I Could Live in There
Hi.
Time of year.
Merry Christmas everybody.
Yeah.
Oh my word.
Are you home or are you upstate?
I am home for one day.
Just you?
Me and Tiff are here and then we are going to Cancun tomorrow morning.
Oh, nice.
I've never been to Cancun or Mexico, actually.
Neither have I. We discussed this on an earlier show, Casey, but you've forgotten already.
Oh, yeah, this does ring a bell.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Now I'm remembering.
It's all coming back.
I think there's like five of Casey and only one of them is on the show at any given week and then the next one shows up.
It's like those TV shows where twins trade lives with each other and they have to coordinate what each person knows.
You'll never know, John Craig.
You'll never know.
You're the one who knows my middle name.
So, John, what computer are you using this week?
Damn it, Marco, you took it from me.
I was about to ask.
I'm on my Mac Pro.
Yay!
What monitor?
They're both Mac Pros.
I did the same joke both weeks, and you had different reactions both times.
I'm on my Mac Pro.
That's the joke.
Does it have small holes or big holes in the front?
It's fine big.
Everything old is new again.
All right.
What year did this Mac Pro come?
Is this Mac Pro old enough to vote?
No, not vote.
Is it old enough to, no, not drive?
I don't know.
Is it ancient or is it not?
This is a 2019 Mac Pro.
It actually shipped in 2019 and it's set up and running in 2019.
We did it.
2019 Mac Pro.
Are you using your ancient monitor or are you using something else?
I'm using my PlayStation monitor.
Because that's all I got because my other one hasn't shipped.
Destiny has been given a backseat.
You've said to Destiny, no, thank you.
I have more important things.
Not entirely.
We'll address and follow up.
All right.
So a certain somebody I know sent you an early birthday present since your birthday is coming up extremely soon.
Why are you not leveraging that to use your ancient monitor?
because a my ancient monitor by the time i got that thing was already packed up and put uh raiders of the lost ark style into my attic and it's not easy to get at and the second reason is that monitor was non-retina and i just can't do that to my mac pro you know i don't blame you so what do you have now like a 4k 24 inch kind of thing yep
I'm actually kind of surprised they make the 4K monitors that small.
It seems like nobody wants that, except Mac nerds.
But it seems like the entire PC and gaming worlds want 4K resolution at much larger sizes, but nobody seems to want retina scale.
It feels so tight to me.
Obviously, it's bigger than the other monitor replaced, but I'm used to the 5K iMac, and everything just feels so much bigger on this screen.
I know 5K is not that much bigger than 4K, but I'm just like, wow, is that how big my browser window normally is?
Why is everything taking up so much?
The screen seems so short.
I don't know.
Anyway, I will be happy when I get my real monitor, but for now, it's 4K.
And that has not even shipped yet.
Is that correct?
Has not.
So other people are getting scary messages that say that their shipment has been delayed.
But so far, I have not received that notification.
So fingers crossed.
I feel like I should update you on my computer situation.
All right, go ahead.
Wait, what?
There shouldn't be an update.
No, there shouldn't be.
That's not a good thing.
Well, it's me, and where would I be if not with... No, I'm just kidding.
Everything's fine.
I was so afraid you messed with the RAM or something.
No, not yet.
Don't case you up this computer.
Please keep all liquids and third party RAM away from it.
No promises.
No, everything is good.
I will say, though, that I realized that one of the three of us is now running Catalina.
Does that mean I can too now?
no i replied to you in slack you don't have to i have to i have no choice this my machine doesn't run anything earlier than catalina so i'm stuck but you don't have to upgrade you can just hang out for a while yeah i've been running catalina on my laptop all week as i've been uh moving around as i've been using it for a week i'm reminded why i don't have it on my desktop yet
So all kidding aside, tell me why.
Because I feel like any of the bad experiences I had with Catalina were really the hardware that I was running on, not the software.
Because on my MacBook, it's been fine.
I can't think of anything that's been particularly wrong with it, although naturally I've been using my MacBook less and less recently.
But what has reminded you of the bad?
What are the bad that you've been reminded of?
I've had two, maybe three issues so far.
Two and a half issues so far.
Number one is just the annoyance of all the stupid permissions dialogue boxes.
Like, yes, for God's sakes, I let this app that I just opened access the downloads folder or the desktop or whatever.
It's like, yeah, I just put files there.
That's what I want.
Like, it's...
It just feels like Windows Vista, which I never actually used, but it feels like what people say Windows Vista was like.
It's just constant barrages of permission dialogues that you just think... I mean, this is well-trodding ground.
I don't need to go over it, but like...
Could there really have been no better way to do this?
Was this really worth it?
Was this really the right design for the security of the system?
It seems like this is going to be looked back on as a mistake.
So that's one big problem.
It's just the annoyance of all the permissions and everything.
And then problem number two, which I'm not sure is a Catalina problem, but I sure as hell hope it is, is that...
I seem to be getting frequent keyboard input lag.
And this is on the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the new keyboard, which has me slightly concerned.
But I'm hoping... It feels like software because it isn't all the time.
And I haven't been able to pin down when it happens exactly.
It isn't just in one app, but I am definitely seeing keyboard input lag, and that is extremely concerning.
But it feels like a software issue, so I'm hoping that's it.
Yeah, this sounds familiar.
Yeah, right?
And I forget, that was with Catalina, wasn't it, on your old weirdo Mac?
It was definitely with Catalina because that's where it is right now.
It has Catalina on it right now.
I don't recall in this long and sordid tale if I had seen that in Mojave or not.
I do remember that I had intended to downgrade to Mojave at the point in which I said, screw it all, I'm just going to get an iMac Pro.
So I'm not sure.
I can't recall.
Somebody would have to remind me where it was in the timeline, this terrible, terrible timeline that I was seeing the input lag and if it was in Mojave as well.
But I don't think it was.
All right.
All right.
Well, so anyway, so I am I am seeing significant keyboard lag sometimes using the built in keyboard with nothing else connected.
And that is that is extremely concerning.
So I'm hoping that's a software thing that gets resolved.
And then finally, the touch bar seems buggier.
Which is funny because it doesn't seem like they've actually done anything to it.
It doesn't seem like it's different.
Well, it is, though, because it's smaller because of the escape key.
Well, right.
No, I'm serious.
I'm not trying to be funny.
No, you're right.
But it seems like the software side of the touch bar seems pretty much unmodified from where it has been since 2016.
Which is funny.
If they're going to keep saying how nice it is and that they're not going to give us an option to not buy it...
They're also not making it any better, which is, you know, I have issues with that.
But anyway, I have to more frequently do whatever the kill-all command is that reboots the touch bar because it either gets stuck on something or it has an empty gap in the little control strip area or something.
It's just...
Function keys, man.
Like, they worked every time.
I just... Well, did they?
Stop.
Yes.
Well, yeah, they did.
Like, why Apple?
Why take something and make it worse and make us use it?
Like, I just...
Even if the touch bar worked a hundred percent of the time, I still would prefer function keys, but the fact that it doesn't work a hundred percent of the time and the fact that it goes to sleep all the time, which I also like it, it turned something that was one tap into two taps.
Cause you said wake up the touch bar first and then tap the pause button or the brightness button or whatever.
Like I just, Oh, please Apple give us more touch bar free options.
Um,
I'm sorry.
Anyway, so those are minor issues.
Other than those issues, I actually have been extremely happy with the 16-inch as I've been traveling and using it more.
I still love everything else about it.
It just does seem like there's these weird little software glitches with Catalina.
I'm dealing with the permissions stuff too.
And in particular, the strain of it that really bothers me is like apps that were, they're like recent semi-modern apps, but not quite modern enough to know that Catalina was a thing.
And on first launch, like these are installing apps that I didn't have or reinstalling them or whatever.
On first launch, they have some kind of first launch experience, whether it's prompting you to set something up or even if they're just trying to run an auto updater because I'm launching an older version of an app that needs to be updated.
um there that process is not accounting for the fact that the os is also going to throw stuff up in your face about permissions and often they fight with each other like the app expects to be able to do a thing on first launch but it can't because it hasn't hasn't been given permission yet and you have to sort of pick which one of the dialogues you want to do or do you want to go back to system preferences and try to give a permission but when you give permission and system preferences it requires you to quit the app but it could be in the middle of the first run setup and
And it's just a mess figuring out, all right, what state are we going to be in?
Can I trigger the first running experience again?
Do I have to go through it again?
Has it already done it?
Have I already signed up or registered or updated or downloaded?
Half the time, the solution is, you know, to throw the app out, reinstall, go to system preferences proactively and add it to full disk access so you just don't get asked about it.
But then what if it's asking about something different that doesn't have to do with full disk access?
It's quite a long road.
But the one thing that Catalina,
is doing to me and it's like this is a custom tailored bug just for me because i've got to be the only person who cares about this bug in the entire universe so i don't know if you know this about me maybe you have you've seen me use my computer i try i try mightily you know as as documented in 15 years of mac os 10 reviews i try mightily to get the finder to behave how i'm accustomed to like not as a browser like
windows for each folder no sidebar no toolbar just that's i mean i'm not against the browser sometimes i will open a browser window as so to speak because it's the separation is not clean and has never been but anyway i try to get my finder windows with nothing on them this is something that almost nobody ever does so this is probably a problem they don't have but two you can do this now you're on your max go to the finder and i'll pick a folder and try to make the window
as i described maybe you don't even know how to do it because it never occurs to you to do this but just try it status bar on or off uh on okay so you basically only have the top bar and the status bar below it but when you say top bar what do you mean like the title bar sorry like with the with the traffic light controls and the name of the phone exactly so that's how i try to have my windows and of course the finder and mac os 10 has always had no respect for me setting the the state of any window and
because it doesn't associate windows with state and folders and yada, yada, yada, right?
So right now I'm looking at my documents folder.
It's in list view.
It shows documents on the top, and then it's got the status bar that says how many items and how much space is available, and then it's got headers or name, date, modified, size, whatever, and then a bunch of folders, right?
This is how I want pretty much all my Finder windows all the time.
This is how I set all my Finder windows all the time.
And Catalina Finder, if I have a bunch of windows open like this,
I can watch it happen.
I'll be working in one window or I'll switch to another app and I'll come back to the Finder on its own without me doing anything in the Finder.
I'm not dragging anything into the Finder.
I'm not activating the Finder.
I haven't just done something in the Finder.
Just literally on its own will say, you know what?
You're getting a toolbar.
And all my Finder windows will spawn toolbars spontaneously without the Finder even being active.
I swear to you I'm doing nothing in the Finder.
I'm not sending in an Apple event for another app.
They will spawn toolbars.
The first hundred times this happened, I'm like, I must be going insane.
I swear, I just hid that toolbar with Command Option T. How does it have a toolbar now?
In fact, I'm looking at documents right now.
I'm going to go back to Chrome.
I'll just hang out in Chrome.
We'll see maybe by the end of this episode, that window will have spawned a toolbar.
They come back, and I can't get rid of them.
Like, they refuse to stay dead.
They just keep coming back.
and you wouldn't think like well who cares you know i i made the the toolbar icon only i actually make it text only to make it even smaller but i don't want the toolbar there and by the way it screws up the size of the window so if you have an icon view window like my applications folder is icon view and i have it sized and set up so i can see an integer number of icons and rows and columns right but when the toolbar comes the bottom ones get cut off right
because it doesn't it doesn't push the view down and i've never i have literally never seen this bug in any other version of mac os or mac os 10 where the view changes in currently open windows behind your back before your very eyes i've seen it happen it animates in what is going on i cannot figure it out and it's driving me batty um so far no input lag issues or anything like that uh so yeah it's just permissions and then the finder uh
Just really, really sticking it to me for no reason.
I'm so sorry, John.
The struggle is real.
I just realized when I had my keyboard input lag, I was using a Bluetooth Magic Mouse.
which I normally don't use a mouse with my laptop, but at this time, there was one.
This shouldn't affect the built-in keyboard, but it might be related to the bug.
I don't know.
I saw a much better performance when I put my trackpad in wired mode rather than wireless mode.
Unfortunately, you can't really use the mouse in wired mode.
That is true.
That is very true.
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I would like to quickly drop something in the chat room, and I would like you guys to look at this.
I stumbled across this earlier today, and I thought it was hilarious.
What I've put in the chat, in case you can't see it, this is AudioQuest Diamond USB Cable, Type A to Type B, 0.75 meters, which is 2.6 feet.
So this is a cable that goes from the traditional USB that, you know, your lightning cables always used to come in, to one of those big, chunky USB things that, like, a printer would take in.
The connectors have names, Casey?
I said A to B, but that doesn't mean anything to anyone.
Come on, man.
If it means anything to anyone, it's listeners of this show.
Although, doesn't type B come in two different shapes?
Well, there's the micro B, which is that weird, like, double, long, skinny rectangle thing.
Three different... Is that micro?
Yeah.
Because it's no smaller than... Oh, it's mini B. Well, so there's mini... I rest my case.
A, but A, everybody knows.
Anyway, yeah.
Anyway, this cable, AudioQuest Diamond USB cable, type A to type B, 0.75 meters, 2.6 feet.
I haven't looked at monoprice, but I would assume on monoprice this cable is...
four dollars something like that if that if that this is the kind of cable that like when you're going through your cable bin and trying to clean it out you just throw away like five of these right because you just have these around like they come with everything they call them printer cables nowadays which is funny yeah history of things that have been called printer cables in this current moment in time this is what people call a printer exactly you can find it under that name on amazon
Yeah.
So what started me down this search was me thinking I have all these USB-C ports.
Maybe I'll just get a USB-C to USB-B.
Yes, I think I have that right.
It doesn't matter.
Anyway, so that is an example of a piece of audio equipment that perhaps would use one of these style cables.
But I don't know what else there is.
Maybe does your DAC use this, Marco, or anything like that?
This is the kind of cable that any USB DAC or any USB sound card that is not super portable, like a desktop one, this is the kind of cable that almost all of them would use.
I'm speaking to you right now through a cable just like that.
In fact, one I just bought new.
I'll have some cable follow-up related to this, actually.
I'm also speaking to you through actually two of these.
One of them is going to my main DAC and one of them is going from my microphone interface to the computer.
Yeah, so all three of us are speaking to you through one of these cables.
Now, mine very well may be a Monoprice cable, which, by the way, Nietzsche in the chat has pointed out on Monoprice, $1.27.
I have been procrastinating in telling you that this exact cable on Amazon.com, $599.95.
This is a USB cable that is less than three feet long, $600.
And sure, I look at the reviews thinking, surely that can't be right.
Ridiculously expensive, but it sounded really good.
Five stars.
Listen to this USB cable before making judgment.
This last one continues.
So I'm amazed at how many people have had reviews without ever listening to the cable.
Ah, what the hell?
Huh?
Hold on.
A ladybug just landed on my... What?
Sorry.
First, the cricket was killed with an iPad 2.
2019 ladybug massacre.
Do you have any devices heavy enough to kill a ladybug anymore, my girl?
No.
Oh, there it is.
Yeah, a 30-watt USB-C power brick.
There you go.
They're pretty small.
Well, anyway, so I just wanted to point out $600 for this frigging cable.
Why?
Why?
My favorite review is one star, subject line, all capital, LOL, period.
I said they put the period and capitalized it.
I like that.
Review text, LOL, period.
17 people found this helpful.
I'm going to rate that helpful.
Yeah, this is, I mean... Oh, audiophiles.
You're so crazy.
There are some places where cable quality matters, but way fewer than most people think.
And the ceiling of how much it matters is usually reached at far lower of a level than anything marketed to audiophiles.
This is all mumbo-jumbo BS.
And, you know, audio... Yeah, audio sound quality is...
famously easy to fool just similar to like wine tasting there's all sorts like wine gadgets that are mostly placebo effect as well but you can also kind of argue that like the that you know the placebo effect is real and you can say like people who pay a lot of money for something and then think it sounds better are getting their money's worth like if they if they pay something ridiculous and then they get enjoyment out of it even if it's totally fake it's
They did pay to get a better experience, and they are tricking themselves into believing they are getting a better experience.
So you can kind of argue that maybe it works, but yeah, this is all BS, and it's not really changing anything.
I like how you're trying to move on real quickly from you killing a ladybug.
One of the cute bugs, Maribel.
It's not cute when it lands on your hand as you're trying to use your computer.
All right.
Well, listeners, let Marco know how you feel about killing ladybugs.
Don't we have a surplus of them?
I think we do.
Aren't they invading the entire continent?
Isn't it actually a big problem in a lot of places?
I don't know.
I think it actually is.
All right.
Maybe we should start with some follow-up 20 minutes.
Andrew Woods has some information about MagSafe connectors that I don't even understand why we're talking about this.
What did I forget this time?
Because there was like the cable that was hooked up to my old monitor that split into multiple cables.
It split into mini DisplayPort and USB.
And also there was the MagSafe ones.
You could connect your laptop right to it.
And I was like, I don't like that magnet.
wanging around because I'm trying to, you know, I don't have anything connected to, but I didn't want to have like this powerful magnet touching like electrical cables and everything like that.
Well, it turns out that in MagSafe, that part, the part that like connects to the laptop,
It does not actually have any magnets in it.
It's just a ferrous block of metal, so I shouldn't have worried too much about it being near other cables.
So that's good to know.
The magnet's on the computer side, not on the cable side.
You still have to find a place to put it, and it is kind of heavy and, you know, flopping around.
But anyway, I just thought that was worth throwing in there in case people wondered.
MagSafe.
Magnets on the computer.
I am unable to find a definition of wang as a verb.
You just heard it.
You've got to use the context clues, Marco.
Closest I can find is wangle, which means wang is going to be the new yeet.
To obtain by persuading others to comply, such as, I think we should be able to wangle it so that you can start tomorrow, or I wangled an invitation to her party.
there you go but wanging around does not appear to be an actual word take that dictionary and eat it over here and then i'll wang it over to the casey and we'll be all set it's just wanging around before we move on it just occurred to me i have two questions one we just get banned in england one marco have you ordered a mac pro yet what do you think
I don't think so, but I am not confident about this at all.
So December is coming to a close as we record this, and therefore that 6% incentive is coming to an end.
Oh, here we go.
I also just got a whole bunch of gift card credit at the Apple store from trading at a bunch of old devices.
Oh, here we go.
But I still haven't ordered anything, and I'm not going to.
Oh, okay, good, good.
I got you there for a second.
Now, would you tell us if you had?
If you asked.
I mean, I wouldn't volunteer it necessarily, but if you asked, I wouldn't lie.
All right, all right.
But no, I really... Again, my opinion remains.
I'm still extremely happy with my iMac Pro, and there is nothing about it that is...
in dire need or motivation to upgrade like i'm very happy with it and like if it'd be different if i was like you know constantly hitting its limits or if i was like you know if i bought too small of an ssd with it or or i needed more ram like if there was something like that about my computer that i that i was like kind of itching for an upgrade i would i would probably do it uh even though i shouldn't but
the fact is none of that is true like i'm extremely happy with everything i have in my mac pros currently i'm not i'm not pushing any of its limits yet and and so as long as that remains the case and as long as it still continues to work properly i think i'm going to keep it the way it is all right good i'm glad i'm surprised but i'm glad all right moving on uh john tell us about setting up your mac pro please
So I did finally decide to set it up because I had the time to do it and I had a gap in my podcast schedule, which is basically what I was looking for.
And the earlier episode, you reminded me about the HDMI connection.
So I'm like, I can just bring my PlayStation 4 monitor.
So I began the process of setting things up.
And I think I said this last show, I decided not to do Ethernet.
I decided to do direct connection of one.
I took the SSD out of my old Mac Pro and connected it to my new one.
And that went by surprisingly quick.
The magic of SSDs, they're very high bandwidth.
I put it in a, not the fastest external case in the world, but it was like 10 gigabits, which is 10 times better than one gigabit now, isn't it?
I don't know how fast it actually went.
But anyway, it didn't take too long.
I used migration assistant.
Everything seemed fine.
I spent a long time
Deleting tons of 32-bit applications, sadly, but God, so many of them.
Installing application updates, getting stuff to work, but for the most part, it has been pretty smooth.
A couple of things I want to talk about in using this thing.
The first is like...
You know, all right.
These days, computers don't get that much faster year over year, especially desktop.
So we've talked about this many times.
You're lucky if you get a single digit percentage increase in single core performance.
Maybe you get one with more cores.
Maybe you get one with less.
But they're not.
It's not like it was in the 90s where your new computer that you buy a couple of years later is like twice as fast.
Right.
But I was replacing a 10 year old computer.
So you would think this thing is going to seem a lot faster.
You would hope.
Yeah.
Yeah, and it absolutely does.
I mean, just if you wait 10 years, the computer seems a lot faster.
Not only does it seem faster, it also seems faster than my wife's 5K iMac, which granted is also old.
And this computer probably isn't, it might not even be faster in single core.
I haven't even compared it to her old iMac, but...
Yes, it feels faster.
But the thing I feel the most, and this is part of the most fun of having a new Mac, I feel like, and Marco has touched on it in the past, is the effect of having so much more storage and so much more RAM.
Because these days, unless you spend a lot of time doing things that are very CPU-intensive, like all you do all day is encode or decode video and it takes a long time and you're waiting on the computer, these days the thing you will feel the most is
is the removal of previous limits and if you're replacing a computer probably the limits that you had have to do with ram or disk space both of which were smaller many years in the past either because you always kind of buy a computer for the same price or or you know and then you know the storage goes up year over year or usually when you replace it you want to replace it with something bigger so this has so much more ram than my other computer like it basically has infinite ram i keep looking at the ram diagram
I don't think I've hit quarter full, right?
So I may have overbought on the RAM.
But the point is RAM no longer exists for me.
It's just an abstract concept.
I don't care about it anymore.
And you use Chrome, right?
That's saying something.
Yeah.
You can keep Chrome and Slack open at the same time.
Yeah.
I mean, I haven't really.
Yeah.
So RAM is fine.
And then storage.
I went from a one terabyte SSD to four.
And granted, I brought over my entire photo library.
So I immediately used half of that four terabyte.
So I'm slightly over two terabytes.
But still, my disk is half full.
And this is after living for many years on the ragged edge of the one terabyte.
I was so close to the edge of the one terabyte that I didn't even have my own photo library on it.
Like not even an optimized storage mode.
I just literally didn't have iCloud Photos enabled because I just ran out of room.
So having that breathing room and just feeling like, you know, I was doing some stuff where I was copying some things around.
I'm like,
I can copy, you know, a couple 500 gig files on here just temporarily.
Why not?
I have so much room.
I brought them over, copied them there.
Like, just the luxury of having all that extra space.
And you can have this extra space with a Mac Mini, to be clear.
You don't need a Mac Pro to feel these effects.
That's what I'm getting at.
Just get a new computer or, you know, on your existing computer, add more RAM and more storage.
Like, humongously more.
Not 5% more, but like double, triple, quadruple.
Feels super awesome.
So, I'm enjoying that.
The next thing I experienced with this is when I was setting it up, I had the opportunity.
I had no reason to go inside it, but come on, you get a MacBook.
You got to look inside.
So I took off the case, which was surprisingly difficult.
I mean, granted, it was up on a high desk, but you have to pull it straight off and straight up, and there's a lot of friction there.
And you have to keep, you know, you just want to, like, yank it off like voila, but you have to pull it exactly straight, otherwise it doesn't come up, and it goes very slowly.
And also, I echo what other people have said about the turny thing on the top, like the little handle that you turn.
It's like metal on metal inside there.
It's not scratchy or scrapey, but it's not smooth either.
It is, you know, I'm assuming machined aluminum against machined aluminum.
So it is not a particularly pleasing thing.
It's a little bit... Like you would imagine aluminum rubbing against aluminum, right?
Which is probably good for precision and fit, but it's not good for feel.
Not that this matters in the grand scheme of things, but lots of people commented on it, and I agree.
But it is very precise fitting.
So anyway, I got it off, and I'm looking around inside it, and yes, it's beautiful in there.
There's lots of YouTube videos out there that show sort of teardowns.
And in particular, one thing I took note of, mostly after seeing these videos, like I had been telling...
people about it you know people in my family anyone else who's interested my children who don't want to hear about it but anyway um that you know it's not just like a tower computer it's very neat inside there and i had been referring to it with the same language as i had talked about my power mac g5 or the g3 for that matter or my you know my mac pro 2008 macro but
that everything sort of fits in and you don't see any cables flopping anywhere like all the cables and everything are routed so that like it looks like just you know this everything is perfectly fit like that if you were if you could manufacture everything to be exactly the right length and you know sort of hidden behind things like if you looked at those you know my old mac pro or the g3 tower it's hard to even find like where they routed the cables because they put them like behind the motherboards and up through little plastic things and just you know it looks beautiful and clean
And, of course, this Mac Pro is all color-matched, and it's all black inside there, and it's very sleek and cool-looking.
But the thing I hadn't realized until I'd seen people, like, actually disassemble this computer down to the studs, like iFex said or whatever, is that, as far as I'm aware, this computer has no cables.
inside it so how how do they connect the components like i mean it's got for example it's got a bunch of fans surely the fans connect with little cables to power the fans otherwise how the pans get fans get power uh the power supply that's got to plug into something with power right but if you think about it
First of all, a lot of things in this are card slots.
The SSDs, they're not cables.
They go into little connectors, right?
You've seen what those are like.
PCI cards or the video cards, those go into connectors.
Again, no cables.
And because of the MPX module, they don't need a cable from the power supply to power the GPU because they have a second connector.
They get all the power through the slots.
The CPU, obviously no cables there.
There is no hard drive.
There is no optical drive.
The USB ports, again, on a card, so no cables there.
The fans, where you think, surely this is the place where they have to be cables.
No, they have like these, you know, contacts, essentially.
There's contacts on the fan assembly.
There's contacts on the motherboard.
And they like, you know, mechanically friction fit against each other to power them.
the power button and the ports on top all sort of go down and do pressure fit contact things like this this is so over-engineered and ridiculous and awesome and i love the inside of it and i just think about it and it makes me smile so this is one of the other nice benefits of having a machine like this it is it is better designed and more beautiful inside than the mac pro in the same way that the mac pro was better than the the you know power mac g3 g4 the
The G5 and the Mac Pro are similar, but this is like the next step up.
Like everything in it is custom and beautiful and color matched and has, I don't know, I love it in there.
I could live in there and make a little apartment design like that.
It's amazing.
I should have found one of the better links.
I forget who it was, but somebody had a really good just like literal disassembly of let me take all the pieces out.
iFixit did it as well, but they did it more towards an eye of repairability.
This person was just doing it to say, look at how this thing is put together.
I was super impressed by it.
yeah i i too found a couple videos that mentioned the whole no cables inside thing and it blew my mind i'm like wait a minute yeah there are there aren't any cables in there and by the power supply i mentioned it briefly it goes into like a slot type thingy too like it doesn't have a cable it's just into a slot with connectors
Yeah, that's incredible.
I mean, it was probably not necessary to design this way.
As the pro community and people who wanted this computer to exist, as Apple was taking its sweet-ass time making this computer and developing it, we were all saying, like, just ship a PC tower.
It's not that hard.
Everyone else does it, and it's fine.
And if you want to do something fancier later, great, but just ship a PC tower now while we're waiting.
Yeah.
And, you know, that's not really Apple's style.
They're not going to, like, you know, quote, just do things the way everyone else does them, for better and for worse.
And all the time that it took them to develop this computer, because, again, like, I have a pretty good sense of how and when this thing started with all the different things we've heard and picked up over time and things we've been whispered and everything.
It really does seem like the development of this project started very shortly before they held that Mac Pro roundtable.
It wasn't already in the works for three years before that.
They started it fairly recently before that.
And so it basically took them about three years to develop this.
And this is why.
Because they didn't just do a tower.
And this is also why it cost $6,000.
They really over-engineered the crap out of it.
And it took them three years, and they're selling it at a very high base price because...
It's a very fancy design.
They did things the best way, not the most economical way.
They're going to sell this thing in very low volumes, and so they have to make up all their R&D costs with low volume.
If you're going to amortize out the cost of
all that development and engineering per unit, you have to do it over fewer units.
So each one bears more of that cost.
Uh, and not to mention the fact that they, you know, leave their healthy profit margin.
So like there's a reason why this machine is so expensive.
There's a reason why it's so nicely made inside and so nicely designed.
Uh,
I hope it has no major flaws, and so far no one seems to have found any.
And so, like, it does seem really awesome.
Now, we can argue, and many people are, whether that's the right decision, whether they should have made this crazy fancy thing that kind of maybe had to be very expensive, depending on how it's designed and how they're budgeting for it and everything.
Like...
Yeah, they probably should have made a cheaper one.
But if you are willing to swallow these costs, it does seem like this is a really awesome computer.
And pretty much the only reason I don't have one yet is because I don't have any need for all this upgradability at the moment.
But if I did, like our friend Stephen Hackett bought one, and he's been documenting the various upgrades he's done to it so far.
And it started out with a storage upgrade.
He bought that drive enclosure thing that goes in the top slots and put some SSDs in it.
And that's just really cool that you can do that.
And right now, I don't have the need for more internal storage than what I have on my Mac Pro, but...
If I did, the ability to just pop in a bracket with an SSD on it from Amazon or like a PCI card with an SSD module on it, like that's awesome.
And I don't know if I'll ever need that kind of upgradability again, but if I do, I'm going right to the Mac Pro.
More on that later in follow-up about expandability in the Mac Pro.
But for now, let me say, this strategy that you just described of making a very nice tower, Apple has always done that strategy.
It's just that time marches on, tech marches on, and Apple gets better at it.
I think there is a fairly linear progression from the G3, G4, the tower, Yosemite El Cap tower case, to the Power Mac G5 slash Mac Pro cheese grater case.
to this case, taking a detour into the trash can, uh, in terms of how many components are there?
How much does it look like a PC?
How much can we hide the cables?
Like what can we do to make this accessible with a door and what's on the door and what's on the case and how easy is it to remove things and what kind of tools you need?
They have always tried to make a computer like this.
It's just, they are getting better at it and tech gets better.
Like, I don't think you could have made this computer, uh,
for you know any reasonable amount of money or even a slightly unreasonable amount of money back when the you know blue and white g3 was made but they did the best they could like that case was amazing it's like wow you can just open it up pull this handle up look at the side and here's all the components and first of all there were so many more components and many of them had to be like come on they had optical drives and hard drives which apple does not make so there's a limited amount you can do and you don't want to make that proprietary it just so happens that in this technical error they can do this type of design it must have you know when they were talking about it like
Oh, we want to do this and that.
And it's like, well, wait a second.
We don't have any of those things that we absolutely have to have a cable for.
So why do we have to have cables for anything?
Like, forget about routing them cleverly behind things so they're not in people's faces and they look neat and we make them the right lengths.
Why do we need cables at all?
That wasn't the case on the earlier computers, but they've always tried to...
custom engineer and arguably over-engineer.
That's what Mac users like.
It's kind of a tautology and a self-fulfilling prophecy, but it's true.
People who buy Macs and like that type of thing, these tower computers that are accessible and cleverly designed...
It's something that people like and are willing to pay for.
And in this case, I'm hoping that this design has not sort of gone too far and like sacrificed reliability for aesthetics.
We've talked about this a lot in the past.
It could be that this is...
more reliable than having cables everywhere?
Or it could be much worse and those connections corrode and we're all going to be sad and, you know, I'll sell this sooner rather than later to get an ARM Mac or something.
Time will tell.
But for now, I appreciate the engineering involved.
It is aesthetically beautiful.
And from an engineering perspective, it just, you know, pushes all my buttons.
I think also, I think that seeing quite how over-engineered and, you know, just engineered this product is,
suggests to me that this is not a one-off, that this is not intended to be a short-term product.
I don't think they would have put this much effort and this much development into this product if it was going to be one and done, just a temporary patch until the ARM transition, or they just want to satisfy people once and then never update it.
I don't think that's what happened here.
Because if that was their goal, I think they would have done a much...
smaller scale job on it it wouldn't have been this custom it would have been maybe more like the old cheese grater or something like it wouldn't have been so much new custom high-end development and design but it is and and that suggests to me that this is a product category and form factor that they're intending at least at this moment to keep around for a long time it does raise the
the increasingly worrisome question for me of, will the iMac Pro ever be updated again?
Because I look at this, and the more I think about it, the more I think that the iMac Pro was intended to be the long-term thing, they changed their mind and made the Mac Pro instead, released the iMac Pro as it was, but are now not going to put any effort into it.
Because why would they?
Because every iMac Pro buyer
is somebody who, if the iMac Pro didn't exist, would be very likely to buy a Mac Pro instead.
And so it seems like they have a severe cannibalization angle to never update the iMac Pro again, which I would be very unhappy with.
I don't know if I agree with that because an iMac Pro is an all-in-one system.
Everything is ready to go right out of the box for about $5,000, right?
That's where it starts?
Yep, $5,000.
So you can have for $5,000 a completely functional computer, which is to my eyes and amongst anyone I can think of –
Probably the the upper limit of what an average person would do, even for, you know, people like us that are independent professionals.
Right.
Like, I don't think most normal independent professionals would look at a seven to fifteen thousand dollar computer purchase and say, oh, yeah, that's them's the breaks.
Right.
So I think I understand what you're saying, Marco, and I'm not feeling confident about the iMac Pro getting updated, but I wouldn't necessarily say that the Mac Pro is taking that spot in the lineup.
I think that the iMac Pro has a very clear spot in the lineup.
The question is whether or not Apple cares.
Well, yeah, that's the thing.
I'm not saying that there's no room for it, but I think the way Apple developed the Mac Pro, I think they're going to want people to buy it, and they're going to want to funnel the iMac purchasers who are going for the iMac Pro upmarket into the Mac Pro.
They're going to want to upsell us, basically.
And enough of us will come along for the ride that they will, because most of the people I know who have iMac Pros right now
didn't have Mac Pros before, they had regular iMacs.
Because the regular iMac is also a damn good computer.
So I think what Apple might see is, hey, why don't we just split this market up and down, basically.
That people who really need the Pro hardware, we want them to now buy our higher-end Mac Pro.
not the iMac Pro.
And those who don't want to or can't spend that much money on it, they'll be well served by our consumer iMac line.
Like, I'm not saying I agree with that statement, but I think that's what Apple very well might want us to do.
Because...
If you think about it, we've heard from a couple people now, I haven't verified this, I'm sorry, but I think the next processors that would go in the iMac Pro are out by Intel.
I think they're available, they're out.
Somebody said they're also a lot cheaper, actually, than the current ones, because Intel is getting a lot of competition from AMD recently, and so they're competing on price a little bit with some of these lines.
And so...
Apparently, we have what we need to have an updated iMac Pro, and it hasn't happened yet.
And I was thinking, this is kind of a cynical thought, but why would Apple update the iMac Pro right now?
Because if they update the iMac Pro anytime soon, it's probably going to make their brand new Mac Pro look bad.
Because it's probably going to beat it on single thread.
And it's at least going to perform extremely well.
And it's going to almost certainly give it a really good run for the money for value, because it does now.
Unless they dramatically raise the price on the iMac Pro, I think it will continue to be a way better value than the Mac Pro.
And so if they released a new iMac Pro anytime soon, I think it would make the Mac Pro look bad.
And if you follow that logic, like, okay, well, that kind of makes sense why they wouldn't update the iMac Pro now.
But why would they ever update the iMac Pro if that's the logic?
So again, I don't know if this is how they're thinking, but I think it's likely that this is probably what's going to happen.
I think the iMac Pro is not going to be updated again.
And that makes me very sad to think about.
I don't know why, unless you have some info that I don't.
I'm not as pessimistic as you about that.
I mean, and getting back to your other point about the Mac Pro being the case being designed for like a long term.
Like if you look at Apple's tower case history, they've gotten a lot of knowledge about all of them.
Again, starting from the G3 Yosemite style case.
I know it's confusing because it's an OS.
But anyway, the case that looks like a...
a square with handles coming out at an angle, and it was all plastic and had the door on the side.
They used essentially that same case design, although they changed the colors.
Blue and white G3, then the G4, then Quicksilver, mirror drive door.
They got a lot of mileage out of that.
They did a lot of surface finish changes like car models do by changing the front and rear fascia, but otherwise it's basically the same chassis.
And then, of course, the cheese grater launched with the Power Mac G5, and they kept using it right through the Intel transition, basically the same case with different ports and stuff.
on the front and the back and they changed the fan holes and changed all the internals but that case lasted a long time and this case assuming they continue to make tower computers they'll keep using it straight through the arm transition if they have one you know it if you look inside that case there's plenty it's a good design that can support basically any kind of computer that has a motherboard and stuff stuck into it so it is very versatile
And I think they'll keep going with that.
The iMac is another example.
We've had essentially the same iMac design ever since someone came up on stage at an Apple keynote and said friction stir welding.
And I remember how many years ago that was.
Even though the iMac Pro is totally different on the inside and shares zero parts with that original iMac that shipped in this case.
You look at it from the outside and you're like, yeah, if I made a mold of that case, it would basically be the same as that first one, right?
And so they got a lot of mileage out of that case because it was hard to design.
I think an iMac redesign is coming.
If they do it Porsche 911 style, they'll redesign the iMac.
And they won't touch the iMac Pro.
And Mark will be like, see, I told you, they're not making an iMac Pro.
They just came out with a new iMac and it's got, you know, it looks different and whatever the hell, but it's an all-in-one computer and it is a different physical case.
But there's no new iMac Pro and I'm sad.
But when a Porsche comes out with a new 911, they don't launch with the 911 Turbo, right?
They just give you the Carrera 4S or whatever.
And then you wait, and then the turbo comes out.
And same thing with the BMW and the 3 Series.
Like, the M3 doesn't launch with the new generation.
In fact, for some period of time, if you get an M3, you get the previous gen, because the new gen isn't out, right?
So maybe the iMac Pro ships later in the new form factor.
Obviously, I think the iMac is going to stay around.
I think it's due for a redesign.
I think they'll keep making an iMac Pro, just because they either have to make a new iMac Pro, or they have to make a non-upseemly priced monitor.
Because...
No one who is buying an iMac Pro is going to be upsold on the Mac Pro if the only monitor available is that thing or the LG.
So I still have more faith than Marco, let's say, that the iMac Pro will be updated even if the iMac gets redesigned and the iMac Pro doesn't come with it.
I expect the iMac Pro to come later.
I hope so.
I really do.
Because I just, speaking for myself, there's no way I'm going to be pushed into a Mac Pro.
It's just not happening.
I would get a Mac Mini and a crappy LG monitor before I would get a Mac Pro.
You would just get the other iMac.
But the reason people got the iMac Pro, though, is because the iMac Pro is the best iMac.
Like, that's... It's not because it's fast, not because of Xeon, not because of ECC.
It is a better iMac.
Like, its cooling system is better.
Like, and apparently its reliability is better so far, right?
Is it because of the Xeon and ECC?
Probably not.
Probably just because they put more engineering resources into better designing the cooling system and dropped the support for the spinning hard drive that let them have the bigger fan and yada, yada.
We've talked about this before.
It's the best iMac.
It just also happens to be darker colored and have a fancier CPU and ECC RAM.
But, like...
I really hope in whatever the next iMac is, we'll share even the plain old regular 5K iMac or 6K iMac, whatever the hell, whatever they call the base iMac, I hope it inherits all of the good sort of runtime performance characteristics of the iMac Pro, even if it doesn't have a Xeon or any of that stuff in it.
That's my hope for the model.
And when that comes out and there's no new iMac Pro, I still hope and believe that there will be a subsequent iMac Pro that will be
sort of the all-in-one sibling to the Mac Pro.
I think there's enough differentiation for Apple to do that, and I don't think they're going to try to upsell people.
I'm just surprised when you brought up the 9-11 that you weren't making a joke about how the iMac will always and forever look the same, just like 9-11 does.
9-11's evolved, too.
It gets bigger and wider every year.
Almost every year.
Plus 10% every year.
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What are you doing about Time Machine in your Mac Pro, John?
This is one thing about my setup experience.
I've got all this data on here.
I copied the photo library from a different SSD.
Because remember, my photo library is an external SSD.
And I had to copy it over.
At first, I was like, oh, I'll just sign into iCloud.
And it will sync the stuff down.
But iCloud does not sync your projects, which sucks.
It syncs your photos and your keywords.
And it syncs a lot of stuff, but not everything.
And in particular projects, like I do all those photo books.
icloud does not sync though so i had to actually physically copy my iphoto library iphoto library like all my photo library which is on an external ssd i just brought it over here hooked up to this one copied it over launched it then i have to allow icloud to get itself in order and be like oh what are all these new pictures i feel like i need to upload these but it doesn't so but it has to go through all of them you know so i was doing that and then of course i've got backblaze or
I had to inherit my backup history and backblaze.
I know you don't need backblaze.
You don't need to reupload everything.
This has a lot of the same data as my old computer.
I didn't, you know, I didn't have to like transfer the license.
It thinks it basically thinks this is my old computer.
So I had to let backblaze run.
I'm like, all these things will take time.
Those things finished relatively quickly.
The photos synced backblaze is all set, right?
Everything's good.
Time machine.
Now, I don't have an internal Time Machine drive yet.
I'm still letting Stephen Hackett be the pioneer here and figure out what the good internal storage solution is.
Again, more on that a little bit later.
But I have my Synology, where my old Time Machine backup was for my Mac Pro with a very long history because I had a generous amount of Time Machine space on there.
And I didn't want to lose all the history, so I had Time Machine inherit that backup history.
And Time Machine's like, okay, I'm doing that, and I've got to go through all your stuff, and then plus you have all this new stuff for me to backup because this photo library is new, and it's like a terabyte photo library I've got to deal with.
And so Time Machine's got a lot of work to do.
Time Machine has been running on his computer for like...
four days, five days.
It is not completed yet.
It is, it is showing me new, new kinds of progress messages that I've never seen before.
Like if you see time machine goes, it does like preparing to back up and then backing up and backed up X amount of Y you can look at the preference pane in time machine and it will show like a little message underneath in a progress bar.
You can look in the little menu and see what it shows and
It has given up trying to give me any progress other than telling me how much it has backed up.
So right now it is saying backed up colon 1.41 terabytes.
It doesn't give me X out of Y. It doesn't give me percentage.
The progress bar in this preference brain is indeterminate.
It is doing work.
Occasionally I peek at it with FSC usage to say, backup D, are you doing anything?
It's totally doing stuff.
In fact, for the past day or so, it has been wandering over all of the individually stored messages that Outlook shoves in some obscure folder.
Like, it makes one message free Gmail, one file free Gmail message.
Man, like, it's been going for a long time.
I made a mistake after the first day of trimming the exclude list in Time Machine, and it was like, oh, I have to start over.
I trimmed from the exclude list directories that no longer exist.
Like, I don't know why they were in there.
It was like...
my ps4 movies folder back from when i was using a dlna server with my playstation 3 like i had lots of i'm like oh i don't need that i'm just you know going through everything get rid of old stuff let me trim that time machine says stopping backup i'm like oh no and it's just repairing back so time you know i normally i stop time machine when we record podcasts because i'm paranoid but i've got 12 chorus and there's no way in hell i'm stopping it so time machine has been running this entire time
And since this is the first recording on this computer, I'm hoping everything will go off well.
But just so you know, I have been running a time machine backup this whole time, which shouldn't cause this computer to break a sweat.
And speaking of that, so I've got this computer here.
It is on my little end table thingy.
So it is up off the ground, about two and a half feet-ish.
It's a lower level table than my desk, but it's higher than the floor.
When I mentioned that I had my Power Mac G5 and at various points of a Mac Pro on the desk next to my monitor, but it was just too loud.
Power Mac G5 was way too loud and I had a chirping power supply that was bad.
My Mac Pro in general was quiet, but it was still too loud to have on my desk.
This computer is quieter than my Mac Pro, my 2008 Mac Pro.
Definitely quieter than my Power Mac G5.
is not quieter than my wife's 5K iMac when it's not doing anything.
So the 5K iMac is basically silent if it's not doing anything.
Obviously, as soon as you do anything, the 5K iMac makes a racket.
But if you're idle, the 5K iMac is almost entirely silent.
At idle...
sitting not on the floor but raised up sort of you know i can reach i can touch it with my left arm barely you know like i'm touching it with my left arm now without moving my body but barely can reach it it's right there it makes a noise that's kind of like imagine like
the wind moving through like a deserted grand central station after the apocalypse terminal but not a but not a strong wind just kind of like or it's not like the uh the this what do they call it uh margot would know this was it called room noise what is it what is that called
an audio engineer yeah room tone yeah there you go it's not the same as the star trek room tone or the sci-fi ship room tone but it's very kind of like but in a really low volume right like you think at first like am i hearing anything but if everybody else is really silent you can kind of hear like even with my headphones on
can kind of hear it but it is like all the stuff i talked about of like randomizing the fan blades like it has no discernible frequency and it is very sort of it's like the most inoffensive it's not even fan noise it's like it's like air noise right if it was under my desk i think it might be entirely silent
Um, so, so far I've had it up here and I'm probably going to keep it up here because I don't mind it because like, it's the type of noise that if you're not concentrating on it, it disappears entirely.
Uh, for about 20 minutes today, earlier today, I figured I, I really need to stress this thing.
Cause I've been messing with it in backblaze and running a time machine has been running and I've been deleting stuff and copying things and installing programs and whatever.
I'm like, but I need to like see what this thing.
So I ran a handbrake thing for, for 20 minutes.
So all the, you know,
24 threads, 12 CPU cores being pretty much pegged.
It didn't make any different noise, like ever.
The noise that I just described to you, that's how it has sounded the entire time I've owned it.
They don't even spin up when you boot.
I don't know what these fans sound like if they ever get loud.
I'm pretty sure the volume has never increased, and there's nothing I can do to it to make it increase.
I've played Destiny on this more than that in a little bit,
And it sounds the same.
So I'm not sure.
Sometimes, like, is the computer on?
Like, and in this way, it is like the iMac Pro, but more so.
Like, I honestly, let me tell you how deep.
I installed iStat Manus.
It's like, whoa.
Can I see the
fan rpms because i was like tell me are the fans spinning any faster because it would make sense that i don't hear any noise if the fans are not spinning any faster because they're the only moving part in the machine like there's no hard drives there's no optical drives like only there's only three fans and then a blower fan in the back so there's four spinning things in here and i don't know and i said man you couldn't make heads or tails on this computer it gave me a bunch of temperature stuff all which was like ridiculously cool i couldn't get any fan rpms out of it i have to buy it or register anyway i installed it
you know oh that's what i always do with iStat menu because i install it i'm like all right i want you to stop now and the only option is to uninstall so i can't figure out how to make this thing make any more noise so the noise that it makes like i said so much quieter than my previous towers but i feel like an iMac at idle is still more silent than this because this is this is moving a lot of air through it somehow magically
I am a little bit disappointed that you can hear it at idle, though, because the iMacs that Apple has made in recent years, especially the iMac Pro, are so damn quiet.
That's because the fan is on the other side of you.
That's what it is.
You have a screen between you and the fan, whereas these fans, it's like open-air headphones.
These are open-air fans.
They're right there.
Huge openings are in front of them.
There's no way... If they're moving air through it, you're going to hear it, whereas in the iMac...
It's all just, like, behind you.
Like, I bet if you turned your iMac around and stared at it that way, you'd hear it at idle.
But you don't.
You stare at the screen side.
Like, closed back.
You have a closed back, Mac.
I have an open.
Yeah, yeah.
I think I would have to keep it on the floor for that reason.
Because I'm spoiled now.
Like, now that I have...
had you know basically silent iMacs for geez six years something like that five years i i'm now ruined and i really don't want to ever hear my computer again yeah it couldn't i don't think you would like it on the desk like next to you again mine is off the side of the desk like if this was one foot farther away or it was under the desk i wouldn't be able to hear it probably
That's good.
And especially because it's such a massive thing that I think almost everybody, myself included, would not keep it up on anything.
I'd keep it on the floor.
So it wouldn't be a problem.
I'm keeping it up because the floor is a dangerous place for a fancy computer, but also because it's nice to look at it and I like to look at it.
It may eventually graduate to slash be relegated to the floor later in its life.
but for now i'm happy to have it up here so i can look at it and appreciate it because it is like like a lot of new cars that look kind of weird when you first see them cyber truck excluded which will always be weird um i this has really grown on me and just having this in your house is a beautiful thing to look at which again is one of my one of my uh sort of fitness criteria for having a mac uh i enjoy i enjoy looking at it i enjoy seeing it there it's it's a nice thing to have in your house
uh so more more setup stuff i know casey used to joke like oh that's the mac pro we're gonna be talking about the mac pro for such a long time like how much is there to talk about it i now concede that casey was correct mostly because like mostly because this setup process like is never ending yeah i don't even have the monitor yet like this is gonna get dragged out i feel like it's not entirely my fault but some it's partially my fault
it's entirely your fault no because if i had everything i could get it all out in one show but you're gonna be hearing more about this stupid mac pro for a while now i'm sorry but hopefully i'm touching on topics that are at least educational or interesting here's one that is not mac pro specific and but it's well you'll see so i've got this thing it stole my playstation monitor i want to play destiny i can of course just bring the monitor back and forth and i did that a couple times but that's a pain you gotta go into the desk and find the stupid power brick for the lg monitor and then you know it's just
carry it over and reconnect it and it's a pain and i did want to also play destiny on this computer to see what it's like to play at more than 30 frames per second because as i noted the last show for people who don't know destiny on playstation runs at 30 frames per second destiny on pc runs at whatever frames per second that your computer can run it at um and there's some speculation about how crappy the base video card is what it would be able to do but i wanted to try it
So to run Destiny on this Mac, obviously I need to install Windows.
To install Windows, I need to do Boot Camp.
Boot Camp is always sort of this mystery.
We've joked about if it's still being supported.
You know, would it run?
Does it still work?
It is apparently still supported.
When I ran Boot Camp Assistant, it wanted to install a Boot Camp partition on my...
my boot drive basically and i didn't want to do that uh because i i have not even done setting up my boot drive and time machine is running and i don't want to repartition it and i didn't know what it was going to do i'm like no i don't don't touch don't touch my four terabyte ssd leave it alone that's just that's mine i don't want windows taking any of that space that's a precious commodity i enjoy having a lot of it i don't want you messing with that i'm gonna install boot camp on a external drive which is exactly what i had in my mac pro i had a whole i had a hard drive mechanism in there that was my boot camp
my quote-unquote boot camp partition but it was whole drive right that was ages ago like you know 2008 i installed it had windows xp windows xp on it originally i think i might still have windows xp anyway i need windows on this thing i have an external drive i hook up an external ssd i'm gonna be fancy i guess temporary i'm just gonna use it to see how destiny runs
I connect into the SSD.
It's an external USB-C connected, again, 10 gigabits per second, but it's plenty for playing Destiny.
And I go launch bootcamp assistant.
Bootcamp assistant is like...
You have an external drive attached to your computer.
Get that crap out of here and then relaunch this program.
Oh, no.
And not that it say, I can't install Bootcamp or Windows on external drive.
It said, you can't even run this program if external drives are connected to your computer.
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure I unmounted the drive.
And it still said, looks like you have external drives connected to your computer.
You've got to get that crap out of here.
I'm like, it's unmounted.
I had to physically disconnect it.
But here's the thing.
I want to install boot camp on an external drive.
And boot camp assistant is like, nuh-uh.
No, you are not going to do that.
And I'm like...
what like i guess i don't you know so many times i'm like oh just why don't i just go through the system and let it do it to my boot drive i'm like but you know what no i don't know how to get rid of that partition i don't know what it's going to do uh will shipley just had a question on twitter right before the show was like does it do the apfs like volumes thing where you can easily add and remove volumes to you know an apfs container like you know that whole thing like how easy it is to add them and they share the space and i was like
I don't know, but I didn't want to find out.
Like it made it look like it was going to partition.
Like there would be the APFS container and then there would be like the sort of, you know, GPT partition level thing.
And then there would be like, I didn't want to find out.
And I was like, but it would work and it would be fast.
I'm like, no, I'm going to do this.
I'm going to figure out how to get bootcamp installed on an external drive.
And thus began probably the worst computer battle experience I've had in the last five years.
maybe the last 10 years i i can't nothing in memory was worse than this experience uh you know and as many of these things do these days it starts with you know you do a google search because surely someone else has had this problem and boy google search has come up with a lot of results which is usually a blessing and a curse because it shows lots of people have this problem but if there was one answer they're feeling like there would be fewer uh results and
So we're going to put a bunch of links in the show notes.
I put a bunch of links to things that I found in the show notes.
None of these links had a procedure that would work for me to accomplish the task.
I'm going to put them all in there, though, just to show you kind of what's involved.
And what's involved, and the solution that I actually did do is like a modified mix of these, but it more or less starts with installing VirtualBox.
What?
Which is a bad sign.
Yeah.
which is because the free version of virtual box like there are ones that use vmware too and i own a copy of vmware virtual box is free if people don't know it's it's an emulator that runs like x86 os is like vmware so you can install windows and vmware you can install windows or linux and virtual box and it runs like natively on your intel mac alongside your other thing anyway
This is also you can get yourself to a situation where the virtual Windows machine thing that's running inside VirtualBox views your external drive.
as if it is like the one and only internal drive and can install Windows onto it.
So you end up creating like a VMDK virtual disk thing in raw mode against your unmounted drive using the device.
This is all command line stuff.
Using your drive's device number, which is a terrifying experience when you're typing.
Anytime you find yourself typing...
slash dev slash disk something in mac os it's like oh my gosh let me you know and this let me just take this opportunity to reiterate one of my rules of computing for young people and old people like do not type things on the command line do not type process ids do not type device numbers do not type things on the command line because you know what happens when you type things you get typos
Kill minus nine PID and you type out the PID.
Oops, you killed in it because you put a space before the first one.
Like, you know, device numbers slash dev slash disk five.
Oh, I typed four instead.
I just deleted my boot drive.
Like, and you're running all this as root, right?
Do not type things.
Copy and paste.
copy and paste and also confirm because you can copy and paste and think you copied but really you didn't you pasted the previous none but yeah do not type things so i'm carefully doing this and then i'm running windows the virtual machine i have i have a legit copy of windows 10 a windows 10 iso that i purchased and downloaded for this purpose and you can point make the make that be the optical drive for the you know virtual box thing
And you go through this whole procedure and you have to type in your, in VirtualBox, type in your, you know, Windows product key.
It doesn't allow copy and paste for, you know, there's no like copy and paste from the Mac world.
So I typed that Windows product key so many times that I almost have it memorized.
It's one of those things that I may remember portions of that Windows product key.
oh my god i typed it so many times i actually did have my college windows xp key memorized yeah it's a good thing to know i also installed on a lot of computers anyway you follow the procedure in one of these things and they're like they're like you know use virtual box get the thing set up as a drive uh partition it with with disk util and then you know reformat the partitions during the windows setup process and do a custom thing and type in your windows key and then let the windows 10 installer run and this is my favorite part of the procedure that it
end up doing... RM233, FR4RH, JP89H... I forget the rest.
Damn it.
I was hoping I could do that.
No free copy of Windows XP for anyone listening.
Sorry, you almost got it, but not quite.
If you know the checksum rules, maybe you can figure out what the missing numbers are.
And you're supposed to run the Windows installer and the instructions say... Did I say 2PRQQ?
That was in there somewhere.
The instructions say...
When it says we need to restart Windows, like after like all the little progress steps go, power down the virtual box thing.
So like hard power off, like hit the red button, red window widget on the thing.
And it's like power off because you don't want it to continue the process.
The thing was like, at this point, you have taken your actual external drive connected to your Mac and convinced the VM that it's one of its virtual drives.
And it has installed Windows on it to the point where now your Mac can boot from it.
oh my goodness so you're basically using virtual box instead of the bootcamp assistant to do that you also there's also another step where you uh download the drivers for bootcamp which they actually do make easy in the bootcamp assistant you can download just the drivers and put them on like a fat 32 usb key and then copy them onto the thing like that that's a side like that's part of it more or less worked but this part of it's like do this procedure set up this disc which is a pain because you have to unmount and then it gets auto remounted then you have to unmount it again and then
set up the virtual drive and you can't give it the same name twice because it thinks it knows about the virtual drive but the uu id is different and it's a whole bunch of details that make it more complicated but the point is i did this fairly lengthy procedure many times and then i would reboot my mac and hold on the option key and it would not see my external drive like it wasn't an option
it would just show my internal drive the external drive would be connected and it would not show it at all and i was like what but just i i'm doing what it says and people saying there because i tried the vmware approach and similar type of things like my mac would not see that external drive like maybe it's lying to me about the partition format maybe it shouldn't be master boot record maybe it should be gpt
maybe it should be fat 32 versus ntfs and just i went around around in circles forever and just trying to get to the point where the thing would even see my external drive this took many many hours alone to convince myself that i was at the point where i thought i was right and then there was one instruction like i found the comments on those articles like pages of comments and one was like everything this article works up up to step 36 and that was one this is not a joke
up to step 36 and then it says you're supposed to do x y and z but it turns out what you're supposed to do is when you get to that step in the windows installer delete all your previous partitions and then just let the windows installer run and it will create the correct partitions for it to be bootable that's a lie and this person
is wrong oh no but I was I was at the point because he's basically saying the instructions stated to this but instead you should do the opposite but I was at the point where I'd done this so many times and was so familiar with like what it was trying to accomplish I read that comment and I had speaking of galaxy brain I had that moment like this would be like the dramatic music I looked at that comment and I said
If I do the opposite of this comment, I bet it will work.
So I did the opposite of the comment.
Instead of deleting those partitions or whatever, I set them up the way the comment said they shouldn't be and I left them there.
I'm like, this has to be it.
Like, I'm like, I figured it out.
I figured it out by reading an article that's wrong and then reading a comment and then knowing that I have to do the opposite of the comment, even though the comment says, hey, I read the article and it didn't work and I had to do something different.
Do the opposite of that.
And I was so proud of myself.
I'm like, this is awesome.
This is going to work.
And I rebooted, and it wouldn't see the drive.
Oh, no.
It held the object.
It just does not see the drive.
And then this is where being old is bad.
This is where being like Casey, who doesn't remember what happened previously on this show.
In my memory bank somewhere was the information I needed to figure out the final piece that I needed to know.
Because at this point, I had installed Windows 10 like a dozen times.
I'm an expert Windows 10 installer.
Yeah.
I'm an expert virtual box, virtual machine setter upper.
I did all sorts of other experiments by setting up multiple virtual machines and having one talk to the other.
I did lots of stuff.
And I'm like, this should work.
And further Googling tickled something in my mind.
I'm like, wait a second.
do you either you know remember people who are listening to this are shouting right now they're shouting at me right now they all know what my problem is do you two you two also know this information because we talked about it in atp but then we all forgot yeah didn't i create an external boot disc to play uh inside yeah but what is the key piece of information that i'm missing that's thwarting me assume which is which is the correct assumption i can tell you right now that i had correctly put the bits on that external drive what's my problem
Why is this not working?
Is it a weird Catalina thing that it's not booting some kind of unapproved drive?
You got it.
Remember when we discussed this back like it was actually when that not Catalina, but like the T2.
Remember when the T2 Max first came out and we just talked about the T2 Max?
Oh, is it a T2 thing?
yeah what is it that we know about the t2 in terms of security oh that would be why like some people in the comments would have this issue and some people wouldn't like if they had a new mac they would have this issue no one in the comments as far as i could see had this particular issue they were just arguing about how to get the bits onto the disc and they were all wrong and so was the article but i eventually got the right bits on the disc but the t2 like this the reason you can't take the ssd out of the mac pro
and just put it in a third-party one, is because it's paired to the T2, and it's paired to the T2 so it can have a secure boot environment, where it boots knowing that what I'm booting from is a known, good, secure disk that has had system integrity protection, that is keyed to the T2, you know all that crap?
Right?
Yeah.
I hope nobody at Apple who works on all that crap heard you summarize it that way.
It's basically trying to... Like we have discussed, and I've made this exact analogy many times, the assumption used to be that when you have physical access to a Mac, all security bets are off because you can just boot from an external drive and you own the thing, right?
Assuming the disks aren't encrypted.
Whereas the assumption with a phone is that the iPhone has been like, even if you have physical access, it's really hard to get in.
So the Macs with T2 are trying to be more like iPhones.
Even if you have physical access, if I encrypt the disks and put a firmware password on...
You shouldn't be able to just, oh, I'll boot from an external drive and I'll be able to run hacking software and try to crack your thing.
Like, T2 Max will not boot from an external drive.
Period.
Like, there's a security setting in T2 Max that says, hey, should I allow booting from an external drive?
And if you don't turn that on, it will never see an external drive that you've just installed Windows from and it will never boot from it.
It will never even show it.
And that was the final piece of information.
And I boot into recovery mode, and I go to the setting, and it says, hey, do you want this Mac to be able to boot from external drive?
And I said, yes.
Yes, that's what I've been trying to do over the past literally 10 hours.
It's like 3 a.m.
at this point.
I'm like, yes, boot from the external drive.
And I reboot, hold down the option key, and there it is.
There it freaking is.
Oh, my gosh.
My boot camp disk.
And I boot from it, and Windows 10 launches.
And I'm in Windows 10, and I can't do anything because it doesn't see my Bluetooth mouse and keyboard.
but that aside bluetooth this this is my this is my first mac that i've had a bluetooth mouse and keyboard because they came in the box and i really like this keyboard this is my favorite keyboard feel the key layout is still i wish the function keys were far away from the numbers but i like the big escape key i really like these these key switches the mouse i hate i've used it for a week now i knew i would hate it i still hate it anyway maybe i'll talk about them a little more later
But when you reboot into Windows, it has no freaking idea what input peripherals are.
So I had to get a wired mouse and keyboard, connect them so I could type in my username and password and blah, blah, blah, then get it to pair with the Bluetooth mouse and keyboard.
And every time I reboot into macOS, it's the same deal.
but other than that i was so relieved so if you have a t2 based mac and you are trying to install anything on an external drive and boot from it be re-advised as discussed on past episodes of atb that we all forgot about if it's a setting you have to allow external booting otherwise you can't boot from an external drive um
so that's that's my boot camp battle it was it was long and terrifying and anything that involves like a 30 minute you know install process as your sort of iteration you know step size it's just bad like even if i only did it like 12 13 times it seems like forever and each time i was just banging my head against the wall so all the end of that story is i installed steam installed destiny ran it
The answer to the question is this crappy Radeon 580X.
It can run Destiny at like 90 frames per second in 1080 in 4K.
But when you run it in 4K, it gets more than 30 frames per second, but it dips below 60.
So luckily, Destiny has lots of settings on PC.
So I basically set the screen resolution to 4K and the render resolution to 75%.
And that gets...
pegged at 60 frames and i have a 60 hertz monitor anyway so there's no point in being faster than that so i do get to play destiny at 4k at 60 frames per second a lot and it's really good i love the wider field of view it's super smooth i enjoyed it i didn't enjoy playing against pc users with mouse and keyboard because they kill me a lot uh but it was fun uh the other there was more battles in this with uh with steam by the way because
I have a PlayStation controller and I've paired it with my wife's iMac to play on like GeForce Now and Stadia that I've talked about in the past.
I'm like, I'll just pair my PlayStation controller with this Windows 10 computer that I'm booted into and I'll be able to play Destiny with my PlayStation 4 controller on this.
And I pair it and it works fine.
And I'm moving it.
I'm using it to move around the Steam user interface.
So I know Steam sees the controller.
Every time I launch Destiny, all it sees is the mouse and keyboard.
I'm like, I just, I used the controller to launch this game.
Steam knows about the controller.
I can customize the settings in Steam.
Why, Destiny, do you not see the controller?
I was still in that, you know, when you get in that mindset after you've battled with a computer.
This is the next day at this point, but I went to bed at like 3 a.m.,
this is the next day i'm like now i get to enjoy the fruits of my labor and i can't get the controller to work i tried mouse and keyboard i suck so bad at mouse and keyboard and destiny there's just too many controls i cannot handle it i am garbage so i'm like well back to controller for me i couldn't get it to see i was i was so just distraught that like nothing on a computer will work for me ever again like that's it last night was all i gave all i had and i succeeded but now now nothing will ever work
uh i think people who play destiny on pc know the answer to this question and would be yelling it say you dummy yes of course the playstation control controller works in steam and your pc recognizes it and it's paired but destiny does not use steam's control thing it does its own thing and destiny has no freaking idea about bluetooth playstation controllers you have to plug the playstation controller into your quote-unquote pc with a usb cable
And then Destiny sees it.
And so, yes, I finally played Destiny with a controller at 60 frames per second at 75% resolution on a 4K monitor.
And it was good.
This entire segment has been the biggest advertisement for just getting a gaming PC that I think we've ever had.
Well, this segment is an advertisement for getting your monitor shipped to you at the same time as your computer, because I don't plan on playing on PC.
I'm going to play on my PlayStation, but this thing is hogging the PlayStation's monitor, so if I want to play it, it's just such a pain to carry it back and forth.
I did it a couple of times, and it's just...
yeah so i'm i'm not going to use this as a gaming pc i'm not going to reboot into windows 10 i became a little bit more familiar with windows 10 by the way doing this which is not as terrible as i thought it was going to be um but i'm comparing it to like windows 7 and 8 uh and xp i suppose i don't have much experience with the news but anyway i got steam installed on it and i ran a game but
Not recommended.
All this to say is that 580X is a garbage gaming card.
I look forward to my next GPU.
What are you using for peripherals other than this PlayStation controller?
Like I said, the keyboard.
I would like to keep this.
It annoys me that I don't think... The solution that it's been recommended to me is unpair it for your Mac before you reboot into Windows.
And then maybe Windows will pair with it.
But I wish it was the case that when I rebooted into Windows, it would remember that it was paired with this one.
I wish I didn't have to do anything.
I wish I could just reboot.
It doesn't matter.
I'm not going to be rebooting into Windows anymore.
But having done it like a dozen times trying to fight with this thing, it annoys me that I can't do that.
So I kind of wish this keyboard could be wired because I don't care if my keyboard is wired.
I have little wire guides under the desk.
It doesn't affect my life.
But I really like this keyboard, so I'm going to use the wireless keyboard even though I wish it was wired.
And I think, maybe one of you can confirm, I'm assuming if I were to plug it in with the lightning to USB thing, that's just power, right?
No, no.
I believe it makes it a wired keyboard.
Does it?
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I might try that then if I can get a cable long enough to reach my computer because the one it comes with is not going to reach under the desk and through the woods to grandma's house we go or wherever.
But I would like to try that because I think that would make my life a lot easier.
The mouse...
do not like it um and for a new reason like i'm having you know i don't like it i've been using it i don't like it because it's low and it's not you know it's not shaped the way i like it but you weren't gaming with that mouse are you the magic mouse no no okay i was gonna say like i love the magic mouse but i would not game with it
The thing I did actually try like on the first launch to, you know, I was just trying getting stuff work and something I'm pretty sure this is physically impossible with this mouse, but it didn't occur to me until I tried to do it.
People who don't know the the Apple mouse looks like a piece of sushi.
It has one flat surface on top of it.
Like the top surface is one continuous thing.
There are no seams or gaps in it anywhere.
But it does handle right click because it senses where your fingers are.
Like it's got a touch surface on top.
So if you click on the right side of the mouse, that's right click.
And if you click on the left side, it's left click.
But every time you click, the whole mouse surface goes down, right?
There is no, it's just one big button.
So in Destiny, I get right in the game and I go to ADS and then I go to fire.
And the default, you know, key bindings and setup is ADS is right click and fire is left click.
ads for you two who are listening have no idea i'm talking about is aim down sights i thought it was ads because destiny is a game where where where you aim down sights and then right right click for ads you cannot right click to ads and then left click to fire on the apple mouse because as soon as you right click to ads the button is down already
you can't you can't left click because it's in the middle of a click you're holding it down now you could do right click toggle ads i thought maybe it would be touch sensitive and i could tap the left side of the mouse while holding the right but that didn't seem to work anyway it's not a gaming mouse that's not why i don't like it but the reason i the new reason that i dislike this mouse other than the ergonomics which alone would be like they don't match the way i want to use a mouse right
But the new thing that's driving me nuts is it's like the Apple TV remote.
The way I just go and grab my mouse, I end up accidentally swiping the thing and my windows are scrolling all over the place and I'm activating mission control.
And I'm like, it's like my computer is haunted like my TV.
Like every time I try to pick up that remote, it's like, why is it fast forwarding?
Why did it skip around?
What is it doing?
Did it go to the next episode?
Because my fingers brush the touch sensitive surface.
This is not what I want in a mouse.
Looks nice.
It's black and sleek.
I think it's a beautiful piece of art.
I don't want to use it as a mouse.
yeah in all fairness i disabled most of those gestures the first first time i set up a mac even just horizontal scrolling like swipe sideways or swipe vertical for crying out loud like i'm not going to disable scrolling right i'll i'll go to grab the mouse and in the act of grabbing it i will scroll my window two lines that i didn't mean to do because of my fingers just hit it so anyway i'm not going to use this mouse so i've been in the market for a new one and i have ordered two mice two mouses two meeses
uh i tried both of them in person and i couldn't really decide if either of them if i would like them but i'm going to give them both a try i got an expensive one and a cheap one i'm hoping i like at least one of them because it's been slim pickings like these these are the least objectionable mice that i have found they both have things about them that i don't like and i'm not really a fan of but i think hopefully one of them will be okay i'm i have coming to me the microsoft precision mouse which is microsoft's current like
normal mouse like it's not not like super gamey yeah exactly um but it's also like it's their fancy one so it's got the thing that marco talked about where and all you know almost every every mouse that has a score wheel has this feature where it's like you can it's either in clicky mode or free spinning mode right oh they'll do that now
Well, not all of them, but the nice ones do it.
In fact, Microsoft sells the same mouse without the mode switch that just is clicky.
Anyway, it's got one of those.
Logic has a name brand for it.
And the switch that switches the two modes is really nice and satisfying, which I enjoy.
It's got three side buttons that I hope to never use.
and it's got a left and a right button and it's got that little flange off to the left like if you know the logic mx master has like a huge like shelf over there for you to like put your rest your hand on or some shopping or groceries this has a tiny flange which i'm like you know what i've never used a mouse with the flange this flange is very small i don't find it particularly objectionable if i just pretend it's not there and grip the sides of the mouse maybe it'll be fine so that this is the fancy mouse this is like 70 bucks so i'm getting this one
um and i think it's bluetooth which may or may not be an issue depending on how catalina catalina's bluetooth issues evolve for you too so far i haven't seen any of the stuff you've described but i'm on lookout for it and the other one is the logitech marathon mouse m705 which is one of the cheaper logitech mice it's also one of the simpler ones um
i think it also has the mode switch wheel less satisfying it has two side buttons instead of one and it also has a small flange for your thumb and it's just generally like this is 30 bucks it's a 30 mouse it is not bluetooth it's logitech's weird rf thingy which i actually kind of like because my experience that rf thing they use is rock solid and doesn't interfere with bluetooth yeah if you're if it's for a desktop those are way better honestly
yeah so i mean you don't have that choice on the microsoft one it just it is bluetooth or whatever so i got that one my plan is whichever one i don't like i'll try to pass off the other one to my wife because she has a logitech wireless mouse now but it's one of those portable ones right and i always thought it was silly for her to use that at her desk it's like one of those little it's it's miniature it's like 75 of a normal size oh yeah i don't mind it but anyway so i'll i'll keep you updated on those two mice
And also, the final thing I've ordered is way too many cables.
For what?
So many things.
This is the problem when you get new things.
I did the preparing the way, the new power supply.
It just ripples outward.
I mentioned this on a past show.
I want everything to be braided in black.
I don't want any white cables.
I don't want any plastic cables.
I don't want to buy anything sold, bought, or processed.
I want everything to be...
black braided cables why braided why who cares about braided braided cables appeal to me because they are less less kinky oh boy like if you have a typical plastic cable it comes to you in a package it's usually tightly wrapped in either a circle or an oval or whatever and you sort of unfurl it and those kinks kind of stay and you can kind of it's like well are these kinks ever going to go out probably sometimes eventually but then you might sort of bend in new kinks braided cables in theory are
remains supple and able to sort of flow and don't they don't come with you get out of the package and you just string it out and it hangs pin straight straight down for like six feet right that never happens with a plastic cable and then in theory if you use them for a long time they won't pick up kinks from the other places oh i said in theory again i'm sorry phone go away oh man so black braided everything so any cable that i had in my life that was not black and braided
Needs to be black and braided.
Of course, the computer comes with a black braided power cable and a black braided USB-C to lightning cable to charge, to harpoon your turtle mouse and to charge your keyboard.
And that sort of began the whole thing.
So...
I have a black braided USB-C to USB-C for my portable hard drive, another black braided USB-A to B to connect my existing black USB hub, like a black braided speaker cable to connect my speakers.
I'm going a little overboard.
I mean, cables are cheap.
Like when you're buying expensive computers, like I can get a cable for $5.
I should buy two of them.
They're $5.
And so I did.
So I've been buying cables.
So I'm not entirely in the braided cable lifestyle.
I have a few here and there, but do they not just wrap like a cloth braid around the same rubber that every other cable has on the outside?
So first of all, I think, no, I think they don't.
I think the braiding replaces the rubber.
The second thing I worry about is that they are less well shielded than the other ones.
Like, you know, it's used like a foil wrapper and then inside of the actual conductors, each of which is separately insulated.
And then around that, they have plastic.
I think it's all the same, except the outer plastic is replaced with braids.
I don't know.
I honestly don't know anything about cables and these are all like $5.
So I have no idea what the hell I'm buying.
Uh, although I did buy a Thunderbolt one that was like 30 bucks or whatever, because I'm, I'm pre buying for stuff that I think I'm going to get.
Like, I think I will eventually have some high speed, uh, external SSD peripheral thing.
Um, but yeah, I, I'm assuming that is the only difference is a aesthetics and B how the cables flop.
Um,
basically i'm hoping there's no c interference susceptibility is worse i'm hoping that's not true anything else about the mac pro john are we done no we're not sorry one more thing oh my god this this is not for me though this is from i've been i've consuming lots of mac pro content as you can imagine there's lots of good youtube videos yes so am i apparently yeah well you yeah you mentioned something so quinn nelson of snazzy labs uh is had one of the many videos that's like hey i got this mac pro what the hell can i put in here
And a lot of these YouTube channels are not Apple-specific, so they have tons of, you know, essentially PC hardware hanging around.
We will put a link in the show notes to this particular video.
He said, let me just shove some stuff in there and see how it goes.
So the first thing he stuck in was a USB card.
uh to put a bunch more usb ports on the thing uh and that didn't work because there was no drivers for it um he's looking around inside the case for power connectors most pcs have satis style power connectors coming off the power supply that is not the case in the mac pro which is why there's that 80 belkin thing because they've got a proprietary power header on the motherboard so you can add cables to your previously cable-less mac like there are no
molex you know style connectors there's no place in there except for the apple proprietary place to connect the thing so anything that requires power you have to get at least that power you know cable thing from belkin which i think is the only one that makes one for now or have something that's powered through the slot um there's the pegasus drive bay thing that stephen hackett bought against four hundred dollars for a bracket plus an eight terabyte hard drive stephen said that hard drive is incredibly noisy so that kind of turned me off like i wasn't a fan of buying that anyway but
I certainly don't want a noisy spinning hard drive in there.
And that comes with its own power thing?
Or do you have to buy it?
I think it comes with its own thing, too.
It does, yeah.
PCI Express cards that you put M.2 SSD or NVMe things in.
uh that worked right out of the box it's a tiny little pci card that connects into your pci slot and it's got a tiny little m.2 slot where you put one of those little nvme sticks in there stick not included um work fine no drivers you can boot from it uh you buy an nvme ssd for however much they cost these days and you plug it in there the card itself is 13 dollars
$13.
$100 for each wheel on this machine, but if you want to put an NVMe SSD in there, for $13 you can do it.
And then you can spend $400 on a 2TB NVMe SSD, and for $413 you have 2TB worth of very fast bootable stuff.
He also tried U.2 SSD cards, which is the standard for those enterprise over-provisioned SSD things.
And that didn't work, even though it had worked in previous ones.
And it turns out that it's because Catalina is missing drivers for the Intel U.2 drive that he tried.
But that's $50 for the card if you want to get one of those fancy enterprise SSDs.
You just need to use a mechanism that they have drivers.
Mojave had drivers for this thing, but Catalina doesn't for whatever reason.
um he did a bunch of ram upgrading and saw the cool ram slide advisor thing that tells you hey you got your dims in the wrong place and put this one here and put that one there so that's a cool uh feature and app if everyone upgrade the ram but like i said i probably don't because i've already got tons in here
uh black magic video capture card hey it worked magically uh even though it's more or less pc hardware uh that worked fine sound blaster what was it which one he was talking about sound blaster yep yep they still make products apparently for pcs that was the bigger shock is that they're still in business yeah and he bought a sound blaster card and put it into his mac and the mac was like nope unless you also buy this external box that they have uh and you use it in windows then it works
um and a bunch of other people have tried other things in it so right now like in the absence of any mac pro specific products like the pegasus thing that apple sells you know and like i'd imagine third party you know apple specific vendors will sell you can try shoving in lots of pc hardware some of it might work in windows and some of it might work in mac os it's somewhat hard to tell but i am excited that literally any of it works
with like no drivers and no awareness that just plain work like that pci express thing because that basically means if you want to have a bunch of internal ssds you can buy those little nvme sticks and just slap in there like they have cards that hold four of those nvme sticks and you can mount it as a single drive and get insane speeds if you can afford all those that nvme storage of the card itself is like nothing so although one of them i did see had a fan on it which was a little upsetting but
anyway of course i am excited about uh putting things into my mac pro and i am plotting what those things might be but i'm i'm not in a rush because it seems like the video card options that was another thing lots of people were trying different video cards in there video card options are not currently great as we've discussed in the past i want something that's an npx module if possible so i'm just waiting the final thing uh quinn nelson of snazzy labs talked about which hadn't occurred to me but looking at all the pictures but i know i had been thinking about it the wrong way even after i'd taken the case off my mac pro i didn't realize this but
obviously we've said before when you take the case off the computer powers down like you can't have it turned on there there is there's a literal physical power disconnect thing that if those contacts are not touching from the top of the case down to your mac it will not run the power will not be connected the circuits will not be complete right so you have to turn your mac off to take the case off
But what people might not have mentioned, people realize now that they have them is not only do you have to turn it off, you have to unplug every cable from the back of your computer because the case in the back is not like a U shape.
Like there's a bar on the bottom.
And so as the case comes up, that bar goes and if the cables are in the way, it will block them.
So you have to unplug every single cable, the power cable, all the USB cables, your display cable.
Any cable that is connected to the back of his computer needs to be unplugged to take the case off.
Which is kind of a shame because you're like, okay, fine, the power has to be off, but do I have to unplug all those things?
Because if you have a lot of stuff connected, especially if you have cards installed, like lots of people put in different video cards, and you can have all these monitors connected, like you can do all sorts of cool stuff.
You've got to disconnect all of those, and if it's on a desk or in some place deep, it's hard to see back there, and they might slide down, and it's just...
Not convenient at all, but it's so clear that Apple does not want you mucking around inside this thing when it's anything close to being plugged in or turned on.
Doesn't that also make it so that it's not grounded anymore?
Yeah, that's one of the many theories I'm working with.
I'll keep it plugged in so it's grounded, but you should also have a grounding strap separate from that.
It doesn't mean you can't plug it back in after you get the case off.
You could plug the power cable back in.
It just means it has to be out to get the case off.
yeah because like because i was always told like keep the power supply plugged in with when you're working inside of a pc because then it keeps it grounded and then you have you know extra esd protection through the case yeah i suppose we haven't seen the repair guide for this computer i i imagine it might still tell the repair technician to do that but i don't know is you gotta unplug everything because otherwise that case is not coming off and also there's also you can look at the picture we'll put in the show notes of the tweet someone was mentioning the uh
the bnc connector that's poking out here i think that's what it's called uh that's from the black magic card someone said hey do you have 10 base 2 ethernet on that thing but anyway if you have a long enough connector poking out of the back of your computer it could be that you can't get the well i suppose you couldn't get the case on then because you'd insert the card and then when you try to put the case back on it wouldn't go down because it would hit the connector uh but that's not the case it clears the black magic card obviously but i can imagine there might be some card somewhere that expects you to
expects to be able to stick out the back of your computer as long as it needs to and that's not going to work on this we are sponsored by squarespace start building your website today at squarespace.com slash atp enter offer code atp at checkout to get 10 off make your next move with squarespace now that's the new year lots of people start new projects and for any new project or hobby or just new thing you want to try you need a website
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All right, now that we're done with follow-up, let's start the show.
All right, well, we're out of time, so let's move on to Ask ATP.
Dimitri Tabakuro writes, My relatives and I have iPhones, and we use iCloud photo sharing.
It was working fine until my father decided to print some photos from one of the shared albums.
He is not able to get full-res images from shared albums, only images resized down to about 2048p.
Am I supposed to send zip files to my parents so they can print photos?
No.
Also, why does it appear that photos are downloaded to the local device before adding them to a shared album?
Can't Apple do this process on the server side?
It's very inconvenient when I want to share a lot of photos from some trip when those photos already exist on the cloud.
It takes up to tens of minutes, fails often, and so I have to share photos by batches.
I hope you'll help me so I'm not going back to Google Photos slash OneDrive.
I don't use iCloud Photo Library.
I do use iCloud Sharing, but only very sporadically.
So I haven't really personally run into any of this.
John, I think you're the heaviest user of this stuff out of the three of us.
Any solutions?
I like this question because it highlights many failings of iCloud, like all the major failings of iCloud sharing things.
This is true in things that a lot of people don't realize if you're not a computer nerd into these things, that shared albums don't share photos at full resolution.
You might not notice that you're like, I've got the picture and you give it to your relatives.
They're happy to have the picture.
But if they ever try to print it like in a photo print, especially if they want to make like an eight by 10, it's not happening.
Like they're not high enough resolution for that, which is a shame.
Like I understand that Apple does it to like save space and whatever.
But this is a decision that was made many years ago and they should revisit it because then the next question is, OK, well, whatever.
Shared albums is just so people can see them on their phone.
What if I want to give the full res ones?
What do I do then?
There are tons of ways to do it, but none of them are part of Apple's photo experience, except maybe like AirDrop or iMessage.
And even iMessage, I'm not sure if it downscales.
I think there's a preference for downscaling somewhere in the iMessage settings.
You can email them.
My solution is usually to use Google products, as in I put them in Google Drive and send them a link.
It really depends on what the person on the other end has access to.
Like, if they don't... If they have Apple things, I know I can use that Apple Mail thing where it doesn't actually attach it to the message.
It puts it at, like, a public iCloud link.
You know that feature?
It was in, like, Sierra or something.
I hate those.
And it's...
I always try to do that, and people in my family always yell at me mid-sentence and say, don't do that.
It's too big to be an attachment.
Like, it's not going to actually attach it.
Like, that's the point.
It's going to just – it's going to put it in iCloud, then it's going to send them an email with a link, and then they're going to click the link.
Like, I like that system because it gets around the attachment stuff, and you know they're getting the full res thing.
But it is easier and better if you know everyone on both ends to do Apple stuff.
iCloud – not iCloud.
Google Drive –
If you just put it into Google Drive, Google Drive just thinks it's a file.
You can make a public link that can download the file.
The web interface to Google Drive will try to be clever and say, oh, this is an image.
I can present this to you.
You have to tell, this is the annoying thing.
You have to send them like, don't just click on the image and like right click or drag to your desktop or whatever.
Go find the download button, which is a download facing arrow.
Like you have to actually not let Google Drive try to be nice and like decode the thing for you.
You just want the file.
And so the zip file, although it's stupid to zip JPEGs, which are already compressed and you won't save space.
At least that will make it so that everything in the chain understands, like, I don't know what this is.
It's just a file.
I'm just going to send you all the bits.
Here are the bits.
Then you have to worry about attachment stuff.
So if you put that zip file in Google Drive and have people download the zip file, and hopefully Google Drive doesn't crack the zip file open for you conveniently.
See how complicated this is?
It shouldn't be this difficult.
And the thing about copying it down to the device.
He's right.
Like, Apple does have it.
Why, if you want to send it to somebody else or, you know, add it to a shared album, do you have to bring it down to the device?
then put it back up to the shared album.
It's both in the same place, but that's, you know, I don't know if it's a privacy thing or they don't want to do it server side.
There's lots of inconveniences for people with bad, slow connections or not a lot of space on their phones have to end up fighting with Apple's photo system.
So, yeah, I don't have a great solution to this.
There are tons and tons of mediocre solutions, most of which I get by with, but I really wish Apple would do this better.
Yeah, we also got a question from Todd Vaziri around the last week or so saying, hey, when is family based like a shared photo libraries ever going to be a thing?
And oh, do I ever want it to be a thing?
But I don't see that being a thing anytime soon.
We talked about that a lot.
His question, he listens to the show, so he knows like his question was not how can we do that?
It was like, are there any indications as in any birdies or any hints anywhere?
Is there any hope saying yes, Apple is going to address this need?
I haven't heard anything.
But as we've discussed in past shows, Apple has taken many stacks over the past decade to prepare for that by having families and iCloud photo library like all those are prerequisites.
I just don't have any actual information about, oh, in the next year or two or three, they're going to roll out this feature.
They desperately need to.
And they have laid a lot of the foundations.
I just haven't heard anything rumor wise.
J.K.
Cross writes, I remembered Marco saying something like Swift is such a dick in an episode a few months ago.
As someone who has been writing almost exclusively in Swift so far, I've been wondering, would you please elaborate on that statement, Marco?
And I would just like to say, I didn't implore this to happen.
I didn't bring this up at all.
I didn't even put this in the show notes.
So I am excited to get in a fight with you.
I mean, to discuss this with you.
I mean, it's a matter of style and preference.
I mean, lots of people like dicks.
And so, you know, we just have different preferences, I guess.
That's totally okay.
You know, there are trends and waves in programming languages.
And we've gone throughout the history of programming languages, we've gone from
very strict to more flexible languages, more dynamic languages, and now we're kind of in a wave that's swinging back towards very strict languages, very super strictly typed and everything.
And this is what Swift is.
Swift is extremely strict and rigid and picky.
In the way that some languages don't require you to differentiate between...
levels of integer precision like you can you can cast a 64-bit integer to a 32-bit integer context transparently and it doesn't bother you about anything and that's the kind of thing that we're swift will generally bother you about stuff like that um it is not the only language that does this uh and and things like this this is not the only thing it is a dick about uh but just as i am using swift which honestly i haven't been doing a lot of recently because i've been working in an existing object to see code base so i've been mostly writing that but
Whenever I write Swift, it just nitpicks everything I do to death in a way that I understand what it's doing.
I understand that it wants everything to be explicit and correct and everything.
But in a way that is not logical or factual, it seems like it's being a dick to me.
I don't know.
It's hard to explain.
I think I understand what you're saying.
Obviously, I have a very different opinion about what is happening and why it's happening.
I think even as someone who quite likes Swift, it is extremely picky.
I don't really see there's any two ways about that.
It is very picky.
It wants you to...
do things in the safest way possible.
It wants you to be as explicit as possible.
To me, Objective-C is much happier shooting from the hip and just pew-pew-pewing all over the place, and that's fine.
I think for certain developers, that's how they prefer to work, and that's great.
For other developers, it's not as great.
I think that the thing that bothers me about Swift is...
To my eyes, the language nerds have not only gotten hold of it, but I've performed a hostile takeover of it.
Oh, yeah.
And and I feel like early on, you know, in the first couple of years of Swift, it had a lot of these jerky tendencies, but was workable and decisions were made pragmatically.
relatively often, and I wish I could cite a specific example and I can't off the top of my head, but I try to keep up with the general gist of what's going on in Swift evolution and the general kind of trends and what's going on in Swift.
And even as someone who I think is more language nerdy than your average developer, and I am not bad at all, I'm just saying more than your average developer, I think I appreciate the nuance of
of a lot of languages um i i i don't care for the direction swift is going which is let's let the academic language nerds just go bananas and eschew any sort of pragmatism whatsoever and i'm sure that that's not literally what's happening but that is what appears to be happening to me and man i do not like it i do not want it and i do not like it and
I don't know.
That frustrates me.
That frustrates me a lot.
And that is where I think Swift is taking a turn for the worse.
But I don't know.
Maybe that's just me.
John, do you have thoughts on this?
I do.
That's why I put the question in.
I wanted to hear about Marco's assessment of Swift's dickishness.
My own assessment of it, like I've spent my career programming what they call dynamic languages, which are the least dickish.
Depending on how you look at it, if you ask someone of a dickish language, they will say the opposite.
But like, yeah, in Perl, JavaScript, anything goes to the nth degree, right?
That's the beauty and some would say the curse, right?
My impression is that what I thought Marco was saying when he said Swift is such a dick, I thought I understood what he was saying because I feel the same way about statically typed languages.
Basically, any language that has a strong, complicated type system that you have to participate in
I find it annoying to be writing a program and for it to say your program is cool and everything, but like this is not the exact type that that says it is.
And you're like, oh, my God, they're trivially convertible with each other.
And I know this thing is always going to be in this range and it's fine.
It's like, yeah, but I'm the language and you I can't I'm not going to take your word for it.
You have to actually make the types match.
For me, any amount of brainpower and time I spend dealing with a type system annoys me.
For other people, types are your whole program.
My problem is solved by defining types.
Once I've defined the correct types, the problem practically solves itself.
Furthermore, I cannot be reassured that anything I write is remotely correct in any way if I am not assured that all the types are matched up down to the nth degree because that makes me feel comfortable that, well, my logic might be wrong.
But at least I know all the types thread through the system, and that makes me feel reassured.
Lots of people have that as a big security blanket, and they flip out in any language that isn't that strict, and they're like, how can I use this language?
I don't know if it's an integer or it's a string.
How do you write anything that works?
And yet gigantic companies in millions of lines of code have been produced and work just fine without that, and those people can't even imagine.
How can you have millions of lines of anything with quote-unquote no types, even though there are types, but not the types they're interested in?
you know strings being coerced into numbers and vice versa nothing will ever work and that's just not true right so there's that's the divide and i think languages that appear dickish to people who are accustomed to working in a sort of a loosey use your language are like oh god don't make me tell you again about the types
I don't care.
Or, like, why can't I just have this thing as a bucket of things that all conform to this protocol?
Oh, I'm not allowed to have that?
Oh, then I have to figure out some other way to do it.
Just, like, just take a bunch of things of type ID, like an Objective-C.
Like, just, you always want to just have that out to say, I don't want to deal with types.
Just, like, and so that's my impression of the dickish and non-dickish divide, which is...
It's not an accurate assessment because depending on which camp you're in, the other side is a dick of saying like, oh, you're just going to let me pass a string to this thing that takes a number and you're going to give me an answer and not say anything.
You're going to let me call a method and you have no frigging idea whether that method exists.
Oh, sorry.
You're going to send a message and you don't know if you can even receive this message.
how do you how can i how does that even compile you don't know that this thing has a foo message and you're just gonna let that compile and i'm gonna find out at runtime that it doesn't have a foo message how can you write anything in this language obviously everyone knows you can't write anything useful in objective c because you can send a message you can send a message to nil and it's a no op what the hell you'll never be able to make a successful commercial system in this language as we all know there will never be any successful products or a company based on a language that acts like this without static types nothing works
Obviously, you know which side of this I fall down on.
Swift tends to be more dickish in that way.
When I wrote that long thing about Swift when it first came out, which I smuggled into a Mac OS X review because that's the forum I had for a lot of my writing, I described all of that.
But my perspective on it then and still mostly now is that
swift is dickish in this way to a much greater degree than objective c because that's how we can figure out how to make your code run fast and its ambition was to be expressive and able to write cool programs but also as fast as it can possibly be like a systems programming language like you could write an operating system in it like it is you know you should never have to resort to c because this should be just as fast
And there's no way a language can be that way unless it knows down to the minute detail exactly how everything is set up and the fact that they match up.
It needs to know that method exists.
So it knows that it can call it.
So it doesn't have to do like a method table lookup or a runtime check.
No runtime coercion.
It's not like you have to know everything that it does down to memory allocation and stuff.
And with arc, you know, anyway, that's one reason it's like that.
But I think Swift also, this gets to Casey's point,
Again, you two use language way more than I do.
I read about it, but I'm not actually using it.
But my impression from reading about it of the debates among the language nerds, as you derisively call them, but those are my people as far as I'm concerned, which may sound weird based on what I said there, but my people were like the Pearl language nerds, which is a different breed of language nerd.
But anyway, based on those conversations, I think what they're trying to do is say –
Swift needs to know about all the crap in the program so it can make it efficient and so it can turn runtime errors into compile time errors and help you in that way to make a secure, more correct program that runs really, really fast.
But we don't want it to bother you that much.
We don't want it to be so dickish.
That's what type inference is about.
And half of the Swift stuff is...
How can we make it so you can write something that looks simple and the compiler can figure out what it is that you meant and whether it's valid without having to ask you, cast this to that or reassure me that this conforms to that protocol or don't say anything about types at all and I'll figure it out.
Like the whole type inference engine and, you know, all the type erasure and the protocol system and all their generics and everything.
They're trying, I think.
to make a language that has all the attributes of the, you know, the, the, I forget what the Pearl people used to call it.
They something in bondage.
Uh, it was a sex analogy.
I'm sorry.
Nerds in the nineties.
Anyway, the discipline bondage and discipline languages that want you to say everything about the types you want to get all that performance.
We don't want you to have to deal with that.
And I feel like that's what they're trying to do.
Pragmatically, like the number of times they change the string system, they needed to be efficient.
They needed to not have to go through conversions.
Um,
They need it to be able to efficiently get offsets and split and join strings without you having to worry about all the Unicode stuff, but they want it to be really fast under the cover.
So that's why they get rid of UTF-16 behind the scenes, even though that's what Objective-C's NSString used for all those years because it was back when UTF-16 they thought would be the thing, right?
And for backward compatibility, it was good to do that, but they changed the system again and all the different methods to get offsets and indexes and
Just, I see the Swift language people trying to make Swift less of a dick while also making it blazingly fast and convenient to use and expressive.
Obviously, they're failing to a degree that Casey feels like he's getting put upon by new things.
That's why I wish you had some more concrete examples, you know, where you feel like it's getting more dickish, not less.
But for sure, Swift is on the bondage and discipline side in terms of
The compiler needs to know what the hell's going on, right?
But I think they're trying to be much less... And they have the whole dynamic dispatch thing they added for Python support and everything like that, where you can actually call a thing that you're not sure exists at runtime, but they try to do it in an efficient way.
Maybe it's easier to be a fan when you're not forced to write programs in the language, and maybe someday I'll write something significant at Swift and then come on the program and...
complain about all the dickishness that i just described but i feel like swift is trying to not annoy you with the type system but it's never going to give up that type system it loves its types yeah and i think again i wish i had a more concrete example you're just like you said but i feel like so much of the stuff i see in in like the newsletters that i read and stuff like that and i'm not i'm not deep into swift swift evolution so it very well could be that there's plenty of pragmatic people arguing the way i would argue and i just don't see it but
So much of the stuff I see flying around is like super esoteric, really weird stuff that I as a traditional Swift user, a commoner, like the common folk like me, I don't think care about, will rarely see.
None of that stuff matters.
And so that's the stuff that I think once ABI Stability came in in Swift 5, I think it was.
Once the ABI stability train had reached the station, I feel like all of Swift Evolution just went to, all right, my one super nerdy language thing that nobody else gives a flying fart about, that's what we need to perseverate on right now.
And some things have gotten better, like codable and decodable.
or codable, encodable, decodable.
I think that's right.
It's been a while since I've written any of that stuff, which is basically JSON encoding and decoding.
That was an absolute win.
And that came in in the last couple of years.
And everyone and their mother had written a JSON parser in Swift.
And some of them were good and a lot of them were crap.
But with Codable, a lot of that was brought into the language, or into the framework anyway.
And I think that that works really, really well.
And it was really well abstracted in the way that a lot of Objective-C shines.
There are things about Objective-C and foundation that bother me.
And I've said this example before on the show, and I'll say it again.
Now, coming from C Sharp to Objective-C, there was, I believe, if memory serves, it's been a long time now, there was one date time class in C Sharp.
And that did anything related to dates.
And then I get to Objective-C and there's date, there's like NSDate and NSCalendar and some series of classes and objects with regard to time.
And it all seemed frigging overkill.
But as it turns out, it was really just that it was properly abstracted and that time is friggin' hard.
Who knew?
And I think that the codable stuff in Swift, I think that that's properly abstracted.
And if you want to do something super basic, it's actually very straightforward to do.
And if you want to do something really esoteric and weird, it's doable.
I just wouldn't say it's straightforward.
And that's a great example of things going the right way.
But so often I feel like there's just weird decisions with regard to weird corners of the language that oftentimes bubble into my world either via newsletters or actually into my code that I'm just like, come on, people.
This is not something we need to worry about.
Like a silly example of this was like the removal of the pre-increment, post-increment operators plus plus.
Oh, you're going to bring that chestnut back.
Yeah.
I mean, it was years ago.
I don't think that's a good supporting example of what you were describing.
That's more of a bike-shedding thing.
I would say, like, a better example, and I think this is a beneficial attribute of Swift, is they will take multiple runs of this stuff.
Like, how many times have they changed strings?
And they should, like, they tried it, they tried it again, then they tried it again.
But it's good.
Like, they should not have stuck with the first one.
The first time they didn't get it right.
No, it was garbage.
So, like, they keep trying.
Sometimes, and even the codable stuff, I think they took at least one other run at that type of thing.
You know, or they keep changing equitable and hashable stuff like because they realize people use them and there's some things that are a little bit more annoying or they add features like the default initializers and it becomes easier to write certain things and they redo them.
It's annoying for people for source compatibility and so on and so forth.
But I think it's the right call.
Like if you didn't get strings right the first time, don't be like Java and be like, nope, we did strings.
That's it.
That's unfair to Java.
But other languages.
No, it's not.
Other languages evolve more slowly, let's say, than Swift.
And I think one of Swift's advantages is their willingness to rip everything up.
And the fact that they implemented so much in the standard library that's not part of the quote-unquote language, they can say, hey, we're not changing the language that much.
We're changing the standard library, which is mainly how people use the language.
But no, I'm a fan of the process, and I think they're headed in the right direction.
They are the only criticism.
It's not a criticism, but the thing that is not to my taste is they are doing this in a language that is pot committed to...
efficiency like that's how i always think about like i what i want if i ever have to deal with bondage and discipline you damn well better run fast like that is the only reason i will tolerate this kind of garbage because otherwise just i'll just write it and i'll write in javascript for crying out loud because if you're going to run slow no way i want to deal with your types but if you deal with types this is all me the programmer doing work so that you the compiler can make this thing run as if it was written in assembly like that's what i want out of out of this language
And then finally, Tom Bornhold writes, I had a dream that I was road tripping with the ATP crew.
To ensure the dream's accuracy, if the ATP crew took a road trip together, who would be driving, who would be in shotgun, and who would be in the back seat?
Let's have Marco start with this.
I will go next, and John can finish this out.
john would be driving because there is no way in hell that casey or i would want to drive with john as a passenger you have driven with me as a passenger both of you i think yeah but not for a long road trip all right okay that's a lot of pressure and you know you're gonna have opinions and it's not we're not worth it it's like selling you an old computer like no bad idea you two would never have opinions about driving i'm sure
No, not a bit.
So John would be driving, and then the question of opinions would come up, and Casey would have much more opinion than I would.
And so Casey would be in the passenger seat, and I would go in the back.
Also, they're both taller than me, so I can fit in the back more easily with my shorter legs.
And so I would just go in the back and look out the window or...
took around on my laptop or or whatever and and they would talk cars and i would try to i would zone out probably or fall asleep and from the back i can fall asleep without them noticing as easily oh that's an interesting point okay so i started with there was no way there's no way that john would let anyone else drive
But then I got to thinking, and I think John would enjoy just spacing out, just like you were saying.
I think John would enjoy just spacing out.
I don't know if John's capable of it, especially as we've heard his airplane passenger tendencies, but I think he would enjoy it.
So I think a happy medium for John would be riding in the passenger seat.
And Aaron has driven John a mini road trip.
It was like half an hour, I think, each way, something like that.
I was not in the car at the time.
And I don't remember her coming back traumatized, so I consider that a good sign.
I think...
I would want to drive, but in all likelihood, I would have said, and so now I'm cheating because you've gone before me, I would have said that, Marco, you would have been more opinionated about being the one in control, and I am a comparatively more passive person, and I would resign myself to the back, and Marco, you would drive.
Although, hearing what you said a moment ago, maybe I would switch you and me.
I'm not sure.
John, whose car are we driving?
It's an indeterminate, some crummy rental car.
Oh, I'm definitely not driving that.
Remember, gentlemen, the rental car is the fastest car in the world.
Unfortunately, the rental car probably has a CBT, so John won't drive it either.
All right, John, what do you think?
So when I see my interpretation of this question, you know, there's lots of things left unsaid, but like road tripping.
Right.
I think of that if it's a question worthy of considering, like, who's going to do what?
And it's like some road trip.
I'm thinking of like an epic road trip and very long road trips.
The dynamic, if you've ever been on one of these, especially with people who like aren't your family members and you haven't been on road trips before, is such that a few things are true.
One.
It is basically impossible, and even if it is possible, it's a terrible idea to have a single person drive.
So I was assuming that we would all take turns driving, because if you're on a really long road trip, it's dangerous for one person to drive for, like, you know, 12 hours in a row.
Like, and you have three people in the car and three people who can drive.
You should change drivers.
Second thing is that however you might start the road trip, when hour 27 rolls around...
it's a different vibe in the car everyone is comfortable with each other to the point where even after after 27 hours in the car a thing that i would never even consider doing i would be open to which is like sleeping in the back seat while someone else drives which you're right that normally i would not i would if someone else was driving i would have to be mentally backseat driving the entire time to try to keep myself alive but at a certain point you're just like everyone's exhausted you need to sleep because it's going to be your shift to drive for another four hours and in like
so yeah all of a sudden then i'm in the back seat and i'm asleep and mark was in the front but he's asleep too and then it was but the person in the practice sheet should stay awake to keep the other person awake and you're rotating drivers and you're stopping for food like a different set of rules engages at a certain point on a road trip in which case this question takes on a whole new dynamic and i feel like that's how all road trips have to go is that you rotate drivers you rotate seats the person in the back is sleeping
And the person in the front is there to assist the person who's driving.
That I feel like is how it would have to go.
For a shorter thing, obviously you're both considering short, but for a shorter trip, I would probably want to drive...
I don't think I've ever driven with Casey.
I don't know if he's a maniac.
He might be.
I hear a lot about, so I've driven with Marco and he drives fine.
Like I would, you know, obviously I would be backseat driving from the front seat.
Right.
You know, like I, like I do with any, literally anybody else, but I wouldn't have any particular objection to Marco driving.
I don't think he's a dangerous or reckless driver.
Casey might be dangerous or reckless driver.
I don't know.
Um,
But I would definitely, and Marco nailed it before, I would definitely want to be the passenger seat.
It's a legroom issue.
I feel like it's, you know, this is heightism, but yeah, you can get more legroom in the front.
So Marco, I feel like would have a higher chance of being, depending on the size of the backseat, if it's a tiny backseat and everyone would be uncomfortable, you should rotate, but yeah.
I would like to be in the passenger seat or the driver's seat.
And also for car sickness, I need to look out the front window.
You can do that from the backseat, but it's harder.
So, yeah, I would probably be driving.
The longer the trip gets, the more I would be very open to passenging because I would be tired of driving.
But then I would be backseat driving from the passenger seat.
And then in a really long trip, I'd be sleeping in the back.
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Collide.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter.
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
I forgot to mention that when I was trying out mice, I had the first ever occasion to go into a Microsoft store.
It's right near the Apple store in my mall.
And there was lots of people in there, surprisingly.
Really?
Not as many as the Apple store, but there was at least one person per table display area kiosk thing, which is way more than I'd heard stories of.
Again, it wasn't packed like the Apple store where every table had people around it shoulder to shoulder, but there was people there.
I went in to feel the mice, as you do.
So, you know, I think they had all of them set up.
So, I mean, it's just their current product line, but that's how I got to try them out.
One of them was actually connected to a computer, so I got to use it and mess with the tracking.
Obviously, the computer's running Windows, yada, yada.
The only thing I was disappointed is they didn't have any Xbox Elite controllers out anywhere.
I wanted to try one of those.
I never used one in person.
I thought it would be cool to try.
Maybe it's because the things come off magnetically and people will steal them out of the store.
I'm not sure.
But anyway, it was pretty nice.
People there were nice and helpful.
Two thumbs up for the Microsoft store.
I have never seen the Microsoft store in my mall have more customers than employees there.
Yeah.
this definitely had more customers than employees usually the like two of like at least two or three of the employees at microsoft store are playing like the minecraft booth that's set up because they don't have anything else to do yeah this this thing had a booth that was set up it was a disney plus booth like the one right next to like the hallway you know the mall thoroughfare or whatever the one right next to there was like a bunch of seats i guess it had previously used for like vr or something or whatever anyway
It had a big Disney Plus thing and they were showing episodes of The Mandalorian or whatever.
It's like, is there some deal with Microsoft and Disney for them to sell Disney Plus subscriptions?
I don't understand what they were demoing, but that's what it was.
There was tons of Xboxes set up too and kids playing games.
Maybe that's why.
Maybe it's like kids who wanted to play games and their parents were just milling around.
I don't know.
The Surface Studios were there.
I still think that's really cool.
Has that gone anywhere?
It's a cool idea, but I haven't heard a thing about it since launch.
I would love it if Apple made an iMac like that.
A gigantic touchscreen that can go down to drafting table mode and up into regular 5K screen mode.
If the hinge feels good, the form factor is cool, it's underpowered, it's overpriced.
We've talked about it, but that's an interesting idea.
Yeah.
It runs Windows, so there's that, but...
Other than that, I looked at that and I looked at the iMac and the iMac looks like a previous gen product.
It's like, oh yeah, I remember when computers used to be just like an L-shaped foot and then a screen.
There was no touchscreen on it.
I mean, that's how, like when I was in the Microsoft store, like looking at laptops last year, that's how I felt with laptops too.
Like when you saw like the super skinny bezel laptops with like that one with the pop-up camera and the F and keys.
Like it really does make a lot of Apple designs look very dated by comparison.
Which is funny, because it used to be the opposite.
Or at least less daring.
Yeah, well, it makes them look more conservative.
I mean, you look at anything in the Microsoft store, and you see Apple's design from three years ago.
Like, the reason all their keyboards look like they do, and they borrow so much from Apple's design aesthetic, but they're so much more daring.
Well, unfortunately, it's more than three years ago, though.
It used to be that PC designers looked... It looked like PC designs looked like Apple products from two or three years ago.
now it looks like pc designs look like apple products 10 years ago two or three years yeah or no yeah i guess in yeah you're right it's like the other direction the keyboard aesthetic of of this current keyboard like that it's sitting in front of me now that come you know the the flat keys on the thin keyframe thing with the very squared off edges and like whatever like apple pioneered that aesthetic in their laptops and it spread through microsoft's products and and the aesthetic microsoft has of like the
gray on gray rectilinear brushed aluminum thing owes a lot to Apple.
But then Microsoft takes that ball and runs with it.
Like the Surface Studio, I mean, the fact that it just was like a big screen, like what do you expect screens to look like?
The fact that it has a black bezel around it, it looks a little bit iMac-y, but that chrome hinge is like a remix of the arm on the, you know, the...
iMac thing and then the little case is like an oversized Mac mini in a different color of beige like you see how it's a kind of a mishmash but then the Surface stuff is Microsoft's own thing that if anything Apple has followed along a little bit and sort of squaring off the edges on the iPads and stuff I don't know it's a good mix and I think Microsoft
microsoft like has taken up residence as a semi-premium pc vendor because i'm not going to say the most premium pc vendor because there are fancy pcs and there are ones with different aesthetics like the you know alienware origin or whatever all these gaming pc makers are and some of that stuff is really cool too but
that's one of the reasons i'm ordering this microsoft mouse a mouse i tried it and i'm like you know what this these buttons feel good this wheel feels solid this mode switch feels satisfying seem like a quality made peripheral and it was priced like one like it's not a 30 mouse so i'm i'm i'm optimistic that i actually like that product when i get it yeah microsoft has always been really good about input devices like their keyboards and mice have always been really rock solid
I mean, I hated the – Microsoft's first peripherals, their first mouse and their first keyboards, I hated those with a fiery passion.
They felt cheap.
They weren't shaped the way I wanted them.
But the new ones are more premium.
They feel solider.
They cost five times as much, right?
They've done – they've amplified themselves.
But those old peripherals had a particular style and tons of people love them.
Like how many people had Microsoft mice on their PCs for years and years?
It was like –
de facto, you know, the standard mouse that you would see on anyone who cared anything about mice, you'd get the Microsoft one.
The PC vendors shipped them.
So, you know, they've just sort of moved up market a little bit.