work anymore.
Casey:
By the way, ShopSafe was Flash only.
Casey:
And at the same time this event, this email came out, I noticed that Chrome was saying, hey, we're no longer supporting Flash coming soon.
Casey:
So I think what happened was they just decided we can't be bothered rewriting this.
Casey:
So we're just retiring.
Casey:
So now you know, everyone.
Casey:
I know you were waiting with bated breath for all that time, and now you know.
John:
Yeah, I'm sorry I didn't let you include this in the event show.
Casey:
See?
Casey:
I'm telling you, it was so important.
Casey:
It got sidetracked a week.
Casey:
A week, John!
Casey:
A week!
Marco:
See, that was so boring.
John:
I should normally cut it, but you have to leave it in as punishment.
John:
As punishment.
Casey:
It's deserved.
Casey:
I can't even lie.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
John, why don't you tell us about other John's theory about Apple presenter names, please?
John:
In our very long conversation about the Apple event last week, we were talking about how some presenters were announced or brought to the stage by saying their first and last name, and some just had first name.
John:
And Gruber had a theory that I found very convincing.
John:
His idea is that
John:
you if you've been on the stage presenting at an apple event before you get just the first name but if you've never been on the stage before you get first and last which i think for all the names in the presentation that works out for it's kind of charming and sort of familiar and like we're all friends here like you remember ann and it's like honestly i'm not sure i remember like this person may have been an apple event before but there's a lot of apple events and a lot of people and i can't even remember the names of
John:
You know, people I meet in real life, let alone people on stage in a presentation.
John:
But anyway, I think that fits with the facts and it makes some amount of sense.
John:
I think it's kind of adorable, but also I think it's not maybe a great idea.
John:
So Apple, please consider first and last names, at least until they've been on stage, let's say three times, because then we're like, oh, yeah, I know that person.
Marco:
I would even go even further.
Marco:
I would say first and last names and titles for anybody who isn't on the executive leadership page on the site.
John:
Yeah, there you go.
John:
I mean, or you could be casual, but put it on a slide, right?
John:
Behind them, you know?
John:
Yeah, that's even better, yeah.
Casey:
Yep, I dig it.
Casey:
We were also told that midnight green, the color that I will be getting in a couple of days when I'll be... That actually might be my third consecutive day visiting the Apple store, which you'll hear about later.
Casey:
Midnight green, not a China thing.
Casey:
I don't remember which one of us said we thought it might.
John:
I had heard it as a theory put forward that, oh, this is a thing in China, but it was just some random tweet, so I didn't know if there's any providence.
John:
Lots of people from China wrote in and said, nope, not us.
Marco:
My favorite feedback on this were the multiple people who pointed out like...
John:
yeah we said this must be from you know demand from somewhere else meanwhile like everyone we know is getting green yeah i mean a lot of that is just because it's the one different color and alongside space gray and white silver or whatever so you know people i think that what it really shows is the appetite as you said last show mark like you wish that the that the pro model had the vibrant colors and had more choice but it doesn't so you're lucky if you get one interesting color per year and
John:
That's what everyone's going for.
John:
Poor Jason Snell pointed out that his red-green color blindness makes it so it looks exactly the same as the space gray run to him.
Marco:
I mean, in all fairness, many of the people who have them so far say it does look very similar to space gray, especially in low lighting.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Jason Snell had a really good article over on Six Colors about the U1 and what is it?
Casey:
Ultra Wideband?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Is that what U1 is?
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Which is a really great read, including a brief interview or some commentary from the CEO of a company that makes some of these chips.
Casey:
And it sounds like and maybe I'm reading this wrong.
Casey:
So correct me, gentlemen, but it sounds like what it's kind of doing is almost like GPS, but at a very, very, very micro level.
Casey:
So you can get like a really good position of where you are in relation to another thing based on just one of these chips and like a couple of antennas or something like that.
Casey:
Is that kind of a reasonable summary?
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, I think so.
John:
It's doing a time of signal propagation to locate things in the same way that the time of signals from satellites overhead lets you locate yourself on the Earth.
John:
It's just a smaller version of it.
John:
I would love to see the tear down and see exactly what the hardware looks like for this and how it's incorporated.
John:
But yeah, this definitely sounds cool.
John:
We talked about it last week in terms of the one feature that Apple announced that uses this chip, which being you can...
John:
point your phone at somebody else's phone with a u1 and they will be the default top item and airdrop so you know of all the people listed or whatever uh but of course this uh all the rumors about those little tiles that you can stick on which is a name we call them tiles which is so terrible tile is a company that makes a product like this apple probably will not call i think tiles but anyway it's a little tiny thing that you can stick on your belongings and then if you lose your belonging with a little thing stuck to it you could use your phone to find it
John:
with much much greater precision than like find my iphone today which will tell you that your phone is somewhere in your house and you can make it beep and listen for it like it's a smoke alarm with a bad battery until you find it but this presumably would give you a much more precise location even a location than you could use with your fancy ar goggles to just look around and see where it is and yada yada so anyway link in the show notes to jason's article to give you an idea of what could be in store for us all with these yuan chips and all the new phones
Casey:
Real-time follow-up from Ryan Jones.
Casey:
It's more like radar in terms of operation than it is GPS.
Casey:
I said GPS earlier.
Casey:
What I just meant was location, relative locations of things, but he is right that it works.
Casey:
As you had said, John, about the time it takes for signals to travel, and so it is more radar-esque, and that is a reasonable correction.
Casey:
Uh, speaking of things that were corrected, a lot of people pointed out to us more than I expected that, Hey, you know, you guys have been begging about iPhones to get thicker over time and they have been.
Casey:
And as it turns out, I had talked about that last episode, but Mark would justifiably cut it out because we went for about 14 hours last episode.
Casey:
Uh, but yeah, the,
Casey:
The iPhones, if you look at each individual lines, like the X to the XS to the 11 Pro, they are getting ever so slightly thicker ever since something like the 5S.
Casey:
And Joe Beninato put together both a chart and a graph.
Casey:
uh that he had put it on that he posted on twitter we will link to in the show notes but short short version they are getting thicker and the assumption is that a lot of the games from the battery life games in the pro models is because of a combination of the phones just plain getting thicker and you know perhaps using some of the space that the 3d touch sensor was taking up in prior phones
John:
Yeah, as we record this, unfortunately, I only checked about an hour ago, the iFixit teardown isn't up yet.
John:
So we're still going by people's speculation.
John:
But someone tweeted out a bunch of statistical speculation about the nature of the phones.
John:
This was, I think, even before the embargo broke or whatever.
John:
So I'm not sure where they're getting these numbers.
John:
But they have guesses for the increase in battery size for all the various phones.
John:
In theory, the iPhone 11, which, you know, are the XR.
John:
The XR versus the 11 has 6% larger battery, and the XS versus the 11 Pro has a 20% larger battery, and the XS Max versus the 11 Pro Max, God, these names are killing me, has a 10% larger battery.
John:
So I'm mostly trusting the battery numbers because you can pull this from the devices or whatever.
John:
The really tricky bit in these specs that have been posted, again, unconfirmed, were people trying to measure RAM.
John:
And the theory here is that the iPhone 11 has four gigs, whereas its predecessor had three.
John:
And the 11 Pro has six gigs where its predecessor had four.
John:
And same thing for the Pro Max.
John:
But the six gig thing is a big question because I've heard a lot of doubts about that.
John:
So anyway, all this is to say, I can't wait to see the iFixit teardown to find out exactly how much RAM these things have.
John:
And you would think with the embargo up, well, didn't all those reviewers just ask Apple to tell them how big the battery is and how much RAM it has?
John:
Oh, you can ask Apple that.
John:
But they don't like to talk about those things.
John:
And so they don't.
John:
And so we would have to wait for the iFixit teardown.
John:
I'll be excited if the pros have six gigs of RAM.
John:
Because, you know, why not?
John:
Like, I do like to see RAM going up over time.
John:
And they're so powerful now that it's just, they can do stuff with that RAM.
John:
Like, if they have Pro right in the name, they should have a huge amount of, kind of like the weird thing they did with the
John:
ipad pro were only the one that had a terabyte of flash had the the extra amount of ram uh but i think that's that's a cool sort of pro level feature and they did put pro in the name and the battery size i think just based on the size and weight which you can see in the graphs it's clear that something's heavier in there and the battery makes total sense that it's larger 20 bigger battery uh nothing to sneeze at in the 11 pro
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, no matter what the exact numbers end up being, where we are right now is we don't have the teardown yet, and none of us have phones yet, but the review embargo lifted this morning for all the press units that went out.
Marco:
And all the press reviews, all of them, even the ones from publications that are normally critical of battery life, like Joanna Stern and Wall Street Journal, all of them said the battery life is significantly better.
Marco:
So whatever the numbers actually end up being, it almost doesn't matter.
Marco:
Like now we know like, okay, it's a big deal.
Marco:
They made the battery bigger and it made the battery life way better with the other improvements as well.
Marco:
So that's just great news.
Marco:
And frankly, I don't really care about RAM and I don't really care about how they made battery life better.
Marco:
As long as they did make it better, that's fantastic.
Marco:
So that's very good to hear.
Marco:
I can't wait to get my phone.
Marco:
With all the press reviews, I don't know if we're jumping ahead here, but so far all the press reviews seem to agree on the two major themes of the camera actually is significantly better in certain ways, and also the battery life is significantly better.
Marco:
So those are great things.
Marco:
The one thing that the reviews have not seemed to say much about, or if they did say it, they said, oh, I can't notice the difference, is the increased angles and distance for face ID.
Marco:
No one seems to really...
Marco:
notice that or they say it's about the same that's the only thing about it that I'm a little bit disappointed to hear because that's one thing I really wanted was improve face ID you know distance and stuff but we'll see what you know when we actually get these phones but so far you know the major themes of like battery and camera being significant upgrades that's that's good for me and I'm happy with that
John:
Did you see any reviews that actually test, like, explicitly said they tested the Face ID angle or even mentioned it at all?
John:
I haven't seen any, no.
John:
So it could, I mean, it could be this not a thing that they, because the embargo was pretty tight in terms of, like, when they got the phones and when the embargo was lifted.
John:
So maybe there just wasn't time to do that.
John:
And, you know, the other features are obviously so much more important.
John:
But when you get your phone, try it against your XS and we'll see.
Casey:
I thought Panzerino had said something about it, but maybe I'm making that up.
Casey:
Oh, here we go.
Casey:
This is from TechCrunch's review by Matthew Panzerino.
Casey:
Now I'm quoting.
Casey:
Oh, about that improved face ID angle.
Casey:
I saw maybe a slight improvement, if any, but not that much.
Casey:
A few degrees, sometimes hard to say.
Casey:
I'll be interested to see what other reviewers found.
Casey:
Maybe my face sucks, said Matthew.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So yeah, I'm basically reiterating what you guys said.
Casey:
Nobody seems to be completely convinced from what I've seen, but Matt at least had mentioned it and was kind of ambivalent about it.
Marco:
I mean, some of the gain is just iOS 13.
Marco:
Like iOS 13 made Face ID a little bit faster.
Marco:
And so they could be kind of lumping that in with their claimed gains.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
The iPhone 11 lineup is said to include two-way charging hardware, but the software has it disabled.
Casey:
Now, we had talked a little bit about this idea last week, and one of the things that we, and I think particularly I, had said was, I don't really feel like this is something I need in my life.
Casey:
I'm sure I would enjoy it if I had it, but I don't yearn to charge other people's phones from my phone.
Casey:
But then a lot of people wrote in and pointed out, yes, but what if this would allow you to charge an Apple Watch without bringing the bespoke Apple Watch charger when you travel?
Casey:
And that, my friends, has dramatically changed my tune.
Casey:
Now, with that said, the Apple Watch, as far as I knew, even the modern, even the brand new ones don't
Casey:
support regular Qi charging.
Casey:
Is that correct?
John:
Yeah, I think so.
John:
I mean, I don't know if they officially support it, but like, I think it might be able to get it to work because it's not like it, you know, it's just got a coil of wire or whatever that you induce a current in.
John:
I can imagine it sort of working, but I don't know what the official support situation is.
Marco:
Well, and the reality is like Apple could make it work with their phone.
Marco:
They could do that if they wanted to.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
That's true, too.
Casey:
But I don't know if this is even true or not, but people are saying that the two-way charging hardware may be there.
Casey:
And here's another reason why we want to see this iFixit teardown.
Casey:
But the software has it disabled, at least for now, which is a very interesting approach.
Casey:
And I'd be interested to see if that's the case.
Marco:
Yeah, I never considered the possibility.
Marco:
I was also very critical of two-way charging last week saying, why would you want to kill your phone's battery to charge something else and it would be slow and everything?
Marco:
But I hadn't even considered the possibility of using your phone as a charger for something else while your phone is plugged in.
Marco:
So therefore, yeah, you could just take the phone and the watch somewhere and just take the phone charger and plug it in overnight with the watch on top of it with the phone face down.
Marco:
You could do that, yeah.
Marco:
I still think it's...
Marco:
Not an incredibly compelling feature, but maybe that's easy to say as somebody who doesn't travel with an Apple Watch.
Marco:
But all the rest of the uses for it, I think, are not incredibly compelling.
Marco:
So I'm sure there's a good reason.
John:
Well, no, we've really left the Johnny Ive design era when Apple incorporates a pop socket on the back of their phones, which doubles as a watch charger.
John:
Oh, yes.
John:
Like you collapse it and it's a perfect little watch charger.
John:
That'd be so bad.
Casey:
Good, but bad.
John:
Mike Early would have five of them.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
Still in follow-up.
Casey:
It's the follow-up that does not end.
Casey:
The Apple release date matrix.
Casey:
So there are so many different pieces of hardware and software that are coming out at so many different times that our good friend John Voorhees over at Mac Stories has put together an entire page full of information about what is being released and so on and so forth.
Casey:
This is an incredibly long list.
John:
Yeah, it's been confusing.
John:
I mean, the confusion continues.
John:
I think it's on this list with Apple Arcade and what's the state of that and what's released when and can you get the things just on iPhones and iPads?
John:
And what about the Apple TV version?
John:
It's just, yeah, Apple's got a lot of stuff and it's all kind of overlapping and all kind of interlinked with each other.
John:
So if you get confused, reference this page, which I assume is correct as of our recording.
John:
But who knows?
John:
Maybe by the time you listen to this, things will change again.
Marco:
I will say on this topic, we're going to release this show about a day before iOS 13.0 was released.
Marco:
iOS 13.1 is coming out in a couple of weeks.
Marco:
If you're the kind of person who tends to wait until the .1 update before you upgrade to the major OS, let me advise you this year, wait for the .2.
Marco:
Because this 13.0, which all the reviews noted, is a buggy mess.
Marco:
And it's usable, like, you know, when your new phone, if you're getting the new phone, you're stuck, you know, you have to have it anyway.
Marco:
But if you're not getting the new phone yet, and you have a choice of when you update to iOS 13 point whatever, I would say wait, like one version past what you normally would update to.
Marco:
If you normally do it immediately, wait for 13.1.
Marco:
If you normally do 0.1, wait for 0.2.
Marco:
Because it is still... I was using the 13 betas most of the summer.
Marco:
And again, it's usable.
Marco:
Your phone's not going to melt.
Marco:
It is usable.
Marco:
But 13.0 feels like a typical year's beta 2.
Yeah.
Marco:
And unfortunately, 13.1, I would say feels like a typical year's beta three or four still.
Marco:
Like it still feels like a beta.
Marco:
There are still beta bugs.
Marco:
Like 13.1, I still have issues with Mail, the Mail app.
Marco:
I have issues.
Marco:
13.1 broke the way the navigation bar handles transitions in all apps.
Marco:
And to the point where if you happen to have Overcast on a 13.1 device right now,
Marco:
you can, this is a bug introduced in the latest beta, go try to add a podcast via search, then hit cancel and go back to the root menu, and the navigation items in the top navigation bar from the search will be on top of the ones that go in the other menu, and you'll have a big stack of overlapping navigation items.
Marco:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
I'm not doing anything crazy here.
Marco:
This is just a search controller and a navigation bar.
Marco:
And it's like, this is like common things.
Marco:
And in the latest beta, they broke that they broke the way navigation bars work in like beta two of iOS 13.1.
Marco:
Like this is what, this is the kind of bug we're still dealing with here.
Marco:
So like the, this is the kind of thing that again, like normally you would see this like in, in mid June in the beta cycle.
Marco:
Like not even July.
Marco:
You'd see this kind of stuff like in mid-June.
Marco:
And that's still where we are here with what is supposed to be the stability release 13.1 that comes after the really buggy 13.0.
Marco:
So this is still a mess.
Marco:
So I would, again, strongly advise wait at least one extra version past what you normally would before you update.
John:
Yeah, I finally installed an iOS 13 beta.
John:
I installed 13.1 on my iPad, and the first thing I did after it was installed was tap the YouTube app icon, and it sat there for a while, and then YouTube crashed.
Marco:
Yeah, there's problems.
Marco:
Like Instagram, too.
Marco:
Instagram has problems with the keyboard.
Marco:
If you're typing a comment or whatever the text on Stories is called,
Marco:
after a couple of tries of typing, the keyboard will just not appear anymore.
Marco:
It'll be a blank area, and if you tap where the keyboard should be, you can type out things.
Marco:
But you're doing it blindly.
Marco:
You can't see it.
Marco:
Again, there's so many bugs like that.
Marco:
And again, this is...
Marco:
this is like beta 2 level bugs here, not 13.1.
Marco:
We should not be seeing these kind of bugs for a bug fix release that's supposed to come out at the end of September.
Casey:
Even the 13.0 GM is rough and the 13.1 beta is also rough.
Casey:
It's not as bad as I'd
Casey:
been led to believe, but it is not great.
Casey:
And I echo what you're saying, Marco.
Casey:
If you're the kind of person that is capable of waiting for plus one of what you normally do, I would do that.
Marco:
The big stuff seems pretty much fine.
Marco:
Your phone's not going to reboot in the middle of the day, probably.
Marco:
It's not going to burn the whole battery down for no reason, probably.
Marco:
But
Marco:
there's just so many little paper cuts still all over the place that it's like i don't think ios 13 is so great that you need it so fast you know like i don't think you're not really getting much by updating to it that couldn't wait a few more weeks for the next version do get more icons on the springboard on your ipad that's true although it's distant speaking of the ipad you know so i install 30 moment beta i try to launch youtube it shows me like the youtube slash screen and crashes
John:
What would I do after that?
John:
Of course I tap the YouTube icon again, and it worked.
John:
That's not reassuring.
John:
Like, literally, I didn't use the app.
John:
I tapped the icon, and it crashed, and I tapped it again, and it didn't crash.
John:
Okay, 13.1.
John:
This is how we're going to do it, I guess.
John:
Just, I mean, it's mostly been okay, to both of your points.
John:
Like, it's fine, but it's a little bit wonky sometimes, and you don't know why.
John:
So I'm, you know, I'm looking forward to 13.2.
Casey:
Yep, me too.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So other news that has kind of slipped a little bit under the radar over the last week or so is that Apple Care Plus can be purchased in one lump sum for two years of service or coverage or whatever.
Casey:
But in general, you can also treat it as just another monthly subscription because everything should be a subscription these days, according to Apple.
Casey:
And you can just pay for it month to month.
Casey:
Was that in the presentation?
John:
I thought it was in the presentation, wasn't it?
Casey:
Oh, if it was, I totally missed that.
John:
Maybe it wasn't.
John:
Anyway, I remember having questions about it after the event and saying, well, what do they mean by that?
John:
Is it monthly like you're just taking the lump sum and dividing it up into payments because you don't want to pay it all up front?
John:
But no, the answer is you just pay a certain amount a month and you just keep paying that forever and ever and ever.
John:
Basically, Apple has reinvented insurance.
Marco:
I mean, it makes perfect sense.
Marco:
Because that's, you know, what Apple Care Plus is on the phones is basically, you know, fancy insurance.
Marco:
And before, your only option was buy it for two years or don't buy it.
Marco:
And have one year of limited coverage.
Marco:
And then, you know, eventually it became two years of accidental damage coverage.
Marco:
But now it's like you can still do that.
Marco:
Or you can pay monthly, which will end up being a little bit more money if you actually keep it for two years.
Marco:
But what's nice about it is that it decouples that time interval from it.
Marco:
So now you can buy it if you want to.
Marco:
You can still do the same thing you used to do and buy the two years up front for about the same price.
Marco:
Or you can...
Marco:
just you know if you only keep your phone for a year great you can buy just one year of it and then stop it on that phone and start for the next phone if you keep your phone for three years i'm pretty sure you can keep the apple care going for three years yeah just just uh do the math before you decide to keep your phone for six years and pay maybe insurance every time because that's probably not going to be a great deal for you
Marco:
Well, I mean, if you're the kind of person who drops your phone on average of once or twice per phone that you own, that could be significant.
Marco:
For me, I still don't buy AppleCare for my phones, but someone else in the family needs it right now, and I'm happy that we have it on that device.
Casey:
That's funny.
Casey:
I did AppleCare once in the past.
Casey:
I don't even remember what phone it was on.
Casey:
But this year, I am pretty sure I'm going to stop using cases for the first time in a long time.
Casey:
And so this year, I decided to get AppleCare on my phone.
Casey:
So as discussed in the last episode, I can be caseless, caseless.
Casey:
And this way, if I do drop and shatter my phone, it will be considerably cheaper than it would have been otherwise.
John:
I need to look farther into this thing because my other question that I realized I didn't put the answer to in the notes here is like, can you buy this at any time?
John:
Like if I decide six months into owning the thing, can I start paying monthly for it?
John:
And the second question, can I interrupt it?
John:
If I started paying for it as soon as I got the device but stopped for a month, can I resume for a month?
John:
Like what are the rules about...
John:
you know, because there's lots of things that I've always wanted to do with computers.
John:
Like, oh, I'll use it for the first year to see if it's a lemon.
John:
And if it's not, if it's not a lemon, I used to be able to do this.
John:
If it's not, if it's a lemon, I'll buy the extended warranty.
John:
But if it's not, I won't, you know, that type of thing.
John:
Or, you know, not being able to afford to pay it for a couple months and just being more careful with your phone, but then resuming paying for it later.
John:
I don't know what all the rules are.
John:
I'll look into it.
John:
If my interest stays until next week, I'll look into it.
Marco:
they had a thing with that with apple caps before where like if you could you didn't if you didn't buy it up front you could add it later i think within a month but only but you'd have to like bring it into an apple store and they would have to like look at it to make sure you hadn't already broken it yeah that's the problem with like you know buying it and then uh not buying it when the device is new there's always sort of the problem of well you bought it then suddenly you drop your phone what a coincidence you know
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
And this is the kind of thing, too.
Marco:
And this goes into a lot of the stuff about repair law and battery servicing that we didn't ever have time to talk about on the show, I don't think, that went on last month.
Marco:
But anything about iPhones...
Marco:
getting repaired or replaced.
Marco:
You have to keep in mind, we talk about it and we think about it as the ideal case of people who have their stuff and they're being honest and they break it, oops, let me get it fixed, whatever.
Marco:
But anytime Apple creates a way for you to transform a broken phone into a working phone,
Marco:
people will take advantage of it in giant scam operations to basically take trashed phones and swap the serial numbers and somehow bring them in.
Marco:
There's these giant scams that run all over the world where people basically try to get free phones out of Apple so they can sell them and make a bunch of money.
Marco:
Anything Apple does in this area, you have to also consider how could this be used fraudulently
Marco:
at scale to defraud apple because it will be like whatever whatever possibility is there it will be exploited and so you kind of have to consider like you know whenever they touch this area whenever they make it possible to get things repaired or replaced or whatever else like there's always that risk that you have to consider
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:
Because whatever you want to build, you can build it there.
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:
They recently opened up Toronto.
Marco:
They're opening one up in Mumbai shortly.
Marco:
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Marco:
So I've used the support here and there.
Marco:
It's been rock solid every time I've had to use it.
Marco:
And most importantly for me with web hosts, the pricing is just incredible.
Marco:
Like just earlier tonight, I just resized, I was getting hit by a ton of requests.
Marco:
And so I just, it took about five minutes and I scaled up all my web servers.
Marco:
I doubled their CPU capacity.
Marco:
And the pricing is so incredibly awesome for that.
Marco:
Like what it did to my pricing was not that significant compared to the amount of power I got.
Marco:
And they've been just, you know, not only is it super easy to do, you can size things up, size things down.
Marco:
I'm only being billed hourly.
Marco:
So if I, if that plan, if that rush ends and I want to drop that plan down, I can, no problem.
Marco:
And then I just pay for the hours that I was using it.
Marco:
And if I don't change anything, I just pay the monthly rate by the time I hit that cap.
Marco:
So it's super easy to figure out pricing and everything.
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:
Once again, Linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Promo code ATP2019 for a $20 credit.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for keeping all my servers running and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Now we should move on and talk about the press embargo that we've kind of been touching off of already.
Casey:
I've read Gruber's review.
Casey:
I've read a piece of the Verge's review, Neely Patel's review, and I've read Panzerino's review.
Casey:
All of them seem to be saying the same things.
Casey:
I think it was Marco that said so earlier.
Casey:
Camera's great.
Casey:
Battery life's great.
Casey:
Phones are great.
Casey:
You probably want one.
Casey:
But I assume that the two of you want to dig in a little bit deeper on some of this.
Casey:
So where shall we start?
John:
Yeah, I'll start with Gruber.
John:
So you had a couple of interesting points that I hadn't seen elsewhere, and particularly things that people were speculating about during the event that actually turned out to be true.
John:
One of them is that, yeah, so things got three cameras, big deal.
John:
But the thing that people were saying that Apple would do well that a lot of multi-camera phones don't do as well is,
John:
sort of making sure the cameras are well matched to each other that when you transition from one camera to another the colors don't look different or the perspective isn't weird or whatever and gruber said that basically like not only are all the cameras the same but you can smoothly transition between them like during a zoom motion or whatever and you have no idea it's even changing cameras that's the type of super cool magic that i would like but in particular i i
John:
I really am glad that the cameras are sort of calibrated to each other because that's what you'd expect from an Apple device.
John:
And you don't want your pictures to look different when you're zoomed in.
John:
It's bad enough that the apertures are different, which has some effects, but apparently they managed to paper over that as well.
John:
You can even do it while you're shooting video.
John:
So you can be shooting video with your triple camera phone and zoom while you're shooting video.
John:
And while it's recording, the video will switch smoothly from one camera to another.
John:
So it just looks like you zoomed in on the video, which is...
John:
Pretty amazing.
John:
The only exception to that is at the very tippy-top end of the capabilities.
John:
If you're recording in 4K60, you are stuck with the camera lens that you started with because apparently that is stretching the limits of the processor.
John:
So it's always something for next year's phone, I suppose.
Marco:
So I'm a 4K60 shooter.
Marco:
I was tweeting about this earlier today.
Marco:
I don't actually mind this limitation because the phone has never been able to switch lenses during video.
Marco:
So for me, it's just like everyone else gets this one new feature except me, but I haven't had it ever before and I don't really ever need it.
Marco:
So I'd rather keep shooting 4K60 and enjoy my new dynamic range that I get with this new mode than drop down to 4K30 just to be able to zoom in.
John:
Yeah, it's probably more important for photographs, though, because the experience, like, this is part of the magic of the camera system and everything, all the software, that if you look at the back of the phone, it's got these three things on it, but your experience from the front of the phone is you just have a phone with a camera.
John:
Like, you don't think about three cameras.
John:
I mean, I suppose you can if you're a nerd and realize the aperture differences and select them or whatever, but if you're just a, you know...
John:
using your camera, just pretend there's one lens back there, and you can zoom in and zoom out, and it's just like from the front face of the camera, it's just, or from the front face of the camera, from the front face of the phone, it's just like you have a single really, really good camera, and that's the way it should be.
Marco:
And one thing I love about this too is like the specs of them are much closer than they used to be.
Marco:
So in the previous phones that had the telephoto and the regular lens, the telephoto was never as good in pretty big ways.
Marco:
Like I think the first ones I don't think were even stabilized, were they?
Marco:
I don't remember.
Marco:
But anyway, on the old Plus phones, I don't think those were even stabilized.
John:
I think the Plus ones were stabilized, but the non-Plus phone wasn't.
Marco:
That was the wide camera back when it was only wide cameras.
Marco:
Anyway, it doesn't matter.
Marco:
But until the 11s, the ones that have the telephoto camera...
Marco:
the telephoto lens had a much tighter maximum aperture.
Marco:
We mentioned this last week.
Marco:
And so the result was that the telephoto camera did way worse in low light than the wide camera.
Marco:
You'd get much more noise to the point where sometimes the phone would actually...
Marco:
evaluate the the conditions and would use a digital zoom on the wide sensor in low light when you were using 2x mode because it was less crappy than actually using the 2x sensor because it was it was such a worse camera and so the result of that was that these last couple years i've had the 2x camera with the with the 10 and 10s there were a lot of times where i just wouldn't use it when i wanted to because the image quality was just so much worse
Marco:
And with the 11 family, with the 11 Pro specifically, that's the one that has the telephoto, it isn't exactly the same between the two, but it's a lot closer.
Marco:
Like before it was f1.8 versus f2.4, now it's f1.8 versus f2.0.
Marco:
And I know these numbers don't sound like a big difference if you aren't a photographer, but trust me, f2.4 to f2.0 is a huge increase in light.
Marco:
And f2.0 to f1.8 is a relatively small jump.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
It's a surprisingly close match now.
Marco:
So the telephoto is almost as good.
Marco:
And they're both stabilized.
Marco:
The wide is not stabilized.
Marco:
And you don't need stabilization nearly as much on a 13mm equivalent lens as you would on a 26 or a 52.
Marco:
But I would like it to be stabilized just to have that across all three.
Marco:
But again, I understand why it's not.
Marco:
But yeah, I'm really happy to see that the...
Marco:
that all three lenses are almost optically the same quality and have the same features and everything else.
Marco:
With this phone, you're no longer having to make a ton of trade-offs between like, all right, well, I want to shoot telephoto, but then I'm going to have crappy low light performance.
Marco:
I want to shoot 4K 60, but I'm not going to have good dynamic range.
Marco:
There are very, very few of those little tricks and exceptions and trade-offs you have to make between the cameras now, and that's really great.
John:
Speaking of trade-offs, another one is that night mode is not available on the ultra-wide lens due to hardware change.
John:
Gruber described this as, I'm assuming this is coming from Apple, doesn't have 100% focus pixels like the other two lenses do.
John:
So on camera sensors, there are a certain number of
John:
uh parts of the sensor that are used for focusing and apparently it doesn't have enough of them to do night mode i'm not sure how the focus pixels are related to night mode but anyway it sounds like it's a hardware limitation and so tough luck but you know that's again there's got to be something for next year like what do they do to improve this well are all the cameras as good as they could be are they all identical this is a big leap over like as marco was saying last year but there's still room so don't worry they'll find a way to improve the camera next year too
Casey:
One of the really funny parts of Gruber's review, which one of you, I guess, John put in the notes, was when he was talking about how he needs to adjust his grip.
Casey:
So he said, the ultra wide lens is so insanely wide that I need to learn a new phone grip while shooting photos.
Casey:
I caught my finger in the frame several times while shooting ultra wide photos.
Casey:
And he actually includes a picture of him and how he holds the phone.
Casey:
uh, when he's shooting and I guess he's holding it wrong, uh, because, uh, as it turns out, you can, I guess you can see some of his finger, uh, in the frame that he captured.
Casey:
And if you look at the picture that he posted of him holding this phone, you would never in a million years think that any of his, any part of his finger was anywhere in the frame.
John:
Yeah.
John:
He's not blocking the lens at all.
John:
And this does not bode well for me because I get my fingers in the frame now without an ultra.
John:
I need to just get it.
John:
I was thinking about this when we were talking about the camera and I'm thinking about that little bulge on the back or whatever.
Uh,
John:
i know there's lots of like meme images going around making the camera uh cluster look like a stovetop with little stovetop rings or whatever they say next year there'll be four and it will look like a real stovetop and they show like a little camera square with four uh cameras and i don't think they're going to four cameras next year who knows i mean again the gelade razor thing we've already covered
John:
Um, but I am thinking about, uh, assuming next year's phone, great.
John:
We're talking about next year's phone already.
John:
Assuming next year's phone is like the redesign year where we've had a couple of years of this similar form factor.
John:
And next year is, you know, I don't know, a flat sided iPhone SE look and shape, or who knows what it is like a redesign redesign.
John:
I was thinking of how will they arrange the cameras on the back of the fancy model.
John:
So you've got three cameras.
John:
It's kind of weird that they're in a square now.
John:
I know they tried to sort of,
John:
work it out by saying well we also have the flash and the microphone and but like honestly if you have three big circular things putting them in a square is not particularly harmonious putting four in a square would work but i'm not sure they're going to go to four cameras so i was thinking well do you go back to three in a line do you go to a triangle triangle is even more disharmonious with the apple design aesthetic probably with the whole round rack thing um but the reason i think in the context of blocking with your finger is
John:
especially with wide lenses like this, the arrangement they choose and the position they choose in the back of the phone has user interface implications in terms of how likely people are to actually cover the lens with their fingers or get their fingers in the shot.
John:
And you see a lot of this with other phones that choose different locations for their cameras.
John:
Some of them can be in the middle of the top.
John:
Back in the day, some of them were actually dead center in the middle of the phone.
John:
I don't think anybody does that anymore.
Yeah.
John:
I frequently find myself fumbling with my phone to make sure that, A, I know where the camera is on the back of the phone because it's very easy, especially with my sort of monochrome case and everything, to not quite know which side is up or whatever.
John:
Often I feel for the volume buttons, either because I'm going to use them as a shutter.
John:
Or because they let me know where the orientation is.
John:
And then I accidentally get some part of my finger in front of the shot and don't notice until after I take it.
John:
So it's actually a difficult problem because as much as it was likely to call these things cameras, if you were making an actual camera that was not a smartphone, you would never make it shaped like this.
John:
It's not a good shape for a camera.
John:
It doesn't have a grip.
John:
It's really easy to get your hands in front of things.
John:
It's not easy to hold or use with one hand.
John:
That's why, by the way, I use the volume buttons because...
John:
If you're trying to hold your phone in a precarious position and then also trying to hit the onscreen shutter button with your finger, that's how you drop your phone.
John:
So I'm always trying to use the volume button for that purpose to be a shutter release and then end up taking a screenshot.
John:
And, you know, bottom line, it's not it's not the world's greatest camera.
John:
But those physical attributes like to think that there's nothing left to do with the phone design, figuring out where to put your now three cameras and how to arrange them and how far off of the edge they are and if they should be in a line and if the line should be horizontal or vertical or they should be
John:
in a triangle pattern or maybe two of them should be on one side of one on the other like i'm coming with all sorts of very ugly scenarios that might have some advantages but that's what i'm thinking about it's gonna be interesting to see how many more fingers and fingertips we see in shots on the iphone 11 especially with the ultra wide lens
Casey:
Neely Patel seems pleased with the battery life especially.
Casey:
I didn't get a chance to read the entire review, but he had some very complimentary things to say about the battery life, including, quote, the iPhone 11 Pro Max I've been using every day for a week has consistently run for 12 to 14 hours on a single charge.
Casey:
With over 10 hours of screen on time reported in the battery settings per 24-hour period, that's compared to 8 to 10 hours of battery life at most for my iPhone XS Max.
Casey:
So that's an increase of 4 to 6 hours.
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's very difficult to do battery testing.
John:
As many reviews pointed out, Apple is not helping here because they're giving sort of times for their very narrowly defined tests, like video time, talk time, or whatever their measurements are.
John:
And nobody really has a good comprehensive battery test.
John:
It's not an easy thing to do, especially from year to year.
John:
So what they do is they just use the phone and say, all right, well, I'm using this phone just like I normally use my phone, and here's the battery life I get, and I can compare it to my old phone.
John:
Now, Gruber was nice enough to point out the battery percentage of his old phone to say, yeah, I'm comparing it to my old phone, but my old phone, according to the battery health thing, says 92%, so it's not like it's totally a dead battery.
John:
But the real comparison would be, what was the battery life for your XS when it was brand spanking new and you were reviewing that?
John:
as compared to your 11 pro again i do not doubt that the 11 pro is uh much better i do believe it has a bigger battery and i think uh all the reviewers can absolutely agree that it is much better than its predecessor so thumbs up but the difficulty of battery testing like and that's not only is it difficult to test a battery it's difficult to talk to people about battery life because you don't know you don't know their life you don't know what they do with their phone
John:
Maybe they play, let's say, Pokemon Go all day.
John:
It will destroy your battery.
John:
It laughs at your battery.
John:
And, yeah, you can add an extra, quote-unquote, four hours.
John:
That's like an extra five minutes of Pokemon Go.
John:
So if someone says, oh, I hate my phone, you know, the battery dies in the middle of the day, there's nothing you can really say to them because, like, however they use their phone, the battery is dying.
John:
I mean, unless they have, you know...
John:
some sort of you know facebook thing in the background destroying their battery assuming everything is working as intended all you can really do is just buy a bigger and bigger battery case and maybe not play so much pokemon uh did you guys read joanna stern's because i have not had the chance to yet
John:
I just pulled out the quote from her tweet.
John:
She tweeted this.
John:
It feels so good to write an iPhone review without complaining about battery life, which is great.
John:
I mean, here's the thing.
John:
It's such a big advance that people are drawn to say, I have no more complaints, which is not strictly true.
John:
Everyone would actually like more battery life, but if you make a big enough leap, they're like, oh, this is so much better that I feel like it is now adequate.
John:
And so it's a...
John:
You know, it's a time of peace in the battery kingdom on iPhones.
John:
Everyone says battery life is good.
John:
And it will take a year or two for people to go, you know what?
John:
I could use another three or four hours of battery life and then Apple has to up its game.
John:
But we seem like we're in a good spot.
John:
Speaking of this and speaking of battery life and the cameras and all this other stuff, I was surprised when I saw a couple of people think that we had a negative take on the Apple event.
John:
And I just want to reiterate, like putting the event aside, which we also have complaints about their game now or whatever.
John:
I think this almost every year after the September event, and I think it again even more strongly this year, Apple doesn't screw up the iPhone that much.
John:
These iPhones are really, really, really good products.
John:
I can't even think of a year when I'd be like, oh, this year for the iPhone, it's not good.
John:
The worst thing people can think to complain about is like, is it better enough over last year's phone?
John:
It's like, are you kidding?
John:
Forget phones don't exist.
John:
Their new iPhones are really good.
John:
There's like nothing to complain about.
John:
It's just a question of, yeah, but how much better is it?
John:
It's like, you know how hard it is to make a product, a new product every year where there is like nothing wrong with it and you spend your entire time arguing over...
John:
the percentage increase in some stat that you care about these iPhones are good the iPhone is almost always good and these are I think particularly good right and it kind of makes sense for being like the third iteration in the same form factor they're really perfecting it but they're really good phones people the iPhones are really good phones and we are spoiled by every year Apple introduces an iPhone that's a really good phone you know I don't know how else to express that like Apple's really good at making phones and the iPhone is a good phone
John:
And I guess people can say, well, it's not the best phone in the world or there are better other phones from other manufacturers.
John:
Sure, fine, whatever.
John:
Think what you want.
John:
But the iPhone is really good.
John:
And every year they introduce one.
John:
And every year they basically, worst, you know, don't screw it up.
John:
But at best, produce an amazing product.
John:
If you buy one of these new phones, I think you will be very satisfied with your product.
John:
And then Tim will put you on a slide.
Marco:
well and ultimately i would broaden that to say like the vast majority of apple's products every version of them is good like it's you know we we complain a lot about the ones that aren't because those are anomalies because you know like there hasn't been a bad apple watch either there hasn't been really i mean there was a mediocre ipad the ipad 3 had some minor mediocrity to it but like bad things about my ipad 3 also the series zero yeah maybe not great
Marco:
But the Series Zero, it didn't have major hardware problems.
Marco:
It was just slow.
Marco:
It was no worse than the original iPhone.
Marco:
Well, it was slower in the things it tried to do.
Marco:
But it wasn't a bad product.
Marco:
I mean, I wore the Series Zero for a year and a half.
Marco:
It was fine.
Marco:
Every Apple Watch has been a totally fine, at least fine product.
Marco:
Many of them have really been excellent products for what they are.
Marco:
Every iPad has been at least fine, and many of them have been great.
Marco:
And yeah, every iPhone, there have been a couple of minor issues here and there.
Marco:
The antenna gate thing was a minor issue, not a major one.
Marco:
The iPhone 5 had a bunch of weird failures, like the home button failed pretty easily on that one.
Marco:
There was minor stuff like that.
Marco:
The Bendy 6.
Yeah.
Marco:
Even that was not really a thing.
John:
That was to Casey's point earlier, which I would have made much more strongly, where Casey did have a very extensive section that was edited out of last week where he talked about the size of the phone going up.
John:
Six was the thinnest, I think, right?
John:
I believe so, yeah.
John:
That was as skinny as they got, and it was also as bendy as they got, and they corrected course.
John:
That's...
John:
they the phones have mostly been good and i feel like this year these phones are probably going to go down and sort of down in history as this was one of the good years people who get these phones are probably going to be super because people love the 10s and you're going to get something that is better faster has a better camera and the battery lasts ridiculously longer
John:
Who wouldn't want that?
John:
I'll take that deal on a Mac upgrade any day of the week.
John:
Imagine if they upgraded the iMac Pro and it was as better one year later as this iPhone is over the iPhone that came before it.
John:
There was already a phone that everybody liked and normally had complaints about.
John:
the iPhones are good I mean I'm trying to say here you would have me at imagine if they updated the Mac something pro every year exactly right well you know beggars can't be choosers but let's just not even talk about when the Mac pro is going to be updated let's get the first one out there oh god
Marco:
Thank you.
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Casey:
In the last 24 hours, Apple Arcade has kind of soft launched and I have not played with it at all yet because I've had bigger things to worry about.
Casey:
But apparently, John, you have fallen in love with at least one of the games.
Casey:
Can you tell me what Apple Arcade has been like so far?
John:
I forget, someone mentioned that, like, check in the App Store.
John:
You might be able to see Apple Arcade.
John:
It might be available to you, but you have to be on iOS 13 or whatever.
John:
I think I had already installed the beta, or maybe I installed it for this.
John:
I don't remember.
John:
Anyway, I went to the App Store thing and said, Apple Arcade is available.
John:
And I signed up, and it's like a free trial, so I don't have to pay anything.
John:
And I had Apple Arcade.
John:
And then I went into the little UI.
John:
which was a little buggy.
John:
And sometimes the videos would stop playing in the Apple crash.
John:
But anyway, welcome to iOS 13, John.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
13.1.
John:
Remember I'm using the 13.1 beta.
John:
Um, I went through, I think most or all of the games and downloaded like 10 of them just to try them out, you know, picking the ones that I thought would appeal to me.
John:
And I knew about some of these games from the trailers and I, you know, I've seen stuff about them.
John:
Some of them are cross platform that I've heard of before, whatever.
John:
Um,
John:
And then, you know, I'm done with that.
John:
I go back to the springboard and decide I'm going to try out one of the games.
John:
And the one I picked was Sayonara Wild Hearts, which is prominently featured in a lot of Apple's advertisement.
John:
I'm like, oh, I've seen that one before.
John:
It looks interesting.
John:
I'm going to try it.
Marco:
If you're not familiar with... Is that the purple driving to music one?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's a... I don't know.
John:
I was trying to think when I was tweeting about this.
John:
Like, what is the proper name for this genre?
John:
It's like...
John:
arcade rhythm game some people used to call them like rhythm shooters like res or like there's lots of games that are in this family it's a genre and I saw it I'm like oh this is one of those type of games now I don't typically like this type of sort of rhythm arcade shooter runner type thing but this looks like a cool implementation so I figured I would give it a try
John:
and I've got like 20 other games that I'm going to try.
John:
Turns out I didn't touch any of the other games.
John:
All I did was play that game all last night.
John:
I played through the entire game twice and then had my son play through it once on the television, which was a fun exercise because it's not available on Apple TV.
John:
Um, yeah, I, this is my experience with Apple arcade.
John:
Uh, Marco was asking for, is there going to be one good game?
John:
I only literally only tried one game and the one game I tried, I thought it was fantastic.
John:
Now, uh,
John:
If you don't like this genre of game, as I'm not particularly into this genre of game, I think the reason I like this implementation is it's like... I'm not going to say it's a simple version, but it's not punishingly difficult.
John:
It's very inventive.
John:
It's beautiful and stylish.
John:
I love the music, and it gives me... And it's easy.
John:
I mean, it's not super easy, but...
John:
It's easy enough that I didn't get frustrated with.
John:
That's usually my frustration with these type of things.
John:
And so for me, it was like the perfect Apple arcade game.
John:
I just love everything about it.
John:
I have quibbles with the surrounding story and framing device, but I don't even care because it's brief or whatever.
John:
And, you know, the fact that I played the entire game twice goes so.
John:
I would have paid $10 for this game alone.
John:
I paid nothing because it's part of the free trial for Apple Arcade, and it was totally worth it for me.
John:
And I haven't even looked at all the other games, which also look like they're really good.
John:
So this could be anomalous because Apple spent tons of money getting developers to make these really cool games, and they're trying to get people on Apple Arcade, and maybe the quality will go downhill.
John:
But having played a single game, I'm ready to declare...
John:
that there is at least a single game that is worth $5, and that is Sayonara Wild Hearts.
John:
I recommend everybody try it, even if you don't like this kind of game.
John:
Maybe especially if you don't like this kind of game because this is such an appealing and inventive sort of sampler of this type of gameplay without being punishingly difficult and with an amazing soundtrack, which I also already bought.
John:
I bought the soundtrack for $10 because I buy music from the iTunes Music Store.
John:
I pre-ordered it for $10.
John:
But I paid nothing for the game.
John:
Check it out.
Marco:
I would also say I also joined the Apple Arcade seemingly intentional launch, but on the wrong day because of the actual launch day, the iOS 13 launch day.
Marco:
Anyway, so I also joined it immediately just to see.
Marco:
I will say one problem I have with it is that
Marco:
They are launching with apparently about 100 games.
Marco:
And I was unable to find more than 20.
John:
I don't know how you really... It's like all games at the bottom, but then the app keeps crashing because the little video previews keep killing it.
John:
But there is a place where you can go to all games.
Marco:
The app store design is so low density that you only really see five or six games unless you really start digging in.
Marco:
And I think that's going to be a problem for them.
Marco:
I think there really is a problem here that Apple Arcade...
Marco:
no matter how big the catalog of games is it's not going to seem big it's going to seem like why am i paying five bucks a month for these like six games that i can see right here um so that that might be something they have to work on but otherwise uh of the games i was able to find i downloaded five or six of them the only one i play i did try sayonara uh but i only used the touch controls and i couldn't figure out how to do that well um
John:
Oh, yeah, I was going to say, so if you're if you're playing Sinai Wild Huts, remember that iOS 13 has support for PlayStation and Xbox controllers.
John:
And that is how I recommend playing this.
John:
I actually have warmed to the touch controls a little bit.
John:
There's an adjustable sensitivity.
John:
And once I figured out how it wants me to play it, it is possible to play with touch.
John:
but don't uh i mean take hopefully you have an xbox or playstation controller you just pair it and use the controller that is the way to play this particular type of game yeah i should try that um i also tried the only one i've tried so far has been mini mini motorways which i believe is made by the same people as mini metro oh that is very good mini metro
Marco:
Yeah, and Mini Motorways.
Marco:
It's pretty cool.
Marco:
I've been playing it here and there.
Marco:
I had a little bit of problems getting past certain levels of busyness in my cities, but it's a minor quibble.
Marco:
It's a fun game, and I've been playing it here and there the last couple nights, and it's fun.
Marco:
I have a few more here I want to try, but I think overall, these look like pretty good games.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Yes, I know we have TLS encryption over all of our connections, but the thing is, it isn't all of them.
Marco:
And sometimes there's vulnerabilities and everything, and I don't want to worry about any of that.
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Oh.
Casey:
Let's finally bring back some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And let's start with Steve, who writes, I've used iMac since 2003, and every single machine and OS randomly ejects my attached drives.
Casey:
I'm a professional wedding photographer, and I have two Drobos, USB and Thunderbolt, an OWC Thunder Bay, which is Thunderbolt, and a printer hooked up to the ports of my 2015 5K iMac.
Casey:
Hmm.
Casey:
2015 5K iMac, you say?
Casey:
Anyway, all this has changed over the years, and the results are always the same with various drives being ejected after sleep.
Casey:
It's always random, and changing them around makes no difference.
Casey:
No disasters have happened, so it's more annoyance than anything, although I can't imagine this is helping these drives.
Casey:
The Drobos have spinning drives as they are my entire image catalog, and the OWC is solid state.
Casey:
These are all arrays, but quote-unquote regular single drives are also ejected when attached.
Casey:
I'm not entirely clear what the question is other than what's the deal.
John:
I think this is a Casey situation here where someone is tolerating a behavior from their computer over a long period of time that should not be happening.
John:
I know that's not particularly helpful.
John:
It's like, oh, it sounds like you have something wrong.
John:
Yeah, well, no doubt.
John:
But I think it is important to understand.
John:
It is possible to use a Mac with external drives over the course of many years and not have this happen.
John:
I have never had this happen, and if this started happening, I would be very upset and very afraid immediately, especially in the days of HMS Plus, because this is not healthy behavior.
John:
I have multiple...
John:
external drives attached to my computer right now.
John:
None of them spontaneously eject.
John:
I haven't used every interface you can imagine.
John:
USB, firewire, various speeds, SCSI for crying out loud.
John:
They should not spontaneously unmount.
John:
And I'm thinking, I'm trying to sort of diagnose this remotely.
John:
I'm like, do you have a cat?
John:
Is there some kind of physical problem with the wiring in your house?
John:
Are they undervolted?
John:
Are you overloading the circuit?
John:
Is your power strip or UPS gone wonky?
John:
I don't even know, but this is...
John:
This is not a situation that you should tolerate.
John:
It is not good for your data.
John:
It's not good for your hardware.
John:
It's not good for anything.
John:
So I don't, unfortunately, Steve, I don't have the solution for you, but I just want to tell you, you need to do some, probably you need to move.
John:
Like I'll just start a new life in a new city with a new Mac.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
So I think one thing that jumps out at me here is they're ejected after sleep.
Marco:
That's the part.
Marco:
So when I first was reading the question and Steve was saying about how the drives get ejected randomly, that can happen as the machine is awake.
Marco:
That I found, I have seen that before, and that is the result usually of a bad USB hub.
Marco:
But Steve was talking about both USB and Thunderbolt devices and specifically said that they get ejected after sleep.
Marco:
So it could just be like, you know what?
Marco:
Sleeping with computers is always a little bit tricky and a little bit buggy and sometimes weird things happen.
Marco:
The...
Marco:
technical process of sleeping and waking externally connected peripherals along with the computer is complicated and that complication you know something might just be getting initialized in just the wrong order or there might be like one thing that's plugged in like one usb device that's plugged in that like the computer goes to initialize it and the timing of it messes up the other thing such that they take too long and they time out and they eject or something like there could be something random like that
Marco:
So it could be, not only could it be one of the drive enclosures causing the problem, but it could be any other USB or Thunderbolt device plugged into Steve's computer at the time.
Marco:
This stuff is very complicated when you get to this kind of level of devices powering on from sleep and having a whole bunch of stuff connected at once and everything.
Marco:
So who knows?
Marco:
The other thing I would say is...
Marco:
Ooh, I hope Steve has backups of everything on those Drobos.
Marco:
Because that is a scary thought to say, the Drobo has my entire image catalog on it.
Marco:
Because Drobos are not known for their reliability.
Marco:
And I sure hope you have a backup, Steve.
Casey:
So last time we did Ask ATP three years ago, we had a question from Marco Silva about communities.
Casey:
And we weren't sure what Marco meant by that, but... John was very sure.
John:
Yeah, I was totally sure, but I was obviously wrong.
John:
I had never heard of... Continue reading.
Casey:
I'm sorry that I wasn't clear enough on my tweet about communities, but I wasn't referencing Nextdoor.
Casey:
I didn't even know what it was.
Casey:
My original question was about...
Casey:
My original question was about WhatsApp groups or Telegram, public or private, Discord, Slack, Facebook, Messenger, and even IRC, basically non-iMessage messaging apps that are used by someone's online community.
Casey:
I have a small group of people in my university class on Telegram, and I participate rarely in some open source communities, and there is a bit of fragmentation nowadays.
Casey:
Also, any updates on Marco's Beach Community Facebook migration projects?
John:
Yeah, so this type of community is basically, I want a bunch of people to have some kind of community online.
John:
I mean, there may be some physical locality or there may be the same university, but it's not like next door where you all have to live near each other.
John:
It's just like, I don't know, like for Discord or whatever, people who play a particular video game together or just a bunch of friends who live all across the country.
John:
Where do you...
John:
meet and discuss and you know although we don't use it that much in this country and then not personally things like whatsapp are much more popular elsewhere in the world facebook is popular with all the normal people who don't realize how evil facebook is uh and irc of course is popular with the nerds uh the slack is there i was gonna say i was surprised not to see a slack mentioned but yeah those are
John:
Boy, there are a lot of choices.
John:
I don't have any experience with WhatsApp other than reading about it, so I have no idea what that's like.
John:
But I can say, having used Slack since nearly its inception, it is a community messaging app that fits the way I work.
John:
I use Slack at my job.
John:
I have a million Slacks for all the other groups of friends that I hang out with online, and I think it is much nicer than IRC in pretty much every way, especially for people who don't want to nerd out.
John:
And the app is getting better all the time, and I really like Slack.
John:
So that's my recommendation if you have to pick one of those things.
John:
Discord is similar.
John:
I have some experience with that, but I prefer Slack.
Casey:
I've found that over the last year or two, I have gone from participating in zero iMessage group chats to a handful.
Casey:
And I actually quite like that.
Casey:
There's one in particular that I have running that's myself and a couple of friends of mine who are big car nerds.
Casey:
And I'm not talking about the two of you on the show, a different couple of friends of mine.
Casey:
And we often talk about cars, occasionally talk about other nerdy stuff.
Casey:
But we typically are chatting at least once pretty much every single day in that chat.
Casey:
And I've actually come to quite like that.
Casey:
It's a lot less fun when it's not everyone on iMessage.
Casey:
It's a lot smoother on iMessage, but
Casey:
If you have a situation where you're willing to exchange contact information with everyone and everyone is on an iPhone, I do recommend, once you can get through those caveats, that having a group iMessage thread is quite nice.
Casey:
I do like Slack for group stuff if possible, but I don't think most people are going to be that interested in that.
Casey:
I still view it as a relatively nerdy thing, and I've never used WhatsApp or I've used it so infrequently.
Casey:
It's effectively never WhatsApp or Telegram or anything like that.
Casey:
Marco, how's your Beach Community Facebook migration project?
Marco:
I decided... First, let me answer the rest of the question.
Marco:
Basically, like you, Casey, I use private iMessage groups for some groups of friends.
Marco:
I use Slack for others.
Marco:
Slack is the one that's typically larger groups of friends, but Slack is...
Marco:
I know zero of my real-life in-person friends, like my neighbors and stuff.
Marco:
I know zero of them who use Slack.
Marco:
And trying to get people to use Slack who aren't familiar with it is not so easy.
Marco:
So for real-life groups of people that are not just my nerd friends, that's usually the iMessage groups because we all have iPhones, thank goodness.
Marco:
And, uh, and unfortunately, uh, Slack, you know, Slack just seems to not have any traction in those groups really.
Marco:
Um, but for larger groups, like, you know, like professional groups and, you know, we have like the relay one, I have an overcast one and stuff like that.
Marco:
Uh, we had some friend ones, uh, slacks are great for the larger groups.
Marco:
So the aforementioned beach thing, the question there was, I think two years ago, I had mentioned that there was this Facebook group that was like all the people in the beach town, and especially including a lot of the year-round residents, and it was like the last reason I was ever on Facebook.
Marco:
The last reason I was on Facebook was because it was a private group, I was in it, and it was where I could keep up on the goings-on of the beach town when I wasn't there all year.
Marco:
And
Marco:
After I left Facebook, I found a whole bunch of beach people on Instagram.
Marco:
And it turns out these are very different crowds.
Marco:
The Facebook group was the angry old people in town.
Marco:
And so while what I wanted from it was like reminding me of the beach when I couldn't be there, what it mostly was was a handful of angry people complaining all the time about everything.
Marco:
And the people I found on Instagram were largely significantly younger and a much lower ratio of complaints.
Marco:
In fact, a pretty much zero because Instagram is not really an easy place to post a bunch of complaints about your village.
Marco:
it's a much nicer place and it's much more encouraging of you to post nice photos of things that you see that you like.
Marco:
And it's just more, you know, in general with Instagram, it's just much more positive.
Marco:
And so once I found the Instagram community, not only did I not miss the Facebook people at all,
Marco:
But it solved the need for me, and I decided I didn't need to run this community.
Marco:
I didn't need to try to make one myself.
Marco:
Like, this Instagram is doing a perfectly fine job for me, better than I could do, and I don't have to do it, and it's already there, and it has already succeeded.
Marco:
So the need kind of went away.
John:
And it's already Facebook, too.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
Nice little shortcut there, yeah.
John:
Are the old people complaining about the Instagram people?
Marco:
like is that what they're complaining about and they're no no no no it's it's just the typical it's actually maybe what you might see on next door it's like you know complaining about like you know there's a pothole on this sidewalk and the village isn't fixing it but yet the village spent money on police officers for doing this thing how you know how could you spend our tax money this way it's that kind of garbage you know it's like that weird neighbor guy was carrying a suspiciously large bag i think he's stealing things from people's homes
Marco:
Yeah, it was a combination of that kind of bad side of Nextdoor and the town meetings from Parks and Rec.
Casey:
Finally, ask ATP of the week.
Casey:
Matthias Lutke writes, iOS 13 supports game controllers.
Casey:
What's the right one to buy, Xbox or PS4?
Casey:
He doesn't own a console or controller currently.
John:
Yeah, my suggestion for people in general is just use whichever one you have.
John:
If you don't have either one, it's hard for me to say because I haven't spent any appreciable time with the latest Xbox controllers.
John:
I have spent literally hundreds of hours with the PlayStation 4 controller, and I can say although the left thumbstick is still in the wrong place,
John:
ergonomically it's so much better than the ps3 controller it doesn't bother my hands the xbox may be ergonomically ergonomically slightly superior on the other hand i think i kind of like the triggers on the ps4 are better i think it's a toss-up and kind of like using you know selecting what mouse you're going to buy for your computer there is absolutely no substitute to just going somewhere and holding it in your hand and seeing how it feels is too big for you is it too small do you like the buttons do you like the triggers
John:
i think they're both really good controllers uh you know especially the ps4 better than its predecessors so i think you just just go to a store where you can actually hold these and try it out now that's that may be tricky because if you go to a store and find these they'll probably be in like a cardboard box or something so your best bet might be to try to find one of the few remaining retail big box stores that has
John:
Some incredibly grimy, disgusting display where kids, in theory, can play with an Xbox or PlayStation 4 and the controller is like bolted to this thing.
John:
At least then you can hold both controllers in your hands, despite the fact that they're covered with the germs of thousands of children and are probably half broken.
John:
But that's probably your best.
John:
Or a cleaner option.
John:
Find a friend who has an Xbox and find a friend who has a PS4 and just try them out.
John:
But I don't have any strong recommendations one way or the other.
John:
But yes, do definitely play Sayonara Wild Hearts with a controller if possible.
John:
so how did you do that in your case did you buy it for the switch or did you play it some other way no it's on apple arcade right right no i know that but like how did you get a controller hooked up oh well so you just in ios 13 you can just pair your playstation controller with your ipad just like a bluetooth device you just put it in pairing mode and you pair it and that's it then you just launch the game and you use the controller even the even the ui work with the controller
John:
oh that's pretty cool yeah and then to play it on it i really wanted to play it on tv so i'm like great i'll update my tv to the apple tv uh beta which i did uh which was probably ill-advised given merlin's experiences with the betas but i did it and then i went to the apple arcade icon and all i had was a video that says apple arcade is coming soon so anyway apple arcade is not yet available despite the fact that i'm quote unquote in the trial or
John:
in the preview or accidentally have it or whatever the hell situation is that it's allowing me to see apple arcade games that situation does not exist on my apple tv but i can take my ipad and you know pair the playstation controller with it and then airplay from the ipad to my television
John:
and play the game that way and you may think for like a rhythm arcade game that would be terrible it's actually surprisingly low lag like i'm not going to say there's no lag there is lag but it's lower than you might think and uh siren our wild hearts is tame enough that it is not going to punish you for that amount of lag thanks to our sponsors this week linode expressvpn and clearbank and we will see you next week
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause 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:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S
Casey:
I don't know if I'll put a picture in the show notes, but I've sent the two of you a picture of a very large space on my desk that has a little itty-bitty laptop in it.
Casey:
And I'm speaking to you tonight from my MacBook.
Casey:
I woke up this morning...
Marco:
I was hoping somebody would do it.
Casey:
So I was watching Plex last night, which if you recall, all the media for Plex is on my Synology, but the Plex server is my iMac.
Casey:
And it was just acting weird.
Casey:
I was watching it off of the Apple TV, but it was just acting weird.
Casey:
It could have been a network issue.
Casey:
It could have been Synology choking for some reason, which has never happened.
Casey:
But you never know.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
For one reason or another, just acting funny.
Casey:
I didn't think much of it.
Casey:
So the next morning, this morning, I wake up, I try to use my iMac, and it's just not right.
Casey:
It's not quite locked up, but nothing's really going the way it's supposed to.
Casey:
It's not really responding to what I'm asking it to do.
Casey:
So I think to myself, well, this is weird.
Casey:
And then I tried to shut it down, and it wouldn't really shut itself down.
Casey:
So I eventually forced it to shut down.
Casey:
I'm sorry, John, I have no empathy for the machine.
Casey:
I forced it to shut itself down, and then I tried to reboot.
Casey:
When I went to click on my username, once I rebooted, I beach balled.
Casey:
OK, I tried booting into safe mode.
Casey:
Eventually that I believe worked.
Casey:
I tried so many things today.
Casey:
I should have taken notes.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
That's why I'm hemming and hawing.
Casey:
I tried to boot into safe mode.
Casey:
I think that might have worked.
Casey:
But then I tried rebooting again.
Casey:
Same beach ball dance.
Casey:
I eventually went into the recovery partition and tried to do first aid on my hard drive thinking, well, you know, I know this isn't HFS plus anymore, but I don't know what else to do.
Casey:
So let me try that.
Casey:
And it spun and spun and spun and spun for a while.
Casey:
And then it eventually said something along the lines of, I can't even unmount the internal SSD.
Casey:
So I don't know what to tell you.
Casey:
This thing is probably cooked.
Casey:
I forget exactly what it said on there and I don't have it in front of me.
Casey:
But suffice to say, it was like, yeah, bad things are happening.
Casey:
Um, I tried several other things, including, uh, I took my external SSD.
Casey:
Uh, oh, here we, here we go.
Casey:
Uh, repairing file system volume could not be unmounted, restoring the original state found as mounted, unable to unmount volume for repair operation failed.
Casey:
that doesn't sound good yeah not good did you try uh are you still using third-party ram in there and did you try pulling it out and putting in different ram i am and i did not and in retrospect i should have but i didn't think of it until it was too late and you'll understand why that why it's too late in a minute but you drop it on the stairs did you run did you run a hardware test i don't know what the current state of that is but there is some key combo you can run right
Casey:
You are jumping ahead, but yes, I did.
Casey:
I did run a hardware test.
Casey:
It gave me a clean bill of health.
Casey:
So I eventually took it this external SSD that runs off of USB and I had Catalina on it and I tried doing first aid from Catalina onto the, you know, Catalina running on the external, try to first aid the internal.
Casey:
It didn't work.
Casey:
I eventually said the hell with Catalina because it was also an old version of Catalina.
Casey:
I thought, okay, let me put a high Sierra on the external and I'll see if I can get this thing to just work.
Casey:
And that sort of worked, but then it would just hang all of a sudden, which brings me back to Marco's point about RAM issues.
Casey:
But be that as it may, leave that aside just for a moment.
Casey:
It would just kind of hang for no explicable reason after some indeterminate amount of time.
Casey:
And so then I tried rebooting into recovery mode again, and it wouldn't even do that.
Casey:
Okay, so I make a Genius Bar reservation, which surprisingly I was able to get one within like a couple of hours.
Casey:
And I go to the Genius Bar after, oh, and I did my hardware diagnostics as well, like John had asked.
Casey:
So I go to the Genius Bar and I worked with a very nice gentleman who tried several things, including Apple's genuinely fancy network boot and then like hardware diagnosis and all that stuff.
Casey:
And all of their hardware diagnosis said, this thing is good to go.
Casey:
Then he said, you know, he and I concluded, all right, let's just try to reboot into the recovery partition again and see if we can erase, you know, the existing hard drive, which I really didn't want to do.
Casey:
But I don't think I would be losing anything catastrophic.
Casey:
It would only be minor stuff.
Casey:
So anyway, so let me reboot into the recovery partition and let's just see if the two of us can erase this together.
Casey:
You know, maybe some, maybe I had some bad juju at the house and, and so maybe doing it at the Apple store will magically cause it to work.
Casey:
And he rebooted into the recovery partition and the little progress bar that's under the Apple logo got about halfway and it never got any further.
Casey:
So he took my iMac from me with my permission and said, I'm going to run some diagnostics overnight.
Casey:
That'll tell us if there's RAM problems.
Casey:
That'll tell us if there's other problems.
Casey:
I mean, again, he did the like quick and dirty diagnosis that the only Apple can do.
Casey:
But he said they apparently have some like four to six hour diagnosis they can run.
Casey:
that will give a much better view of what's broken.
Casey:
This is an iMac that is officially labeled a late 2015 iMac.
Casey:
I purchased it in January of 2016.
Casey:
It does have the one terabyte SSD.
Casey:
It had the four gigahertz chip in it, I think.
Casey:
I don't even remember.
Casey:
It was so darn long ago.
Casey:
And it does have 32 gigs of aftermarket OWC RAM.
Casey:
Now, for those of you who have not listened to the show for a long time,
Casey:
This is my second batch of aftermarket OWC RAM because for the longest time I had a batch, well, I should say like six months or something like that, I had a batch of OWC RAM in there that as I later found out was part of like a bad batch of RAM.
Casey:
And so I told OWC about this well outside of warranty and they were like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's totally our fault.
Casey:
You know, we...
Casey:
But we got a bad batch from such and such Crucial or whoever it was.
Casey:
And they sent me a new batch of RAM, new 32 gig batch of RAM for free, if you will.
Casey:
I mean, I, of course, paid for the original batch.
Casey:
But anyway, and ever since then, for like, you know, two years plus, it had been rock solid.
Casey:
But in summary, my guess, based on not a lot of facts, is that the SSD is borked, but the fact that it was being a little bit wonky even when I was running off an external makes me wonder if there's something deeper.
Casey:
Now, the interesting turn of events here, and then I'll stop my monologue, is that to replace the terabyte SSD would run me about $1,000 at Apple.
Casey:
To replace the entire logic board...
Casey:
at apple is like six or seven hundred bucks but one way or another as it turns out i am now hoping that it's a logic board problem if any problem at all because that will be almost half the price of replacing the ssd so tomorrow in theory i will get a call from apple and they will tell me what is or is not broken with this thing but for tonight i am recording on my adorable little macbook this poor thing that i've that i thought i was going to replace soon but now it sounds like i'm buying myself a new iMac instead and so this little guy is just gonna have to chug along a little bit longer
Marco:
I have many thoughts on this, but just as a little point here, the value of having a spare Mac around, I feel like this should inform future hardware purchases for you when you're making decisions about what kind of laptop you can get away with.
Marco:
I always like to make sure that whatever laptop I have, in addition to my desktop,
Marco:
can take over as my main computer in a pinch and can serve as my main computer for at least a week if it needs to.
Marco:
And as fun as it is to get the tiniest laptop that you can, because when you're carrying it, you're like, wow, this is great.
Marco:
I love how tiny it is.
Marco:
And I don't need the power of anything bigger.
Marco:
I have a desktop.
Marco:
It is really nice when you don't have a desktop anymore all of a sudden unplanned.
Marco:
It is really nice to have a laptop that's a little bit more capable.
Marco:
so that you can have a pinch hitter.
Marco:
Am I using that term correctly?
Casey:
Yeah, I believe that's right.
Marco:
But yeah, that sucks, man.
Marco:
What do you want to do here?
Marco:
If your iMac is toast, which it might even take you a week or two to figure out exactly what the problem is, because what if they do one repair and then it ends up that wasn't it?
Marco:
Suppose the diagnostics say, oh, it's the logic board, and then they replace it, and then it's still flaky, and then they say, oh, actually, it was the SSD or whatever.
Marco:
What if there's something like that where there's a multi-step repair necessary before you even figure it out?
Marco:
I mean...
Marco:
What's your plan here?
Casey:
Well, yeah, so that's the thing.
Casey:
So up until today, my thought was, I think I would like a different laptop.
Casey:
I think what I would like to do is get something beefier.
Casey:
I don't really want a bigger laptop if I can get away with it, but I do want a more powerful laptop.
Casey:
So up until today... I have bad news for you.
Marco:
You have a 12-inch.
Marco:
Everything that's more powerful is bigger than it by a good deal, actually.
Casey:
Well, right, and that's the thing.
Casey:
Now, the new 13s, not even the Air, but the 13-inch Pro is actually not that much bigger.
Casey:
I mean, it is absolutely bigger, for sure, and noticeably so, and particularly heavier, but...
Casey:
In the grand scheme of things, it's actually not that much bigger.
Casey:
And so my thought process was whenever the 13s come to get refreshed, you know, such that they don't have the butterfly keyboard and so on and so forth, I would probably get one of those.
Casey:
Not a completely baller version, but a not crummy version.
Marco:
I think it's so funny, the timing of this, such that what you should really do, what I suggested to you earlier, the solution you should really take right now is, it looks like your desktop is going to be out of commission for a little while, and even if you want to order a new one, you're going to want to customize it.
Marco:
It's going to take a couple of weeks to arrive, and I wouldn't want to go a couple of weeks on just a 12-inch.
Marco:
And so my suggestion was, well...
Marco:
really this would be the perfect time to upgrade the laptop to whatever you know because you want it you've been floating the idea of upgrading laptop for a while and it's just so funny like i can't even imagine a worse time to buy an apple laptop than september 2019 right before they're likely to replace the butterfly keyboard on at least one of the laptops
Marco:
You could be the very last person to buy the butterfly keyboard.
Casey:
That's so true.
Casey:
I don't think buying a laptop now is a reasonable course of action.
Casey:
I know you were being somewhat silly when you were recommending it, but I think if the laptops today were good, and that's a poor way of phrasing it, but hopefully you take my point.
Casey:
If the laptops today were good, then yeah, I'd probably just buy a really nice laptop
Casey:
and then see if I even need a desktop like I do want I like having an iMac I do want to continue to have an iMac but maybe I would just you know you go with just a 13 or 15 inch MacBook Pro for a while and bide my time or something like that and figure out what I wanted to do but my current thinking is I going on the assumption that this iMac is cooked in some way shape or form which I think it is I think what I want to do is get a new iMac and I
Casey:
Then it becomes a discussion of, well, do you want to get a new iMac iMac or do I want to get an iMac Pro?
Casey:
Okay, so the iMac Pro is a couple of years old now.
Casey:
But if I wanted to get an iMac with at least a terabyte of storage, which I would, preferably two at this point.
Casey:
If I wanted to get an iMac with at least 32 gigs of RAM, which I think I do.
Casey:
And if I wanted to get one that has a reasonably nice processor, like I didn't look at the numbers, but at that point I'm hovering at what, I mean, I know you pretty much keep the Apple product catalog in your, in your brain, Marco.
Casey:
So that's something like 3000, 3500 bucks to get it approximately to that point.
Casey:
Is that fair to say?
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, to get an iMac to roughly match the specs of the base model iMac Pro is $3,600, I believe.
Casey:
And at that point, should I just spend another $1,500?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
I'm not one to buy computers often.
Casey:
And as much as I love to poke fun, especially Marco for buying computers as often as he changes underwear, that's not me.
Casey:
And so I think it makes more sense to me or for me
Casey:
to spend a little bit extra to get something a little bit nicer because I probably wouldn't have replaced that iMac for at least a year, if not more, were it not for it having pooped itself.
Casey:
So at that point, I feel like, okay, I might as well just go iMac Pro.
Casey:
If I go iMac Pro,
Casey:
Well, first of all, I'm not going to have it for a couple of weeks, which is a bummer, especially since I was just putting the finishing touches on the vignette updates for iOS 13.
Casey:
But leaving that aside, it's just a bummer not to have your main computer for two weeks.
Marco:
Well, the other option is when we're buying computers, when it's not like something is on a fire situation, like right now, when you have time...
Marco:
uh we we won't compromise on what we want we customize all the specs we get exactly what we want to order oh we want this amount of ramp but not that amount of ramp we don't want the gpu update because we don't want to pay for it but we do want this other update like we customize everything to get exactly what we want and we're willing to wait you know a week and a half or two weeks whatever it is for it to be you know custom built and shipped over here but a lot of times people can't do that a lot of times like something critical broke and you need a replacement today
Marco:
And when that's your option, you can get replacements today.
Marco:
They just might not be the configurations you want.
Marco:
You can go to the Apple Store, and you can have an iMac Pro today.
Casey:
Yeah, and I almost did.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Usually...
Marco:
The only choices you have, though, are either the base configurations.
Marco:
And this, by the way, this is why I am so hard on Apple whenever they make a base configuration of a computer that is a really crappy computer in some way.
Marco:
Like something that's just really punitive, like the spinning hard drive iMac, things like that.
Marco:
I really object to the base models being crappy in fundamental ways because so many people buy the base models.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
there's a reason they do it.
Marco:
Like, it's a massive percentage of buyers who just buy the base model of the computers.
Marco:
So, anyway, your options at retail are mostly just the base models.
Marco:
And then sometimes, like, you know, like, they'll have, like, whatever configurations on Apple.com are, like, the step up that are pre-configured, they'll have those.
Marco:
And usually they'll have, like, one or two
Marco:
tweaked high-end configurations in stock for the high-end computers, like the 15-inch MacBook Pro, the iMac Pro, etc.
Marco:
They usually stock a couple of those.
Marco:
You'll have to ask the business people what they have there.
Marco:
But they almost always have some kind of high-end configuration customized in stock.
Marco:
But
Marco:
it won't necessarily be what you wanted.
Marco:
So you would probably end up paying more than you wanted to get something like the faster GPU that maybe you wouldn't have gotten, but that's just what they had for you in order to get the SSD you wanted or something like that.
Marco:
And I've done that on a couple of occasions with various things, and it's been fine.
Marco:
It's not a huge deal, but you do end up paying a little bit more.
Marco:
But the advantage is just to have something faster.
Marco:
You consider it like, I'm paying an extra $150 or whatever to get a faster GPU, and also to have an iMac Pro for the next two weeks.
Casey:
Yeah, and I kicked that idea around, and there was actually a small window of time where I thought I was going to drive to Fairfax, which is a couple hours north of me, because I forget what Jim Metzendorf had recommended in the Relay Slack, but he had recommended... Micro Center.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
He had recommended Micro Center, which has the base model iMac for $500 off, but
Casey:
What I keep coming down to is like, I do not have any desire to spend $5,000 on a computer period.
Casey:
I particularly do not have any desire to spend $5,000 on a computer when I'm already giving Apple something like $3,000 this month, not even this year, this month.
Casey:
Now, to be fair, a hundred percent, my own creation, I chose to buy two new iPhone pro 11 pros, whatever they're called.
Casey:
I chose to buy two new Apple watches.
Casey:
This is entirely my fault.
Casey:
But this timing in many ways could not be worse.
Casey:
And so now I'm already looking at $3,000 of Apple expenditures in the month of September.
Casey:
And oh, yeah, why not?
Casey:
Let's just throw another five on top.
Casey:
Can't hurt, right?
Casey:
But the thing of it is, is if I'm going to spend $5,000, I really don't want to.
Casey:
I really don't want to.
Casey:
But I'm lucky and blessed enough that I can without being financially ruined.
Casey:
And so if I'm going to do it,
Casey:
then I might as well do it properly.
Casey:
So I'm going to spend nine.
Casey:
No, I'm just kidding.
Casey:
So what I think I'm going to do is I think I'm going to force myself to get at least a two terabyte SSD.
Casey:
I think I am still going to go iMac Pro because this is a computer that I leave on all the time, which we can get into an argument as to whether or not that's a good idea another time.
Casey:
But the fact of the matter is I leave the computer on all the time.
Casey:
The iMac Pro is much better cooling.
Casey:
It has the ECC RAM.
Casey:
It has a lot of other things that make it really nice.
Casey:
And if I'm already in $3,500, I might as well go to $5,000, which again, is such a sign of how lucky I am.
Casey:
And I mean that genuinely.
Casey:
I'm not trying to be funny.
Casey:
I am extremely lucky that I can just shrug at $1,500 extra, much less $5,000, which I'm not shrugging at.
Casey:
But you know what I mean?
Casey:
I don't want to lose sight of the fact that I am extremely lucky.
Casey:
It's okay.
Casey:
You're a working professional.
Marco:
This is required for your job.
Casey:
It's fine.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I'm also trying to justify it to myself, to be honest.
Marco:
But nevertheless... Again, you are a working professional.
Marco:
This is required for your job.
Marco:
This is critical equipment for you to do your job.
John:
Well, I don't know if this computer is required for your job, but you should be more upset about buying a 2017 computer for $5,000.
Marco:
See, here's the thing.
Marco:
Some of the retailers like Micro Center, B&H, Best Buy, you can probably get a few hundred dollars off just because it is not new.
Marco:
Not a new model.
Marco:
But that being said, like...
Marco:
I got to say, even today, the late 2017, so the two-year-old iMac Pro, is still an incredibly good computer.
Marco:
I have similar feelings about my car as I do about my computer.
Marco:
I'm so happy with it that if it was stolen tomorrow, if I had to replace it instantly today, with what's available today, I would get the exact same thing.
Marco:
The same thing is true about my car and my iMac Pro.
Marco:
I'm so happy with it.
Marco:
I would literally get the exact same thing to replace it if I had to.
Marco:
And even in a world where suppose it's two or three months from now and the Mac Pro is in regular availability, I think I would still replace my iMac Pro with the exact same thing if that's what was available.
Marco:
Because that's how happy I am with this computer.
Marco:
Yes, it is two years old.
Marco:
So yes, you shouldn't be paying full price for it if you can at all avoid it.
Marco:
But my goodness, is it a fantastic computer.
Marco:
And for you, this may vary for you, but for me...
Marco:
It still solves my needs better than anything else in the lineup could, including the upcoming Mac Pro.
Marco:
And so it is just a fantastic computer.
Marco:
It is not a great value, but not a terrible value for what it is.
Marco:
And there is nothing in the lineup that is better for most people than this.
Casey:
So, my question is, which processor do I get?
Casey:
Because a friend of mine was telling me the 10-core is a sweet spot.
Casey:
And before you interrupt me, let me just kind of put everything on the table.
Casey:
I don't feel like I need anything more than the 8-core, but a friend was saying the 10-core is a sweet spot.
Casey:
I should get that.
Casey:
How much RAM do I get?
Casey:
I don't know why I would need more than 32 gigs for the kind of thing I do, but it's not ruinous to get 64, so...
Casey:
you know should i consider it and what size ssd because i think myself and i think the two of you based on our slack conversations agree that two terabyte is probably the minimum for a computer i plan to keep for several years god willing but uh there actually is right now a refurb uh imac pro on apple site i don't have it in front of me but it was something like
Casey:
$5,200 or something like that?
Marco:
It was $5,249.
Marco:
So $250 above the regular retail starting price.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
But it had a 4TB SSD, which in and of itself is normally a $1,200 option.
Casey:
And not only that, but I could have it like the end of the week as opposed to if I do a CTO or whatever they call it, a BTO, build to order, whatever it's called.
Casey:
If I do that, then it won't be available until the very end of the month.
Casey:
So leaving aside whether I go refurb or whatever, what would the two of you recommend in terms of how many cores, how much RAM, and how much SSD?
Yeah.
Marco:
I would say obsess over this less than you are.
Marco:
Buy that refurb and be done with it.
Marco:
For lots of reasons.
Marco:
You need this now.
Marco:
You need this quickly.
Marco:
That will come quickly.
Marco:
The iMac Pro is one of the only things Apple sells where the base model is fantastic.
Marco:
And this is the base model plus a 4TB SSD.
Marco:
I would say, because the base RAM is already 32.
Marco:
If you had the luxury to customize things and wait a long time, maybe consider going 64 because you do heavy work and stuff like that.
Marco:
But you probably don't need it.
Marco:
You've had 32 all this time and it's been fine.
Marco:
So you probably don't need 64.
Marco:
The base 8-core CPU is great.
Marco:
The 10-core is indeed the sweet spot for developer workloads.
Marco:
But it's not that much...
Marco:
better than the 8 core it's not that big of a deal to go from 8 to 10 if you again if you were customizing sure go for the 10 but you need something quickly and there and because it's old you have some of these really cool and amazing deals available on certain configurations that people happen to have in stock i would get that i would just get that refurb and move on with this and be done with it john any thoughts
John:
As hopefully evidenced by the people who are listening to this podcast right now, you are not in desperate need of anything.
John:
I think you should use your MacBook until November and revisit this question.
Casey:
November?
Casey:
Why November?
John:
Because that gives enough time for any potential iMac update, and it gives enough time for the Mac Pro configurator to hopefully exist.
Casey:
I'm not getting a Mac Pro.
Casey:
That is not up for grabs.
Marco:
Actually, there is one other advantage to this plan.
Marco:
For using your 12-inch MacBook for all that time, anything you get after it will feel amazingly fast.
Marco:
That's funny.
Marco:
I mean, it might be worth it for that feeling alone, that first time you boot up the new computer and everything's like zipping into place and it just blows you away after coming from a 12-inch.
John:
Just use it for podcast recording.
John:
Does it feel slow now?
John:
You're staring at a screen talking to a microphone.
John:
You don't have to touch the computer.
John:
Just talk.
John:
It works fine.
John:
See, that'll hold you over for a month or two.
Casey:
Well, but the problem is that I have been yet floating around without an iOS 13 update.
John:
I mean, you can do dev work on that a little bit.
John:
That's where it'll be slow.
John:
But during podcasting, it won't be a big deal.
Marco:
I have to also tell you that Overcast will not have an iOS 13 update for probably that entire time either.
Casey:
Well, yes, but Overcast has dark mode already.
Casey:
And I'm not trying to be funny.
Casey:
That, to me, is a big deal.
Casey:
I don't think I'm going to be on day one since I need to submit today in order to get there by day one.
Casey:
But I do want to be there week one or two.
Casey:
And if I wait until November, even though, John, as much as I want to yell at you and tell you that it's impossible to wait that long, you do make a pretty good point.
Casey:
I don't think I can wait that long, but you do make a good point.
Casey:
So I think
Casey:
If anything, I'm going to try to get the vignette update out off of this MacBook.
Casey:
And truth be told, I've probably done a third of vignettes development on the MacBook.
Casey:
It's not my favorite thing to do, but I can do it.
Casey:
And so I'm not sure what I'm going to do.
Casey:
So the moral of the story is as much SSD as I'm willing to spend money on, 3264, eh, 810, eh.
Casey:
If I want it now, get the refurb.
Casey:
Otherwise, then I can fiddle with these sliders a little bit.
Casey:
Is that basically what I'm hearing?
Marco:
Yeah, that refurb is a good deal.
Marco:
As your attorney, I would advise you to take it.
John:
I can't believe you gave up on your old computer so easily.
John:
Like your computer throws one shoe and you're like, oh, take it out and shoot it.
John:
Has nothing ever gone wrong with any?
John:
I mean, you've nursed that BMW for years and it was constantly exploding and your Mac has one hiccup and you're like, kill it.
John:
Kill it with fire.
Casey:
Oh, you're not wrong.
Casey:
I mean, truth be told, if Apple can magically sprinkle pixie dust on it and make it work, they can fix your computer.
John:
I assure you.
John:
It's just a question of how much it's going to cost.
John:
It will cost less than five grand, I promise.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
But it's that the best analogy I can think of is a car analogy.
Casey:
Like, at what point is it dumb to continue to throw money?
John:
Well, I mean, given your BMW experience, that point is far off in the distance.
Casey:
Well, I'm trying to learn from my mistakes.
Marco:
This is a knowable thing.
Marco:
Like, just look up on eBay completed item sales for that model iMac.
Marco:
What are they selling for used when they're working?
Marco:
And then you can see, you know, what's it going to cost you to fix it?
Marco:
And, you know, figure out yourself whether whether like, you know, suppose it will cost you 600 bucks to fix it.
Marco:
And they sell used for like $2,000 like, well, that's probably worth it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I got stuff to think about.
Casey:
But if I were a betting man, I think what I'm probably going to do is buy some iMac Pro, like purchase it tomorrow and receive it somewhere between the end of the week and the end of the month.
Casey:
And then inevitably, that means in a month or two, there will be a brand new, much fancier iMac Pro, and I'm going to jump off a bridge.
Casey:
Naturally.
Marco:
Honestly, we've seen zero rumblings to that effect.
Marco:
We learned that the family of Xeons that's going into the Mac Pro is not the same family that would be likely a good fit for the iMac Pro.
Marco:
And so usually with the Pro line, when it's healthy and being updated, every time there's a new Xeon of the class that goes into that computer, they make a new one.
Marco:
And it just so happens, those Xeons tend to only come out about every two years or 18 months, something like that.
Marco:
And of course, now Intel's all over the place now.
Marco:
It's hard to ever know.
Marco:
But as far as I know, there still isn't a...
Marco:
Xeon update that would be appropriate for the iMac Pro without major internal thermal upgrades and things like that.
Marco:
But I think there was supposed to be one sometime this winter.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
Apple hasn't skipped one yet.
Marco:
And there isn't one out yet, but there is probably going to be one sometime.
Marco:
But yeah, the question really is...
Marco:
Are you able to wait around forever for an update that the existing iMac Pro is pretty damn fast?
Marco:
You'd be waiting around forever for one that might be, what, like 15% faster?
Marco:
Like, it's not going to be a huge difference.
Casey:
Truth be told, that iMac that is currently sitting at the Apple Store...
Casey:
It was not often that I longed for speed on it.
Casey:
It happened for sure, but it was not often, you know, and certainly, you know, instantaneous builds would be better than two or three second builds because Vignette is not a tremendous code base.
Casey:
But that being said, the only time I really felt processor problems was when I was doing, you know, like
Casey:
transcoding it with FFmpeg, which as much as I joke, I don't do it that often.
Casey:
And it's never, almost never something that I need to put a rush job on, if you will.
Casey:
So I don't feel like this two or three-year-old, whatever, three-year-old iMac was really that processor.
Casey:
The processor wasn't that much of a problem for me.
Casey:
So I can only imagine this three-year newer iMac
Marco:
pro imac pro would be just unspeakably fast from my perspective especially coming off of this damn macbook which i love but is slow i mean honestly i think one thing you should strongly consider is what if you just got a laptop that was good and use it in both places because like especially like if you look at the new if you look at the 15 inch line yes i know it's a lot bigger shut up you can deal with it
Marco:
You're a grown man.
Marco:
You can lift a laptop.
Casey:
But my commute is so hard, Marco.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Because you take your stupid little 12-inch out all the time and work on it.
Marco:
You like to work in libraries and stuff like that.
Marco:
You go out and work out in the world on a pretty regular basis.
Marco:
And you travel and everything.
Marco:
So performance-wise, you would be totally fine with any of the modern 15 inches.
Marco:
Even the 6-core models.
Marco:
They go up to 8 now.
Marco:
But even the 6-core would be totally fine for most of what you're doing the vast majority of the time.
Marco:
If you're going to have a laptop anyway, as much as I'm a huge fan of desktops, as much as John is going to rake me over the coals in a second for even suggesting this...
Marco:
I think really for your needs, a good 15-inch might be the way to go.
Marco:
And you could, I know this is crazy, you could buy one now to tide you over and then return it in 15 days and see what the situation is then.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It probably won't be any different, but I don't know.
Marco:
It could buy you some time.
Casey:
Well, that's the thing.
Casey:
I think, like I was saying earlier, if the Apple laptop line was quote-unquote good, like if this was a good time to buy an Apple laptop...
Casey:
I would very strongly consider that.
Casey:
I would have a couple problems with it.
Casey:
First and foremost, I have become very accustomed to the 5K lifestyle, and so then I would not only be buying a
Casey:
brand new laptop, but I would be buying one of the Apple or the LG, whatever, whatever displays.
Casey:
And that's like $1,500 on top of the cost of the laptop, which is still probably cheaper than the iMac Pro, but still.
Casey:
See, now I'm convincing myself to do it, but it's such a terrible idea.
Casey:
I don't want to buy a laptop right now.
John:
You run a Plex server off of that thing.
John:
You need a desktop.
John:
You need a big screen.
John:
You don't want to buy a laptop with this credit keyboard.
John:
Come on.
John:
It's not an option.
Marco:
But if you can hold out until the 16-inch comes out, that might change things.
Marco:
That might change the calculus.
John:
Yeah, well, maybe we can reevaluate.
John:
I don't think I want to wait that long now.
John:
Of course you don't.
John:
You're very impatient.
John:
Your computer has one hiccup and you're like, spend, spend, spend.
Casey:
Well, I don't want to spend, but I don't want to.
Casey:
The problem is I really don't want to spend the money and I don't want to do it right now.
John:
Seems like you want to.
Casey:
But I don't particularly want to wait a month and a half to make the decision.
Casey:
Month and a half.
Casey:
Yeah, that seems like a long time to wait.
Casey:
Well, let's pull on the thread a minute.
Casey:
When do you think, if the 16-inch is coming out in this calendar year, which is not a given, but if it is, when is that event?
Casey:
Is it effectively Halloween, like the one that you and I were able to go to, Marco?
John:
Yeah, I'm guessing you can't get one before November.
John:
But you might be able to order one in October.
John:
Maybe.
John:
Possibly.
John:
I don't know.
John:
That rumor, we talked about this before.
John:
I can't keep track of where that is.
John:
I think it keeps pushing off into 2020, but don't tell Casey that.
John:
No, I think it's still for this year.
Marco:
And look, we know, or we don't know, but it sure seems like there sure is a lot on Apple's likely calendar that is still left for this year.
Marco:
Now that we've seen the September event,
Marco:
There sure was a lot that wasn't in it that we expect to be coming out any minute now.
Marco:
So I'm guessing we haven't heard the last of Apple this year.
Marco:
And it would be pretty awesome to have that.
Marco:
All the rumors are pointing to the 16-inch coming out September or October.
Marco:
And I think that was still the latest information.
Marco:
I would say... Unfortunately, John is frustratingly correct on one aspect of this, which is if you really want to have all the options available for consideration, you should wait until that next event happens.
Marco:
And that could be another month, or it could be another month and a half, or it could not happen at all.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
They could push all this stuff until the spring or next summer.
Marco:
We have no idea until it actually happens.
Marco:
But I think...
Marco:
Ultimately, if you're going to have a desktop at all, you can just get the iMac Pro right now.
Marco:
Because I don't think they're going to update it soon.
Marco:
Even if they did update it, it probably wouldn't be that big of an update.
Marco:
And the current one can be had with good deals and is excellent.
Marco:
And I can't imagine anything about the Mac Pro configurator is going to change your mind because you'd have a similar display issue with that.
Casey:
Oh, God, no.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
mac pro is not even on the table so so i i then therefore i revert back to my earlier suggestion of just get the stupid refurb that has the four terabyte ssd for almost no money it just that's it done and you can have it at the end of this week that's true uh let me throw a curveball at you though and i promise we'll move on soon i really do uh should i get a mac mini and if so well can the mac mini hold it just hear me out just hear me out just hear me out can the mac mini power the lg whatever whatever ultra fine at 5k
Marco:
Yes, it can.
Marco:
That's how I tested the review note I had.
Marco:
Yep, it can power it just fine.
Marco:
I will say the GPU sucks.
Casey:
Do I care, though?
Casey:
Look at a Mac Mini.
Casey:
What are you thinking?
Casey:
So what if I get a Mac Mini and the LG Ultrafine?
Casey:
Because I'm looking at a Mac Mini and built real nice.
Casey:
So a Mac Mini with a 3 gigahertz processor, 32 gigs RAM.
Casey:
I haven't even looked at refurbs, mind you.
Casey:
This is straight, you know, brand new.
Casey:
2 gig SSD with the fancy 10 gigabit Ethernet is $2,600.
Casey:
And what is the LG Ultrafine?
Marco:
About 1,000 or 1,200, I think.
Casey:
It's like $1,200.
Casey:
So that puts me at $4,000.
Casey:
And then get the iMac Pro.
John:
It's a better computer.
John:
Don't even think about buying a $2,600 Mac Mini with an LG display.
John:
That's madness.
John:
If you already have a display, fine.
John:
But it's just a hodgepodge with a not good monitor and with weird compromises.
John:
Just no, don't do that.
Casey:
But then I would have, quote unquote, saved $1,000.
Casey:
No, no.
John:
You want to save money, you keep using what you're using right now until November and reevaluate.
John:
That's how you save money.
John:
You don't save money by getting a weird Frankenstein Mac mini configuration and buying a third-party monitor.
John:
It's gross.
Casey:
Let me put a final appeal to the listeners out in the world.
Marco:
This is crap.
Marco:
There's no appeal necessary.
Marco:
Ignore John because this is your job.
Marco:
This is your work.
Marco:
You would love it anyway.
Marco:
It's your hobby and it's your job.
Marco:
You need this for your work.
Marco:
You do.
Marco:
You need good equipment, damn it.
John:
You need a $5,000 iMac Pro to record audio.
John:
64 kilobits a second.
Marco:
I cannot bear to see a good friend use a 12-inch MacBook as his only computer for like two months.
Marco:
That's cruel and unusual punishment.
John:
Well, he kind of deserves it after.
Casey:
Well, maybe a little bit.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
All right, so let me put this appeal out to the world.
Casey:
If you happen to work at a fruit company and you happen to know that maybe something's happening in a month or two with regard to 16-inch laptops,
Casey:
You know, if you just wanted to send a little something my way, I promise I won't tell anyone.
John:
You think asking about it now is going to change things?
Marco:
What would that change?
Marco:
Suppose you get the answer back that there's definitely one coming in a month.
Marco:
Are you going to buy it?
Casey:
I would really think about it, yeah.
Casey:
That sounds so wishy-washy because it is.
Casey:
But it would make me wonder, as you said earlier, I do take my laptop out and do work on it at least a couple of times a week.
Casey:
Why wouldn't I just get a 16-inch, if it is what we expect it to be, a 16-inch powerhouse?
Casey:
Maybe pair it with a monitor, maybe not.
Casey:
But presumably, I'm getting everything I want in this fantasy world.
Casey:
And it's about the same money as the iMac Pro, but I'm getting...
Casey:
not literally, of course, two computers, but I'm sort of kind of getting two computers for the price of one in the sense that I have one amazing computer that can go anywhere with me.
Marco:
I mean, the one thing you wouldn't have is a backup computer when that one breaks.
Casey:
Well, and you know, you laugh, but that's very true.
Casey:
I mean, I would keep the adorable, but your point is still fair.
Casey:
And the other thing is I haven't solved my Plex problems.
Casey:
Please don't keep the adorable.
Casey:
Well, we'll see what happens.
Casey:
But I also haven't solved my Plex problems.
Casey:
And
Casey:
This is a silly thing for me to be worked up about, but honest to goodness, Plex is an important part of my entire family's life.
Casey:
The kids will watch a couple of shows each afternoon, and they do that off of Plex.
Casey:
There are other mechanisms that I can do to make Plex servers.
Casey:
Jelly's been talking to my ear over the last couple of days because apparently he just put together some sort of Raspberry Pi, something or other.
Casey:
Presumably, I could make this work anyway.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like money, no object.
Casey:
Let's just talk for a second.
Casey:
Money, no object.
Casey:
I would already have the iMac Pro and then I would still debate whether or not to get a new laptop when the time comes.
Casey:
And maybe that's what I should do is not necessarily guarantee to myself I'll be getting a laptop, but do the right thing for 80% of my computer use.
Casey:
And that brings me back to what you said, Marco, the refurbed iMac Pro and just call it a day.
Marco:
Yeah, you can have it at the end of the week.
Marco:
This could be done.
Casey:
Yeah.
I don't know.