Formative Tech Dystopia
John:
Get your Star Wars tickets, everybody?
John:
Nope.
John:
What?
John:
There's another one?
Casey:
That is the most Marco answer I've ever heard.
John:
Keep making these.
John:
You believe that, Marco?
John:
I don't know why you think they'd stop, but they don't.
Marco:
Is this like the real series or like an alternate series this time?
Marco:
The real one.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Is it supposed to be good?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm on an almost full media blackout, so I don't know.
Marco:
Oh, is this the last one or is it just like a kind of like BS last one?
John:
Like who's the last one?
John:
Estros can tell.
John:
I mean, it's not the last one, but it's the last one in a set of nine and it'll start a new story sequence up after that.
John:
They aren't going to follow the same characters.
Marco:
You don't think?
John:
No.
Marco:
You think they would invest three, you know, three movies into building up these new characters and then just throw them away and never print money with them again?
John:
that seems unlikely not these new characters the old characters this is the end of the skywalker saga which only says that it's going to be the end of the skywalker saga it doesn't say that some characters this movie won't appear in future oh well so okay so that doesn't mean anything that basically is because this is the nine movies have basically been the story of the skywalker family and
John:
presumably the next movie will not be the story of someone in the Skywalker family.
John:
There's plenty of other people to tell stories about, but that's the deal.
John:
Are any of them left who haven't been vaporized or anything?
John:
Spoilers!
John:
There sure are.
Marco:
I bet within three years they put out episode 10, even if it isn't called that, and it still has Rey and Finn.
Marco:
It has some of the same people.
John:
I think they'll probably restart the numbering no matter what.
John:
Even if it's got the same cast of young people, they'll probably restart the numbering.
John:
oh they'll call it episode x yeah well maybe i don't think they would restart the numbering but we'll see just because you get to have a number one then you know what i mean like you get to like they hired a bunch of directors who are going to be doing new things and each each one of these directors in theory is getting their own trilogy or some crap which is never going to work out like those plans will not actually fall through but part of the way you get these big name directors like you'll get to start your own your own trilogy your own series and they all want to start from one because there he goes
Marco:
But we'll see.
Marco:
Star Wars X 10.1, Star Wars X 10.2, etc.
Casey:
All right, let's start with some follow-up.
Casey:
We have some follow-up with regard to Piehole.
Casey:
If you recall, Piehole is the... Did you shut yours, Casey?
Casey:
I actually did just moments ago shut my Piehole because something was broken on the internet and I thought that might have had something to do with it.
Marco:
Anyway... I made it all of last episode without laughing at this and making jokes about it, but it's just... I can't.
Marco:
It's so funny.
Casey:
It's so good.
Casey:
It's so good.
Casey:
Anyways, so...
Casey:
so pie hole is this thing where you have your dns you use it as your dns server and it will just refuse to acknowledge uh dns lookups for things that it believes to be like advertisements and tracking and things like that and we had talked last episode about how i discovered a shortcut slash workflow that would let you quickly and easily disable pie hole in case you find something that isn't working on the internet and that
Casey:
doesn't happen that often i've only had to do it i don't know maybe 10 or 20 times in the last almost month that i've been running it but it does happen and i had said on the show last week that oh i couldn't really get it to work it was something was messed up and i didn't know what well i got a chance to play with it after the fact and then coincidentally the original author chris doley emailed me and pointed me to a reddit thread wherein he released that shortcut to the world so we'll put a link in the show notes and so you can download it yourself
Casey:
It did work, as it turns out.
Casey:
I think what had gone wrong was that I have a host name that points to my house, and I was using that as the host name for this shortcut, this workflow, to go issue an API request against.
Casey:
But I didn't think things through in the two seconds that I spent playing with it.
Casey:
And I actually do not have the PyHole admin interface port forwarded.
Casey:
So it was reaching out to the internet to get to my own network.
Casey:
But the firewall was stopping it coming back into my own network, if that makes any sense at all.
Casey:
So in summary, what I needed to do was just use an IP address instead.
Casey:
Once I did that and once I plugged in the correct API key, which if you're following along at home, if you're in the PyHole admin interface, you go to console, settings, API slash web interface, show API token.
Casey:
And that is the token you need to plug into the shortcut.
Casey:
And once you put all that magical special sauce together, the shortcut worked no problem.
Casey:
And it allows you to quickly and easily disable it or disable it for 30 seconds or five minutes or what have you.
Casey:
So again...
Casey:
We will put a link in the show notes to that.
Casey:
Additionally, somebody wrote to us, Billy Brawner, who is apparently putting together a Swift UI app that is open sourced in order to do a very similar thing.
Casey:
I have not played with this at all.
Casey:
I didn't even crack the code open.
Casey:
I didn't have time.
Casey:
But it's something that we'll also put in the show notes in case you wanted to look at that.
Casey:
So those are ways that you can shut your pie hole, Marco.
Marco:
Thank you.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We talked last episode about indicating or progress indicators and how they're all kind of garbage.
Casey:
And Adam wrote in to point us to a YouTube video, which again will be in the show notes, wherein Microsoft kind of had an interesting take on this.
Casey:
John, would you like to tell us about this?
John:
They're trying to show something fancier than just a bar that fills from left to right.
John:
They're trying to show throughput to give people an idea of like historically how fast have things been going and how fast are they going now.
John:
Watch the video.
John:
I mean, it's it's a noble effort.
John:
But if you showed that to your average computer user, they'd be like, what is this?
John:
Like, it does fill from left to right, so that's still there, but it's just complicated enough that they would probably be blinded to the fact that it is essentially filling from left to right, and when it fills all the way to the right, it's done, because it looks like a graph.
John:
It's got numbers on it, the numbers change, it's got a line, it's got a shaded region, it's like...
John:
I get what they're trying to do.
John:
I don't think they've really cracked it.
John:
That's the problem when you say, you know, this tool that we have is so crude and we can't give accurate feedback about how long things are going to take.
John:
Can we put more information in the same area?
John:
I mentioned in the last show that, like, the...
John:
old aqua progress bar from the original mac os 10 had one second piece of information which was it wasn't even a real piece of information it was an animation that lets you know things are still happening even though this bar isn't moving but as i said last show that's mostly a lie that texture animates pretty much no matter what
John:
So it's not like that animation is telling you anything other than your computer hasn't entirely frozen, which is somewhat reassuring.
John:
But I don't think the solution is to continue to add more and more information.
John:
That said, it's cool to see stuff like this, and it would be nice if it was an option for people who really did want to see lots of numbers change or run diagnostics or whatever.
John:
But I'm not sure it's the right default choice.
Casey:
Moving on, one of you guys put this in the show notes.
Casey:
I'm embarrassed to admit it wasn't me that spotted this.
Casey:
And I'm assuming this was John, but either way.
Casey:
New Diagnostic Architecture Overview on Swift.org, on the Swift Programming Language blog.
Casey:
This is a post by Pavel Yeskovich, wherein Pavel goes through and talks about how error messaging is going to hopefully be a whole lot better used
Casey:
In the future, thanks to some changes to how they're doing type discovery and inference and things of that nature.
Casey:
I feel like I know Swift okay.
Casey:
And a lot of this, my eyes were rolling around in my head in opposite directions trying to read through it.
Casey:
However, if you get to the very end, it is really, really worth it.
Casey:
And there's a heading, examples of improved diagnostics.
Casey:
And again, I am a Swift apologist.
Casey:
I do quite like Swift.
Casey:
Some of the code on this is just as inscrutable as C++, which is about as damning a bit of... What's the opposite of praise?
Casey:
As damning an insult I can give to it.
Casey:
But anyways...
Casey:
If you look at these examples of improved diagnostics, you can see some actually reasonable looking Swift and where it's wrong and how these error messages have gotten so much better.
Casey:
And I am really, really excited for this.
Casey:
And I think, and this was John, I believe, who pointed this out, this is going to be really, really interesting and important for SwiftUI.
Casey:
Because as Marco and I both lamented, SwiftUI's error messaging is so bad, it's borderline insulting.
Casey:
And this
Casey:
really smells to me like it's going to be getting a lot better.
Casey:
And in fact, a lot of the examples they use are for SwiftUI.
Marco:
I'm hoping they are, but honestly, I read through this too, and maybe it's because I don't know Swift or SwiftUI well enough yet, but I didn't think that the examples they were showing really indicated that SwiftUI's error messaging is going to get better.
Marco:
that much better it's gonna get a little bit better and that's great it has a long way to go but like in in the way that a lot of the error messages you get now have these like crazy long uh you know huge type errors some of which are actually like parse errors sort of but it's really hard to figure that out
Marco:
Some of which are like, you know, you're somehow returning a value somewhere inadvertently or you're returning the wrong value somehow inadvertently.
Marco:
Like, I don't think a lot of these, like, while it's good that they're improving this, it doesn't look like they're improving it enough to make the difference between SwiftUI error messages being useful or totally inscrutable.
Casey:
I don't know about that.
Casey:
I think this might get you to the point that it's at least actionable.
Casey:
Because one of the things that's actually conceded early on in this post is that a lot of Swift error messaging, both for SwiftUI and not, just plain isn't actionable.
Casey:
And that's just not useful.
Casey:
And so that's what a lot of this post is about.
Casey:
But I don't know, John, what are your thoughts on this?
John:
This is kind of what I was talking about last week, where it's not just a matter of finding some string in the Swift compiler and saying, oh, this message is bad.
John:
I'm going to put a different string in there to be more clear with the words that I put in.
John:
So you can read this whole article and you can see how, you know, it's not a question of phrasing.
John:
It's a question of sort of metadata.
John:
And even beyond that, you have to...
John:
Do some unexpected things like continue the compilation process even after you've encountered what you know to be a fatal error so that you can produce a better message.
John:
Like you need to have different awareness and data structures and do some fairly Byzantine things like make a guess at a fix and allow the compiler to continue to try to pinpoint where the actual error is so you have enough information to then construct a better message, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
But even that, as Marco pointed out, this is all with the type checker and the type inference engine.
John:
A lot of Swift errors are inscrutable because of that, but because of the way Swift UI is structured in sort of this domain-specific language is really just a fancy word for you can make a bunch of specially named functions with some implicit arguments or return values or implicit state and then nest them inside each other.
John:
So it looks kind of like you're making this cool sort of
John:
language of your own with curly braces when really it's a series of change function calls with some stuff that some some implicit code that doesn't actually appear visibly and because that's what it is and because we're not accustomed to calling a function that calls a function that calls a function that calls a function that calls a function and then like somewhere in the middle of that chain something went wrong
John:
that's why that even when you have a much better type checker your message may not indicate to you something useful or explicable because you're not conceptualizing your code as this giant nested series of function calls where in fact that's what it is you're thinking of it as like okay like here's this structure like you're thinking of like like you're declaring data like it's a big json structure or something you want to show you where in the json you've done something wrong where it's like the compiler doesn't look at it that way and so it's
John:
There's still some ways to go in bridging the divide.
John:
This is a necessary first step to say, if you just had normal Swift code that you would write and not SwiftUI, there's lots of situations where the type checker will give you a garbage error and you don't know what the heck it means.
John:
This helps with that.
John:
And it also happens to help with those same type of errors that happen in SwiftUI, but I still feel like these sort of...
John:
novel structure of SwiftUI.
John:
It's not structured the same way as your pre-SwiftUI and I guess pre-Rx or whatever.
John:
Your quote-unquote normal imperative Swift code would be structured.
John:
Because it's different, there's still some more work that needs to be done to
John:
be able to give better messages.
John:
And I think mostly, well, that will probably come down to, I'm just guessing here, I know nothing about compiler design, but I imagine it will come down to some way to better annotate the actual APIs that make up SwiftUI so that the compiler knows more about how they're expected to be used and what the semantics are and how the developer is thinking about it.
John:
You know, as opposed to just like a function that adds two numbers together that you call just as a function somewhere versus something like, you know, a function that is used to generate a list or a set of switches or something.
John:
And then three levels nested down, you put something that isn't allowed to be nested in there.
John:
It should know like, oh, this type of control isn't allowed in a list view switch thingy.
John:
and be able to phrase that in some way other than referencing the type system.
John:
Because that's like Swift's tool for everything.
John:
It's like, if your types all add up, everything's great.
John:
And if they don't, we will tell you what you did wrong in terms of the types.
John:
But...
John:
And that goes a long way if you have well-chosen types, but sometimes they're like invisible types or types that you didn't declare that you don't know the names of that get referenced, when in reality it's trying to tell you something simpler, that if someone's looking at the code, like, oh, you can't put that type of control in this container, or if you do, you have to have one of these things over there, so...
John:
Still some ways to go, but, you know, progress is being made.
John:
And I do think it's an interesting blog post.
John:
It seems like it's a little, might seem like it's a little over your head, but if you just read it slowly and kind of understand what they're saying and don't get too bogged down into like the, you know, weird generics and templated code they have in the examples, I think it does make sense.
Casey:
So somebody pointed out to me, forgive me, I don't recall who it was, that the folks at NS Hipster have put together an unbelievably great website.
Casey:
And I am overjoyed that this exists and that I didn't have to do it myself.
Casey:
The name of this website is No Overview Available, and it's at nooverviewavailable.com.
Casey:
And it is subtitled A Survey of Apple Developer Documentation.
Casey:
And so the NS Hipster folks have put together a list of all the Apple frameworks.
Casey:
So these are all the top-level Apple code groupings, I guess you could say.
Casey:
I mean, it's like address book stuff and audio stuff and things of that nature, and there's a lot of them.
Casey:
So it goes through all of these and they have written some code to parse how much of the documentation for all of these different frameworks is actually available.
Casey:
And, you know, the name of the website comes from oftentimes you will see the phrase no overview available in Apple documentation if they just haven't done it yet.
Casey:
And I got to tell you, scrolling through this, not good times.
Casey:
A lot of orange, a lot of red, not a lot of green.
Casey:
And I actually did intend to count up and get numbers in front of me with regard to how many are green, how many are orange, and how many are red.
Casey:
If somebody wants to take the time to do that, please let me know on Twitter or via email.
Casey:
Again, apologies, I didn't get to do it myself.
Casey:
But just scrolling through this will give you a hint that this does not look good.
Casey:
And one of my favorites was looking down at Audio Toolbox Mark Alarmic, which is at 48.9%.
Marco:
Yeah, all of the audio frameworks have pretty poor showings here, which is not news to me.
John:
I have some questions about the methodology here, though.
John:
They were looking up the symbols in the libraries and finding out how many of those symbols have documentation.
John:
Is that what the methodology is?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I think I didn't go parsing through the source to figure out exactly what's going on here.
John:
That's what I mean.
John:
Here's the thing.
John:
That's all they can really do, I suppose, because without documentation, there's no way to know which symbols are meant to be public.
John:
I know Apple has the underscore reserve for private and stuff like that.
John:
In general, I don't think it's safe to assume that every symbol in the library is supposed to have public documentation, but that's the only tool they have.
John:
So I think that might be making things look worse than they actually are.
John:
And the second thing is maybe I've been in corporate America too long, but I scroll through this list and I think it looks pretty good.
John:
There's a lot of green and orange in there.
John:
Like, the state of documentation of code at every place I've ever worked would not meet these standards.
John:
I mean, obviously, I haven't worked at Apple, and these are supposed to be public-facing APIs.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
But I still think it looks pretty good.
John:
They expected this thing to come out.
John:
That's a lot of green.
John:
A lot of green.
Casey:
Stop it.
Casey:
This does not fit my narrative, so you are booted off the podcast.
John:
I'm not saying it.
John:
It's just... I mean, think of any place you've ever worked, Casey.
John:
Have you had this much documentation for your public affairs?
Casey:
Oh, God, no.
Casey:
Absolutely not.
Casey:
However...
Casey:
I was not vending a public API for hundreds of thousands of developers.
John:
I have vended a public API, and we haven't done this well.
John:
John, come on, man.
John:
Obviously, all that matters is what your framework is.
John:
You don't care that they have 100% coverage and whatever –
John:
intense ui or something like that but you if you're using uh audio frameworks and they're in the red and that's that's your whole life in fact if you're using one particular subset of one library and there's no docs that's worse you know you could have everything could be green except for your one little corner of the library and you still hate apple for not having the doc so yes the bar should be higher for apple because they have a lot of money and in theory documentation is
John:
parallelizable and can be done with less investment in long-term mental energy than something like designing the frameworks to begin with.
John:
One would hope.
Marco:
It'd be one thing if this was all the new stuff they happened to release in iOS 13, and they haven't quite had enough time to get to it yet, and they'll get to it in the next six months.
Marco:
But no, that isn't it.
Casey:
I think that's inexcusable, too.
Casey:
I take your point, and I do agree with you, but that is also inexcusable.
Marco:
But that isn't even it.
Marco:
It's even worse than that.
Marco:
A lot of these frameworks are five or ten years old, and they haven't been documented over that entire time.
Marco:
I think what bothers me about it is that
Marco:
Not only what John said, it's not like they're so constrained with all their resources that they can't hire people to do this or task people to do this.
Marco:
This is something that can be easily outsourced or tasked to other teams and everything.
Marco:
You don't need difficult engineering scaling problems to solve this.
Marco:
You just need the will and some resources, which they have the resources.
Marco:
I guess they don't have the will.
Marco:
But I think what bothers me is enough about Apple's
Marco:
message to developers over the last few months has been crappy.
Marco:
This is kind of insult upon injury.
Marco:
It's bad enough that all the platforms that are shipping to customers right now are causing so many problems for developers and customers because they're still so lucky and it was such a rough beta season.
Marco:
Doing the early public beta really was a jerk move by Apple to both their customers and their developers.
Marco:
launching catalina without notifying any developers ahead of time when that was going to happen was really a jerk move to all mac developers too like it's just this has been like not a great season to be a developer in apple's world right now and to add an insult upon injury is like yeah you know what none of this stuff seems documented and it also seems like based on how long some of these things go without being documented it seems like apple thinks this is fine they don't care apple thinks this is good enough
Marco:
And that, I think, is what I hope that websites like this will help convince them differently on.
Casey:
Well, but that's the thing is that I don't know that Apple thinks this is good enough internally, but I agree with you that because there is nothing spoken about externally, this is all we have to go on.
Casey:
And so by Apple releasing iOS 13 and all these new APIs and, to your point, leaving alone all the APIs from many, many versions ago,
Marco:
and not having proper documentation about it that is them saying that this is good enough i do agree with you but i'm waiting for all the internal apple people to be like well guys come on we don't think this is good enough but but but but well yeah i mean look but like look go up the chain then right like someone on apple thinks this is good enough you know like you can keep going it's like okay maybe you individual engineer are unhappy with this great how does your boss feel about it are they unhappy with it okay how does their boss feel about like
Marco:
eventually you hit tim cook right like so it's somebody's problem somebody needs to care about this kind of stuff and you know if if you or your boss care but can't get things done okay why why can't this be improved go a level up what you know go to that next person why can't this be improved like the company has seemingly infinite money
Marco:
I know it's hard to hire for certain things.
Marco:
I know it's hard to scale certain things.
Marco:
But this is one of those things that's actually a lot easier to hire for and scale than a lot of other engineering challenges, right?
Marco:
This really is way closer to like, you know what, you can just choose to allocate resources to this and get it done.
Marco:
Not everything in the company works that way, but this is one of the things that works a lot more that way than everything else.
Marco:
So the fact is, they don't think it's important.
Marco:
Someone somewhere up the chain has decided this doesn't matter.
Marco:
And so that's why I hope things like this website can kind of help push that on the people who might be hearing and reading about this kind of stuff.
John:
If done well, hiring more people to document libraries can actually be a funnel into helping with your engineering scalability problems.
John:
It's not to say that most people want to start by doing documentation to become programmers, but...
John:
Some people who start in documentation never really thinking that they're going to be a programmer will end up realizing that they have an aptitude for it, and that's like kind of a farm team for your larger engineering org.
John:
And again, that's not to say that there's 100% overlap between those skill sets.
John:
People can be very good at documentation, not very good at coding, and vice versa.
John:
But I think there will be at least some people who start off documenting, and if your documentation team is respected and paid well and
John:
you know, expected to either know or understand the fundamentals of API design, they can find themselves in a position where, guess what?
John:
After a year or two in this job, you know an awful lot about Apple's APIs.
John:
And if you didn't know how to program before or in this particular language before, you probably almost know how to do it now.
John:
And so you're perfectly positioned to transition from documentation into the larger engineering org.
John:
And vice versa.
John:
Again, if you pay the documentation people well and respect their position and have a path for advancement, you can see people going in the opposite direction.
John:
Lots of the, uh, early Apple employees are justifiably famous, not because they wrote quick draw or, you know, created switcher or whatever, all the engineering feats of like the original Mac team and stuff, but because they wrote amazing documentation for the Apple two or for the Macintosh.
John:
And, uh,
John:
They weren't looked down upon.
John:
It's like, well, you didn't write the code.
John:
All you did was write the documentation.
John:
Yeah, but the documentation was amazing.
John:
And amazing documentation was part of the reason, part of the way the good qualities of Apple's products were communicated to developers to let them know.
John:
You want to develop for this platform.
John:
Isn't it cool?
John:
And here, let me explain it to you.
John:
Explain our thinking behind it.
John:
Explain how things work.
John:
Explain how it works together so you appreciate the beauty of whatever system we've made.
John:
That was an essential part of both the Apple II and the early Macintosh in terms of gaining market share.
John:
Not that iOS is in that position now, but it's always a good thing to have.
Marco:
Also, I feel like at this point, when not only APIs are broadening and changing at a crazy pace right now, they introduced an entirely new programming language five years ago, whenever that was.
Marco:
Everything converted over to that.
Marco:
That language has changed in that time.
Marco:
Some of the original old sample code doesn't work anymore.
Marco:
A lot of APIs and things don't have sample code in the new language.
Marco:
And now they're trying to also change the entire UI framework.
Marco:
This is a time when we desperately need great documentation, great sample code, great tutorials.
Marco:
We need Apple writing their own code against these new APIs and sharing it with us.
Marco:
We need there to never be anything we run into that says no overview available in the new frameworks and new languages we're supposed to be using now.
Marco:
This is an incredibly critical time that they're trying to really move things forward in some pretty big ways.
Marco:
And there seems to be no guidance on how to use any of this new stuff.
Marco:
Are they ever going to document any of this stuff?
Marco:
Are they ever going to have good documentation for SwiftUI, for instance?
Marco:
I don't know, but right now they don't, and they're asking us how to learn it.
Marco:
And I don't know what they expect us to do exactly.
John:
So one way to highlight the problems with this methodology is to look at something like the kernel.
John:
where they have like 28,000 symbols, only 2,000 of which are documented.
John:
But there's probably almost nothing in the kernel that you're supposed to call directly.
John:
Like Apple has been really tightening down the public interface to the kernel.
John:
Kernel extensions themselves are so incredibly locked down now, they're basically frowned upon...
John:
And they have the whole user space driver thing, right?
John:
So it's always, you know, the kernel line on this graph is always going to be a tiny little dot.
John:
There's actually a one with zero as well, and I'm not sure about that one.
John:
I owe USB hosts.
John:
But anyway, this is all to say, like, third parties doing this is all well and good, but one way Apple...
John:
can address this problem start addressing this problem is by coming up with their own metrics because they know in theory which apis are supposed to be public and which aren't i mean they certainly know because i'm sure the tools that they run against your app store submissions know because if you call a private one there and they're going to reject your app right so at the very least they know like okay this kernel percentage is way off we you know it says eight percent but they don't realize that
John:
Almost all those symbols are private.
John:
For all we know, the kernel has 100% documentation.
John:
But Apple knows, right?
John:
So they should put on every one of their frameworks and every one of their pages a little bar like this that says, what percent is documented?
John:
Because if they can see it internally and they're willing to show it to the world, that will hopefully motivate slash shame them into...
John:
making those metrics go up you know make it part of people's goals put it on you know however you need to motivate the organization but especially if you're willing to put a public face so that every time someone goes to a particular library they see this library this framework is x percent documented like maybe with a date on it the last time that you know hit this so you can historically see a graph of percentage and then you have actionable data from apple itself to say hey
John:
This library has been 42% documented for the past five years.
John:
What the hell, right?
John:
But we don't have any of that, so all we've got is third-party websites like this, which are a start, but really Apple should be doing this internally and should be brave enough, courage, to put this on their docs and show it to the outside world.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
And a real-time follow-up, there is in the GitHub repo a brief about the methodology.
Casey:
I'll read a portion of it.
Casey:
This project uses a scraper to crawl and download API symbol documentation from Apple's official documentation website.
Casey:
An API symbol is any page navigable from and within developer.apple.com documentation that has a declaration, i.e.
Casey:
articles and sample code are not counted.
Casey:
An API symbol is undocumented if an HTML element matches a selector, no documentation.
Casey:
So that's the methodology.
Casey:
It is clearly not flawless nor foolproof, but as a reasonably consistent first step, I don't think it's unreasonable.
John:
They could post their test coverage, too, on the pages.
John:
That would be scary.
Casey:
Oh, that would be amazing.
Casey:
Well, that's the thing, though.
Casey:
I used to work at a government contractor many, many moons ago, and...
Casey:
We were using the rational suite, which was awful in a million different ways, but it made sense given the context.
Casey:
And what that meant was I couldn't check in code unless I specifically in the tools associated it with a issue number or ticket or what have you that that change was for.
Casey:
And they could have, although I don't recall this being the case, they could have gone to the level of not allowing me to check in code unless there's code coverage on that new code.
Casey:
and and i wouldn't been could have not been able to check in code if i didn't have documentation coverage against that new code like the big businesses where they take this stuff this seriously this is a solvable problem which is exactly what you two have been saying like if apple really did care about this this would get solved but the problem is whether or not the rank and file care i could not agree with you more marco someone somewhere does not care enough to make this a
Casey:
And that's just one more reason why, again, to quote you, Marco, this season of being an Apple developer has really just not been fun.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite web host.
Marco:
Go to linode.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP2019 for a $20 credit.
Marco:
I have all of my servers hosted at Linode.
Marco:
And I've used a lot of web hosts over the years.
Marco:
I've been hosting servers since the year 2000.
Marco:
And I've been with Linode by far the longest, I think about eight years now, and it's just the best.
Marco:
It's by far my favorite.
Marco:
Not only is it super easy to be their customer, you know, they have amazing capabilities, you know, all sorts of specialty servers if you need special needs for like, you know, dedicated CPU, GPU stuff, or just general stuff like, you know, basic virtual servers.
Marco:
You can install whatever Linux gesture you want on there.
Marco:
And then you can host applications or backend servers or websites or CI, CD environments, whatever you want to host on a virtual server, you can do that at Linode.
Marco:
You can pick from their 10 robot data centers and they're always adding more.
Marco:
So you can have your data wherever you need to be around the world.
Marco:
Everything is backed by native enterprise grade SSDs, a 40 gigabit network, industry leading, usually, I believe they're all Intel Xeon E5 processors.
Marco:
They're really, really good processors.
Marco:
And so it's really just an amazing host, very powerful, very just good capabilities.
Marco:
And it's all brought to you with amazing values.
Marco:
So their plans are just pay what you use with hourly billing across all plans and services.
Marco:
And then they all have monthly price caps that they advertise very clearly.
Marco:
So you always know if you just use a server for a few minutes, you'll pay whatever the hourly rate is.
Marco:
But then if you use it all the time, you'll pay just that monthly rate.
Marco:
And it's just super easy.
Marco:
The values are the best I've seen in the business.
Marco:
And they have been for the entire time I've been with them.
Marco:
As technology grows and they're able to give you better stuff for the same money or lower the prices on stuff they already offer, they do.
Marco:
And it's just wonderful.
Marco:
See for yourself at linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
See why I love this host so much.
Marco:
You can get a $20 credit with promo code ATP2019.
Marco:
Now, their entry-level plan is just $5 a month.
Marco:
That's a server with one gig of RAM.
Marco:
So that $20 credit could be four months free.
Marco:
Once again, ATP2019 for a $20 credit at linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for being an awesome host, hosting all my stuff, and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
It is October.
Casey:
As we record, it is the 21st of October, and we have yet to hear about the October event that I guess isn't happening.
Casey:
What's going on here?
John:
All the rumors say we're getting a 16-inch MacBook Pro with a hardware escape key and scissor switch keyboard any day now.
John:
Yeah, I put this item in here, and it was a one-word item, but Casey exactly picked up on what I was getting at.
John:
The one word says just October.
John:
it's the 21st this episode will come out on the 23rd or whatever there's you know i know apple doesn't like to give a lot of notice and they can have an event in early november but i really do hope before the end of the year obviously a they put up the mac pro configurator but b uh 16 inch macbook pro with a new keyboard uh you know if if you don't want to have an event apple and you just want to do a private press thing whatever we just want the machine
Marco:
I originally thought, like, you know, weeks ago when we were trying to predict this, I thought, well, you know, would they really introduce, like, a brand new laptop without demoing it, like, in a public way?
Marco:
That leaked alleged image is in 10.15.1 beta.
Marco:
whatever it is it was all over the rumor sites a few years ago it's one of those rendered icons that you see where the system has to show an icon for a certain Apple device and it has these stock icon images of every Apple device every model and everything it shows in things like the about window or in connecting to network share stuff like that
Marco:
There's this image resource that claims to be the MacBook Pro 16-inch, and by various conventions, and by looking at it next to the other one, it does seem like that's very likely.
Marco:
So it appears that we have Apple's official rendering of this device from the front, and there was this helpful little...
Marco:
animated gif on the mac rumors uh post in the comment section i'll put it in the show notes uh by user stanley dot okay uh that shows you can very quickly see them compared like the old the old 15 inch the new 15 inch and you can tell that you know the the 16 inch one is clearly you know a bigger screen smaller bezels proportionally to the screen and you can tell there's a very very
Marco:
very slight difference on the keyboard at the top where it does appear as though there is a hardware escape key to the left of the touch bar and a separated power button to the right of the touch bar.
Marco:
But what's interesting is how little else appears different.
Marco:
They appear to be very, very similar.
Marco:
And so I'm not sure Apple's really going to want to very loudly announce this is a brand new laptop.
Marco:
And there's all the complicated reasons with the keyboard issues they've had.
Marco:
They might actually try to downplay this a little bit.
Marco:
They might actually just be like, here's our new 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
And
Marco:
not much else about it might be changed besides the screen proportion and that it now has a scissor switch keyboard it wouldn't surprise me if it has like all the same ports if the it looks like from the from this image looks like things like the trackpad uh area which many people thought was too large and it got in the way of your thumbs and would cause accidental accidental input that appears to be unchanged by this image
Marco:
The spacing between the keys, which I've always said because it got smaller on the butterfly keyboard generation, it actually made it harder to feel where the keycaps ended.
Marco:
And therefore, I think that's part of what made me less accurate of a typist on these new keyboards.
Marco:
That appears to be unchanged as well.
Marco:
the distance that the keys appear to be raised up from the like bed they sit on also appears unchanged in this image so granted this is not a super high resolution image of the keyboard itself and it's also a marketing image and everything so you know it's sanitized probably in certain ways but this doesn't look like it's that different of a laptop from the 15 inch that we've had for three years and
Marco:
And so therefore, I'm guessing that, you know, combine that with all the, you know, embarrassing and legally problematic keyboard problems Apple has had, they might just downplay it.
Marco:
They might just be like, hey, here's the new update.
Marco:
You know, have a few briefings here and there and, you know, do a big press release.
Marco:
Some YouTubers have them do like some rendering tests or whatever.
Marco:
And that might be it.
Marco:
because they might just want to get this out there and quietly start solving the keyboard problem.
Marco:
And if not much else has changed, there actually isn't that much more for them to have an event about.
Marco:
And we kept thinking, beyond the 16-inch MacBook Pro, we've been trying to figure out for a while in the rumor mill, if they had an event, what else would be in the event?
Marco:
Is it just this new laptop?
Marco:
That seems like they wouldn't have a whole event just for that, especially if it's not a huge revision.
Marco:
So, okay, what else is there?
Marco:
iPad Pros have been pretty definitively ruled out by the rumor mill for, like, you know, not this fall.
Marco:
Other laptops also ruled out probably not this fall.
Marco:
So we're basically left with, like, the possible AirPods with the squishy tips and the possible noise cancellation that we talked about last week and the alleged, like, tile tracker thing that uses the ultra-wideband chip.
Marco:
and maybe a home pod update like it seems like there's not quite enough there and if you think back to this past spring uh apple in in the span of a week had i think four product releases all done by press releases like one each day they had like the the new ipad mini and and the new and the newish ipad air at the time uh and then they had i believe that was when was that when new airpods came out
Marco:
Anyway, this past spring they had a few days in a row where they had press releases for just a few product releases and that was it.
Marco:
They might just be doing the same thing this fall.
Marco:
They might just have press releases for this.
Marco:
Maybe a couple days or a week later they might have, hey, here's AirPods with in-ear tips.
Marco:
These might not be major event-worthy things.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Like many of their icons they have in the OS, I'm assuming these aren't actually photos but are just renders.
John:
And they're not even like... A lot of things at Apple's websites are renders, but the icons tend to be renders that aren't even meant to be photorealistic.
John:
They're a little bit iconic, if that makes sense, like a little bit painterly.
John:
So it wouldn't actually surprise me if the 3D models that they just copied and pasted the keyboard, that's why they look the same height.
John:
In other words, I'm not willing to believe that the...
John:
All the rumors say that these have more travel distance, but they don't stick up anymore because this is a rendering and they wouldn't bother with that.
Marco:
I would bet against that, John.
John:
There was a rumor that they have more travel than they have twice the travel of the previous ones.
John:
It was like one millimeter keyboard versus 0.5.
Marco:
Yeah, they call this one millimeter keyboard, and I think the butterfly has about 0.5 millimeters of travel.
Marco:
And this is allegedly a scissor mechanism and everything.
Marco:
I was hoping for more... It's hard to tell whether you have inverted T arrows or not.
Marco:
You can't really tell.
John:
I don't think that's changed.
Marco:
Basically, it looks like almost nothing else has changed.
Marco:
And I think a lot of our perception of Apple...
Marco:
is resting on this laptop release.
Marco:
Like they're going to communicate a whole lot to us with this.
Marco:
And what they might be communicating to us is we're going to do the least amount of change possible to alleviate the issue that's hurting them, you know, not us.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
users have had lots of issues with this generation of laptops.
Marco:
Many people want a no-touch bar option.
Marco:
Many people are not happy with the trackpad size.
Marco:
Many people are not happy with the ports being so limited.
Marco:
Many people are not happy with losing the SD card.
Marco:
There are so many things.
Marco:
So many things on this laptop have really polarized and angered and lost people or cost them a lot of money or made things worse for them.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Apple, so far to date, has changed almost nothing about them since their introduction in 2016.
Marco:
Almost nothing has been changed.
Marco:
Apple has seemed to be doing the bare minimum possible for these last few years to just eke out a little bit more out of this.
Marco:
As a Mac person, obviously, this has bothered the crap out of me.
Marco:
Everyone listening to this show knows that.
Marco:
This generational laptop has just felt punitive.
Marco:
It has just felt like Apple hates us.
Marco:
They hate Macs, they hate us, they hate these laptops, and they hate everything that we like about them.
Marco:
That's how it has seemed to their customers.
Marco:
They have just done little band-aid after little band-aid after little band-aid over and over again to just get the least change possible with this.
Marco:
I said last year,
Marco:
When you compare this to what's going on with the iPad one, like, look at the iPad Pro.
Marco:
The iPad Pro is fantastic.
Marco:
Like, every time they touch that, it gets so much better.
Marco:
And it seems like they're just, like, showering iPad Pro users with, like, awesome advances all the time.
Marco:
You know, it's like a gift.
Marco:
Every year, or every 18 months, whatever, it's like a gift.
Marco:
Look how much better the iPad Pro is.
Marco:
And on the Mac side, it's like, we hate you.
Marco:
Stop using these.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That's how it feels.
Marco:
To be a Mac laptop owner for the last four years, that's how it feels.
Marco:
It feels like they hate us, honestly.
Marco:
It feels like they don't like these machines.
Marco:
They don't want to be using them.
Marco:
They don't want us to be using them.
Marco:
They hate everything good about them.
Marco:
They hate that they're versatile computers.
Marco:
Honestly, it feels like they hate these machines.
Marco:
It matters so much what direction they've chosen to take with the new 16-inch.
Marco:
This is going to be the first totally new hardware design since 2016.
Marco:
What have they done?
Marco:
Have they only changed the keyboard to a scissor mechanism, which will only fix a couple of issues with it?
Marco:
Or have they taken a more holistic approach to actually fixing a lot of the other problems people have with it?
Marco:
So is it only to fix the problem that was costing them a lot of money and causing lawsuits?
Marco:
Or are they actually making a product that their customers are going to love?
Marco:
That's the big question.
Marco:
That's why so much is riding on this.
John:
I hope you feel better, but I was just talking about the keyboard.
John:
You said that the keys didn't look like they were any higher in the picture, and I was saying, it's just a render.
John:
Even though the keys on the keyboard don't look like they're any higher, there will be twice as much travel.
John:
I agree with you on everything else, though.
John:
I totally believe that the trackpad's going to be the same size, that the key layout's going to be the same thing as it was before with a slave to symmetry with annoying arrow keys.
John:
I agree that all the ports are going to be the same.
John:
Like...
John:
It's that much.
John:
As I said, I think several shows ago, all I want is a new keyboard and one more port and we're going to get one of those things.
John:
It's going to be the keyboard.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Part of it also looking at these images is kind of the design corner they've painted themselves into in that aside from better key layout and more ports, they have to make some different decisions about just the overall design if they want to do anything else interesting with these laptops.
John:
Even something as simple as
John:
The long, long overdue Face ID on a Mac, you know, in theory, given the size of the bezels and the rumored Face ID hardware that's not going to require a notch on the next iPhone, they could sneak those into a laptop style form factor, maybe, or maybe put them someplace else like there.
John:
There are things you can do to innovate in laptop design.
John:
to incorporate more features than apple has wanted to and based on these drawings and based on what we all expected this is not that laptop like it's almost like they took how many years three three years three and a half years it took like three and a half years to to apply a band-aid where we don't want to call it that because there have been so many band-aids between like all the different revisions to that keyboard but this is looks a lot like
John:
that previous keyboard like imagine this if this laptop came out after the first bad butterfly keyboard it would be like well they didn't have time to redesign the whole laptop all they could do is replace the keyboard and that required a bit of a redesign so here it is but instead we got to wait three years for what is essentially we haven't changed our philosophy of this product we haven't changed the product design we've just changed the component part so the screen is better and bigger um a little bit bigger and
John:
And the keyboard isn't crappy anymore.
John:
But every other sort of design decision about this laptop remains the same, at least as far as we can tell in this picture.
John:
Now, that said, as a laptop hater, I hate all laptops, not just the Apple ones.
John:
One thing that you can do in a laptop design, even if you don't sort of change any of the things that we've discussed...
John:
that can have a big effect on how people feel about the laptop is all the stuff that's hidden on the inside so in particular cooling and packaging like if you can figure out how to sort of iMac pro this thing like oh it's the same size and shape case as it was before but compare the sort of experience of using a 5k iMac and the experience of using an iMac pro outside they look the same except one is darker but
John:
You love the iMac Pro because it's quiet and it cools the parts and the parts inside are faster.
John:
If you could do that with this one where externally it looks more or less the same, it's a flat laptop, you know, they all kind of look the same.
John:
The screen is bigger.
John:
But boy, this one never overheats or this one doesn't throttle down under speed or this one I never hear the fan spin up.
John:
That is a significant sort of quality of life improvement, even if you're going to continue to be stingy with ports and have a bad keyboard layout, yada, yada, yada.
John:
You can't tell that from a render.
John:
And, you know, it might just be wishful thinking because there's a lot less room to work in a laptop than otherwise.
John:
But I think the iMac Pro shows that it is possible if, you know, if we get lucky and if Apple is inspired to take an existing form factor and basically make a better computer inside more or less the same design.
John:
And this case actually is bigger.
John:
Like, if you hold it next to it, it's not just the screen that's bigger.
John:
The actual, you know, thing that holds the battery and the CPU and all that stuff,
John:
also looks a little bit bigger so maybe there is more room to do cooling so if you want to get your hopes up don't get your hopes up about ports don't get your hopes up about key layout don't get your hopes up about face id that's for sure but maybe best case scenario you can get your hopes up about cooling and nvh as they say in the auto industry
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Something I've been thinking about a little bit lately is what is Apple's kind of long-term plan with their computers?
Casey:
Because if you look at both the iMac line and the MacBook Pro line, as you guys have mentioned, they're all getting a bit long in the tooth design-wise.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I can't decide if I think that's a problem or not.
Casey:
Because I exchanged just a couple of tweets with Steve Trouton-Smith, and he was saying, you know, in so many words, and I'm probably painting it unfairly, but what I heard him say, whether or not he actually said it, was, you know, Apple's laptop line is boring and they're not trying anymore.
Casey:
And I can't decide if he's right and they should be trying new and clever things, or if it's that...
Casey:
They have realized what they believe to be the naked robotic core of computing, and they just don't feel like there's anything else to do.
Casey:
You know, if you look at a computer, it's generally speaking, it's a mouse, a keyboard and a screen.
Casey:
And be that an iMac or be that a MacBook Pro...
Casey:
they may have reached what is almost peak, you know, keyboard, monitor, and mouse.
Casey:
And am I okay with that?
Casey:
And so I wanted to go back and forth with Steve about it, and I guess I could have privately, but I didn't want all the drive-bys on Twitter.
Casey:
But
Casey:
A lot of the stuff like the Surface line, you know, Steve had cited as something that's really exciting to him.
Casey:
And I don't know, I just, I don't find myself getting really excited about new and different takes on keyboard, mouse, and monitor.
Casey:
And maybe I'm old, maybe I'm boring, maybe both, but...
Casey:
I don't think I necessarily want a grand revamp of a MacBook Pro or an iMac.
Casey:
I'm okay with the design.
Casey:
Yeah, I'd like smaller bezels.
Casey:
Yes, I'd like Face ID.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Am I being crazy?
Casey:
Is it silly to kind of be okay with the general gist of what we've got?
Marco:
That's not crazy at all.
Marco:
The reason why we are pretty much okay with our iMacs looking the same for a pretty long time is because it's fine.
Marco:
They actually work really well this way.
Marco:
They don't look as modern and cool as they might with things like smaller puzzles, as you said.
Marco:
It's not a problem that's really a big deal to us.
Marco:
I look at an iMac every single day and I notice the bezel almost never.
Marco:
And I look at the big chin on the bottom almost never because there's a giant, bright, glowing screen in the middle that's taking all of my attention.
Marco:
I don't need to look at the case of my iMac very often.
Marco:
I don't see it.
Marco:
I don't handle it or touch it or move it very often.
Marco:
Although I move it more than most people do.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
That's a fact.
Marco:
It's not a thing that's really a critical part of the experience of owning this computer.
Marco:
The way the iMac looks is fine.
Marco:
It's totally ignorable, and asking them to redesign the iMac is kind of like asking them to redesign the power brick of a laptop.
Marco:
It's like, yeah, it's a thing, it's part of using it, but it's not a huge deal.
John:
Well, I agree that it's in a good place compared to laptops, but the iMac, not the case so much, but the stand.
John:
The stand is ripe for improvement, and Apple has been known to do some interesting innovations in the stand area.
John:
If it was height adjustable and could rotate, that would be a better iMac.
John:
And again, I'm not comparing it to laptops, which are in a much worse place.
John:
The iMac is fine, and it's been fine for seven years.
John:
I don't think it's desperately dying to be redesigned, but if you wanted to redesign it,
John:
If you made it adjustable height, adjustable angle, and rotatable, no one's going to frown at that iMac.
John:
That would be awesome.
John:
Keep all the good things about it and make the one part of it even better.
John:
So there is definitely room for improvement on the iMac.
John:
It's just that the current one, especially the iMac Pro, is really good.
John:
So no one is dying for that change to happen.
John:
But I do think about it.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
Although the problem is now we do know that if they did that, they would charge us $1,000 for it.
John:
They're going to make it... Don't make the iMac one out of Unobtainium or whatever the hell.
John:
No, but like... XDR.
Casey:
So, yeah.
Marco:
So, like, you know, the iMac is obviously, like, you know, it's fine.
Marco:
It's, you know, it's a design that doesn't get in the way.
Marco:
Whereas, like, the laptops have so many problems.
Marco:
They have so many, like, shortcomings and incredibly polarizing or unreliable things or limiting things, like...
Marco:
That's why people who think that laptop innovation is over aren't looking at it enough or aren't trying very hard to think about how could this be better or how could this be brought forward.
Marco:
There are so many ways that laptops can get better.
Marco:
Look at what the entire rest of the industry is doing.
Marco:
Apple doesn't make the best laptops anymore.
Marco:
They simply don't.
Marco:
If you look at the PC world, especially what Microsoft is doing, Microsoft
Marco:
Again, we made fun of them a long time ago when their weird laptops and Surface things sucked, but they don't anymore.
Marco:
Now they're pretty good, and people like them a lot, and they sell a pretty good number of them now, and they are objectively good by many people's measures and many people's experiences.
Marco:
I'm not saying that Apple needs to make as many crazy bets as Microsoft does, but I would like them to try.
Marco:
I would like them to not have stopped trying.
Marco:
the impression i've gotten since the uh touch bar introduction you know in 2016 is like that was their big try and then they just stopped and that wasn't that big or that good of a try we haven't seen yet what this new thing is i sure hope john is right that this image is not incredibly detailed or accurate but i fear that it is i i fear that this is literally all they have for us
John:
I think it's accurate.
John:
You just can't see the sides, so you could continue to fantasize that there's more ports there.
John:
But proportion-wise and everything else about it, I think the trackpad will be the size they show.
John:
I think the overall laptop will be the size, and I think the key layout will be the way they show it.
John:
I just think there'll be twice as much travel, and there'll be scissor switches, and maybe the screen will be a little bit brighter.
John:
I think what they need in the laptop line is they need their Mac Pro moment.
John:
They need to make one model of their laptops that has more ports and is more versatile.
John:
I don't know what the equivalent of the Mac Pro is, but the Mac Pro, as compared to the iMac Pro... First of all, they're starting off with the iMac Pro, which is itself a great computer.
John:
But the Mac Pro was like, how can I... We talked about this so many times before the computer came out...
John:
What can we use to justify the Mac Pro when the iMac Pro exists?
John:
And they have plenty of answers.
John:
Like, there's ridiculous things the Mac Pro does that the iMac can't even imagine, like in terms of expandability and, yes, also cost and stuff like that.
John:
There's no equivalent to that in the laptop line.
John:
If they just innovated in that direction...
John:
I feel like that could be their sort of laptop halo car where they could try a ridiculous expensive laptop that is hugely versatile in the same way that the Mac Pro is hugely versatile.
John:
Hell, make it hugely expensive.
John:
Probably can't literally make it huge because that's not a good quality in a laptop, but you could make it a little bit bigger.
John:
And experimenting with that very expensive, very versatile, very powerful laptop.
John:
Again, there are lots of examples of this in the PC world, gaming laptops and other like...
John:
laptops made for versatility and performance that seem weird and obscene but i guarantee you that if there's a market for the mac pro at all there's a market for a let's call it a macbook pro maybe they'll have to come up with a new name and by doing that it would be an interesting test bed to see like if they start driving people up market and like no one buys
John:
The regular MacBook Pro, they all buy the MacBook Pro XDR or whatever the hell they call it.
John:
It would show them, hey, maybe if we put an SD card slot in our supposed MacBook Pro.
John:
I don't know what the market is asking for.
John:
Is it a key layout?
John:
Is it ditching the touch bar for something else?
John:
But it's clear that there is a lot of dissatisfaction with the current sort of design trend.
Yeah.
John:
All the way up and down the line, even though one of them is called the MacBook Air, and they used to have a thing called the MacBook, and the MacBook Pros.
John:
Even though they have this differentiation in price and in the chips they use in them, in general, the design makes very similar decisions, right down to my original complaint when they went...
John:
to aluminum is they use the same freaking keyboard no matter how big the laptop is the same keyboard the same key layout pretty much the same complement of ports you just decrease the number as the prices go down it's getting very samey and there's not a lot of differentiation so if they had a mac pro moment and went and said we've heard you we're gonna make a versatile laptop for pros i don't know how they would phrase this
John:
I think we could learn a lot from that.
John:
Maybe they'd learn that we're wrong and really nobody wants that laptop except for people on nerdy tech podcasts.
John:
Fine.
John:
But, you know, I don't know.
John:
Maybe we're still living in a tech nerd bubble, but I don't hear lots of people who are super duper in love with their MacBook Pros over the past few years.
Marco:
yeah and this is actually a hilarious idea like so like i realized like this this might be the last episode of this show that gets recorded and released before this new laptop is unveiled and i thought this when this happens to iphones we usually have an exit interview oh god no please no
Marco:
And I realized we don't need to do an exit interview for this current generation of MacBook Pros.
Marco:
The entire last three years of our show have been the exit interview for these MacBook Pros.
Marco:
Exit interview slash funeral.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
I hope this is it.
Marco:
I hope this is the end of this horrible era.
Marco:
Not to make a political analogy, but you kind of feel like, boy, you made a lot of mistakes over the last few years.
Marco:
Let's hope the world is coming out of things.
Marco:
This is just part of that for me.
Marco:
I just want to end this era and be able to look back on it and make jokes without them being so painful because it's still our present day.
John:
Yeah, and honestly, we said like, oh, they're just fixing the thing that's painful to Apple.
John:
Just fixing the keyboard is a lot.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
That's going to really, really help in ways that it might make you feel better about the fact that the ports haven't changed.
John:
Because you're like, well, the ports annoy me, but I've already got my dongles.
John:
The screen is bigger and nicer.
John:
And every time I type on a key, it makes the key that it makes the character that it's supposed to make.
John:
And that will go a long way to...
John:
Making everybody a lot less better.
John:
I say as someone who has just recently had to pull down a Bluetooth keyboard from the attic because my space bar on my work laptop is going wonky and I don't want to be without it long enough to get it replaced.
John:
So I am using a second keyboard on my MacBook Pro.
John:
You know, it's only a small percentage of customers, John.
Marco:
It's killing me.
Marco:
It's a small percentage.
Marco:
It's just everybody we know.
John:
I just feel like I can – and now I know why people pry the keycaps off because I so want to pry it.
John:
Because you just feel it.
John:
You're like, it's a crumb.
John:
I can feel it under my thumb.
John:
Get out.
John:
Like the key doesn't go down all the way.
John:
And the worst part is if I bang it, like every four bangs on the space bar with my thumb, it'll make a space.
John:
So it's just enough to make – like you can't – I can use it.
John:
I don't have to like copy and paste a space.
John:
Oh, it's the worst.
Yeah.
John:
And then I took out my like my ancient Bluetooth Apple keyboard with the takes the double A batteries.
John:
Mm hmm.
John:
And those keys have so much travel.
John:
Yep.
Marco:
It's like I feel like I feel like a Model M by comparison.
John:
Yeah, I think they're supposed to basically I think they're the same key mechanisms as the one that I'm using on my Mac Pro right now.
John:
Like I have the Apple extended.
John:
I think they're the same key mechanisms, but I guess the Bluetooth one isn't sort of like broken in and it feels so much stiffer.
John:
And it makes me realize, like Casey, I think, I actually have come around to liking the butterfly key mechanism, limited travel and all, in the context of a laptop.
John:
I thought we were friends.
John:
Maybe not that extreme.
John:
Like, I could use a little bit more travel.
John:
I still hate the key layout, and I still hate the reliability, right?
John:
But I don't mind the...
John:
the lower travel clicky keys in a laptop context i probably wouldn't want to use it on a desktop but i don't mind it so like i'm i'm all primed to really like the key mechanism in this new laptop even as i continue to dislike the key layout
Casey:
Generally speaking, I really do like my MacBook Adorable.
Casey:
It annoys me from time to time.
Casey:
There are a few simple ways it could be an almost perfect computer.
Casey:
I don't think I have nearly the hatred that either of you do for the modern Apple laptops.
Casey:
But I've never owned a Touch Bar laptop.
Casey:
I've never had the occasion to.
Casey:
I've never really used one for more than a few minutes at a time.
Casey:
And I haven't yet been really catastrophically burned by the keyboard.
Casey:
I've only been annoyed by it.
Casey:
But I don't debate that.
Marco:
You've had failures all the time.
John:
Yeah, but it's always fixed by compressed air, though.
John:
I need to get access to his dad's air compressor or something because my little canned air is not doing the job on this space bar.
John:
And by the way, the MacBook Air, the one I actually own, that one does two spaces.
John:
For the longest time when I was like helping my kids like proofread their little essays for school, I'm like, why are you putting two spaces in the middle of sentences?
John:
They're like, the keyboard just does that.
John:
And I tried it and they're right.
John:
They're right.
John:
The keyboard does just do that.
John:
So I guess it's better than not being able to make a space.
John:
But yeah, when they write all their papers up in Google Docs on the quote unquote homework laptop, sometimes they get double spaces between words just because they hit the space bar once and two come out.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by DoorDash.
Marco:
If you're stuck at the office or you've had a long day at work, treat yourself to the meal that you deserve and have your favorite restaurants come to you with DoorDash.
Marco:
DoorDash connects you to your favorite restaurants in your city.
Marco:
You can order super easily in the DoorDash app, choose what you want to eat, and your food will be delivered to you wherever you are.
Marco:
So not only are places you know, like your favorite pizza place already on DoorDash, but there's over 340,000 restaurants in 3,300 cities.
Marco:
So you might even find a new favorite among what they have.
Marco:
And with door-to-door delivery in all 50 U.S.
Marco:
states and Canada, you can order from your local go-to's or choose from your favorite national restaurant chains like Chipotle, Wendy's, Cheesecake Factory, and more.
Marco:
So right now, our listeners can get $5 off their first order or $15 or more by downloading the DoorDash app, entering promo code ATP.
Marco:
So once again, that's $5 off your first order or $15 or more.
Marco:
When you download the DoorDash app from the App Store, enter promo code ATP at checkout.
Marco:
Don't worry about dinner.
Marco:
Let dinner come to you with DoorDash.
Casey:
Uh, there's some new Google stuff, I guess.
Casey:
Cool.
Casey:
Great.
Casey:
Do I care?
John:
Do any of us use any of these products?
John:
I saw, I thought there was, I watched most of the Google thing as I usually do.
John:
And I put a picture in the, our notes document here.
John:
We'll link to the tech crunch story.
John:
This picture comes from, it's, it's a Google PR picture they gave out to everybody.
John:
Uh,
John:
And it got me thinking.
John:
We've talked about Microsoft and their various hardware products in a couple of recent shows.
John:
And here's Google.
John:
Their announcement was like they have a new it's about their new phones.
John:
They have a bunch of AirPod ripoff things or little wireless earbuds that come in a little case.
John:
They've got a bunch of HomePod looking things or sort of fabric colored cylinders that are, you know, augmenting their existing Google Home line.
John:
They've combined their Wi-Fi routers into the Google Home thing.
John:
So the thing that you talk to is also your router, which is a smart idea that Apple should have done if they didn't get out of the Wi-Fi router business.
John:
We talked about it a lot when we were discussing them getting out of the business.
John:
It's like, hey, you want to have things in the house that listen to you.
John:
That's a great place to put your router.
John:
And then, of course, they have the Google Stadia controller streaming gaming thing.
John:
And they have this little product shop that shows everything together.
John:
And if you look at...
John:
Amazon, Google, and Apple, three big tech companies, all of them can make a picture like this.
John:
Pretty much.
John:
I mean, Amazon doesn't have a laptop, but they do have, still have those Fire tablets, right?
John:
Do they still make those tablets?
John:
I forget.
John:
Yeah, they cost like nothing.
John:
They're like 30 bucks now.
John:
Anyway, and I guess Amazon did have the phone but didn't have it.
John:
But like cylinders that you can talk to in fun colors covered with fabric, Wi-Fi routers.
John:
You know, Amazon's got Eero now, right?
John:
Earbuds.
John:
Amazon even has like a ring that you can talk to, like a literal ring for your fingers.
Yeah.
John:
phone tablets gaming controller things tv connected boxes like it seems like those not that that's table stakes but like every large tech company there aren't many of them but the big three or four big temp companies are all looking at what the other tech companies are doing and like
John:
we should make earbuds.
John:
We should have a voice assistant.
John:
We should have cylinders that are in your house.
John:
We should have a home automation.
John:
We should have a thing that plays music.
John:
We should have a streaming service.
John:
The competition, the similarity in services that they all make, and in particular, this image from Google, all of them seem to be taking the aesthetic from Apple, which is not new.
John:
Apple has sort of led in design.
John:
Whatever Apple decides they're going to do, you'll see lots of competitors copying, which...
John:
And many times like, well, what do you expect?
John:
That's obviously the way things should be.
John:
But it's only like that in hindsight.
John:
It was not obvious that cell phones should look like the iPhone until the iPhone came.
John:
Cell phones looked nothing like the iPhone before.
John:
Even complete screen iPhones like Nokia had like phones that were all screen.
John:
They did not look and work like the iPhone.
John:
But after the iPhone, every freaking phone looks like an iPhone, right?
John:
And down to the aesthetic.
John:
Laptops being aluminum and glass and sort of an unfinished aluminum appearance swept across the industry.
John:
And now I'm not sure if Apple was in the lead here or following, but there's a similar trend for cylinders.
John:
Obviously, Amazon being the leader in the having cylinders that you talk to in your house, but the design aesthetic of sort of rounded marshmallow fabric covered things.
John:
Whoever did that first, that is now everywhere.
John:
You know, Amazon cylinders are fabric covered.
John:
Google's are practically little miniature HomePod marshmallows.
John:
And they have the Google Home Mini because they want them to look nice.
John:
They don't want them to look too techie, but they also don't want them to look like furniture.
John:
Like, they're not made of shag carpet.
John:
Like, there is a sameness.
John:
And then the AirPods, a great example.
John:
Like...
John:
There were wireless earbuds before the AirPods and there are going to be wireless earbuds after them.
John:
But there's no way you can look at this Google thing and say, oh, that's their AirPod competitor.
John:
Like, isn't it obvious that you'd have a little case with the lid to pop?
John:
No, that's not obvious.
John:
Look at all the ones that came out before AirPods.
John:
They didn't work or look like that.
John:
Even if they had a little charging case, it wasn't exactly like that.
John:
But in a post AirPod world, they all have to be exactly like that.
John:
Now, I'm not saying all this to say, oh, look, everyone copies Apple.
John:
Although, again, I feel like they do really set the direction for the industry.
John:
But what it made me think was these three other companies I'm talking about.
John:
And by the way, I'm going to give Microsoft a break here because Microsoft actually has its own aesthetic.
John:
I think it's not as nice an aesthetic, but they have their own thing.
John:
Their surface stuff.
John:
This thing is like cubicle wall.
Yeah.
John:
Well, but I mean, there's a limited little bit of sameness.
John:
Like if you look at Microsoft keyboards, that is inspired by Apple's keyboards very much.
John:
But they do have their own sort of design aesthetic for their big Surface Pro thing and for their Surface things with the kickstands.
John:
Like they have a little bit of their own thing.
John:
They're influenced by the fashion of the rest of the industry, but they are the most innovative and the most original, I feel like.
John:
So they definitely deserve credit for that.
John:
But here's where, you know, the episode where we're bashing an Apple, but it's like, this is not a thing to bash an Apple about, but it's a thing that I think about.
John:
All those other companies...
John:
have some other big thing that they do that they're known for.
John:
Google is Google search.
John:
Like when you say Google, people think of search.
John:
It's a verb meaning to search.
John:
Amazon is a store where you buy stuff online.
John:
If you say Amazon or Amazon.com, you're like, oh, that's where I order stuff.
John:
Physical goods come to my house.
John:
Microsoft is Windows and Office.
John:
If you say Microsoft, people think of the Microsoft PC, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word.
John:
That's what those companies were built around.
John:
All of those companies can arrange a little hardware picture of fabric-covered marshmallows and AirPods and all this other stuff like this.
John:
But that's not their main business.
John:
Google is a search company that also makes practically everything that Apple makes.
John:
Amazon is an online store that also makes practically everything that Apple makes.
John:
And Microsoft is this huge software behemoth that also happens to make everything Apple makes.
John:
Apple...
John:
makes all this stuff, and that's their one big thing.
John:
They don't have a Google search.
John:
They don't have an Amazon store.
John:
They don't have a Microsoft.
John:
They have the iPhone, the Mac, and to a lesser extent, the HomePod, the Apple TV, the AirPods.
John:
That is Apple's thing.
John:
And in many ways, that's part of why the expectations for all the stuff that Apple does are higher.
John:
I mean, partially because we're big Apple fans and we're in that ecosystem.
John:
And that's the stuff we buy and prefer because of their software and everything.
John:
But also because if Apple doesn't do all that stuff better than everyone else, that's the whole ballgame.
John:
As much as they try to expand down to services and Apple has a thing that you can pay for news and they have a thing where you can pay for TV services and they're trying to change that.
John:
It's going to be very difficult for Apple ever to not be the company that makes hardware, software, synergized gadgets and is expected to lead the industry in those things.
John:
And for the most part, I feel like they do.
John:
They made the iPhone first.
John:
They made the AirPods.
John:
They are the...
John:
The leaders in this realm, which is why I think it's so important for Apple to keep the pedal to the metal when it comes to those innovations.
John:
And yes, to be working on the next big thing, whether it be AR or a car they're going to make or whatever the hell it is, because they don't have sort of their bread and butter to fall back on.
John:
Apple did get into Maps and they're doing an impressive job, but there's like Apple is not challenging Google for search.
John:
They're not challenging Amazon for retail stores.
John:
And iWork is not challenging Office and Exchange for that software world.
John:
Arguably, they're kind of challenging Windows still in the sort of desktop PC space, but that space matters less and less.
John:
So anyway, that's that's just what I was thinking about that.
John:
You know, when other companies have events like this, it's almost like they're saying, we are Google, and also Apple, we can do everything you can do.
John:
Almost as good, sometimes better, sometimes worse.
John:
But, like, this isn't even our main business.
John:
We're Google, man.
John:
We're Amazon.
John:
We're Microsoft.
John:
And also, we do everything you do, but backwards and in heels.
John:
Well done.
Casey:
What's the predecessor in who?
Casey:
Ginger Rogers.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
everything you can do i can do better uh you know i hear you i never thought of it that way actually john but you make an excellent point and i don't know anytime that that the three of us are negative about apple we always get at least a handful of people complaining about our complaining and i think sometimes that's fair sometimes i think the three of us can get wrapped around the axle about certain issues keyboards and uh and they're not fixed yet once they fix them we'll stop complaining
Marco:
Fair.
John:
The beatings will continue until keyboards improve.
Casey:
Oh, gosh.
Casey:
But anyways, I don't know.
Casey:
There's nothing so perfect that it cannot be complained about.
Casey:
And it's true.
Casey:
And beyond that, I do think that...
Casey:
All in all, I am really pleased with the Apple stuff that's in my life.
Casey:
There are things about the Apple stuff in my life that really annoys me, especially when I consider my work life rather than my personal life.
Casey:
You know, the lack of documentation is frustrating to the point of being obnoxious.
Casey:
The beta season was difficult.
Casey:
If I was a developer for the Mac, the Catalina release just dropping out of the blue would be infuriating.
Casey:
But especially now that I've taken the arguably shouldn't be necessary nuclear step of having blown away my two computers and set them up from scratch...
Casey:
I've actually been really pleased.
Casey:
Like I used Sidecar for the first time for an extended period of time last week, and it worked really, really well.
Casey:
And Catalina on my MacBook, which granted I haven't been pushing that hard, but Catalina's been fantastic.
Casey:
fine for the most part if there's things that annoy me i'm not saying it's perfect but it's been fine and my iMac now that it seems to be working at least for the next 10 minutes it is it is reminding me how great a computer this is i mean i cannot remember the last time i bought a computer and again i bought this in january of 2016 that is almost four years ago now and for any normal human whose name is not john syracuse a
Casey:
Four years for a single computer is a long time, especially for an all-in-one computer where the only thing I can change is the RAM.
Casey:
And this thing has been working really, really well.
Casey:
It's had its bumps, for sure, but it's been working really, really well.
Casey:
And I can't say that I really long for more speed.
Casey:
I'm sure I would like more speed, but I don't feel like I'm constrained by this iMac that's nearly four years old.
Casey:
And my iPad Pro, as much as iOS does annoy me from time to time when I'm trying to use it for quote-unquote real work, by and large, this is a phenomenal computer.
Casey:
And oh my goodness, I do not have enough good things to say about my poor Shattered i11 Pro.
Casey:
My iPhone is so phenomenally good.
Casey:
And yes, the software does let it down, especially lately, kind of often.
Casey:
But by and large,
Casey:
the things that these devices allow me to do, what was the phrase, like bicycles for the mind or whatever?
Casey:
The thing that these devices allow me to do really is incredible.
Casey:
And yes, the three of us, myself included, can get a little wrapped around the axle about things that upset us, but it's because we love them so darn much.
Casey:
And it's so frustrating to see what we perceive to be fixable problems, not fixed.
Casey:
But it is worth remembering for all of us, myself very much included,
Casey:
how unbelievably cool and amazing these devices are.
Casey:
And it's a miracle that any of them work the way that they do, even half as well as they do.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
And as I pointed out, like I was emphasizing how important it is for Apple to be the best, but I started that whole segment off by saying how everyone else does what Apple does down to the design details and the overall aesthetic.
John:
Like I feel like Apple is still leading in many of these areas and
John:
It's just that it occurred to me they have to lead in those areas because that is their bread and butter.
John:
If they're not the best at that, then why do they even exist?
John:
So I think they are the best at many of those things.
John:
And, you know, some other company didn't come up with the Mac and the iPhone and the iPad, right?
John:
It was an iOS in general and Coco and Objective-C and all the stuff that came from Next that is now attributed to Apple and yada, yada, yada.
John:
So it's like...
John:
They are leading those areas in the same way that Microsoft may have Bing, but Google is Google.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
It's just that it's so much more important for them.
John:
Coming up for our discussion about the laptops...
John:
They may think laptops are de-emphasized and not as important in the larger scheme of things, but it's one of the things that they're known for.
John:
It's part of their equivalent of Google Search or Amazon Store.
John:
They need to execute well.
John:
I feel like they've realized that in the desktop Mac space and have sort of regrouped there and are...
John:
Coming out with computers that are better than the ones that before.
John:
And as Marco pointed out, they're doing really well in the iPad space.
John:
And as I think we all talked about in the show, every year the iPhones are really good.
John:
Like they're really good iPhones, right?
John:
It's just those darn laptops, which are a small part of their business, but it's a part of their business that we all use.
John:
And so we complain about it a lot.
Marco:
It's funny, when you brought up this topic about how all these tech giants basically all kind of do everything now, or at least they all kind of do the same things, I actually didn't think of any Apple complaints for this one moment.
Marco:
Instead, this has been kind of a thing I've been meaning to talk about for a while, of like, yeah, it seems like Google and Amazon and Microsoft and Apple and occasionally Facebook are all doing a lot of the same things.
Marco:
But I see that not necessarily as like a, hey, Apple should be better.
Marco:
I see it as a tremendous waste of collective industry effort and resources and talent.
John:
It's called competition, Marco.
Marco:
You want to designate a winner?
Marco:
What it is, I think, is like, it seems like in the last, I don't know, five to ten years maybe,
Marco:
I don't know if this is maybe a new thing or if I just didn't see it before or if the names were different before, but it seems like every tech company has to have everything now.
Marco:
They all have to have a complete ecosystem.
Marco:
And part of it, I guess, is the threat that if they don't do their own complete ecosystem, then...
Marco:
you know dominant player x is going to be able to lock them out of the market or something and you know and i get that google maps and apple maps like yeah because if you don't if you don't have your own thing then you are at the mercy of the company that does do that thing right and see also the entire reason android exists like it's literally because like you know google didn't want their services locked out of you know a world that had apple and at the time theoretically microsoft controlling all of mobile right and like or blackberry whatever you know
Marco:
So, like, it seems like the tech companies now all have to have everything because everything is so damn locked down and proprietary and everything is a locked down ecosystem.
Marco:
From the voice assistants to the platforms to the services behind them all, you know, all these things, like, everything is so proprietary and locked down.
Marco:
And so it does create this need and this incentive for, like,
Marco:
every tech giant to almost defensively create their own versions of everything.
Marco:
And I feel like it's so much of a mediocre waste of so much of tech's immense resources and the talents and the engineering time and the design time of all these big companies.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
we're all just churning and we're all just like you know grinding our gears against these wasteful efforts to fight one walled garden against another in in massive ways with massive resources behind it like what if we were solving better problems like what like what if we weren't all trying to make the same like three product categories or whatever like that's
John:
It's more than three.
Marco:
Yeah, you're right, I guess.
Marco:
But like, I don't know, it just, part of this just feels incredibly wasteful and just like of like the world's resources in a way, you know?
John:
Well, it was worse back when it was just one company.
John:
When Microsoft was dominant to the degree that younger people probably don't have a visceral sense of exactly how dominant Microsoft was in the day.
John:
Imagine if everything you said was true, but there was literally only one company.
John:
There was one company and then a tiny little gnat that some weird nerds liked.
John:
And an even smaller NAT on that NAT, that was like the Mac and like Amiga or whatever they were like, and Linux, like just Microsoft was so dominant.
John:
Now today we have like named three companies.
John:
Like we have these big tech companies and yeah, they are all doing the same things and are all sort of competing with each other.
John:
But I often think, you know, thank God for Google.
John:
Cause if it was just Apple or just Microsoft or just Google,
John:
They would still all be doing the same things because they're sort of financial synergies to make that happen.
John:
They would find their way to all the same stuff.
John:
They'd all be selling media.
John:
They'd all have services.
John:
They'd all have search and maps and assistants and phones and laptops.
John:
But if it was just one company, that's what it felt like in the Microsoft time, that you had no choice.
John:
You could use the Mac, which was weird, and you weren't allowed to use at work and didn't have any software.
John:
Or you could join the real world and use Microsoft, which is what everybody used.
John:
And like in most sort of sci-fi dystopias or like bad Black Mirror episodes or whatever, that's always the way it is.
John:
There's always like one company, whether it's like MomCo or whatever from Futurama or just like the big company that controls everything.
John:
And there's just one of them.
John:
Very rarely are there three or four equally large, financially successful, powerful companies competing.
John:
It's always like, oh, the dystopia is all of your appliances from this company and all your computers are from this company and your cars from this company and you work at it.
John:
That's worse, right?
John:
The duplication of effort, I kind of understand that.
John:
We talked about this, I think, speaking of Apple Maps, back when we were talking about Apple Maps, the brief moment in time where it looked like Microsoft was fading, so that dark time was ending.
John:
Apple was rising, and we all liked that because we liked Apple.
John:
And there was these other companies that did their things, right?
John:
So you had Amazon that sold you stuff and you had Google that had search.
John:
You remember the brief moment?
John:
It's like, yeah, it'll be like Apple will make like the hardware in the OS and it'll tie in with Google services like Google Maps because their search and maps are really good and we'll get the best of everybody.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You know, Eric Schmidt is on Apple's board and we'll all work together and that's not the way.
John:
That's not the way competition works.
John:
The sort of synergy where each company would be like, you stay in your lane and I stay in my lane and we'll work together.
John:
You'll have this section in the market and we'll have that section and we'll make a combination product that's the best of all possible worlds.
John:
That's not...
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Some of them will do this kind of product better than other ones, and we need them all to exist and keep trying so that we have some kind of choice.
John:
Now, Marco's larger point about Walt Gardens is the real problem is that you can't really mix and match that easily, but you can mix and match a little bit.
John:
I think we're probably the worst it's ever been in terms of mixing and matching, but I have Google cylinders in the house that I talk to.
John:
but I'm otherwise totally in on the Apple thing, but I have Google stuff attached to my TV, but I also have a TiVo attached to my TV, but I also have Apple TV attached to my television.
John:
There are, and they all use the same internet connection and the same web browser engine thanks to Apple across many of the platforms.
John:
So it's not a complete dystopia, but to the extent that these ecosystems try to
John:
completely wall us off from each other.
John:
I think consumers rebel against that.
John:
And that's why I subscribe to Hulu and Apple TV plus and also Netflix.
John:
And those are all like deadly competitors in the video streaming market, but there's nothing stopping me from having all of them.
John:
And anything that did stop me from having all of them,
John:
would be frowned upon by consumers and you know wouldn't do well like if you if you bought a sony television and you couldn't watch netflix or you could even if you bought a sony television and you couldn't watch hulu or you couldn't watch apple tv plus that's not going to fly sony as a television maker needs to make sure that you can see all of those things on in fact they build in half those things inside the television set let alone like the boxes that connect to it so
John:
I'm, for the most part, optimistic coming from the dark time of Microsoft, which is sort of my formative tech dystopia is Microsoft.
John:
Now and forever will be.
John:
Maybe kids today, their formative tech dystopia is like the closed ecosystem of Apple or something.
John:
I mean, I suppose Facebook is all of our tech dystopia, but I'm mostly just sectioning them off.
Yeah.
John:
in the sort of pit of despair that is social media along with twitter um yeah i mean we can all agree that of all these companies facebook is definitely the worst yes obviously sure easy easy uh easy answer but yeah and facebook doesn't make i mean doesn't make any of these products successfully do they make cylinders that you talk to i think they have some weird thing that you talk to but i think people are wisely staying away from that i believe it's like a camera you put in your underwear something like that you can trust them don't worry
John:
That sounds right.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
It's a surveillance camera for your bathroom.
John:
Didn't they make a phone at some point?
Marco:
Well, they only put their software on a phone.
Marco:
Nobody wanted it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I don't know if they make earbuds, but I'm assuming they would track you and film video and send advertisements to you.
John:
Anyway, they seem incapable of fielding the same suite of things.
John:
So they're content to merely control the political direction of the world and all of our lives.
Yeah.
Casey:
Boy, that got intense.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP and lighten things up.
Casey:
Tom Zosh writes, when considering Mac processor options for a new Mac purchase, how can I tell if I would benefit most from higher single-core or multi-core performance?
Casey:
John, what do you think about that?
John:
I put this question there because it sounds like if you're, you know, a tech nerd, experienced computer user listening to this show, you're like, well, what a dumb question.
John:
Of course, you know, you can tell if your app's been over multiple cores if the app uses multiple cores.
John:
But it's not a dumb question.
John:
It's not like a thing you sense mentally.
John:
You just know which application.
John:
There's an answer, and the answer is, out of the box on a Mac, is if you open Activity Monitor and bring up the CPU graph thingy that shows a bunch of little bar graphs for your CPU usage, and then do a thing that takes a long time in the application that you're interested in, and if you see all the bars go up while you're waiting for the thing that takes a long time, that application uses all your cores.
John:
So if you get something with more cores, there's a very high chance that if you add a couple more cores, it will take less time and it will use them.
John:
Not a guarantee because it is possible a badly written program could use like a certain number of your cores, but not all of them.
John:
Games are a lot like that.
John:
Sometimes if you add more cores, games don't take advantage of them.
John:
So beware.
John:
But that's the tool you need.
John:
You want to use activity monitor.
John:
You want to look at the CPU graph and you want to look at those little bars.
John:
If only one of the bars goes up all the way and the rest of the bars stay down, getting more cores won't help that program.
John:
So that's how you tell.
Marco:
And it's also, I mean, there's a lot of complexities to this in reality, but, you know, so John's device is good if it is, you know, mostly multi-core.
Marco:
And the good news is, if it's mostly single-core, single-core performance across Apple's entire Mac lineup doesn't vary as much as you think it might.
John:
It's almost as good as their phone.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Wow.
John:
I'll never get old until they come up with our Macs.
John:
I'm going to just put that in every show.
Marco:
But yeah, so like if you actually look at things like Geekbench and look at like single core benchmarks,
Marco:
There are a few complicating factors here, like how long can something boost at maximum speed and everything.
Marco:
But for the most part, single core performance within a certain generation, year-wise, of Intel's processors doesn't change that much between the products.
Marco:
Yeah, there are differences, but they're smaller than you think.
Marco:
They're smaller than the initial advertised clock speeds would suggest.
Marco:
There actually is not, I've said this before, there is not as much variation between the processor options that you have as upgrades or as built-to-order customizations for a certain product line as you might think.
Marco:
You might have, for a given laptop, say, there might be a $300 option that'll get you a processor that has a higher clock speed than the one that comes stock on that model.
Marco:
But that usually is not a great use for that money.
Marco:
Usually, if you actually look at the benchmarks, because of things like Turbo Boost and thermal limits and everything, it actually doesn't usually perform as much better as you would think.
Marco:
Usually, for that $300-ish upgrade, you're getting something like 10% more performance, maybe at most.
Marco:
It often is not very big.
Marco:
And so, if you're trying to figure out that kind of processor choice...
Marco:
usually you can just stick with the base processor.
Marco:
In most of the Mac families, if you just stick with the base that it comes with or maybe do one small upgrade to maybe go from the i5 to the i7, you will get some value out of that.
Marco:
But if you're trying to figure out where to allocate those funds to best spend them, spend them on a larger SSD.
Marco:
You'll notice that more than you'll notice the extra 5% or 10% on the processor.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree with that wholeheartedly.
Casey:
Kenny Long writes, I'm buying a new car and was looking forward to finally getting CarPlay, but learned that most all models are not wireless.
Casey:
Is plugging in every time as annoying as it sounds?
Casey:
Any worthwhile workarounds?
Casey:
Let me start by saying worthwhile workarounds, none that I'm aware of and I don't expect there to ever be.
Casey:
With regard to plugging in, is plugging in every time as annoying as it sounds?
Casey:
God.
Casey:
Kind of.
Casey:
In my experience, and I typically, most of my car trips are five miles or less, and I live in a sane place, so five miles or less means like, you know, 10 minutes or less.
Casey:
And because of that, I almost never plug in my phone to the car.
Casey:
I usually use Bluetooth to listen to like Overcast or something like that.
Casey:
The occasions that would cause me to plug in are if I'm in the middle of a text message conversation and want to continue it.
Casey:
I will do that verbally using the assistant.
Casey:
I almost said her name.
Casey:
And I will do that.
Casey:
That is much easier to do via CarPlay.
Casey:
If I'm going somewhere I don't know where I'm going, I will typically – I mean, my car does have navigation, as does Aaron's.
Casey:
They both have CarPlay.
Casey:
I could plug in the address in the onboard navigation, but I typically find it just easier to use either Apple or Google or Waze on CarPlay.
Casey:
But generally speaking, I don't plug in unless I feel like I need it.
Casey:
And so I don't find it particularly egregious or difficult at all.
Casey:
uh i i personally would not buy a car without carplay because i do feel like it's future-proofing as i've said many times on the show it's future-proofing that car because the car's navigation system is unlikely to get any better anytime soon that is one of the advantages of owning a tesla is that you know your software always gets better uh of course i can't ask marco about carplay because one of the big disadvantages of tesla is that they refuse to acknowledge that carplay or android auto exist uh i have
Casey:
I have understood that wireless car play is amazing and I have not experienced it myself.
Casey:
The combination of wireless car play and Qi charging sounds like just bliss on wheels.
Casey:
But again, that is not something I have experienced personally.
Casey:
Although I do, I believe the Audi e-tron has both wireless charging and wireless car play, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
So Marco, if you want to buy an actually good electric car, you could consider that for your next ride.
Marco:
Actually, Tiff's car has wireless CarPlay.
Casey:
Oh, that's right.
Casey:
I forgot about that.
Casey:
Yes, you're right.
Marco:
I have used it zero times.
Marco:
And I'm pretty sure she has used it zero times.
Casey:
But how often do you drive her car, though?
Marco:
Almost never.
Casey:
Well, okay.
Casey:
See, there you go.
Casey:
And, John, you are on the same buying strategy for cars as you are computers.
Casey:
So I know this is irrelevant.
John:
Except I don't buy a computer that costs as much as a car.
John:
Well, I don't know how that works.
Casey:
You're about to.
John:
I don't buy a car that costs as much as a house, Marco.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, there you go.
Casey:
So yeah, that's my two cents, and I hope that's helpful, Kenny.
John:
Speaking of, before we get to that one, speaking of Tiff's car, you know they don't make that anymore?
John:
I don't know what she's going to do when her lease is up.
Casey:
Oh, is that right?
Marco:
You know, I was looking at, we were trying to figure out, we're looking at some kind of compact electric option for her to replace it anyway, so that's fine.
Marco:
But I was looking at the site, and I was surprised.
Marco:
Are the GTEs just gone?
Marco:
No, no more GTE model for 2020.
John:
What happened?
John:
happen i mean like not enough people bought them i mean i don't see them i see them hardly anywhere when i do see them around i have to do like a triple take i'm like what is that weird oh that's tiff's bmw like i do not see i see tons of bmws i do not see a lot of that model so i'm assuming it doesn't sell well but yeah not not in the three or the five gt i think they're all gone uh in bmw's model lineup from now on so yeah if you need any further encouragement to find some electric option for her there you have it she can't even get the same car again unless she buys used
Marco:
But then we might as well just buy out her lease.
Marco:
But yeah, we actually have to make a decision on that this month.
Marco:
It's kind of coming out quickly.
Casey:
Oh, really?
Marco:
Yeah, the lease is up in December, so anything that needs to be ordered, we need to get on that pretty quickly.
John:
You could survive with a single car.
John:
I think it'll be okay.
Marco:
That's one of the options we're looking at, actually.
Casey:
And then finally, Marco, you and I can just sign off and go to sleep now.
Casey:
Tobo Granite would like to know things about Destiny.
Casey:
I don't even know what this means.
Casey:
Since Syracuse is not likely to ever do the Destiny podcast, I'd so love.
Casey:
This is Tobo Granite speaking, not me.
Casey:
Any thoughts on Shadowkeep, whatever that means, and what it means for the kind of game that Destiny is likely to become, John?
John:
This is actually very interesting and there could be a full podcast that even people who don't know or care anything about Destiny would be interested in because the way games are financed and sold continues to change.
John:
We know, all three of us know about the whole, you know,
John:
mobile games and free-to-play and all those exploitive mechanics but you know sort of the dark side of that and i think we mostly know about the good side of mobile games that we've all come to love and how those are sold and marketed and what the economic model of those look like uh but in the in another section of the gaming industry in the world of sort of triple a as they're called triple a console and pc games the way they're sold and uh
John:
and how the ongoing development of those funded has been changing.
John:
There's some weird stuff out there that's sort of innovated in this area, like World of Warcraft, which is like a 15-year-old game at this point that charges people a subscription fee that sort of gets you to adopt it as a lifestyle.
John:
And as you know from...
John:
So talking to me all these years, Destiny is also kind of one of those games, but it's not a subscription model.
John:
I don't pay a monthly fee to play Destiny.
John:
I just, in theory, buy a game.
John:
And so Destiny came from a world where you'd buy a game for $60 and then play it, but they would want to keep selling you content.
John:
You probably know it as DLC, downloadable content from back in the day when you're getting a horse armor and stuff like that.
John:
But the current model that so many games follow is sort of
John:
Either you buy a game up front or not, but then continue to pay for sort of regularly scheduled content drops, which is such a sort of clinical phrase, but like basically you'll keep playing the same game and they have all sorts of mechanics that give you new things to play in the game and new things to accomplish and you pay for them, but it's not a subscription.
John:
The new model is mostly if you want to sit out this quote unquote season, they actually call them seasons and
John:
don't play the season maybe you're playing some other game maybe you're not into it anymore but if you come back to it we want to make it so that you don't feel like you've been less left behind hopelessly that was a problem destiny had in many years is that if you weren't playing the game like a lifestyle like it's your job right all your friends would get ahead of where you are and you'd want to get back into it but you'd be so far behind them and you couldn't catch up and then you couldn't play the new content because you had to sort of be leveled and have all these items to play the new content and
John:
And you're like, well, that's not fair.
John:
They should make it so anyone could jump in at any time.
John:
But if you do that, it disincentivizes people to play.
John:
Because you're like, well, if my friend who hasn't played for six months can just jump right in and be exactly where I was, I don't feel like I have accomplished anything in those six months.
John:
I haven't earned these cool items or got to experience this cool content.
John:
So it's a long way of saying that Shadowkeep and what Bungie's doing with Destiny are twofold.
John:
One, they got out of what apparently was not a very constructive relationship with their previous publisher, Activision.
John:
And now they're on their own.
John:
Which is good in that they get to sort of call their own shots without having to talk to some money people who make them make bad decisions about their game.
John:
But bad in that there's no money person dropping money on their heads to make the game.
John:
It's all on them.
John:
So they have to figure out a way to sort of thread this needle.
John:
Make a game where you feel like your time investing is letting you accomplish something.
John:
Where you spend the time and you get the good item and you level up.
John:
but also make it so that if you sit out a season or your friends sit out a season, that they can come back very quickly.
John:
But you don't also feel cheated by them sort of cutting in line or whatever.
John:
And it's very difficult balance.
John:
And they're working on that.
John:
And how much do I charge for each of these seasons?
John:
And what do you get in the season?
John:
And can you play for free?
John:
Like Destiny is free to download and play right now.
John:
But if you want to get...
John:
uh the good content you have to pay something for it and anyway and avoiding uh pay to win mechanics which is a whole big thing nobody likes a game where you can pay money and get a better item that lets you play the game better so you can only charge people for essentially cosmetic items or things that don't actually affect gameplay and that's a difficult line to tread um anyway the final thing that i think is interesting in shadow keep is that the model destiny had been following which is
John:
Pass money, we'll give you content, the game will expand, so on and so forth.
John:
can't continue like that forever because what they would do is you'd get the game, then you get an expansion, then you get a second expansion, then you get a third expansion, then you get a fourth expansion.
John:
Eventually the game is A, huge, as in like hundreds of gigabytes on your hard drive, and B, it becomes too overwhelmingly large.
John:
You can't add content forever to the same game, I suppose, unless you're World of Warcraft, without it becoming overwhelming to both new players and existing players.
John:
So with Shadowkeep, I think they finally said...
John:
we're going to put content out in a season and when the season is over some of that content will leave with the season whether it be destinations or items that you can't get again or whatever and that i think will keep a more manageable game size now this app bungie is just beginning this new phase of their development but i mean you guys make fun of uh me for being into and playing destiny but i have to say that kind of like following a sports team part of the fun of being into destiny is
John:
is the is like the metagame like people who get into like sports teams and learn about like the trades and who's the manager and what position people are in and the salary negotiations and who they pick in the draft to many people that is as much fun as the sports part some to other people it's even more fun and in the world destiny
John:
Figuring out what Bungie is doing to design their game around the desires of their players and the need to make money and how they schedule their content drops and how things come out when and how that works financially is, to me, at least as interesting as the game itself.
John:
And I like the game as well.
John:
So...
John:
I'm enjoying that aspect, as always.
John:
I am enjoying that ongoing, I'm not going to say struggle, but ongoing communication between Bungie and its players and the software they put out to try to make a symbiotic relationship where we give them money and they give us fun in a cycle that makes everybody feel good.
John:
Historically, that cycle has not been a smooth circle.
John:
It has had jagged bumps all over it.
John:
But I do enjoy the process, and I think it's fascinating from a software perspective, from a technology perspective, from a business perspective, and from a gaming perspective.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode and DoorDash, 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 so that's casey list m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t marco armen s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a syracusa it's accidental they didn't
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
So, Marco, in the show, you mentioned that you have to replace TIFF's Subaru Outback BMW 3GT.
Casey:
And you had mentioned that you were going to consider smaller electric cars.
Casey:
Tell me more about this.
Marco:
I mean, it's a little early.
Marco:
First of all, why are they stopping making the GT?
Marco:
The 5GT was a monster, but the 3GT is a really good car.
Yeah.
John:
it's weird looking and nobody buys it i mean i think that's the answer like they're not making manuals they're not making the three gt anymore yeah i guess honestly like at this rate like we're lucky if any automaker is still making like sedans like it's it seems like even that is uh an endangered species ford's not making sedans anymore i think gm's not making sedans i'm forget i think all the american car makers have said they're not making i forget but yeah very few sedans uh
John:
I bet there'll be a 3GT-like replacement by the time BMW goes all electric, which I think is currently scheduled for 2025 or something like that.
Marco:
All I want is just make your existing car lineup, just give electric options.
Marco:
I would love an Electric 2 series.
Marco:
I don't want some weirdo.
Marco:
The i3 is fine.
Marco:
It's weird.
Marco:
We might get one.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
There's currently a pretty compelling lease special on it, so we'll see.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I don't want some weirdo new model.
Marco:
I just want, in John's terminology, we want a car-shaped car, just electric.
Marco:
Audi makes those.
Marco:
And there are very few of them.
Marco:
No, they don't.
Marco:
They really don't.
Marco:
They make SUV-shaped cars.
Marco:
The e-tron are exactly like the other Audis, but with ugly grills on them.
Marco:
but it's only the it's only the SUV right now right well that's all anyone makes it all makes sedans what are you talking about and like all the other ones like like you know like the of all the compelling options you basically have like the Chevy Bolt which is a fairly compelling option we haven't actually test driven one yet but like I have really what do you think of it yeah my parents have one oh yeah I think I knew that I forgot about it because it's kind of it's like kind of like a crossover SUV kind of thing also right yeah
Casey:
it's weird it's a tall ugly car i think that's the category yeah i don't think it's i don't think it's a tuck to ugly car i don't think it's ugly but it is not attractive and it is a it is a tall car it is as much as i like to snark on the gt it is kind of outbackish in the sense that the car is tall but it's not very high off the ground like an suv is it's still low but
Casey:
But it's kind of tall.
Casey:
It's very odd to describe.
Casey:
But I will say driving it, surprisingly good.
Casey:
I was really going into this expecting to hate that thing.
Casey:
And it is actually... Well, for me, who is not used to a Tesla... I've driven Teslas many more times than one would expect, having never owned one.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I am not used to a Tesla in the same way that you or some of our other friends may be.
Casey:
And the Bolt is actually surprisingly, surprisingly good.
Casey:
I was really, really impressed by it.
Casey:
If you went i3, you would not get the range extended or whatever they call it one.
Casey:
You would get the straight electric one.
Marco:
Yeah, because we don't really need the range extender, and I would not want it just for complexity and long-term service risk needs.
Marco:
Having a simpler mechanical thing, especially for BMW, is probably for the best.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But yeah, but like, I just like most of the options that we were looking at aren't incredibly competitive.
Marco:
Like, uh, our friend has a Kia Soul EV, which is a surprisingly good value in practice, but they are currently not in production.
Marco:
They're like between model eras and they're like, they're currently, you can't buy them.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
but that that would be a contender um the i3 looks you know good i for the i3 i like that it has a very small garage footprint it's it's a weirdly tall car but it's also very narrow and short uh and so it actually uh would kind of kind of nice um but like all these have like major problems like the we got the e-golf which is exactly what you asked for it's just a car but electric yes but they don't make it
Marco:
Yeah, it's very hard to find.
Casey:
I think they're out of production now, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
I could have that wrong, but I don't think they're making them anymore.
Casey:
However, that is absolutely, as much as I am obviously biased about this, given what you're describing about a car-shaped car, without question, the E-Golf is the right answer.
John:
That's not car shaped.
Casey:
It's golf shaped.
Casey:
I walked right into it.
Casey:
I walked right into it.
Marco:
But here's the problem with the e-golf, right?
Marco:
So it has, you know, among these cars, there's kind of like two range classes.
Marco:
There's like the ones that are around 100, 120 mile range, which are kind of like the like old generation electric entry level cars.
Marco:
Uh, and there's ones that are like, you know, 200 or not.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So like the Chevy bolt is, is like 238 and officially in the new one.
Marco:
Um, the, the e-golf is the old range.
Marco:
It is 125 miles.
Marco:
It's also zero to 60 in about eight and a half seconds.
Marco:
So a little, a little sluggish there.
Marco:
Uh, you know, we don't want like a step down from her three 40 GT in, in speed, at least much of one.
Marco:
And that's, that seems like it'd be kind of a step down in both.
Marco:
Um, the model three, uh,
Marco:
is a very interesting option here.
Marco:
It's just one of the most expensive options.
Marco:
But it does really kind of destroy the other ones in lots of different ways.
Marco:
I can see, not even being an existing Tesla fan, I can see why the Model 3 is selling so well.
Marco:
Because when you compare it to...
Marco:
Other cars that are other entry-level or, sorry, mid-range electric cars, it really does compete very well against them, at least on paper.
John:
Because there are no other mid-range sedans.
John:
They're all little SUVs.
John:
Yes!
John:
The Model Y is the actual Tesla competitor to the whole rest of the car industry because the whole rest of the car industry makes big and small SUVs.
Marco:
Yeah, and also other things.
Marco:
Most of these don't have things that we want, like sunroofs or all-wheel drive.
Marco:
There's just little things that you think that if you're just looking at drivetrain first, you might miss some of this stuff or not realize it, and then you start digging in and you're like, wait a minute, only two of these even have a sunroof option.
Marco:
Not including the Model 3, by the way.
Marco:
Model 3, although, is the only one that I can find that has all-wheel drive.
Marco:
It also has the longest range.
Marco:
It's the fastest.
Marco:
We can't find a good option yet, but we do have to do a lot of test driving still, which we just haven't been delaying because we're not that motivated.
Marco:
But I'm really disappointed in how relatively few pure electric car options we still have.
Marco:
I was assuming years ago, I was assuming that by now,
Marco:
especially somebody like BMW, who's tech forward and was pretty early to having an electric option at all, I would expect now to be able to go and buy just an electric 3 Series, which you can't do still.
Marco:
They recently added the plug-in hybrids to some of their model lines, but it's very, very few.
Marco:
And a plug-in hybrid is not an electric car.
Marco:
It's kind of a half-assed solution, but that's not what we're looking for.
Marco:
I thought there'd be more options by now.
Marco:
i love that the um the honda e thing that looks so cool not being released in the u.s like there's so many like so many options are like almost really cool or almost good and and just can't get them or they they fall over in some critical way i don't know what am i missing you try you try it's not four-wheel drive i thought it was
John:
it is i believe it's not a car yeah it's not it's a tall wagon it's not as bad as an suv it's more like it is very good looking in person i've seen one once and it was very good looking but i am not nearly as offended by non-sedans as the two of you are yeah you should actually you should see if there's like lurking within tiff some uh like like there apparently wasn't erin some sort of latent suv love
John:
which apparently this is a thing that lurks in people and they don't want to admit it, but suddenly you put them up in a big high chair in the sky and they're like, ooh.
John:
So you should try the Jaguar I-Pace and you'd be like, wow, I'm sitting so high.
John:
Maybe she'll love it.
John:
Erin seems to like her car and it's a monster, right?
John:
So you never know.
John:
Yeah, you think you know someone.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
John:
You could be unintentionally shaming Tiff into not liking giant SUVs like the whole rest of the world does.
John:
The whole rest of the US, sorry.
John:
What we should probably do is probably just go test drive a Chevy Bolt.
John:
That's probably going to be the right answer.
Marco:
You should test drive the I-Pace and the e-tron as well.
Marco:
I agree.
Marco:
One thing we also wanted was something small.
Marco:
My car is big.
Marco:
We already have a big car from when we need a big car.
Marco:
For the second car, we want something small.
Marco:
I think those are both smaller than your car, though.
Casey:
And why does it matter if it's electric?
Casey:
Like, the whole point of getting a small car in the olden days was because it was more fuel efficient.
Casey:
Why does it matter if it's electric?
John:
It's more unwieldy and it takes up room in the garage and might ding Marco's good car.
Yeah.
Casey:
The correct answer to your question, by the way, which you're not going to like, but it is the correct answer to your question, except it's not available yet, is the Polestar 2, which is Volvo's sedan-shaped sedan that is all electric.
Casey:
I don't know if it's all-wheel drive, actually, but it has the equivalent of 490 foot-pounds of torque.
Casey:
It has the equivalent of 300-plus miles of range, or so they say, 0 to 60 in 4.7 seconds.
Casey:
In so many ways, I think this is exactly the right solution for you if you don't want to just get another Tesla.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Does it have a sunroof?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
That's a fine question, actually.
Marco:
It looks nice.
Marco:
It does look a little bit big, but it does look nice.
Marco:
I'll tell you that.
John:
But I think the I-Pace and the E-Tron are both smaller than the Model S. Not by a lot, but smaller.
Yeah.
John:
And I think the Polestar 2, I don't look at the dimensions.
John:
What about the Polestar 1?
John:
Where's this?
John:
This looks pretty nice.
John:
The Polestar 2 is the one that's like, you can tell it's sitting on top of its battery pack.
John:
I think it looks ungainly.
John:
The Polestar 1 is the nicer looking one, but it's not practical, I think.
John:
It also doesn't seem to exist.
Marco:
Do any of these cars exist?
Marco:
I just, why?
Marco:
We've known about electric cars for quite some time.
Marco:
Why don't we have any?
John:
Go test drive a Taycan.
John:
Sorry, Taycan.
John:
The pronunciation is coming down on that.
John:
Is that how you're supposed to pronounce that?
John:
Yeah, they want you to say Taycan, I think.
John:
It's definitely Tay.
John:
The second syllable I'm pretty sure is con.
Marco:
It's way too expensive and bloated and not what I'm looking for.
Casey:
First deliveries of the Polestar 2, July 2020.
Casey:
What about the 1?
John:
Is that a thing?
Casey:
That's not a thing.
John:
No, that's hybrid anyway.
John:
You don't want that.
John:
Oh, it's hybrid.
John:
What the f***?
John:
Polestar 1 was like before the Polestar 2.
John:
Polestar 1 is like their sort of flagship fancy impractical car and it was made in the hybrid air and not in the electric air.
John:
But it looks good.
Casey:
It does look good.
Casey:
Definitely looks good.
Marco:
I want the Honda thing.
Marco:
Where's the Honda thing?
Marco:
Bring that to the U.S.
Casey:
What you want does not exist.
John:
I think that there will be a small Honda EV, but Honda is not tech forward.
John:
So don't hold your breath.
John:
It's kind of amazing that Honda has done that at all, you know.
John:
honda was barely putting turbochargers in its cars so but you know but it will come eventually but for this round i think you're gonna have to get something else you know test drive doesn't mean buying you should you should test drive them all anyway again you might might release those latent uh suv love genes you should ask erin about her experience of living with an suv shamer for all those years and finally breaking through and getting to be her uh her bad suv self
Casey:
I never really shamed her that much for SUVs.
Casey:
I really didn't.
John:
I'm trying to get more garage space, not less.
John:
I understand the struggle for garage space.
John:
I more than anyone understand what's really at stake here is Marco wants to park in the dead center of his gigantic garage so there's nothing around his cars and he can swing them open with impunity and not even hit his rack-mounted networking gear with his door.
Casey:
Which is ridiculous because you could just summon your stupid Tesla and then it'll unleash itself.
Casey:
You don't even have to worry about it.
John:
The ultimate luxury of being able to swing your doors open in your garage to park dead center in a two-car garage.
John:
That's what he's looking for.
Marco:
Whenever either me or Tiff go away for a weekend and leave the other person here.
John:
You park in the middle.
Marco:
Yeah, we always park like a jerk and take a picture and send it to the other person.
Marco:
Park diagonally inside the garage.
John:
It's like that Seinfeld episode.
John:
Wide, luxurious lanes.
John:
Exactly.
Casey:
You have to do it.
Casey:
That's the rules of being married with a two-car garage.
Casey:
That is what has to happen.