Xcode in Anger
I'm actually going to need you to wait a few minutes until I finish what I'm doing here.
I'm doing something extremely important.
You pay more bills?
No, no, no, not tonight.
That is a deep cut.
No, I'm entering the Virginia Tech football schedule for this fall.
It's a very important business.
Where are you entering it?
Hey, for what it's worth, I'm weaning myself off of football.
It doesn't seem like you are.
It seems like you're preparing to settle in for another season.
I'm weaning myself off of football by entering every single game that my HomePods play into my calendar.
No, I've weaned myself off the NFL because the NFL is terrible.
Even leaving aside football as a terrible sport, which I'm not debating is terrible.
The NFL is particularly and uniquely terrible.
And it just so happens that my favorite NFL football team is also terrible.
And so that was a really good time to just wean myself off the NFL.
But that's like saying, like, I give up alcohol except beer.
Yeah, yeah.
Baby steps.
Baby steps, man.
Not really.
I don't smoke weed.
I just listen to fish.
That's very different.
You know it.
All right.
We should probably get started with some follow-up.
And Blake Walsh wanted this.
I don't know if I should be offended by this or overjoyed by this.
Probably overjoyed.
But this is the most preposterous yet beautiful follow-up we've gotten in a while.
Blake Walsh wanted us to know that we were not looking at the Windows logo on one of John's mice.
We were actually looking at the Microsoft logo because it is a perfect square rather than whatever you call that other object, which is like slanty on the top and the bottom.
This is amazing.
This is not the Windows logo.
That's the Microsoft logo.
You can obviously tell the difference because the Microsoft logo is basically straight, and the Windows logo is basically the same thing in italics.
It's like... It's like, okay, totally different.
Same thing, but slanted.
Ooh.
You know, this is one of those pieces... So here... This is a little inside baseball, but...
You know, when one is a podcaster, especially doing a nerdy podcast, one will receive all sorts and manner of feedback.
And nerds often, but not always, are not the most socially adept creatures.
And sometimes the feedback comes across deeply obnoxious, even if it really honestly wasn't meant that way.
This is one of those times where I think it really could have been one of those like, oh, this could go real bad.
You know, like, hey, you idiots.
That's the Windows.
That's not the Windows logo.
That's Microsoft logo.
What's wrong with you?
But no, thank you, Blake Walsh, for for riding that line ever so deftly.
And this this was well done, well executed.
I was happy to receive this.
This was quite funny.
It wasn't the only one to send it, though.
A lot of people sent this feedback.
I'm just so happy that, like, obviously, you know, a company like Microsoft, when they changed their logo, you know, this is not a small process.
And I can imagine, like, all the board meetings and design reviews and research surveys and branding exercises that all led them to finally come up with
Here's a square with two lines forming gaps that make window panes.
This is going to be the Microsoft logo.
And then, all right, now we need a Windows logo.
Go through all that same process again, and then they come out with the exact same thing.
This is not a new logo, by the way.
It's been a logo for years.
And I'm familiar with the Windows one from all that time.
I spent watching the Windows 10.
installer run I think what threw me on the mouse other than me just being old is that I'm used to seeing the new Microsoft logo in its color form like it's a play on the old you remember think back to Windows 95 the Windows logo it's like a wavy flag with these little pixelated squares coming off the end
and that that you know wavy flag is cut into four pieces and the four pieces are different colors right the modern microsoft logo is a play on that where it is flattened out because you know flat versus the puffy whatever 90s era design and the colors are slightly different and muted or whatever right but that's what that's what it is like it's not
Yes, when you look at it, it is four squares stuck to each other, right?
But if you know the history of the logo, you're like, oh, I see how that's kind of a modern simplification and refinement of what I knew to be the Windows logo.
But it's not the Windows logo.
It's the Microsoft logo.
And then the Windows logo itself looks more like a window.
You know, it's perspective skewed.
So it looks like a window on the side of a house.
And I think there's a color variant of that, maybe.
But anyway, you see it in Windows itself, surprise, when you're watching the installer and when you're logging in and stuff like that.
I actually don't think the logos are that bad.
It is just very, in the black and white version, there's really not much to it.
And you really need to have a little bit more character, I think, to pull off a monochrome logo.
Like, the Apple logo is pretty darn good, let's just say.
And it looks good in color.
It looks good in its original rainbow stripes.
And it looks good in monochrome.
And also, you know, it's got a strong outline.
This does not really have a strong outline.
If you didn't even know it was a company logo, you know, and you saw it on the mouse, you're like, I think it would just be invisible.
The Windows logo does look like more like a logo because it is perspective skewed.
So I think that's not actually that bad.
But both of them require you to have sort of a cultural knowledge of the history of Microsoft and
related stuff to get anything from it, whereas you don't have to know anything about Apple the company to understand the cultural significance and American significance of the Apple, biblical significance of the Apple, and with the bite out of it and everything.
It's all there in the logo.
You don't need to know that it's Apple Computer and Steve Jobs worked on an orchard and all that other stuff.
Anyway, not every company can be Apple.
Yeah, I didn't know that.
I don't think Microsoft is.
I think these logos are actually not that bad.
And I certainly like the Windows logo better than the weird wavy flag Windows 95 one, which was very dated, even when it was new.
Of course you would say that.
All right, John, tell us about how you get that darn Dropbox icon out of the Finder, if you please.
Situ Shah wrote in to tell me how to get rid of the Finder extensions.
It's not like a preference in Dropbox anymore where it's like you disable Finder integration.
I had totally forgotten that there is an extensions preference pane because I'm not reviewing the OS anymore and I forget about these things.
And in it, there is a whole list of all sorts of extensions.
There is one category called Finder.
And if you go to the Finder extensions, I have a bunch listed here.
that are mostly just the Apple built-in ones.
Oh, that's just the Finder things.
Yeah, there's Finder and Finder extensions.
Not that that's confusing.
Anyway, I have OneDrive, Dropbox, some Adobe thing, Expand Drive, iCloud Drive, and also Dropbox.
And so I disabled Dropbox.
In fact, I unchecked every single box in the Finder extensions thing just to cover all my bases.
Did that fix the problem?
No, it did not.
I'm glad to know that this is here.
but it didn't fix it.
But while I was in here messing with this stuff, I was like, what else can I turn off?
Can I just stop anything from extending anything to see if I can find out what this problem is?
I scrolled down the sort of source list on the left-hand side, and I clicked on Quick Look, which is also a thing in the Finder.
There are Quick Look plugins when you can, you know, select the file in the Finder, hit space bar, and it will preview it, and you can have plugins that understand different file formats and everything.
And when I clicked on the Quick Look sidebar item in this preference pane,
In the background, all my Finder windows instantly spawned toolbars.
Just clicking on the quick look.
What?
Just clicking on the item.
Like, not actually doing it.
Let me see if I can do it again.
This happened right before the show, so it's fresh in my mind.
Let's get this, and let's see.
If I click on quick look.
Yep, did it again.
Reproducible.
I just clicked on quick look, and all my Finder windows, boop!
Popped inside toolbars.
So there's some weird stuff going on here.
Investigation continue, but I'm glad to know that there is some kind of reproduction.
I'll probably try to make a movie of this and send it to Apple in vain.
Moving on, anonymous Pro Display XDR presets.
John, tell us about your Pro Display XDR, if you please.
The presets aren't anonymous.
This is an anonymous source on Pro Display.
Is that not what I said?
Sorry.
I immediately glaze over when I see Mac Pro Talk, so my apologies.
It's not Mac Pro Talk.
You can use this display with Marco's laptop.
Not with my iMac Pro, though, so it's dead to me.
Well, you can just at 5K, right?
I think that's right.
Yeah.
Anyway, I was asking the questions about the display, like sort of profile presets.
One of them was called Pro Display XDR P3 1600 nits, and one was like Apple Display P3 500 nits.
What was the deal with those?
So here is an anonymous source giving a fairly authoritative answer.
So it's basically what you would expect...
In the default Pro Display XDR P3 1600 nits one, it can display up to 1600 nits of HDR content, but it's only when it's showing HDR stuff.
The Mac OS UI renders an SDR with a maximum of 500 nits, and you can control that brightness with the sort of brightness slider and the buttons on your keyboard or whatever.
But it composites any HDR content into that same scene.
You can see this really well if you get the Arial screensaver, which is like the...
Apple TV, slow motion flying over cities, movie screensaver.
Someone ported that to the Mac because all of those video URLs are publicly accessible.
The video files are publicly accessible URLs on Apple servers.
So someone made a screensaver out of them.
And a bunch of them are 4K and HDR.
So when you go to the screensaver preference pane, the whole rest of your screen is SDR because the entire Mac UI is SDR.
But this little tiny window is HDR showing you a preview of what the screensaver is going to look like.
And it's like this little tiny portal into a brighter world inside your monitor.
It's really freaky.
Although it does make me wish...
they should like update the mac os ui to be hdr like somehow so then the next you know remember how amazed we were at aqua like wow look at this ui it's like a movie interface and everything squishes and everything is like composited and there are soft shadows and you can see through stuff and let's slow motion genie a playing movie into the dock the next the next step of that the next wow factor is hdr ui you heard it here first
But Arial, that screensaver, is very good, by the way.
It's my preferred screensaver if I'm not just going to put up family pictures or something like that.
It is very, very good.
Yeah, and one more bit on the display stuff.
So the SDR preset is there if you want to see, for people who want to see what content will look like on an SDR display, right?
So sometimes you're creating content that not everyone has an HDR television or monitor or whatever, and you want to see what it's going to look like.
So the SDR preset is tailored for that.
And this person suggests that
Unless you're doing that, unless you are trial running content to make sure it looks okay in SDR, just leave it on the default, which is what I'm doing.
P3 1600 nits.
I love the idea of running the Arial screensaver, especially on an XDR, because you have the whole original idea of the screensaver, of like, let's make your screen do something that's going to keep it in motion and everything so it doesn't get burning or whatever else.
So basically, literally try to conserve the screen's lifespan.
Yeah.
And meanwhile, you're going to do something that requires downloading hundreds of gigs of video and then playing it, playing HDR video so that the screen actually uses more of its capacity while it's allegedly idling.
But it still keeps the thing in motion.
So if you're worried about image retention or whatever, it's not keeping the same image.
It changes slowly, but...
you know, enough that the image changes on the screen.
And it's only 33 gigs, by the way.
I know because I downloaded them all because I have so much disk space.
Disk space.
This is going to be like when we talk about taping things, you realize.
Yeah, right.
Disk space.
Like, what the hell is disk space?
Yeah.
It's almost as bad as somebody abbreviating pictures picked.
No, that's totally unrelated.
Although people are going to say, and why is disk with a K?
It really annoys you when people don't understand disk with a C versus disk with a K when it comes to computer technology because you see it all the time and it's very consistent.
But people, I guess, are not that observant.
Anyway, all this knowledge will be lost like tears in rain.
All right.
Tell me, John, about your Logitech G305 Lightspeed mouse, if you don't mind.
We talked about my last episode, but I didn't have that one.
I now do have it.
I was motivated to get it even without actually trying it in person because I'm like, I'm never getting to the store.
I'm never going to actually go to Best Buy and try to
you know try this thing so let me just get it uh mostly because i heard from a lot of people who are fans and it has a higher uh refresh rate like it does a thousand samples per second and the other ones are like 500 or something it's like you know it's a very high sampling rate for games so you can do fast motion with the mouse and it can keep up with it and you know i won't lose track of where you are and all the other good stuff um and this is like a
it's not like a high-end gaming mouse it's like a low-end one but it's got the same shape as my beloved old crappy mx 300 slash logitech usb wheel mouse thing it's so clearly like the same plastic molds but like with a modernized front it's kind of like when they put a new you know front fascia on a model of car with anyway like a tesla yeah i'm sure on the inside it's totally different anyway
i got it i'm using it right now uh the absurd thing which is kind of explicable when you you know you can explain it but it still seems a little absurd is remember i installed like the logitech software that i was saying really it was really cool and you know managed all your devices and had settings and put it in the cloud and all that stuff well the gaming line of mice has its own software that is totally unrelated to the consumer side it has its own website too by the way if you go to logitech.com and look at all the mice
you won't see a single gaming mouse.
You have to go to, like, LogitechG.com or something.
They, like, have all their gaming brand where everything is, you know, black with RGB LEDs in it and everything.
And they don't even, like, they don't even, like, cross-promote, it seems like.
It's just two totally different bins.
So here I am over in the G land, and I got this G mouse.
First of all, it's incredibly light.
I know this is a thing with mice.
People take out the one AA battery, and sometimes people put in a lithium battery, which is lighter, or they get one of those adapters to let you use a AAA in a AA space just to save weight.
The new trend now is gaming mice with holes in them, like sort of cheese grater holes, like mesh plastic to be just incredibly light.
So this thing is very, very light.
It kind of makes sense.
It has more momentum, although I do wonder with the lightness thing,
If you watch people review gaming mice on YouTube or whatever, they're all about weighing them on their little food scales to find out how many grams they are.
And yes, it takes less force to stop a mouse from moving in one direction and move it into another.
You can change direction more quickly with less effort with a lighter mouse.
Totally makes sense.
But I question the assumption that being able to change direction
with very little force, is necessarily good given the vagaries of the human motor system.
Like, a little bit of momentum in terms of when your mouse is headed in one direction and you try to slow it down and bring it in another direction to correct.
I'm not sure, like, just imagine you were doing it with an invisible mouse, a zero-gram mouse.
I'm not sure that's the best performance for gaming.
Like, I think a little bit of the momentum is good to smooth out the, you know, the twitching of your tendons.
I don't know.
Anyway, the gamers love light mice.
So it's very light.
That has the side effect of making it feel cheap.
Because, you know, like stereo components and all sorts of other things, tungsten cylinders, if they're light, they feel cheap.
Like it feels like there's nothing in it.
Because guess what?
There's nothing in it.
The plastic is thin.
The thing itself is light.
It feels cheap.
um it glides really nice it's got four feet on the bottom i think let me see yeah uh four feet plus it's also oh it's got a little turdy fifth foot at the very tail like a little dot and it's got a little bit of the non-stick stuff a non-slip non-slip the slippery stuff around the sensor so maybe six feet anyway
Glides really smooth.
Tracking is unbelievable.
It comes with its own new little dongle.
It doesn't work with the Logitech Unified dongle.
It comes with its own little dongle, the Lightspeed dongle, which looks exactly the same, but it's totally different.
It also comes with an extension cable to extend the dongle away from your interference having USB 3.0 peripherals.
it's mostly just to get it close to your mouse it's like a very long thin cord that you could snake from your computer and put it presumably like right in front of your laptop like it's it's got like little feet on this little dongle thing that says you know it it's like a usb extension cable but with little feet on it so it can be just like an intramural thing so you're getting maximum signal strength on your wireless mouse
um and it really is shaped like my old mouse so it's like hey old friend has come back but it's got two side buttons on the side and because it's shaped like my old mouse there's no place for those side buttons to hide so i kind of feel them by my thumb because they're right on the flat side of the mouse and you know they can't they're not perched up on the top of it or whatever and then the scroll wheel finally the scroll wheel is
plasticky rubberized stuff it is better than my ancient mouse but it's not in the same league as any of the metal wheels it feels cheap it makes more noise when it turns here listen to it you know you can hear it and it you know there's no free spinning there's no ratcheting there's no different modes the button where the ratcheting you know switcher thing usually is changes dpi so you can change to like less sensitivity when you're sniping or whatever
anyway why would you want okay because when you're zoomed in and sniping and you want to make fine adjustments with larger motions of your your hands you know i mean i i guess yeah that's the thing i mean it comes it's such a prominent feature on the gaming mouse lines that you can configure uh up to like maybe five or six or seven different dpi levels and configure exactly what they are and then cycle through them and have like keys to swap to them like when you hold down shift it'll swap to one and then the other one will be the default you can hit the button to cycle through them
The software is very complicated and very gamery.
And both of them, by the way, the original Logitech Options software installed like a local web server or something that I immediately disabled.
God knows what it's doing.
I haven't even looked at what this gaming thing installed.
Actually, I looked at the package content.
They use Pacifist, which is a great program you should check out.
It lets you open any .pkg file on the Mac and see what's inside it and probably will let you know
where it's going to install them, like what is included, are there any launch agents or launch daemons, files going into application support, are files going into user local.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah.
I looked inside of this one and had a bunch of drivers for, like, force feedback, wheels.
Like, it's their Logitech gaming software, period.
It's not just for this mouse.
So if I buy any Logitech gaming peripherals, it works with this.
So now I have two large wads of Logitech code running.
Oh, and by the way, this mouse...
the drivers that come with it there's like a menu bar icon a logitech gaming menu bar icon and i think if you quit that thing all that software that goes with the mouse just goes away and then the mouse is controlled by you know just mac os and it feels different like the logitech software that's controlling it has a bazillion settings and it feels different when you use it that way that when you quit the software the whole mouse feels different so i kind of feel like i have to run the software when i'm using the mouse
that would be a deal breaker for me same like i don't mind when software like writes settings to the mouse and then you can quit it and the mouse kind of retains those settings i don't mind that it has that feature like there is memory on the mouse and it's also you can save them on the internet or whatever but i in my brief experimentation even when i write the settings to the mouse and when i quit the software i think the acceleration curves are different because you can customize that too and the os's acceleration curves are different as well i realize i'm also running steer mouse i turned off steer mouse for this mouse so i think it's just using logic software
None of them feel bad with them without the software.
I don't feel bad, but it feels a little bit better with, because I spent all that time tweaking the DPI settings and everything.
And I don't know what you're saying about it being a deal breaker.
Like, how many drivers?
And the menu bar icon is not monochrome, by the way.
It's bluish.
So it's like, ugh.
Oh, another deal breaker for me.
Yeah.
But that said, I think this is my... This mouse is closest to what I was looking for in terms of the shape.
Like, it almost is... I bet it's the same damn plastic molds.
Like, the buttons are different, but it's...
it's it's what i was looking for with the side buttons aside and i'm kind of glad to have a gaming mouse because if i ever do do any gaming like you know boot into windows and try playing destiny once i get a better video card or whatever i'll probably use this mouse because uh the thousand you know a thousand hertz polling uh stuff and all of the uh configuration options for this and presets for different games and everything
I like it.
It's good.
But for my day-to-day stuff, I think I might be back to my current winner, which is I think now still the Microsoft Precision Mouse.
Because here's the thing.
When I use the Precision Mouse, it's like knobs in cars on toasters and stereo equipment.
It feels expensive.
I'm sitting in front of what I know to be objectively a very stupidly expensive computer, and when the things I touch with my hands also feel expensive, I'm like, ah, I'm sitting in front of my expensive computer.
When I use this mouse, I'm like, what is this am I using?
This feels kind of janky and lightweight, and I could crush it with my fingers because the plastic is so thin.
It doesn't feel expensive.
It's just stupid.
It's like, why do you care?
But that's an important part of the interface.
I mean, if you buy like a...
A car with a nice leather-wrapped steering wheel versus a car with a shiny plastic steering wheel with like plastic mold seams on it.
It doesn't really matter how great the car is.
If you take and search your favorite car here, whether it's a luxury sedan or a sports car, and you slap on a steering wheel from like a 1984 Chevy base model, you know...
it's not going to feel as good.
Even though the car is the same and has the same performance characteristics and the same ride and the same handling, it feels worse because the thing you're touching feels cheaper.
And that is definitely the experience of using the very light gaming mouse with my very heavy and expensive computer.
and also you know the squirrel wheel like just feels way better on the microsoft one it is my favorite squirrel wheel i'm very addicted to it now i do like the lack of a thumb shell from this one so anyway i'm going to give this one a few more days just because i for all these mice i want to use them for multiple days not just past judgment after a day of use um but that's my judgment so far on the logitech g305 light speed
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Thank you to Casper for sponsoring our show.
So I wanted to call your attention to a podcast by a friend of the show, Jonathan Mann, called As It Happens, Song A Day.
And this is a podcast he's doing chronicling him creating a song every single day.
You know him because he does the closing theme for the show.
And some of you also know that there's stuff that happens after that theme, which we've talked about on and off over the last several years.
Anyways, the episode that came out this week, I don't know what number it is, but I'll put a link in the show notes.
It's about the post-WWDC episode from this past June, which includes tweets from me and I think Marco and John, if I'm not mistaken.
It certainly includes tweets from some of us.
And it's a quick 15 minutes on the nose, and I listened to it earlier, and it's quite enjoyable.
So I just wanted to point you in that direction if you wanted to check it out.
yeah the whole process of writing songs to me as somebody who has never done anything even close to that seems like magic like and and i think you know one thing the jonathan mann shows is that you know you can get surprisingly good at that if that's what you do and you practice like that's what he does he's been practicing by writing songs every day for i mean how long has it been like 10 years something nine years something like that
he's gotten really good at it.
And it's, it's really interesting to hear his process.
And that's, that's what this podcast does.
Like it explains, like it's him talking through and you can kind of see like how, how these songs get made.
And I, I don't know.
I find that fascinating.
Real-time follow-up, over 10, January 2009.
My mistake.
There you go.
I can't imagine writing a song, much less a song a day for, what is that, 11 years?
Good grief.
And more importantly, doing anything once per day.
Yeah.
Like literally anything.
Especially if it's something that requires some kind of effort.
I mean, I suppose you all brush your teeth every day, but that is a lot less work than...
Coming up with a new song, words, music, and recording it that has never existed before.
And then the next day you got to do it again.
It seems even more like magic when you don't possess that skill up front.
But yeah, like even if I had to just like, you know...
post a tweet on twitter every day like even that is that's that's that's the most nothing is nothing of all time it's like it's like the biggest thing that feels like something but isn't spoiler to all your twitter protests out there it's nothing uh but like that takes nothing nothing at all and yet doing that every day for 11 years it would be nearly impossible
As somebody in the chat room just said, I'm not sure I poop every day.
I think that's a pretty good summary.
At least not every day for 11 years.
You might want to get more fiber in your diet.
Oh, my word.
All right, John, why don't you give us an update on front and center?
You've been hot and heavy with the updates, my man.
What's going on there?
Yeah.
So first, I'll start off with saying thanks to everybody who purchased Front and Center.
I'm assuming it is only people who listen to the show because my experience has shown that no one who didn't listen to me explain at length what this thing does understands what it does, which is not their fault.
It is a weird it's a weird program that's hard to explain half of the difficulty of.
releasing this is trying to explain to people who are looking at it what it does so that if they decide that they think they want it and they get it they won't be surprised by what it does or doesn't do but anyway uh we got a lot of uh press coverage on the first day from you know all my friends it was nice i thank all of them for that and as you would expect for an application like this which is like i said probably the most trivial application that could actually exist on the app store and not get rejected um
That one day of coverage resulted in the vast majority of its sales.
Again, thank you to everybody who bought it.
And then, you know, the sales dropped off to nothing.
And so my plan has always been, as I discussed, to eventually raise the price from $2.99 in my deterrence pricing strategy, mostly because I just don't, like, after, basically after sales dropped to zero, I don't want anyone accidentally buying it on an impulse and being disappointed because it's difficult to explain and people don't read
on the internet or in the app store they just see the icon and see some screenshots and think they know what it does and then they get it and they're disappointed because it doesn't do what they want so I want to keep those people away I don't want people to buy it and be disappointed so I raised the price like yeah today today I raised the price from $2.99 to $4.99 and
to keep away uh the riffraff um and don't worry this is not affecting sales because they'd already dropped nothing so it's not a big deal um but still uh it did much better than i thought obviously the press coverage helped apple sponsored uh apple not sponsored put it in their little like top or like their editorial section where it's like games that we are apps that we love right now on the mac app store um so i'm very thankful for that i got to look at the sales graph to see like the first day of coverage is like
99% of the sales or 95% of the sales.
Then the sales go down like a rocket.
And then when Apple added it to the apps we love, there's a little tiny lump, which I appreciate.
I appreciate that lump, Apple.
Thank you so much for that lump because it's better than zero.
But it just goes to show the Mac App Store is not
a place where visit people visit every day whereas say daring fireball is a place that people visit every day so if you're featured in daring fireball you will get way more sales than if you are featured on the mac app store in the games we love section or an atp for that matter because obviously us talking about in the show really helped and again thank you to everyone who bought it
You can buy sponsorships at ATP.fm slash sponsorship.
You got it wrong again.
It's ATP.fm slash sponsor.
Oh, jeez.
I never go there.
I never have to sponsor the show.
I can promote my stuff for free.
All right.
Speaking of your stuff, have you bought a Mac Pro yet?
No.
So last episode, I had mentioned that I was having trouble with my iMac Pro for the first time ever.
That I was getting noticeable fan noise when doing things that just heated up the CPUs a little bit.
And that I had spent most of the last two years using this computer never hearing any bit of the fan at all.
And I heard from a couple other people who had a similar problem or had heard of other people having a similar problem.
At the time, I thought, let me just try blowing out the computer.
I assume it's dust that's impeding the thermals.
And so I'll try blowing it out.
So I brought it into the garage very carefully on my lap on the floor with an air compressor.
And try blowing it out first, you know, blowing out into the intake or into the exhaust.
So it would like blow stuff out the intakes.
And nothing really came out of it.
And then I tried blowing into the intakes themselves at various angles.
And a couple of very small pieces came out, but nowhere near what I was expecting.
And then I vacuumed the intake holes to kind of finish up, but obviously I can't really tell what came out of that, but it didn't seem like there was a lot of dust in there.
But I can tell you that before the cleaning, the idle temperature was about 10 degrees higher Celsius than after the cleaning.
Wow.
I did a quick little benchmark running Cinebench and looking at the fan RPMs over time.
And the iMac Pro usually idles around 1100 RPM.
That's when you basically can't hear the fan at all.
Before the cleaning, it would be at 2400 RPM by about 45 seconds into Cinebench.
And after the cleaning, 45 seconds in, it was still at the idle speed of 1100 RPM.
And the highest it ever got before the cleaning was about $2,500.
After the cleaning, the highest it got was $1,500.
It took 68 seconds to get that high.
Even that's only very slightly audible.
So I consider it a success, even though it doesn't appear as though a lot of dust actually came out of it.
But maybe I moved it around in there just enough.
I don't know.
Or maybe there was some dust in just the wrong place.
I don't know.
But whatever it is, it now is significantly better thermal performance.
And it seems to be either back to normal or close enough to back to normal that I no longer notice it.
So, success!
You know what you need on your computer, Marco?
Access to the inside.
Way bigger holes.
Yeah, honestly.
Way bigger holes and more of them.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, definitely.
While I did solve the problem and while I do still love this computer...
this moment did make me wish for a tower so I could just like because I have no real access to the insides of this thing unless I do heavy disassembly like taking the screen off which I'm not going to do so I do wish at that moment I wish I had a Mac Pro instead but that moment alone is not enough to make me actually ditch my setup and buy a Mac Pro
Yeah, the Popular Mechanics article was talking about this was the, you know, exactly how widely spaced the heatsink fans are on the things in the Mac Pro.
I mean, obviously the holes in the front are big and we talked about them not having a dust screen because they want the fans to be able to run more smoothly and pull the air.
There's a very large holes in the front of it.
not difficult to get air through it but then once the air gets into there and i suspect this is what's going on inside your iMac if there are any kind of heatsink fins the closer those fins are together the more able they are to trap dust and get clogged up like the fins are really far apart in the Mac Pro i don't know if they're like a centimeter apart but they look like you could fit a pencil between them like they're not like you'd expect heatsink fins to be you know sort of stack those together and that's not like the previous Mac Pro or the Power Mac G5 which had very closely spaced fins in which i
often blew out with compressed air because they really did clog up so i'm glad you uh you use the apple and in the uh 2010s and 2020 solution of compressed air to fix your computer yeah because like normally if you're designing a heat sink normally you want as many thin thinly uh you know very thinly spaced fins in the heat sink as possible so you can get as much surface area as possible for the air to blow over so it can cool as well as possible
And so normally you do design them really close together.
And I don't know how much dust plays into the engineering of these things, but clearly on the new Mac Pro, they thought of that.
So, you know, you have these very widely spaced fins on these heat sinks that, you know, you do give up, you know, some density of surface area.
Although you also have a much longer path for the air to go through total, right?
Yeah.
Well, that's why they can't do this in the iMac is because the reason it works at all in the Mac Pro is they're like eight inches long, each fin, right?
So you can get away with having fewer, but there's not a lot of room back there in the iMac.
So just to get enough surface area to cool things, maybe they need to have them more closely spaced.
Or all I know, maybe there aren't even any fins in there.
It's all heat pipe stuff.
I'm not actually, I don't actually recall what's inside that thing.
But the point is, there's not a lot of space in there.
So your options are limited.
They obviously did an amazing job on the cooling system, but it seems more vulnerable to dust.
We'll see how this Mac Pro does.
And how old is your thing?
Three years old now?
A little over two.
And we'll check back in two years.
I can say that I did blow out dust from my 2008 Mac Pro, but never from the CPUs.
I was always just blowing it off of my third-party video card that had its own GPU cooler that just made this terrible dusty mess in there.
I never took compressed air.
to the cpus so i guess they survived dust but it wasn't because there wasn't dust trapped in there there's plenty of it like i said it started the dust started to weld to the inside eventually if you go to the attic and pull up my mac pro you're like oh it looks dusty in there and then you run your finger across it and the dust doesn't move it's just like textured metal now metal that has been textured with dust oh my goodness
Oh, man.
Do you go up there and cuddle your old Mac Pro ever?
Or is it good riddance?
No, but I did.
Did I send you a picture?
I did refactor everything up there.
I got rid of a lot of big boxes, rearranged stuff.
We're still working on the attic.
There's a whole other side that is a gigantic mess.
Looks like a bomb went off.
But my side is looking pretty good lately.
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There's been a big brouhaha this week about iCloud backups, encryption and Apple and whether they really give a darn about privacy or not.
And as chief summarizer in chief, I will do my best to summarize.
Gentlemen, please feel free to interrupt me if I go off the rails.
There was a Reuters article.
Uh, just a couple of days ago saying in summary that Apple had planned to do end to end encrypted backups and then either pre-flighted it with the FBI or somehow got the FBI's, the FBI got wind of it.
And the FBI unsurprisingly said, uh, nope.
And then Apple did an about-face.
Now, what does encrypted end-to-end mean?
What that means is if there's a backup of your phone that resides on Apple's servers but is encrypted from the time it leaves your phone, then—and I'm deeply oversimplifying, to be clear.
But anyways, if it's encrypted from the time it leaves your phone with keys that only you have, then that means Apple would not be able to, say, crack that backup open and send your iMessages to the FBI.
Okay.
Now, obviously, there's good and bad that comes of that.
There's good in that that's hyper private.
It's bad if you are a terrorist or do terrible things and should be investigated for doing those terrible things.
And there's a lot of different ways to look at this.
There's a really good post on Stratechery this week, which I believe was the free post.
If it was, I will put it in the show notes.
But one way or another, there's a lot of different ways to look at this.
But there was also a lot of debate as to whether or not Apple really acquiesced to the FBI or if that story at Reuters was all kind of wrong and backwards.
And there was a series of really good posts on Daring Fireball about this as well.
Is that a reasonable summary?
Again, I know I've oversimplified, but I'm trying to do this in less than 16 hours.
Does that sound about right?
Yeah, it's close.
I mean, I feel like the reason I put all the Daring Powerball links in there is I think Gruber did a good job of sort of trying to make sense of the various stories, all of which could be true at the same time, but not really getting the whole picture.
In particular, I think his most salient point was like the idea that Apple would consider doing a thing, but then go and ask the FBI what they think.
Not because Apple wouldn't ask for permission, but why bother?
You know the FBI's opinion.
You think the FBI's going to go, oh, no, you're good.
Go ahead.
Go do that.
You don't have to ask them to know.
Law enforcement always wants access to this.
There is no situation in which this topic would ever come up and their opinion would be different.
So the idea of Apple bringing this information to them for their opinion or approval is completely ridiculous.
It doesn't change the fact that Apple knows their opinion.
The FBI probably expressed their opinion to Apple many, many times.
That may have factored into Apple's decision.
Now, the other articles that Guru put in here are about interviews with Tim Cook, some of them from years ago, discussing this very thing.
It probably related to previous security blow-ups and FBI asking for access to people's phones or whatever.
And the suggestion was that we're thinking about doing end-to-end encryption for your backups.
uh but one of the reasons this is apple speaking or tim cook one of the reasons i haven't been doing it is because in case you didn't mention this and i think this is actually this sounds like corporate bs but it's actually probably a real thing is that when people uh don't know their passwords and the and their data's gone and it's only in apple's backups if apple couldn't give them their backups people would be angry um
Even if, as Gruber suggested, I'll just make it optional.
Don't make it the default, but for people who care about security, let them enable it.
Everybody thinks they're not going to forget their password, right?
Oh, yeah, I want the maximum security.
And then they forget their password, and then they want to get their data back, and they go to an Apple store, and they say...
I don't remember my password.
Can you just give me my data?
They'd be like, sorry, we can't.
Like, you turned on super-duper encryption.
And the customers will be sad.
Whether or not the customers are angry, some of them probably will be angry because people are people, but universally, they'll be sad.
Oh, those are, you know, I've lost all of my data.
And it's not really everything, because things like photo that appear on the web aren't part of this, because if there's a web page where you can go to to view your photos and anybody can view them there, it's clear that Apple...
has the ability to decrypt them because they're showing them on a web page, but for other stuff, for your contacts, for your text messages, for your notes, for anything that Apple has on their server, any kind of data in any of your iOS applications, if it really was end-to-end encrypted.
It would be a customer service and user experience negative.
And only Apple knows the extent of that because they only they know exactly how many times they end up with customers who don't remember their iCloud backup password and their phone fell on a lake and they want to get a new phone.
They say, OK, where's all my data?
They're like, oh, we'll just log in with your Apple ID.
And they're like, oh, I don't remember that.
i'm sorry well if apple didn't have the ability to say no problem because you've been doing icloud backups we can get your data back for you if they didn't have the ability to do that customers would be sad um so i'm not sure what the solution here is i think the whole government angle is mostly irrelevant because we know what the government's you know we know what law enforcement position is and you know we know what apple's position in general is and i think
One of the reasons that Apple's position is not hardline like encrypt the entire world is this customer service angle.
The other side of it is also Apple's probably sick of legally fighting with FBI over this.
And, you know, this that is definitely a factor.
But I think to to frame it as a.
Apple sacrificing your security to appease the government is a simplification.
It is not factoring in, like I said, what sounds like corporate BS, but I think is a real thing.
And the wildcard in this and Gruber also posted about this is that Android, the world's most popular mobile operating system, or at least if you use Google services, Google does offer end-to-end encrypted backups.
I'm sure the FBI hates that they do that too, but it's not as big a news story maybe because Apple's not involved or whatever.
So I think eventually Apple will probably implement this somehow, some way, and at least give it as an option.
But right now it's not.
It hasn't been for years.
If you're in the sort of security circles, this is not news.
I think we talked about it on this show last time we talked about the FBI thing.
Was it the San Bernardino shooter FBI thing or whatever?
um the fact that the phones and the device is all encrypted and locked away but if you've been doing iCloud backup those are also encrypted but Apple has the key and can give them to you and the stats and the latest thing is like Apple Apple does that thousands of times like law enforcement asks for backups and Apple gives it to them because they have like a warrant or whatever like they comply with the law because they have to if Apple couldn't comply because they were encrypted then they couldn't comply and that would be a different story and that's what they're fighting over but um
You know, of the billions of Android phones, I'm not sure how many of them actually use Google services and use their backup services.
So maybe it's a, you know, a small portion.
But anyway, it's a complicated topic.
And the right thing to do is probably to offer end-to-end encryption.
But I kind of understand why Apple has been waffling for so many years to do so.
Yeah, I mean, it's such a complicated topic in practice for so many reasons.
And a lot of this goes back, like we were talking maybe a month or two back about the complexity of Apple dealing with China and other big world governments where they have to sell products, or they don't necessarily have to, but they basically have to.
And this has a lot of overlap with that.
We're dealing with not just Apple's technical abilities, but
But we're dealing with Apple having potentially large clashes with the countries in which they need to sell phones and their own country that they are based in because encryption is really tricky with law enforcement.
And there's lots of different encryption laws all over the world with what kind of encryption is even legal in different parts of the world.
There's always going to be this friction between the reality of encryption and
and law enforcement because as john said like law enforcement has a job to do their job is to um allegedly solve crimes most of the time um and that is most of the time what they do but they also have a culture of feeling entitled to everything to any possible thing that might even lead to evidence anything that might maybe contain a little bit of evidence and they really really feel entitled to look through your phone and
As encryption gets better, their ability to do that is going down over time.
As various security gets better, as security holes get patched and hopefully not too many more made, it's getting harder for them to access what they consider evidence they are entitled to.
And so, of course, they're going to go to the public.
They're going to make a stinking public.
They're going to try to scare people because throughout all of history, it's been a proven strategy that if you want people to give up their freedoms, scare them, and they will usually give them up more easily.
And so they make all these crazy threats in public about how, oh, you're enabling terrorists and all this stuff and are helping drug dealers.
And they drum up these big, hefty terms and labels and scary things to try to make a public case, try to convince lawmakers maybe to maybe change what the laws are.
None of this has anything to do with the tech, really.
It's all like political and political.
It's very hard for us as tech commentators to fully understand that world and to be able to really say like, oh, they should definitely do this.
They should definitely not do this.
Most of it goes way above our heads.
Most of it is happening behind closed doors or as part of more complicated strategies that we aren't really thinking of or knowledgeable about.
So it's so hard for us to say like, yeah, they should definitely have a full encryption because –
If they do offer full encryption, they are taking a very big risk that that will provoke the government into making full encryption illegal.
And there's lots of reasons why we don't want that.
Because keep in mind also, the legislators are not only people who are incredibly financially bought off for the most part.
And...
The law enforcement complex is a very big complex in this country.
So they're a very powerful lobby.
It's also really bad politically to ever show yourself as being soft on crime at all.
Just like, again, another hack that works with people.
You can't ever say as a politician that you're like...
being a little bit soft on what criminals can do.
So the reality is we're at a very, very dangerous point where we're very close to this kind of encryption becoming illegal.
And to even the US, the country that allegedly has freedoms, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, asterisk, even we...
are very, probably very close to outlawing this kind of encryption at all and to requiring companies like Apple to build in backdoors for our law enforcement agency so they can spy on brown people when they cross the border.
So it's so complicated.
So I know that Apple usually has their head on straight with matters like this.
Even if they're doing things that we see as unpopular,
Or even when they're doing things that we see as capitulating unnecessarily to an oppressive government, whether it's somebody else's or ours.
But in the long run, in retrospect, we can look back on what they've done and usually we can say, okay, that was probably the right move at the time.
So I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to stuff like this most of the time that if they've made a decision –
That doesn't seem quite right to me in this arena, in the area of like dealing with big governments, basically.
They probably had good reason to do it or they didn't have a choice.
And we can complain all we want about that.
We should because the reality is our freedoms are getting eroded at an alarming rate.
But that's not really Apple's fault.
And there are much bigger issues in our own society and government that need to be addressed.
That's where the real problem is.
And if Apple is being forced to really toe a line here, it's probably not Apple's fault.
Are you just being an apologist?
Yeah, you know me.
I'm known for never criticizing Apple.
I don't know.
Like you said, it's so tough and I'm so torn.
And it turns out I was looking.
The Stratechery piece is not free for this week, which is kind of too bad because it's a really, really good piece.
And the gist of it without doing near as good a job as Ben did is that, hey, there's many different ways to look at this.
And, you know, there's compelling arguments on every side of it.
Like I could make a compelling argument that nobody should be able to use encryption in case you are doing something naughty because I'm not doing anything naughty.
No, you could.
You can make a bad argument for that.
Fine, fine, fine.
You take my point.
I can see reasons why one would desire for less encryption.
I don't agree with them, but I can see the reasons why.
Terrible reasons, but yes.
It's like Marco said.
He was saying fear, but it's like appeal to emotion.
All the logical fallacies you can think of are things that motivate people to argue for dumb things like no encryption anywhere, right?
But I think Marco was really getting to the heart of it.
It's like it's doing something less than the absolute right thing as a long-term strategic play to prevent even worse things from happening, which unfortunately in this country in particular, we're in a precarious situation.
It's like you should really be playing the long game a little bit and saying –
I can't make a moment to moment decision of always doing the right thing because it has a high chance of triggering a much worse calamity in the very near future.
If I do like in some respects, when, when slash, if our, our actual United States government was functioning in a reasonable way, each, each of the, the sort of parties involved in any sort of governmental issue is,
should be and it's like the pro workflow group in apple should be lobbying from their position law enforcement should be doing everything they can to get every strap of evidence that's their job they should try as hard as they can within the bounds of the law
they're always going to want more data.
They're always going to want like that, but that is their interest.
Like that's what they're supposed to do.
There has to be a countervailing force, but it's okay.
On the other hand, people have rights and they elect representatives to protect those rights.
So as strongly as law enforcement tries to get all the data and personal information from people,
Equally strongly, our laws and representatives should be protecting the rights of the people from the overreach of law enforcement.
That's how it's supposed to work.
Like, two groups with different interests, like, you know, coming together, balancing each other, checking each other's power, right?
In this country right now, checking each other's power is not working quite the way it's supposed to.
So we're in a dangerous situation where things could go downhill very fast.
And so in this situation, and again, companies want to...
make as much money as they can protect their data from the government you know like be able to make a pitch like apple saying we are the privacy company we'll protect your data because that helps them sell more devices and you know whatever like they haven't apple has interest as well if apple were to lobby as strong as possible for its interest saying we are going to end and encrypt the entire world and middle finger to the government
Because the system of balances of the government itself is not in a healthy state right now, that could very easily tip things.
And so I feel like, you know, this is all more fear-mongering.
Oh, if Apple end-to-end encrypts, that means they'll outlaw encryption.
I don't think that's true at all, right?
All I'm saying is that it's not a slam dunk to say, oh, it's obvious Apple should just, you know, say screw the government and encrypt everything immediately, right?
Because there are potential consequences to that.
and it's worth at least considering them now i think my personal opinion is yes absolutely apple should absolutely end encrypt everything they they should the government will be mad they should do it in a tactful way they should have done it years ago they should we shouldn't even be waiting google already did it apple should have already done it that's my personal opinion but i do understand that every point when apple had to make that decision thinking about even if it was years ago right thinking thinking that
yeah like there's the customer service angle and also as one of the the sources and the routers i would say routers wrote your story said um they didn't want to poke the bear it's like we just got through this big fight with the government we do have to deal with the government that's the worst corporate slime it's like oh well so you're going to screw your customers because you want an easier relationship with the government so you can make more money
That's mostly true, but there are other angles to that exact thing that I just said that are slightly more altruistic than the most cynical possible angle.
So in this case, I think Apple did make the wrong call many times over and continues to make the wrong call, but not by a huge amount, right?
So I grow tired of people who are like stridently like, who really believe that Apple
you know, companies like this or, you know, whoever is in this kind of conflict with the government should always be taking the hardest of hardline positions.
If you are one micron off of the absolute hardline position, you're dead to me.
That is a more reasonable position to take when the system that we're all sort of playing in, sort of the game rules and like the...
The sort of balance of powers and structure of the game rules is such that that is a reasonable thing to do.
But we're not anywhere close to that right now.
And a hardline position in one or two areas can very quickly lead to worse things.
And again, I don't want to be fear-mongering about that.
I just think that's the thinking that...
is factored into apple's decision to essentially do the wrong thing uh multiple times over uh by a small amount and that's before getting even getting into like okay well then apple has to sell products has to apple does sell products across the entire world and everyone else has different encryption laws and how do you deal with that
It's complicated.
It makes you not want to be the CEO of Apple, you know, setting aside having to stand next to Trump at a Mac Pro factory and just depressing episode.
Who put this topic in the notes?
Yeah, and I have much more of a problem with that Mac Pro factory thing.
than I do.
And the whole thing with, you know, the tariffs, like it's one thing if Apple's trying to just make more money off of tariff BS, like, or not, or not pay as much taxes.
Yeah.
Like I have absolutely zero respect for Tim Cook on those fronts, none whatsoever.
But when it comes to standing ground on things like privacy and encryption, I,
he's doing a pretty good job.
And so when it comes to stuff like this, you know, I do have to give him the benefit of the doubt that, yeah, if it's about tariffs and ways that Apple can either cheat the tax system to make more money, even though, I know cheat is a loaded word because it's what all corporations do, but if Apple can, you know, loophole the tax system to make more money or avoid tariffs that many other companies have to pay, like, that's just slimy.
And I have...
Zero respect for how much effort Tim Cook seems to be putting into things like that.
But privacy stuff, it's pretty solid.
And I do give him credit for having a lot of credibility on that front.
They probably have their reasons for the decisions they make or don't make around encryption and privacy and the way it interacts with governments.
I would also say, we're focusing a lot on the government angle here.
don't forget the customer service angle on this as well because i think that's bigger than people realize people do forget their passwords all the time and need apple's help to get back into their stuff all the time and as we lock down security better with things like two-factor and end-to-end encryption we we do cut off avenues for people to have like a way out and we try to tell people okay here's some you know
recovery codes or you know have have iCloud recovery enabled for certain things whatever but the reality is we've heard from people who work in Apple stores all the time that like it's heartbreaking how many people come in and cannot get their data recovered and lose their you know pictures of their children or whatever because they forgot a password and they're locked out of everything in a way that Apple can't help them recover it
That happens all the time, every single day, probably in every Apple store in the world.
Indeed.
Yeah, right?
And so that is such a huge factor.
It wouldn't surprise me if that's a major factor in Apple decision-making in this area, just to leave them an out, because if they didn't have that out, how many more people every day would have that horrible outcome?
I think that's exactly right.
And I even spoke to the genius I was working with.
And, you know, the genius I was working with, they had said that, oh, you know, this happens a lot.
Because I'd asked, you know, do you have to break hearts often?
And I forget.
I don't think I phrased it in that way.
But basically, you know, how often do you have to deal with people who have lost their photos forever?
And the genius said, you know, it happens a lot.
Yeah.
It breaks my heart every time.
And this is why I constantly tell people, you know, you've got to have backups, you've got to have backups.
And said the genius.
And, you know, as I'm watching the different discussions happen around me, it was clear that pretty much nobody that was there was excited to be there, which isn't really surprising.
But at least half, if not three quarters of the people that I saw...
were dealing with potential data loss problems.
And they were devastated because of it.
And I don't know, I didn't hear any specific sob stories about wedding pictures or baby pictures or anything like that.
But it's not a hard thing to imagine.
And yeah, I think you're exactly right, Marco, that I would be stunned if Apple made this end-to-end encryption the default, if it happens at all.
I would be stunned if they made it the default for exactly that reason, for customer service reasons.
Because
That leaves all of the responsibility of the customer.
And when you're a company as big as Apple, I would wager that a lot of your customers are probably not as, I'm trying to find a word better than smart, responsible as they should be.
no i mean it's not and it isn't about intelligence like people people screw up no one's perfect like we screw up too everyone screws up and it's it's nice when you screw up really badly it's nice when somebody can come in and save your ass yep and if you don't leave a way for that to happen you you're playing with fire
And if you have security concerns, like even with Apple's stuff in its current state, just, you know, don't do iCloud backup.
Like you can turn off iCloud backup and then your device will be your device and it will be the only place where your stuff is unless you backup locally to your computer, which you can still do in Catalina through the Finder and yada yada.
Like...
If you are super security conscious, Apple still does give you the tools to do what you want.
But I think, you know, and speaking of customers being said, the Apple store was a lot of stuff.
The introduction of iCloud backups made that better, both because people had the ability to have their pictures someplace other than just on their phone, which was a failure mode before iCloud backup, where someone would be like, oh, my phone broke.
Well, where are my pictures?
Well, can you get them off the phone?
It's like, eh.
the broken phone the phone in the bottom of the lake not really all right so introducing iCloud backup really helped with that you know you know because it would put them on a server and for the people who did remember the passwords you could just get them off the server if you don't remember your passwords Apple could still get them off the server because they had the ability to decrypt it because they had the key for it or whatever but if Apple really wants to make fewer said customers we've talked about this a million times more space for iCloud backups I don't know how many people who was like oh I don't want to enable iCloud backups because it'll fill up because I have too many photos or whatever it's like
Yeah, and I was like, well, just pay a couple bucks a month.
People don't want to pay for backup space.
So fewer people do iCloud backups.
Therefore, more people have the potential to lose data if they drop their phone in a lake because it isn't backed up, independent of remembering or forgetting your password.
Yeah.
Anyway, like I said, I think Apple absolutely should introduce end-to-end encryption for iCloud backups, if only as an option.
And I think they will eventually.
It's just a matter of time.
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You know, one of my favorite things to see in the show notes is something that I don't entirely understand, but I know there's a good story.
And the next line item in the show notes is as follows, quote, Xcode layout hell, end quote.
John, I presume this is you and you've had some bad experience with Xcode.
Yeah, this is a sort of companion to my, you know, just follow-up item about how Front Center was doing.
So I have been in Xcode doing development.
I've done 10 releases of Front Center in the past two weeks, which is too many.
Yeah, and that's all going through the App Store?
Yeah, yeah.
The Mac App Store has not a lot of traffic going on.
It's just things sail through.
Although the very last update did take several days, and then the very last update took, like, 48 hours to propagate, too, so it was really long.
All right, so I always keep thinking, like, oh, maybe they do – you know the thing to do?
Lots of companies do this where, like –
your first whatever your first widget from the widget company comes through really fast to make you have a good impression of the company right like they prioritize new customers on their first widget or whatever their thing is so i was like oh well probably on your first submission to the app store you jump to the front of the queue so you have a positive thing but then as i did my second and third i'm like well am i eventually going to get like throttled like am i going to get on a blacklist like this guy puts out a new release every day put him at the back of the queue um
I don't know.
I don't know the answer to that question.
I think I praised it in the last episode, but my review times have continued to be very good.
Granted, my app is incredibly simple, right?
So it's not requiring lots of deep scholarship to figure out whether it should be approved or not.
But the review time's been fast.
Anyway, I put out 10 releases.
That's too many.
Again, more rookie mistakes.
Hey, how about you just get it right before you put it out?
I know.
But part of it is mindset.
Having never put in anything on an app store that's mediated by a company before, I'm in the mindset of like, I'm a service side developer.
You can deploy five times a day.
I'm just used to the idea of sort of iterative development.
And of course, it can always be a little bit better.
And as soon as you have an improvement, you put out that small improvement to,
you know because why sit on that small improvement well the reason you sit on it is because app review takes a long time and if you spend your whole time waiting for app review you know anyway i need to get in a different mindset for doing things for the app store and just chill a little bit work more on the thing before i release the first version and then maybe batch the updates in more it's difficult because like the first one there's a bunch of bug reports and things that are critical to get out and stuff like that but
Anyway, all this is to say I've been spending a lot of time in Xcode.
And this is the first time I've actually sort of used Xcode in anger to do anything real under any kind of pressure of like, oh, there's a bug.
I need to get it fixed and figure out and so on and so forth.
And surprisingly, of all the new experiences of using sort of modern Xcode where
the last time i used it interface builder was separate and then maybe the last time i used it before that it was called it was called project builder oh yeah yeah yeah you know there's the swift stuff and we talked about that before but like of all the things i didn't think would be driving me nuts it is laying out the controls in my one stupid window my dinky little application it's like a
couple pop-up menus labels checkboxes and some text like that's it and having played with xcode before and played with interface builder and seen a million wwc things like oh you just drag the controls out of the cool little palette and there's all sort of grids and snapping and it'll just put them into your view and you're you're good to go
that has not been my experience of using xcode like i the layout i want to achieve i feel like i could achieve more easily in photoshop or illustrator than i can in xcode part of it is the lack of zoom which i already complained about uh because you know there's little tiny retina pixels and there's no way to actually zoom in in uh the xcode interface builder thingy on the mac apparently in ios you can zoom but not on the mac
so i've been using the screen zoom you know sort of control mouse wheel or whatever but that just makes the pixels a little chunky or whatever but really it's like apple has i'm i'm you know sifting through the rubble of every layout system that apple has introduced over the past several years and they're all available at the same time and you can mix them together which you should not do so it took me a while to learn that lesson like do not mix springs and struts and auto layout because you'll drive yourself insane uh
the the idea of a wizzy wig editor hey just put the controls where you want in the window right and then you run the application and your controls are all over the place it's like what's the point of wizzy wig if the control is going to shoot off off into some other direction like it's not there in the thing like oh it's just driving me insane and then once i eventually resign myself to say look stop trying to be fancy
The old ways are best.
This window is not resizable.
Pixel perfectly place every control and just never have it move.
Even doing that is driving me insane because like, oh, what if you want to add another control?
I'll just make the window taller and put the new control.
Oh, when I do the thing, auto resize the subviews is on somewhere because it's dragging something down.
I got to hunt through the thing and turn off all the springs and struts and everything.
And then I'm in there trying to line stuff up.
There are guides in Xcode, but there's also grid snapping and there's also guide snapping and there's also snapping to controls.
trying to give you the proper spacing between things trying to let you align the baselines of text but then being off by like a half a point right like one retina pixel and then i got to go in there and put put fractional numbers in the positions in the text fields 10.5 instead of 10 because they're not lined up even though the guide snapping says they're going to be it's like oh my god this should be so much easier like this should be like a grid it should be like snap snap snap snap like everything should be just chunky gigantic 16 by 16 point grids or whatever it's
you know it it should be impossible for things to be off by one pixel but it's not not only is it not impossible it's practically impossible not to have things off by one or two pixels and i just want to do things like i want this to be the same distance as that like i wish i was an omni graph i wish i was in photoshop i wish i was in illustrator i wish it was in any other application that lets me put things on a canvas and align them in some sane way other than this hell that is x-code interface building this is one window for
One tiny little... Granted, I'm terrible at this.
I'm bad at this.
I'm a beginner.
I'm a novice.
I don't know what I'm doing.
I have fundamental misunderstandings of how things are supposed to work.
But I'm not entirely ignorant.
And I feel like the thing I'm trying to do, getting back to the Swift thing, easy things should be easy.
What I'm doing is an easy thing.
This is not a...
fancy program it's got one stupid window with some controls in it it should be so easy to do the right thing and get a correctly laid out window there there are places where you have to make decisions about you know subjective aesthetic decisions or whatever but in general it should be impossible to have things like one pixel off misaligned because you sneezed when you were trying to move something
so i am really struggling with that struggling to the point where i've got xscope which by the way is an amazing application from icon factory that lets you sort of overlay on your screen rulers and guides and you know frames and all sorts of other things i'm there zoomed in with xscope lining up everything single thing by by single retina pixels making sure okay
i'm gonna send this to the app store are all the freaking colons lined up on my labels oh that one moved the hairline i gotta move it back are the baselines are all in a text line oh this one's aligned but that one's not how is that possible are these things exactly this number of points away from each other how many points is it supposed to be i don't know but when i drag it i see the little guide and it snaps that but sometimes it doesn't show the guide so when it doesn't show the guide i have to measure the other gap and say if the guide was visible it should be this far apart so this is
one two three four five six seven eight retina pixels let me move it eight random pixels down here oh you can't use the arrow keys for that because it doesn't do the half pixel oh it's driving me insane i don't know how anybody does any substantial application with xcode interface building and the answer is of course oh you can just do it all in code and then you put the exact values in why are you bothering with the gui builder
And I tried that approach for a few things.
I've tried a lot of things.
Spoiler for the future, I'm already working on my next application, and I'm using SwiftUI.
And so I tried doing it programmatically.
I tried doing it with auto layout.
I tried doing it with springs and struts.
I tried doing it with SwiftUI.
I'm sampling everything to see if anything is easier.
But thus far, again, caveat, I'm bad at this.
I'm a beginner.
I don't know what I'm doing.
But it should be it should be easier to do these simple things.
And so I my overall thing is I was surprised that this is the thing of all of all the things about making an app and App Store Review and Swift and all the APIs and of all the stuff.
It is laying out the minuscule GUI in my tiny trivial applications that's driving me up a wall.
I'm so sorry.
I hate to tell you, but it doesn't actually get easier the more experience you have.
You're like the opposite of the ad campaign to Marco Arma.
It doesn't get better.
No, it really, when it comes to like using Apple's various layout systems to try to make correctly looking interfaces without that much effort, it actually doesn't get better.
Like it's, you just trade it.
You just trade in one hell for a different hell.
I'm not doing anything fancy.
I have no custom controls anymore.
Yeah, but it isn't about that even.
Custom controls don't actually make it that much harder.
You have a tremendous amount of legacy, you have a tremendous amount of complexity, and you have UIs that are used by people who are mostly experts in them.
And therefore, or rather, they are designed by people who are mostly experts in them.
And so, it's very unintuitive to beginners, first of all, as you have found already.
But...
Auto layout is extremely complicated.
The interface for making auto layout constraints and dealing with them in Xcode is hilariously obtuse, although so is the rest of Interface Builder.
Don't even try to object to that.
I know how to use the GUI now.
I know how to use it.
Auto layout itself is inscrutable, but the UI for doing it can be figured out.
It's just not obvious, but it is not good yet.
yeah so there's all that right then then you also have the problems of first of all you have these many different systems that all have different behavior so you have the old you know auto resizing mask springs and stress system then you have auto layout then now you're doing swift ui which is its own brand new thing which is both completely different and also incredibly immature still so
you have many different problems that you're like juggling between these three different systems.
None of them are great.
Uh, and people have such different opinions that like, you know, whatever I think or Casey thinks is probably going to be different than what you think, John.
Like for me, I, I do everything in code for the most part.
That's not great either.
It just has downsides that I'm willing to tolerate more than the alternatives downsides.
Yeah.
Yeah.
See, I feel like, let me, let me start by saying I've never done anything on the, never written anything for the Mac.
So I can't speak to your particular foibles when it comes to writing Mac OS software, but like Vignette uses storyboards and I've survived.
Like it's fine.
I use auto layout and it mostly works just fine.
And yeah, I, I mean, auto layout's weird, man.
It really is.
But yeah,
I don't think it's entirely inscrutable.
As with all things Apple lately, like the documentation is hot garbage and it's very unapproachable.
I don't think it's inscrutable though.
And I agree that interface builder is very, well, I keep, I mean, obviously it's not interface builder anymore, but laying out an iOS app is very weird.
I wouldn't say it's horrible.
hard necessarily but it's very very weird and the way that ib does things is very unlike any other visual sort of designer i've used in the past and there are definitely times that things are are hard to understand or i get error messages that i can't really make heads or tails of like those things all do exist i'm not saying you're completely wrong or full of crap like your lived experience is factually your lived experience but
I get the feeling up until what Marco said just a moment ago, I get the feeling that you're both saying that IB is hot garbage and is unusable.
And I don't think that's really the case.
It's got its own set of trade-offs.
And Marco, I like what you said a moment ago about how you do everything in code, but that also does indeed have its own set of trade-offs.
And that's fine.
If that works for you, man, then stick to it.
You don't need my permission to keep doing that.
And you certainly don't need me guilting you into using IB.
Yeah.
For me, I like laying out these things visually, and it's easier for me to reason about it visually than to do it in code.
And I've also found that IB is much easier to tolerate when you either have an extremely small team or a team of one.
And so...
When I was at WorkWork, when I had an actual real job, I eventually got to the point that we were passing around some sort of trinket, I forget what it was, to kind of claim who was using the storyboard or whatever nib at the time, which is absolutely barbaric.
I mean, it was like using exclusive checkouts in Perforce way back in the day, which is also barbaric, if you ask me.
But that's what we needed to do.
So, yeah, I'm not saying interface builder is perfect, but I also don't think that it's a complete, utter disaster, at least with iOS.
Again, I'm not trying to argue with you, John, about macOS.
macOS may indeed be that bad of a disaster.
But on iOS, I mean, it works for me.
It's not perfect, but it works for me.
I mean, it's not completely worthless.
I think iOS has it a lot easier.
Yeah.
Yes, I would completely agree with that.
It is significantly harder to make a well-laid interface on the Mac than it is on iOS, because for lots of reasons.
I mean, the Mac is just more complicated.
There's way more UI usually to a Mac app.
iOS apps tend to have significantly less UI.
There are fewer standards that you're supposed to comply with on iOS.
Making a great Mac UI is significantly harder than a great iOS UI.
Or even just a reasonable-looking Mac UI.
Here's the thing about Mac versus iOS.
On the Mac, you have this giant blank canvas that is a window that can be any size, any shape, and you can put a billion things on them, and you can put them anywhere.
There's really no precedent for that in iOS, because in general, in iOS, first of all, you're usually full screen or half screen or quarter screen or whatever.
And you're using controls and things that essentially define bounding boxes for themselves.
You've got a table view.
A table view has rows.
Within the row, maybe you have some freedom to lay things out.
But there's like a thing on the right and a thing on the left.
And you can align them and you can have padding.
And that's about it.
And that is incredibly constrained compared to here's a gigantic gray window.
Throw these 900 controls on them.
And that's where you really need the tool to help you.
All right.
What should the margins be on this window?
How far away should a label be from its pop-up menu?
How wide should the pop-up menus be?
how much space should there be between them if you have to group them how should you group them should you group them with white space or you group them with a bounding box if you make a bounding box does everything get nested in that view or it should not be nested in the view once they're nested in multiple views can you align things and they're supposed to be aligned if you're in a good mac design things in these little gray boxes should be aligned with each other like the labels should all line up but you can't actually align them with the tool because you can't command click or shift click items that are in different bounded views so you can take them out of the views but then every time you try to move them they re-nest themselves into the view it's like
the tools are not helping and you really need help from the tools because you don't have help from the controls themselves.
They're not things nested inside each other and they don't tend to go from edge to edge and define sort of regions or whatever.
I'm not saying that iOS designed it easy because iOS has its own weird set of problems with device orientation changes and different sizes and things you can't control or whatever.
But in general, the controls on the Mac, it's like just a bunch of Legos and you just dump them out onto a carpet.
It's like, make sense of that.
And like I said, that's where you really need the tools to help you.
And
The tools aren't really fighting me, but they're not doing me any favors.
That's why I'm using accessibility, you know, the screen zoom and Xscope to get in there and zoom.
And again, I've heard that in storyboards on iOS, you can actually zoom in Xcode itself.
You absolutely can.
would really help when you're trying to get things lined up but but even with that zoom like like i said with the the grouping that's a real thing that i'm doing like because even in my swift ui app i i was i have you know i have other windows that i was starting to do in swift ui i was like how the hell do you do regular controls in swift ui and i was like oh let me i'll just do this one the old-fashioned way so i have swift ui and a storyboard in this new application and for the storyboard based view
I do actually have a bunch of controls that I decided to group with sort of, I don't know what they're called, but like these boxes, these little sort of recessed darker gray regions that you're familiar with on the Mac.
Like if you go into, I'm looking at it right now in system preferences and the extensions pane, there's a sort of source list on the left.
It's like a table view, a scrolling table view.
On the right, there's a detail view and that's sort of recessed in a little well.
And I want to group the controls in those boxes.
But once you do that, you can't use the alignment tools in Xcode to align things across those boxes.
So you have to use a guide.
But then when you put the guide in, how do you place the guide so that it is...
correctly positioned so that the thing you already know you snap to the right distance from the field it like how do you place the guide so that it is in place with the first set of items because you can put the guide and eyeball it but then when you try to move the thing you're like oh actually it that guide is one pixel off where it's supposed to be because the thing just moved and it shouldn't have moved because it was already aligned this it's it's not helping me as much as i feel like it could that's all i'm saying
I think in many ways, if it goes the way it's, I think, supposed to, according to plan, SwiftUI should really help this.
I have a whole other show about SwiftUI, let me tell you.
Oh, I'm ready.
My body is ready.
Let's do it.
It should, in theory, provide more standard grouping, standard layouts for controls across the platforms, including the Mac.
That, I think, is what we're really lacking, is like,
As you mentioned, the controls basically doing a lot of this work themselves.
With SwiftUI, if it fulfills the promise, I think you should have significantly less of this work to do manually.
That being said, that's a really big if.
I'm not going to go into all the SwiftUI thing.
now but if you go go to my website go to hypercritical.co and look at i keep updating as i release new versions of front and center i keep updating the screenshot on the website so it keeps you know being anyway the screenshot you see there is the current version so look at that dialogue right or you can just launch front and center which i know you're all running and check the preferences right yeah
I bought it, but I am not running it normally.
Yeah.
Anyway, if you look at this and think about what Marco just said about Swift UI, like that these controls come with canned metrics and that there's some cross-platform nature where it'll put the right control for the right thing.
There's nothing, as far as I'm aware so far, in SwiftUI that would help with a window like this.
Because this window, I think, is... I mean, it's not perfect.
It's not great.
I mean, it's overwhelming because I have to have all this explanatory text.
That's the fault of my application.
It's not the fault of Xcode, right?
Me making an application is hard to explain, so I've got to be all wordy.
Set that aside.
Just imagine it was two tabs, two pop-up menus, four checkboxes.
Like, forget about all the other crap.
And trying to... SwiftUI doesn't give you anything that will help you lay out these controls in a Mac-like way.
Because there's 17 Mac-like ways you can lay out these controls.
And the one I've chosen is partly... Like, this is part of the things in Mac.
It's partly aesthetics.
It's partly, like, artistry, which sounds highfalutin.
But it's like...
There are tons of different ways to do it.
You are sort of expressing the personality of your application and by extension yourself in what you decide to do.
There is no generic standard way to lay out these controls because they're not just controls.
They have semantics in your application.
So you have to sort of
Try to provide some kind of visual hierarchy that expresses the meaning of the controls to the user.
I don't think that not only do I not think Swift UI would help me lay out this dialogue, I don't think I could lay it out in this way with Swift UI.
without a ton of work.
I'm using SwiftUI on my new app for, I think, what its strengths are.
Like, when you use SwiftUI, it's a lot like doing web development, right?
It feels more like that.
It feels like using CSS, right?
Because, you know, right down to, like, you know, dot padding or whatever, and then alignments and hstacks and vstacks.
And, you know, it is very much like doing web work, where in the web, in general, you sort of define these regions, and then you style them, and it's, you know, hstacks and vstacks and lists and texts and whatever are like...
Yeah, or like divs and all those other things, right?
You know, it's like, you just tell me what the elements are, and then you can style them with some, you know.
But that, like, if I had to make a web page that looked like this dialogue, it would also be a little bit tricky, because...
things really are sort of lined up down to the pixel based on spacing and visual weight i mean i'm not particularly happy with the result it's too busy i'm not sure about those lines the spacing is a mess but i just at this point i just don't ever want to touch it again because anytime i touch anything everything just cascades into this giant mess and everything's misaligned
Right.
I'm terrified of this stupid thing.
Like, for example, the space to the interface and startup regions of checkboxes.
I wanted them to be separate because they're kind of two separate things.
One of them is about hiding and showing icons.
The other one is like, what do I do when I start up?
How much space should there be between those two sets of checkboxes?
Does anybody know?
I can tell you for a fact.
Xcode sure as hell doesn't know because it does not give you any guides.
Like, if you want to have a space there, how much space do you want?
You can choose it down to the retina pixel.
How much space do you want?
God forbid you have multiple groups because then they should all be spaced by the same amount.
Can you do that in Xcode?
Have fun zooming in and trying to make sure they're the same space.
Like the tools for sort of laying out groups of like this is not they don't doesn't do it for you.
You got to do this yourself down to the pixel.
And again, with Swift UI doing it, if you like I spent a lot of time wandering through the preferences dialogues of like every application on my Mac, third party and first party.
there is a huge variety out there.
Like it is, and again, like I said, it's the expression of the personality application that comes through in the way they lay out their preferences.
And sometimes you can look at it by age.
Like if you go through system preferences, you're like,
you can date them by like oh i remember when this was the way we used to do mac uis like this hasn't been touched in five years this hasn't touched been in seven years you know it's you can really feel that if you're familiar with the way things done but then you're like well how should i be doing it now and that's kind of like asking question of like what kind of song should i be making now what what's good what's good music now it's like well that's up to you to do like you there is no like i just want to know how to make a song like what's how are people making songs today
Like the same thing with apps, right?
I just feel like the tools should at least sort of help you sort of align your, yeah, I'm trying to give an audio analogy, to align all of your various tracks in Logic.
Like, you know what I mean?
Like Logic doesn't make the song for you, but it makes it easy to have multiple tracks and cut and remove things from them and align them up.
And like, I'm hoping I don't have much experience with Logic.
But anyway, that's what you want the tool to do.
The tool's not making the song for you.
But the tool is letting you sort of know, like, can I make a one second gap between these things?
And can it always be one second?
Yeah, because the tool has a way for you to do that.
It's a little bit different in that, you know, there are standards for standard spacing of stuff.
Like, for example, the distance that the label is from the checkbox.
Xcode does that for me.
I don't have to guess that, right?
The distance from the label to the left side label.
Xcode has a snap for that.
but it has snaps all around there and because you can't zoom like am i aligned with the baseline of the text or am i aligned with the bottom of the checkbox they're about one pixel away from each other make sure you're aligned with the right one it's just very sort of persnickety so i mean this is all this to say is app development is hard surprise person who doesn't do app development finds it difficult surprise like this is not you know this is not a condemnation or anything other than just myself and my my poor choices and uh and not learning this stuff better before i started using it but uh
yeah app development is hard and i'm surprised i mean maybe i shouldn't be surprised because the programming part and programming for 20 mumble years right that you know programming is just programming right you know finding the right apis and fighting with sandboxing and stuff like that is a little bit tricky but in the end it's not much different than fighting with like you know and browser apis and all the other stuff that i've done in my actual career like programming is programming but
GUI stuff and having to use tools and having to decide do I want to do it programmatically do I want to use Swift UI do I want to use auto layout do I want to use springs and struts do I want to throw up a web view like people make all sorts of decisions in their applications for good or for ill and so I'm you know I'm kind of maybe I've gone I've gone over the deep end where
I have the ability to do all of those things badly and I'm taking a tour of all of them and just finding all the different ways they're all bad or that I'm bad at them.
As usual, the hardest problems in computer science are choosing your GUI framework, fighting your tools and visual design.
So true.
Speaking of visual design, why is there a crossfade between the two tabs?
And that is not, this is the great thing.
Like one of the, I get a lot of, you know, having, having gooey apps and getting bug reports and not being able to actually communicate with your customers.
One of the bug reports I got was I click on the tab.
Like there's a general tab and the exclude tab.
They said, I click on the tab and nothing happens.
that was they didn't even say that i i click on the tab and it doesn't work i or something like that it was very as you imagine very terse thing thing is that control that tab you control first of all it's inscrutable to be able to i didn't even go into this but it's very difficult to get that to work but that's a control like you just make that and you add tabs to it i have zero amount of code i'm not controlling that you can programmatically make that tab group and control it yourself but i'm not i'm using the widget from you know that from the little library in the interface builder
it does that i can change the animation to be you know on or off or whatever i just left the default so that fade you see is the default action yeah no way yeah i didn't i didn't like there's a checkbox to turn it off and there's like a pop-up menu to pick what kind of animation you want but i'm pretty sure that's just the default i sure as hell didn't seek it out and add it so i assumed you did seek it out and add it because i can't recall ever seeing this crossfade i mean i'm sure it exists somewhere but i cannot recall ever seeing this crossfade anywhere
Yeah, it's weird.
But anyway, I'm not controlling that.
So when they say, hey, I click on exclude and it doesn't work, it's like, but I didn't make that work.
That's part of the control.
But the thing that drives me nuts about this with storyboards is, so you've got the window in the storyboard, right?
And then you've got the view, which is a second rectangle with a line coming from it in the storyboard view.
And then you've got another line from that view box to the tab control.
which shows the two tabs.
And then you've got two lines coming from that.
One for the contents of the left tab and one for the... And that's a lot of boxes for everything that's going to be a single window.
And the thing that was driving me nuts is when I click from the left tab to the right tab, I don't want anything to move.
In particular, I don't want the tabs that I just clicked on to move.
So you have to make the views so they exactly fit in the same size box so that when you switch from one tab to the other, the tabs don't move, and the darker gray rectangle, the inset thing, also doesn't move when you change tabs.
I must have spent hours doing that, mostly because I didn't understand.
What is it that's determining the size of these things?
You can control them down to the pixel in Xcode.
I had them down to the pixel matching, but then I started measuring them when I ran it.
I'm like, yeah, I have everything down to the pixel matching, but when I run it, it's like three pixels different.
so what what is determining the size thing and this is just ignorance on my part like but but surprising to me that you would think oh see this window you see in the screenshot that's exactly what you see in xcode right nope that is not what i see in xcode what i see in xcode is this big giant sprawling thing and storyboards with lines between them and none of those boxes are the same size as the box you see on your screen right here it's non-obvious to a beginner let's say easy things should be easy in xcode easy things are possible
I think one of the bigger challenges also that you have here, which you were talking about earlier, is you're trying to make a correct-looking Mac interface, basically.
You're trying to make the right style, using the right spacing, using the right controls for things.
But in practice...
that is kind of poorly defined like on ios it's it's all over the place but it always has been so it's kind of okay the mac i feel like mac enthusiasts like us have this idea in our head of like what like what a mac app should be or what's like a good mac app or what's like a native mac app style what should a song sound like that's the idea we have what should we we know when we hear it we know when we hear a good song we know we hear a bad song we know when we hear an old song we know we hear a new song
But it's very difficult to say, well, how do I make a song?
Right.
And when it comes to making a, quote, Mac-like Mac app or a native Mac app, we have this idea of the kind of things it should have, the kind of way it should look.
But all these little details, most of them are not codified anywhere.
Most of them are not in the HIG.
There's no standard.
Everyone kind of just fuzzes around and does what they think might look right.
And there's the secondary but significant problem of not only are the number of developers who make good quality Mac apps seemingly pretty small...
But that number seems to be going down over time, not up.
And so you look around, like, Apple can't make a great Mac app to save their lives anymore.
And it's kind of... It's getting more and more rare to see it out of anybody else, either.
Meanwhile, you have...
A lot of Mac apps coming out that are just total random garbage or just basically web apps that are wrapped in a UI or something that just throw away any concept of there possibly being a right way to do these things.
Of all the apps that we use every day, how many of them are actually, quote, good Mac apps?
I bet all three of us have Skype open right now.
At least two or three of us probably have Chrome open right now.
We have Slack open.
How many of these apps have anywhere near what you would call a good Mac interface?
It's getting increasingly rare that this is going to become one of those lost skills that there's just very few people left not only doing this, but who even will know how to do this.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, there's Mac-like, which, and you mentioned, like, that you don't have metrics for all this stuff, and the HIG just tells you vague stuff, but the original Aqua HIG had metrics for, like, everything, like, down to the pixel, because that was before points and pixels, but they had, it was very, I wish I could have an old copy of it, maybe I do somewhere.
Yeah.
but it would give you it would show you dialogues like this is how far the okay button needs to be from the left this is how far it needs to be right this is how wide it should be this is how much white space there should be around the labels on buttons this is how far the buttons should be from each other like this is where the text should be this is where the icon should be it was like nailed down for the basics anyway not for a complicated window like this um and i don't even think the original aqua human interface guidelines told you how far apart the checkbox should be and on classic mac os there were fewer controls and it was simpler
And your layout options were fewer.
And they did define the metrics more precisely.
But on the Mac today, there are the quote-unquote Mac-like Mac apps, which is just a totally drifting target, as you noted.
But then there are other applications that bring their own thing, like Slack and other applications that say, we are, yeah, we're quote-unquote native applications.
But what we're basically bringing is a web-style UI.
And the web has its own aesthetic, with which I am very familiar with.
uh and bringing that on the mac doesn't feel mac like but at least when i'm in those applications i feel i feel the groove of that song genre i'm like okay you're a web ui i get it i use web uis are you a good web ui or are you a bad web ui i'm not confused into thinking you're a mac ui but you're like web like things like chrome are like well you're not really web like you're not really mac like you're your own weird thing and then there are things like you know speaking of good mac applications all of us are probably running right now audio hijack
there's nothing in the hig that's going to let you make audio hijack that's an example of saying we have a problem that we think we can solve with an interface that is undreamt of by apple that's an example of how do you write a song like sometimes no one's giving you any guidance you just got to make up your own thing and if you do it really well you get something like audio hijack
which we use and we would say feels quote unquote Mac-like, but I don't know if there was any standard controls in the entire application, right?
So it just goes to show that you don't have to use standard controls at standard spacing with standard fonts and all that other stuff to be Mac-like.
Like it really is more abstract than that.
But I totally agree that I was mentioning going through system preferences and being able to sort of date the time that UI was made by how it looks, right?
That the modern face of like,
canonical apple mac applications or canonical mac applications that apple hasn't been the standard bearer for that for years like there are still great mac apps like i think safari is great on the mac but that's not a new application the new applications we have recently are you know stocks and voice memos and these catalyst apps and they are not good mac applications
They're not good iOS applications.
They're just not really good applications, period.
Rewrites of existing applications.
I think the Notes application is good, but it is more like Audio Hijack than it is like Safari in terms of making up its own UI.
So really, like, that center that used to be there, the sort of center of, like...
apple's bundled applications show you what a mac app should be like and they may be simple text edit mail safari finder but here it is and they look at them all together they have a family resemblance they look like mac apps and they're kind of the standard it's kind of like you know if you made an ios app in the old days with just apple standard controls everywhere with the standard spacing and everything
You'd look at it and you'd say, well, it's not, you know, it's not anything to look at.
But I look at that and I know that is the beating heart of iOS.
Then branch off from there.
That doesn't really exist in the Mac anymore.
And Apple is not doing anything to sort of bring it back.
I think maybe the peak of that was like when Apple was making the iLife applications.
Here's a suite of fairly complicated applications that take the standard Apple, you know, take the standard Mac design flavor and riff on it a little bit because they use custom controls and they use all sorts of weird stuff.
But they defined a sort of.
Here's what Mac apps look like today.
Even if it was, oh, they're giant brush metal windows and have a bunch of glossy buttons on them.
That was the thing for a while, and Apple had many examples of it.
And if you wanted to make an application look Mac-like during that era, you could pull up every application in iLife, look at every single window, and just look at them and say, make something that looks like that, and you will fit it in on the Mac today.
If you go to a modern Mac, there are no set of Apple applications that you can open and crib off of and make something that looks like the Mac.
You'd open them and you'd be like, these are all made by the same company in the same decade?
Seriously, go look at the preference dialog boxes from seven first-party applications from Apple and compare them to each other and see how wildly different they are.
It's a little bit of the Wild West today.
It's not to say there aren't good ones out there, but it's definitely the beating heart of Mac user interfaces.
I'm not going to say it's exploded and spread all over the place, but it's hard to find, let's say.
Well, and I think that's the same problem Windows has had forever.
one of the reasons why Windows app UIs are all over the place, I mean, there's multiple causes for this, but one of the big reasons is that there was fairly weak leadership from Microsoft, from the platform vendor and the major application vendor.
There was fairly weak leadership from them on what a good interface for the platform is.
And for a long time, Apple had really strong leadership in that area on their platform.
And that's one of the reasons why...
Third-party software on the Mac tended to be better than third-party software on Windows, or at least nicer.
There was strong leadership and a strong concept of what is a good-slash-correct Mac design to make.
And now, I think Apple has the exact same problem that Microsoft has had forever, which is Apple itself is not providing strong leadership in that area anymore.
And they haven't for a little while now.
to the point where, I said earlier, Apple can't design a Mac app to save their lives.
Apple can't seem to design an app anymore to save their lives.
Apple seems to be really incapable of making good interfaces anymore.
Whatever their current software design leadership and structure and variables, whatever goes into that, when's the last time Apple made a great UI?
It's been a while.
There's a reason why most of our favorite products from Apple are things like AirPods that have no UI.
uh that you know they're just not making great uis anymore and they're really good at making junk drawer style things where like you just sweep everything off the table and you have you still have tons of complexity it's just buried and that they call that you know simplicity or minimalism or whatever but like the apps are still horrendous to use they're things are still very unintuitive there is no standard for anything anywhere that
different teams in the company that make different apps follow seemingly totally different UI conventions and standards or no standards whatsoever music so like there are so many just like random bad designs coming out of Apple these days they are providing no leadership whatsoever anymore on what makes a good UI and so we're going to have this problem we have it on all their platforms where like
The standards are fairly eroded or gone at this point, and we all are just kind of fending for ourselves trying to figure out, is this good?
Is this good?
And every company has a different opinion of what that means.
I mean, I think it's mostly, like I said, mostly true for new apps because a lot of their existing apps, even existing apps that have been refreshed, like I said, notes before, reminders, there is a family resemblance to them, but they're not, to your point, they're not new apps.
Like, where is the new app that Apple came out with?
Here's this new application from Apple.
Like, I mean, examples, I know they're catalysts, but like setting a catalyst out, they made new apps that either came with the Mac or purchased separately for doing stocks or podcasts or TV or, you
you know voice memos or whatever if those were just new applications from apple like we don't see that we see okay well you're continuing to refine safari and i think again i think safari is great and if you want to look at a screen that has tons of complicated ui in it that apple does a pretty good job of wrangling the web inspector in safari they add features to it all the time it's very complicated it's a developer tool and they do such a great job of taming that complexity in a reasonable mac like looking ui right and notes and all these other applications that have the toolbar with the monochrome buttons and
The title barless windows where the toolbar buttons are alongside the window widgets like that's if I had to try to pinpoint some kind of, you know, faintly beating heart of modern first party design, it would be to look at how Apple has redesigned a bunch of their bundled Mac applications to have this.
family resemblance and then we can debate like the second thing is okay if that's where mac design is at supposedly those three or four applications that have some kind of family resemblance that try that are trying to say this is what a mac app should be like then we can say is that a good way to be you know again getting back to brush metal
there was clearly a way that apple was saying first parties app should be was that a good way for them to be or was that kind of not really you know as timeless as they could have wanted it to be right i you know i i could if i was you know i still running mac with interviews i probably i think i maybe did get into this when they first did the thing of like removing the title bar and merging it with the toolbar and doing transparency and the vibrancy layers and the sidebars and borderless windows and
hiding the scroll bars and all that other stuff like lots of decisions that have been presented as mac like uh you know new directions in mac like design defining what it means to be the mac even when they've been very strong sometimes haven't been the
best decisions again it's like the the you know the group of songs that you can tell are you know made at a certain time and a certain moment in history and have a certain feeling or in a certain genre but aren't great songs so i do have some complaints about even the the commonalities that i find in mac ui which is why i think like the standouts are again you know because i'm staring at my screen like things like audio hijack which are like
We are going in our own direction and we're just going to make a great UI, period.
And it will feel Mac-like because the people who make it have the Mac in their bones and understand sort of the underlying ethos.
But it doesn't have to actually use any standard controls and it doesn't actually have to look like Safari or Notes or Reminders or Contacts or anything like that to be a good Mac app.
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Clear, Casper, and Health IQ, and we'll talk to you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
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-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-
So the implication that Matt is getting at here, I think,
is that this isn't like down the road or anything like that.
The three of us are driving in separate vehicles easily halfway across the country.
Now, I have an answer, which I like my answer.
I'm not overjoyed with it.
Would you like me to tip my hat and just start, or would one of you prefer to go first?
Is it a Jeep Wrangler?
Sure.
No, it is not a Jeep Wrangler.
Oh, that's an interesting thought, but no.
It should be as punishment for thinking about buying one.
Can you imagine?
Is there a worse punishment than being forced to drive a Jeep Wrangler for like, how wide is the country?
Like 5,000 miles?
You don't know what animals look like or how big the country is.
That's good.
So wasn't it just recently that there was a new Cannonball run record of like 24 hours or something like that?
It was preposterous, whatever the answer was.
Yeah, they broke the record that was made and widely publicized on the internet like five or ten years ago.
I forget what the new time is though, but yeah, it was broken by a lot.
Yeah, because Alex Roy did it.
And that was like the 32 hours or something like that.
It was in the M5, too.
And it was the it will never be beat time.
And then like a couple of years ago, that got beat.
And then I think just in the last six months to a year, there was another new record.
Preposterous, I tell you.
All right.
Well, since I'll just go ahead and go first, since none of you seem overenthusiastic.
So I was thinking to myself, all right, I'm going to be in the car for a very long time.
I'm going to want a car that probably can do a fair amount of self-driving but I don't want an electric car because I don't want to have to stop all the time to charge.
Can you back up a little bit?
You're going to want a car that can do a fair amount of self-driving.
Could you please unpack that statement for me?
So there are degrees of, like, self-drivingness.
So, for example, my Golf R, it will ping-pong inside of the edges of a lane if I just let my hand off the wheel, which I would never do.
I'm just saying, like, it is capable of keeping me in a lane.
That sounds terrible.
And it would get very angry about it.
Oh, it's a terrible approach.
Like, I would never rely on it.
I'm just saying, strictly speaking, it would keep me in a lane if I really, really, really needed it to, boinging between the two dividing lines.
That's not really self-driving.
Aaron's car does a fairly decent job, at least on the highway anyway, of full on self-driving.
Like you have to keep your hands on the wheel, just like on a Tesla usually.
And it'll actually, you know, stay dead center in the lane.
It'll follow appropriately if people in front of you slow down and it'll speed up again if they speed up, et cetera, et cetera.
And then to me, I actually think the best self-driving that I'm aware of is the Tesla.
And as much as I love to poke fun at Tesla's, their self-driving suite, for lack of a better word, is really and truly incredible.
So I would want something that's along the lines of Tesla's self-driving capabilities, but I don't personally want to do this trip, this hypothetical trip in a Tesla.
Is that fair, John?
You can continue.
So I want a gasoline slash petrol-powered car.
Actually, I didn't even think about diesel, but I don't think I want that, especially since in America it's not as prevalent as it is elsewhere.
The kids will do the thing where they pull their arm down.
They want you to hunk the horn.
I wonder if that happens in other countries.
But anyway, so I want a sedan.
I don't think I want a coupe, although a coupe is an acceptable answer, I suppose.
I want a luxury barge is what I want.
And the obvious answer to this question is some sort of ridiculous S-Class.
Now, to be fair, I haven't driven a modern Mercedes really in probably 10 plus years.
But I returned to Old Faithful, which is really Old Unfaithful, actually.
I returned to BMW and I thought to myself, well, what would I get from BMW?
And so this has actually been in the show notes for several weeks.
And so several weeks ago, I actually built myself a 2020 750i X-Drive sedan with, of course, the M Sport package.
This is zero to 60 in under four seconds in a sedan that's probably as long as my house and weighs about twice as much.
And the MSRP as built, we will put a link to my build in the show notes, $111,500 for this 750i X-Drive sedan.
So again, my theory is this will kind of self-drive to at least some degree.
It will be comfortable.
It is large, plenty of room for whatever luggage I might want to bring.
And it's just nice.
So that is my answer.
So I mostly agree with a lot of what you have said.
All right.
That's a good start.
I don't agree with the grill on that car.
That's one thing I don't agree with.
That's fair.
That's very fair.
We'll never lose sight of you in the rearview mirror, Casey.
The gigantic grill gleaming behind us.
So I think for me, like one of the critical questions here is,
Is electric really an option?
Like, so, you know, this depends on a lot of the details of, you know, the implementation details.
Like, are we sticking together?
Top Gear style?
Yeah, exactly.
Because if we're not sticking together, we're not going to sit around for you while you sip coffee for 45 minutes while your car charges.
Right.
I love driving the Model S, and I've driven it for lots of long highway trips.
I drove it today on a long highway trip.
I love it, but there is the reality that about every four to five hours of driving, depending on how you're driving, you're going to have to stop for about 40 minutes.
I personally, in my life, owning these cars for now almost four, four and a half years, whatever it is, I find that totally fine.
I hardly ever have to actually do it in practice because I hardly ever take drives that are longer than that.
And on the rare occasions I have, I have found it pretty pleasurable, actually, because that is about, like, usually after about four hours, I want to stop for about a half hour anyway, just to get some food or take a quick rest, you know, whatever it is.
But you know the Top Gear rules.
You stop, we just leave you behind.
Sorry, later.
Like, there's no waiting.
Right, so for me, if you guys would actually wait for me, no question, Model S. No question at all.
Okay, so slow down.
Why not the X?
Not to say you're wrong, I'm just curious.
He wants to drive around in a shoe.
It gets less range, first of all.
Yeah, first of all, I think it's less attractive.
It also gets less range.
Fair enough, fair enough.
You get a sunburn on his head to wear his hat the whole time in the car.
I mean, the Model X is also excellent.
It's very similar in many ways to the Model S. So really, I would be perfectly happy with that as well.
But I would be happier with the S. So really, the question becomes, like, is that the style of driving we're doing?
Are we going across the country on the interstate highways?
Or are we not using the interstate highways?
Are we going to be somewhere crazy where there's not going to be any superchargers for hundreds of miles around?
Yeah.
See, that's the thing that worries me more, because you would know the Supercharger network better than me, and I'm glancing at the map that's at tesla.com slash supercharger.
And it certainly does seem, just looking at the Supercharger map, that there are some north – or excuse me, some east-west passages that –
Oh, yeah.
So I hear you, and I accept the answer with the caveats you've given.
But I would also be curious, have you thought about, when you're done with the electric part, if there is a gasoline or diesel-powered option that you have considered, I would love to hear that as well.
What do we care about diesel for?
Diesel would be terrible on a long road trip because you'd have to wait until you found a diesel gas station.
Across the U.S., that's not going to be every highway exit.
I think it's plenty easy to find diesel, but I don't want to listen to a diesel engine for that long.
Spoken like an American.
Okay, so carry on.
So any other thoughts about your election?
The whole appeal of gas is that you can stop at any exit off of the highway and pull in directly off of the ramp, and there's going to be a gas station there, and you can just get gas and be done in 10 minutes.
Diesel makes that not always the case in America.
I know, you know, other countries, it's much more common, but like in America, you, you know, if you're not in a very dense area, you might, it might take you a few exits before you can find a station that has diesel, or you might, it might not even tell you, and you just kind of have to guess and try a few until you find one.
So it's not nearly as common.
So anyway, so yeah, I think if you're going to go with any kind of, you know, burning fuel in America, you go with gas.
But
I still would really dramatically prefer electric because the self-driving is so good.
And I know it's just a very comfortable car for long trips because I've taken many long trips in it.
Because for me, long trips, you're optimizing for comfort and ease of driving, basically.
You want something that's going to be nice, that's going to be fairly easy,
But you're also not going to get too bored with the car in because any car gets boring on a long highway trip, but you at least want to have some fun with it.
That's why I didn't even think of things like a big old Mercedes boat because I find them really boring and they just kind of don't get my gears revving, I guess.
So...
So for me, my number one pick was the Model S with the caveat that only if we're actually going to stick together through the supercharging.
If not, if I had to get a gas car for that purpose...
I think I would go back to the M5.
Even though I haven't yet ever seen the current generation one, and I certainly don't love the idea of its automatic transmission, despite what everybody says it being so close enough to good.
But I don't love the idea of that.
I'm skeptical.
But anyway, I did also take a lot of long road trips in the M5.
In more than one country.
In like three different countries.
Well, no, it was two countries here and like three or four there.
Is that right?
Something like that?
Yeah, something like that, yeah.
So like I've taken many long trips in that.
I've driven thousands of miles on the highway in the M5 and
It's very comfortable, you know, because it's similar.
It's a like, you know, it's a large sedan.
It has a lot of like cushy interior features.
It has the butt massaging seats.
So like there's all sorts of features like that.
You know, it has it has radar cruise control.
So like because that's to me like if you're not going to give me, you know, self-driving that'll keep you in the lane.
my minimum for long highway drives of functionality, if I'm going to make a pill like this, is it has to at least have adaptive speed cruise control where it has the radar to look at the car in front and everything.
It has to at least have that.
So if we're having these things, to me, no question, it's the Model S first with the Astros Gov electric waiting periods.
And if you're not going to wait with me and I need to get a gas car, I'd probably go for the M5.
So John, you'd have an Accord and that's the end of the show.
Thanks everyone for listening.
We'll see you next week.
I'm glad to hear that both of you have come around on the ocean that if you're taking a long trip, the most important thing is to be comfortable because now you're old and have old person butts and want your old person butts to be pampered.
So no one's like getting a Ferrari Daytona and just being like, yes, I'm going to drive that for 25 hours because it gets old real fast.
Yeah.
It's just not worth it.
So my choice is the one you both kept talking about and dismissing because you are wrong.
The big old Mercedes.
The big old Mercedes.
Check your show notes now.
It is the – what do they call it?
It's the AMG S63.
It's faster than Casey's BMW.
It is undoubtedly cushier and more luxurious.
And the thing is that's what I want for a long trip.
I want to feel like I'm driving in the living room.
i want it to be yes ridiculously comfortable i don't care about the handling right i mean having power is great and this thing has plenty of power you know it's like 3.5 seconds to 60 huge top speed like but being comfortable for a long period so yes all these cars have heated and cooled seats and butt massagers or whatever but the mercedes ones had the reputation for being the most squishy the least sporty let's say because even though the car is incredibly powerful they're big squishy seats and
beautiful materials all over the interior burled walnut is what i selected for mine because i'm just a traditionalist yes it's cliche but it looks really nice everything is nice and leather it smells good you have good visibility uh they have you know their dashboard is a nice big screen but not like a tesla screen it's more like just a regular large console that happens to be a screen it's got a heads-up display
And I bet it's really quiet at speed, but it's very comfortable.
But if you're as solid as a rock and you can go down straight highways at high speed.
Now, I'm going to depart from both of you on the whole requiring electronic assistance.
I don't want any of that because I tend not to trust it.
uh and all of my long road trips have been taken in cars without any of that stuff and other than basic cruise control so you don't have to hold the accelerator pedal down for hours at a time other than that i don't need any other assistance i'm sure this has them i mean all cars have them and everything like that and i wouldn't do things like turn off the emergency braking system so that like if you're going to rear end the car in front of you and you're falling asleep it will stop the car like they all have that now
I would leave that on.
I'm not saying I would like I got to turn off all the electric nannies because I'm going to, you know, I got to drive it all myself.
No, I would leave on like the emergency things.
But things like lane keeping cruise control and even maybe even radar detecting cruise control be wary of because the thing is about long trips is.
I want to be engaged enough to make sure I am paying attention.
I can't let the car do too much.
So even though this car has them, I wouldn't use them.
You say that, but have you experienced radar cruise control?
Because radar cruise control is amazing.
I'm sure it is, but I feel like that is, for me personally, that is one level of engagement that is a little bit too... It's removed too much.
Especially with cruise control and especially if you're going on long trips.
You're on the open road.
There's nobody around for miles.
It's not as if you need it.
And if I'm in traffic or whatever...
I've only ever owned stick shift cars.
So if I'm not constantly shifting in traffic, that already is fairly luxurious.
I don't have to be doing that, right?
So maybe over the course of a long trip, I would come around to a radar cruise control, but I would definitely never do line keeping.
I am very down on lane keeping just because, I mean, if you know how the lane keeping stuff works...
For the most part, GPS, you know, highly accurate GPS maps aside, the car has no idea where the road is other than by looking out in front the same way a human would and trying to figure it out.
And humans are better at that than cars by a long stretch.
Driving in Massachusetts, where sometimes you will come upon a road that has 20 sets of lines going 100 different directions, some of which lead off into a ditch.
I fear what a lane-keeping system would do when faced with that.
You're hoping it would just throw up its hand and start beeping or something, but if there's one clear set of lines slowly leading off into the ditch, I have a feeling the car is going to take that route, and it's going to kill me.
So I say no to lane-keeping.
I say yes to big, luxurious, fast, quiet Mercedes.
I actually considered going in... The only other direction I considered going in was picking, like...
classic a classic for my childhood mercedes because i took a couple of long road trips in my friend's father's 80s mercedes which is how i came to my mercedes love because i was always just amazed at how solid it felt and how quiet it was and how squishy the seats were and how fast he drove in it and that always you know that sort of like gave me my childhood impression of mercedes and i mean the 80s mercedes were not particularly good looking but um
They were smooth and they were solid and they were quiet and they were surprisingly fast.
And the modern ones, I'm not sure if the modern ones are continuing with that tradition, but everything I've read about them makes me think that more or less BMWs are still slightly sportier in the large car, not in the rest of the car market these days.
In the large car market, BMW feels the need to be tougher and stiffer suspension.
So the M5, especially the M5 competition, is probably a much more harsh ride than any of the S-classes.
So that's why I'm going with my tried and true Mercedes S-class.
And so since I am the oldest and have the most old person butt and need to be cradled, I think that by the time we arrived at our destination, my body would have the least wear and tear despite being the oldest and the creakiest.
And I even selected the model when I was building it that has like the rear seat heaters and coolers and everything so that on the way back, you two can just ride in the back of my car and we'll all be comfortable and we can just, you know, ditch those other two lesser cars and not wait for Marco to have to fill up his battery again and just drive back in quiet.
A genuine question, and I think I know the answer.
Why not the wagon?
There's no S-Class wagon.
Oh, no, I'm sorry.
No, S-Class.
You are correct.
I'm sorry.
I was looking at the S in E63 S wagon.
But no, you are correct.
I apologize.
I was actually considering one of the coupe options because I'm like, oh, I'm not going to have any people.
It's us driving separately.
But I got the big backseat for YouTube because I know you're going to want to get out of your uncomfortable car.
You are going to want to get out of your uncomfortable cars.
I got the wireless charging and the rear seat options.
So you can just put your phone down when you want to charge it and the screens.
You'll be all set back there.
There was a thing called like, what was it in the options?
It was like something bucket.
There is a, there's an option to get a CD player in the glove box for $130.
I didn't pick that one.
Or for $5,000, you can get something called Magic Sky Control.
Yeah, that's the little stars in the sky.
No, here it is.
No, no, no, it's not.
It's like electronic tinting of the sunroof glass.
Ah, there you go.
I didn't pick that either.
Comfort box.
Yeah.
Add to your driving peace of mind when carrying smaller items in the trunk.
Oh, I thought this was like in the console.
I see the picture.
A box in the trunk to hold smaller items so they don't rattle around.
It's only $350.
I did not choose it.
Anyway, the total price of mine is fairly reasonable considering how much luxury nonsense is in this car.
And, you know, performance stuff.
Again, it's faster than Casey's BMW.
I think it's also better looking.
The total comes to...
I picked good wheels, and I picked the blacked-out light package so there's less chrome.
I think it's 151.
It's pretty reasonable.
That's a Golf R more than my Phantom BMW, for God's sakes.
I mean, we're all picking cars that you can get a pretty good house in Ohio for this amount of money.
Yeah, but this is more comfortable than the house in Ohio.
Well done.
Well done.
This is all-wheel drive.
Is that right?
You know, I didn't even look.
I think it is.
I'm not confident I'm correct, though.
I feel like that's a must for a cross-country trip.
What kind of conditions are we driving through here?
Are we driving across the bottom of the country where it's going to be pretty warm and therefore we might want things like sky control?
Or are we going to be going across the top of the country?
And what time of year is this?
Are we going across the northern part of the country in the winter?
Because that's going to possibly change my pick to some kind of giant monstrosity thing.
Oh, actually, another thing to think about, John, is I don't think you have CarPlay in this, whereas I do.
Probably wireless, in fact.
I don't care.
I don't care about CarPlay.
I almost picked the weird fancy 3D surround sound thing for the fancy speakers, and I decided the stock speakers are probably fine.
I should be listening to podcasts anyway.
Yeah, right.
What are we listening to that's going to use the fancy Burmester high-end 3D surround sound system for $6,400?
Mm-hmm.
Anyways, these are all good choices.
I'm not surprised by any of them, if I'm honest.
Yeah, they're all kind of boring choices.
Well, but that's the thing.
When you reach a certain age and you're going to be in the car for hours, you want to be comfortable.
Yeah, exactly.
That's why I didn't consider any kind of comedy option or fun old car.
I'm not going to pick a DeLorean or anything.
It's like...
What you really want, yeah, it's like you want a comfortable car that's going to mostly drive itself on the highway, at least with cruise control, and you're going to want all the creature comforts of good climate control, good cushy ride, great visibility.
Yeah, quiet.
And that's actually, quiet is not great in the M5.
The Model S is way quieter, and I'm sure your S-Class is quiet as well.
I also thought about things like with a gas car, like you want a car with a long range, so you don't have to stop as much to fill up.
so you want like a really big gas tank yeah no it really isn't no those cars do have big gas tanks like doesn't the m5 have like a 25 gallon gas tank or something they they had to add a giant gas tank to it because it's so incredibly inefficient you know the mileage isn't great but that's the thing about these cars you can just add adding a bigger gas tank is really easy to do and extends the range by a ridiculous amount
There was some, I think it was one of the Engineering Explained videos recently that was comparing like the range of a bunch of electric cars and everything and saying like, here's the long range Model S and here is like, maybe it was a Camaro or something.
I don't remember.
It was some terrible, a car with like terrible gas mileage and it's like, so the long range Model S gets more on a fill up than this terrible like Camaro or whatever.
So it's like,
uh if you wanted to extend but here's this other car that had like you know i think it was it wasn't a cord or something like that that had a very long range because it was like a wimpy four cylinder it's like well the electric cars can't match this range it was like a 800 mile range or something how much more battery would you have to add the electric to match this range and it was like well you'd have to add another 5 000 pounds or something it was ridiculous right
Then it was like, how much weight would you have to add to the Camaro to match the Ranger?
And it was like you had to make the gas tank like six gallons bigger.
It was nothing.
Like, because the energy density of gasoline is phenomenal.
And making the gas tank bigger weighs nothing.
And putting the actual gas, it's like...
It was ridiculous.
It really just hammered home the energy density dichotomy between gas cars and electric.
Not that I'm saying we shouldn't all go electric, but like, boy, gas cars have it easy.
So if you have a gas car with bad range, know that that is entirely chosen based on like interior space concerns.
And maybe if it's a sporty car, a little bit of weight.
But really, gas is lightweight, energy dense, and it weighs nothing when it's not in your car.
If only there were no other problems with it.
Yeah, well, there's that.
Yeah, well, you know.
All right, so final question since we are running long.
If someone who is just filthy rich said, I will literally buy these cars, and you decide whether or not we can keep them afterwards, but I will buy all three of these cars.
I'm glad I picked the most expensive one.
Exactly.
I will hand you the keys and you guys have to film or record or do something to chronicle the trip, but I will fund the trip of the three of you to go from New York to LA.
Would you do it?
Does it have to be video?
Does it have to be LA?
No and no.
Fine.
No, it does not need to be LA, and no, it does not have to be video.
Golly, tough crowd today.
To do video well would cost way more than these three cars are working, and that would be a hassle.
Doing video well is a giant pain in the butt and takes a lot of people.
Yeah, assume that whatever it is, it's no impact on us.
If it's video, there's a film crew that handles everything.
We just have to be the talent, as they say.
Well...
I would probably do it just for the life experience as long as it wasn't a race because I don't want to have to be like, you know, rushed or, you know, going fast or anything like that.
Yeah.
And honestly, if someone's paying for it, I would go as slow as possible and stop at every stupid tourist attraction and just like hang out and make it like an entire, you know.
I don't know.
It's assuming I get time off work, but you know what I mean?
What's like the babysitting situation?
Yeah, that's the exact tolerance of our respective spouses to have us gone for what amount of time?
Doing what exactly?
You're doing this why?
I have always wanted to do like a cross-country road trip, but it's road trip.
Oh, God.
I would love to do a cross-country road trip.
I think that would be incredibly, incredibly fun.
And fly back, right?
Probably.
Oh, yeah.
You're not driving back.