A Jacket and Some Pins
So, Casey, what trackpad are you using?
Look at the show notes, Marco.
I saw you using the show notes.
There is a time and a place for me to talk about my computer.
So, Casey, what OS are you using?
I will say that I did not downgrade, and there are reasons.
There are reasons.
Most of them came from a – I think it was a post-show conversation between the three of us where I was convinced not to do it yet.
But I don't want to talk about that yet.
So who's going over to kick you?
Yeah, I don't know.
That's up to you guys.
Give me one moment.
I have to go turn the air conditioning on because it's super hot in here.
Remember when Marco said he was going to hang out above 77 degrees in his beach house?
I remember that.
I remember that too.
He's going to turn on the air conditioning?
What the hell temperature is it over there?
I just jammed my mouse cursor into the lower left corner to try to get Dashboard to come up.
Aww.
Because I wanted to see what the weather was.
It was just instinctive.
What temperature is it?
Mouse goes into the lower left corner.
Nothing happened.
It's 46 degrees, but it's a hot room.
Yeah, if you need that AC, you're right.
Get that on immediately.
Let's start, as we must do, with some follow-up.
We had some really genuinely great feedback with regard to radar and feedback assistant and my particular feedback with regard to my Catalina Woes, which we'll get to in just a moment.
According to a couple of different people, I believe,
So feedback or feedbacks is, I guess, the plural of them.
Those get turned into radars internally.
So feedback assistant, which is what the peons like the three of us would use to file a bug, those are their own bucket of things.
Those are the feedbacks.
And then internal to Apple, they get turned into radars.
And so one of the other things that we had asked about either on Twitter or perhaps here on the show was –
I think one of you guys, in fact, brought it up last week that you could do R-D-A-R colon slash slash and then a radar number.
And that on an Apple owned computer would give the person a hyperlink directly into radar to that direct ticket.
And according to anonymous people, those links do still work.
But the feedback number is different from the radar number.
Uh, feedbacks generate a radar when they're submitted and they get handled internally as the radar.
The feedback number is in a field of the radar.
So you can search for or track an issue by feedback number or radar number.
But if you're linking to it with rdar colon slash slash, you have to use radar number.
And, uh, this one particular individual added, I think the idea is that this lets the radar get handled internally as a radar without worrying about confidential information getting trans transmitted back to the user.
I'm not sure about how or when things get transmitted back to Feedback Assistant or the user.
It sounds worse than the old system or even farther removed from the actual, like, you know, before we threw things into this web thing that went into this bucket that got viewed by a native app.
Now we're in this native app that throws things into a bucket that goes into another bucket that gets viewed by the real.
And then they don't even know if I do something in radar, how does that propagate back to the customers?
It's so disconnected.
It's kind of like a...
uh software developers relationship with their customers in the app store i love that you're now one of us like after all this time i know it's like when you got an iphone like 15 years after the iphone was released like you finally joined the club like i've got an ipod touch on day one just same thing no phone calls
And it was faster, damn it.
It was faster.
Yeah, that's that very first one.
It had like a slightly higher clocked CPU, right?
It did.
It's like 10% faster.
It was thinner and faster.
It was obviously better.
Who needs to make phone calls?
Oh, my word.
All right.
So let's talk about Casey's Computer Corner.
I know that during the main part of the show that I had said that one of you needs to come to Richmond and kick me if I have not yet downgraded to Mojave.
We were discussing before the show, possibly before we went live, who it was that was going to come and kick me because I am still on Catalina.
But I have reasons and I have updates.
So I will leave it to the two of you to decide who's going to make the track down to Virginia.
It sounds like my fingers on my nose.
It's John.
I heard Marco's made an automatic kicking machine.
That's true.
Well done.
So anyway, so speaking of radars and feedbacks and things of that nature, we did get an anonymous update on the radar that was created from the feedback that I had created complaining and moaning and trying to get fixes for my poor iMac Pro.
And so this anonymous person basically paraphrased—and I'm now paraphrasing the paraphrase—what they had seen in the radar.
But if I understand what they said appropriately—and I'm waiting for John to correct me after I make my little spiel here—
It's that, according to Apple, potentially thread contention on kernel tasks VM map lock to the point that the keyboard and mouse events can't get a lock on this like global queue.
I'm pretty confident I butchered that pretty well.
John, can you translate that into something that makes more sense?
I don't know.
Yep, and I have no answers for that.
But another thing that was said in the radar, according to this anonymous little birdie, is that a bunch of SMB kernel work is to blame.
Now, I'm assuming SMB in this context is like Samba, like server message block, whatever it's called, like network shares.
And the reason I think that is because the Apple person noted that MDS and BackupD...
And more importantly, CrashPlan Service and Plex were all between them, spawning a zillion threads, all doing stuff across the network using what I used to call Samba, basically a Windows-style network share to my Synology.
And apparently the Apple person called out CrashPlan as being particularly egregious in this department.
I'm shocked.
CrashPlan software might be inefficient.
Who knew?
It's so bad.
It's so bad.
And we're going to talk about that later if you let me.
But anyway...
It seemed like that was causing some real problems.
Now, I agree with you, John.
I'm not entirely clear why this is worse in Catalina.
Another thing that was mentioned that I didn't copy to the show notes, now I'm going right off the top of my head, is that as cores go up, the amount of things that could be asking for this global lock also goes up.
So on an iMac Pro that has, I don't even know how many cores I have, a billion on this iMac Pro, that could actually exacerbate it and make things even worse, which is no bueno.
But the reason I didn't downgrade, other than some convincing from Marco and John that, again, I don't think made the released version of the episode, I decided to take a few different strategies.
Now, number one, the thing that everyone wanted me to do, which I said I was going to do and then did not do, is try the other trackpad I have.
I had lamented mostly jokingly that it was, oh, it was all the way up in the attic.
I need to go get it, blah, blah, blah.
So I went up to the attic the very moment I stopped recording last week to get that other trackpad, that alternate trackpad that came with the iMac Pro.
And it was when I got the keyboard and trackpad box back downstairs or back into the middle floor, if you will, that I opened it up and realized, oh, wait, I got a mouse with this.
I forgot.
Like a traditional magic mouse.
I completely forgot.
Whoops.
Right.
Right.
I completely forgot.
I didn't order a new trackpad because why would I?
It didn't.
It seemed like I shouldn't need it.
So the reason I didn't try it was because I didn't have an alternate one to try.
And I absolutely had planned on and was going to try it.
However, things... And let me do a little Foley work and knock on my glass desk very loudly.
things might be looking up i think so you're still using the old trackpad okay via bluetooth i should add i'm using it via bluetooth did you just simply stop using crash plan well almost the first thing this this is this is terrible but i'm also overjoyed that it seems to be getting better so
The first thing I did was I started turning off CrashPlan kind of strategically.
So when I was really sitting down working at the computer, I turned CrashPlan completely off.
And there's a launch control command that you can run in the terminal to turn it off.
Now, there are settings within CrashPlan to, like, be very gingerly, you know, treat the CPU with very soft hands when the user is at the computer, but I don't trust their crap software for anything.
So I just freaking turned it off.
And that helped some.
All right, listeners, here's the thing.
The other two aren't listening right now.
I'm about to say something that the two of them are going to have a choice.
And they can either beat the crap out of me for the next 20 minutes or they can be sympathetic and understanding.
So let's see what happens.
Right.
So the other thing I did was I took Plex off my computer.
Which pained me so much.
Why would we complain about that?
Because this is my world.
My world is my media consumption world.
Plex is your world, not running Plex on your Mac.
You just have to have Plex running somewhere.
Yeah, you can run it on pretty much anything.
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing.
Oh, did you upgrade your Synology?
No.
No, I want to so badly, but that's a whole different discussion.
We should talk about that later.
But anyways, it occurred to me that I had this Mac Mini that was just kind of sitting there that I had gotten from Justin at Mac Stadium.
And...
It's old.
I don't even remember exactly what vintage it is, but it is more than enough to run Plex.
And it was literally sitting there sleeping in idle just because I wasn't doing anything with it.
I really wanted to have it in the house just in case you never really know why, but I wasn't doing anything with it.
And it occurred to me, wait a second, why not run Plex on that?
And so I did that.
Well, I haven't literally removed it from my iMac Pro, but I have not run it on my iMac Pro in about a week.
And I am running it on the Mac Mini.
And the moment I made that decision, everything started to feel better.
That and the combination of CrashPlan not running, generally speaking, seems to have almost completely fixed my problems, which is both wonderful and deeply depressing.
What is Plex doing...
that would relate to contention or do you have like is it in the background making optimized versions like how i can understand how it would spawn a bunch of threads like plex is one of the least demanding uses of network and file resources you can imagine it's sequential reading slow sequential reading of very large files granted over the network but it's not like it's like crash plan where it's spawning a million threads and trying to read every single file in your file system it's doing a targeted thing right
Well, yes.
And I do have Plex looking at my photo library, which I don't think helps because I don't think mine is as big as yours.
Oh, God.
I don't think my photo library is as big as yours.
But I am still sure that that doesn't help much.
Yeah.
And also I do have it scanning like every 15 minutes for new media or whatever the case may be, which is probably not necessary.
The new media scan is nothing but like the photos thing.
Tell me – I don't have a newsplex with photos.
What does that entail?
Does it crawl in your photos library like periodically to see if there are new photos?
It is.
Now, I still take your point though, John, and I agree with you that it seems odd that moving Plex away from the iMac Pro has made such a big difference.
But it seems like it's made a tremendous, tremendous difference.
And so –
That has worked really well.
Now, earlier today, I turned CrashPlan on for the first time in a while.
And within, I don't know, a couple of minutes of that happening, I got a machine gun trackpad.
So I think the next step is, and we're going to talk about this more later, I think the next step is I'm going to move CrashPlan also onto this Mac Mini.
Although at that point, I'm really tempting fate because that Mac Mini is on Catalina.
And so maybe I'm just going to move the problem from one computer to another.
Who knows?
But you don't need to use the Mac Mini interactively, right?
Mm-hmm.
That's the other thing, is that who really cares?
As long as the thing is functioning, it doesn't really matter.
So that is probably the medium-term plan.
The long-term plan, which I'd like to get through the rest to follow up before we discuss it, but the long-term plan is I'd really like to just divorce myself of crash plan entirely and find a different mechanism to back up.
the Synology, because that's really what I'm after with CrashPlan.
After having reloaded to both my laptop and desktop like 44 times in the last six months, I've gotten to the point that almost everything that's actually on my computer is relatively ephemeral.
I'm sure there are things that are not, but the majority is on GitHub.
It's on my Synology.
It's, I don't know, in iCloud or something like that.
So
It seems like it shouldn't be a problem to just, you know, get rid of CrashPlan and not have it backing up the iMac at all.
And I do have Time Machine if things really get bad, but in a worst-case scenario, screw it.
I'll just reinstall everything on the computer from scratch.
So my question for later, which I really don't want to get into now, is how do I back up the Synology for less than $100 a month?
And I'm saying that only slightly facetiously.
But in summary...
The Mac Mini saved my bacon.
I really appreciate that Justin had sent it my way.
And everything so far seems okay.
Now remind me of that in like 20 minutes when this thing fails miserably.
But sitting here now, it all seems all right.
You're narrowing it down like we talked about by removing things from your computer.
It's just that you're not removing them temporarily to troubleshoot.
You're moving them permanently into another computer that you don't have to use.
And part of the motivation for moving Plex to the Mac Mini was that Plex is the thing that is least ephemeral on my iMac Pro.
And the reason I say that is because, yes, all the media is stored on the Synology, literally 100% of it.
But the database of what I've watched and where everything is and all of this metadata and all that other garbage isn't stored on the Synology.
That was stored on my iMac.
And
Yes, it is backing itself up to the Synology from time to time, but it's just a nightmare, or it would have been a nightmare to move Plex to another machine out of like haste or angst, you know what I mean?
Like when it wasn't on my own terms.
And so by having it on this other computer, unless the Mac Mini blows itself up, that leaves me much more flexibility with the iMac to downgrade it or to reinstall Catalina from scratch if I felt like it for some strange reason.
You know, now the iMac Pro...
is much more flexible than it was before.
And so, yes, you're right.
It's not a temporary thing with regard to Plex anyway.
But having Plex on its own, basically dedicated device, has really freed up a lot of the stress in my world with regard to the iMac Pro.
One more thing about Plex from my troubleshooting with sleep-wake stuff.
Plex is not great about – if you search the web for this, you'll find it's a bug that they supposedly fixed in the past, but it's not great about it.
It will grab power assertions that keep your – not only keep your computer from going to sleep, but even keep your screen from going into the screensaver or dimming or switching off.
which, you know, it'll grab them when you ask it to play video, if you ever ask it to play video locally, but then it just will not give them up a lot of the time.
Like, you won't be actually playing any video, but because you had previously played video, if you look at PM set, you'll see that Plex has a power assertion that prevents the screen from even dimming, and it's the worst, because I'll walk by the downstairs of the house, and I'll say, where's that light coming from that room?
Because all the lights are out, and I'll look in there, and I'll see that, you know, the IMAX screen has been on full brightness for the past two hours on the same screen.
Ugh.
Because something graded power assertion, and it's always Plex.
So Plex, if you're out there and listening, let go of your power assertions when you're not playing video.
And people, if you have this happening to you, Plex may be the culprit.
The way to fix it is just to quit the Plex server and restart it, and then it doesn't have the power assertion anymore, but it's still an annoying bug.
No argument.
All right.
Tell me, John, about the Pegasus J2i, please.
That's my $400 piece of bent metal that holds hard drives that I shoved into my computer.
I had it on my desk for a while.
I had it on my desk last week.
On the weekend, I got some time to open up the computer to do it.
This is my second time now opening up the computer.
I'm still terrible at it.
I think this design of getting the internals, once you have the thing off, it's great because you have access on all sides to the internals.
Getting it off, not so great.
A, I'm bad at it, but B, it is harder.
It is way harder than popping the side off of an old cheese grater.
It's harder than opening the door on a Yosemite or El Cap plastic tower case.
It is...
It's a physically difficult thing to do because there's a lot of friction pulling the thing off.
And if you are not pulling exactly straight, it doesn't come up.
And it's especially difficult because mine is on this sort of little table thingy that is lower than a desk but higher than the floor.
So there is a little bit of awkwardness of trying to lift the thing up.
But anyway, that aside, I was already ready to install the thing.
And my first problem was that somehow I don't have a T8 Torx device.
driver in the house.
I have T6, and all the sizes are rounded.
T3, I didn't have a T8, so I had to go out and get another tool, which was kind of annoying.
Beyond that, installation went fairly well.
My only real complaint is that they give you a cable to connect to the power and the two SATA ports.
On the motherboard, there's a power connector and then two SATA ports, and then there's the big SATA cables that go to the actual drives.
And they make a single bundle of ribbon cables that, you know, it's supposed to fulfill that role.
And they tape, it's like this bundle of interleaved ribbon cables.
They tape them together, right?
And you would think, great, they know exactly which computer this is going in.
They know where all the parts are on the motherboard.
They know where the ports are going to be on the hard drives.
This cable should be an exact fit.
But it is not.
It's not an exact fit.
Like, for starters, if you look at the parts that plug into the drive, they are exactly level with each other.
It's like the drives are top and bottom.
They're not side by side.
You can't have these things be exactly level.
Like, it doesn't make any sense.
One of the drives is going to be higher than the other.
Therefore, one of the connectors has to have a longer ribbon cable on it.
Otherwise, either one's not going to reach or one's going to be buckled.
Second, the connectors on the motherboard are horizontal.
It's the two SATA connectors and the power connector.
They're in a line horizontally.
But the things that plug in there are not three different lengths to go into things that are three different distances.
They're all the same length.
So I had to untape some of the tape that they had used to tape together this bundle of wires just to try to get it so that things would plug in without kinking too much.
I talked to Stephen Hackett.
He said, yeah, he did the same thing.
He had to remove the tape.
So, you know, I guess you get what you pay for, for only $400 for a bent piece of metal.
You know, they can't bother making the ribbon cable be the right length.
Oh, and by the way, it's, you know, $400 for a bent piece of metal.
I say that because that's all I wanted was the bent piece of metal, but it did come with an eight terabyte hard drive.
So that's where some of the cost is.
An eight terabyte hard drive retail value, $134 or whatever the hell it is.
Anyway, now I've got, uh,
big hard drive in my computer i ordered another hard drive to fill the other bay just because i wanted one a little bit bigger than the other ones i have laying around so i'm doing that um i don't like having a big noisy spinning hard drive inside my otherwise quiet computer so i keep it unmounted and spun down those two things are not synonymous with this computer and catalina it's perhaps surprisingly um when i wake my computer from sleep i
The hard drive spins up even if it's not mounted and it stays spinning even though it continues to be not mounted.
It's an easy fix.
You can just mount it and then unmount it and then it spins down.
And all this is to say is I can definitely hear when the hard drive is spinning.
Forget about accessing.
Nothing is accessing it.
The drive is unmounted.
There is no hard drive heads moving back and forth.
But it's spinning, and I can hear that.
The solution to that, or one of the solutions that I came up with, is this handy application called Mountain, which I've had for ages.
I used to use to mount and unmount my, at one time, four internal drives on my old cheese grater.
and one of the features that mountain has it's on the mac app store but i bought it from the website because anything that deals with hardware i figure there's going to be some feature that can't implement it'll be in the mac app store version so buy direct gives the developer more money and potentially has more features anyway there is a setting that there are many settings in mountain one of which is hey when this drive is unmounted uh spin it down or when i wake from sleep and it's not mounted spin it down like there's a whole bunch of options about what you should do when you eject it what you should do when you wake from sleep and lo and behold
just put that setting and now when i make my wake my computer up the hard drive spins up reminding me of my old uh 10 year old cheese grater making some noises of things spinning up and then immediately spins down back to blessed not quite silence so
Mostly thumbs up on the Ridiculously Expenses Pegasus J2i.
Big thumbs up for Mountain, although I don't like the menu bar icon.
It could be better.
But anyway, other than that, I am headed towards having many, many terabytes of internal storage, and soon I will be very happy.
All right.
Darren Rogers had some feedback with regard to shorter certificate expiration, which we had talked about last week.
Darren writes, the shorter expirations also helps ensure that everyone, for reasonable value of the term, is using the latest standards and best practices for their certificates.
A concrete example would be the Certificate Transparency and SCT signed Certificate Timestamp.
Any cert you get today should have an SCT, but that hasn't always been true.
So there are many websites without them.
The very nature of SCTs is such that they will mostly be useful when everyone has them and browsers can start requiring them.
Until then, they are of nominal value.
So this shorter expiration kind of forces everyone to embrace the latest and greatest quicker than it would otherwise.
Additionally, Chris Thompson writes, you're right about certificate revocation not being very effective currently and that an attacker having a year to use a compromised cert is still bad.
That said, browsers still do use bundled revocation lists to cache a set of revocations.
By constraining the max certificate lifetime, that means you can potentially clear out the expired certificates and this will take up less bandwidth, storage, memory, etc.
secondly with long-lived certs it's it becomes very hard to make important security changes to tls certificates for example in sha1 signatures support was removed in browsers after increasing evidence that collisions were feasible but if certs last up to five years you can't just turn it off or set a reasonable cutoff point instead browsers are stuck with a potentially half a decade long deprecation uh window to avoid breaking the web which is no fun
Yes, by the way, if any developers are listening and don't read any security things, SHA-1 is super-duper broken.
Don't use it for anything remotely related to security.
Yeah, pretty much any hash that you would have worked with in 2006 in PHP or whatever is probably broken at this point.
MD5, if you don't know it for many, many years, has been broken in this way.
SHA-1 in the past couple of years has been super-duper broken in this way.
So there you have it.
And then a friend of the show, Ben Thompson of Stratechery, wrote with regard to, I think it was an Ask ATP question, when do you go to Apple Notes, when do you go to a flat file, et cetera, et cetera.
And Ben wrote, there's absolutely middle ground between notes store everything in an inaccessible database, but it syncs in plain text files.
Ben writes, I use notational velocity on the desktop or more accurately in VALT.
which has a setting to store notes as plain text files in the location of your choice.
At the same time, NVALT uses SimpleNote as a syncing service, which gets me all of my notes on the web or on iOS.
So I have the best of both worlds, sync and plain text access slash backup.
I do at times wish for notes app-rich functionality, particularly in terms of embedding photos and whatnot, but I consider easy access to my data and availability on any computing platform to be table stakes for any data that I want on a permanent basis.
We don't have it in the show notes, but Ben had said something about how, you know, he understands the tradeoff with regard to using SimpleNote as the syncing service.
So he doesn't put anything like super sensitive or private or whatever into any of these notes.
But it was an interesting approach to get a middle of the road, like he said.
Yeah, there was another story that flew by recently, although I think it was a repeat of the same story from maybe a year or so ago, about the security of quote-unquote encrypted notes in the Apple Notes app.
It uses a database behind the scenes, and apparently, you know how like when you're looking through your notes, the notes are represented in the list by basically the first line in the note.
And when you encrypt a note, apparently that first line is still visible in some data store or somewhere.
Anyway, if you're relying on the security of your notes such that no one – if you take a note and then encrypt it and then someone grabs your Mac and runs a bunch of forensic tools and finds a SQLite database and rummages through it, they may be able to find snippets of unencrypted data from that note, which is kind of bad.
But, you know, probably not the end of the world.
All I have to say is if you have something that you really care about the security of, it's best to actually use a security focused application to store it rather than just an app that is like a notes app.
It also happens to have an encrypt feature.
And then finally, Satish Paulio writes, I really enjoyed the segment where you talked about using hyphenated words.
It made me realize how much more I need to learn about the English language.
I found this helpful and wanted to pass it along.
And this is a link to developers.google.com, which is a post called Just Enough Grammar.
Yeah, these things are great.
They're not trying to teach you everything.
English language is ridiculous and huge and has all sorts of strange things, but you just need a little bit.
You just need enough to know what you don't know because then on a case-by-case basis when you're writing, if you're aware of sort of the lay of the land, like you come across some construct in your writing, you're like, I don't know what to write here, but I know this is an area...
of frequent problems or there's an issue here or that this is something i should pay attention to at that point you have you're armed with enough knowledge to just go google the answer okay and this exact sentence structure with this exact word what am i supposed to do if you don't know that if you don't have like that just enough grammar baseline you won't even know that there's a thing to know there and you'll just you know if you don't know hyphens exist or what they might be used for you will just never they'll you'll just never think about them if you know they're used kind of in this context for this reason when you're writing you may come across something like wait a second
is that one of those places i use hyphens you're not going to know the answer you know it's always going to be tricky there's all sorts of special cases and everything but at least you know that it's a thing so this just enough grammar uh page and similar sort of crash courses for the basics of grammar very often focused on like tech writing just so you can like write sensible uh coherent documentation for your code even uh it's well worth the effort to just you know
Get just enough knowledge to be dangerous.
I would say just enough knowledge to know what to Google because that's all you need.
No one really knows all these answers except for some very obscure book editor who's been doing it a million years.
All you got to know is what to Google.
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Uh,
How do you back up a Synology?
And the reason I ask is we had talked just a little while ago about CrashPlan and how I really, really don't like it.
But the advantage of CrashPlan is that it is $10 a month for one computer for whatever plan I'm on right now.
$10 a month for me to back up.
I think my backup set is something like 13 terabytes right now.
Now, admittedly, that backup set includes the iMac Pro.
Admittedly, that backup includes a bunch of stuff on the Synology that I could probably pare down and weed out.
And so I looked before the show.
I was doing a little preparation because I'm allowed, because I'm not John.
And it turns out my media folder on my Synology, which is the thing I care most about, or at least the thing I think I care most about,
is 8 terabytes of the 13 terabytes.
So I was looking at, you know, what are my options for backing up the Synology?
And the most obvious one, the one that everyone recommends, and for good reason, because everything I've read is that it's excellent...
is Backblaze B2.
So this is their, you know, bigger, longer term, if I understand it right, you know, storage that's really for this kind of a use.
You know, it's designed to compete with a bunch of stuff that's of similar vein, right?
You know, you're just going to put something away for a long time and probably not need to restore anything from it, if ever, or not frequently, you know, if you do at all.
And I was looking at it, well, and the thing of it is, is that Backblaze B2 is $70 a month for 13 terabytes.
A month!
It's $40 a month for 8 terabytes.
And these are all rough estimations, give or take a bit.
But that means it would take me three and a half years of B2 to break even with just buying a whole new Synology, filling it with drives, and then moving this one to my dad's house or something like that, which is far enough away that it's not anywhere close, and just mirroring the darn Synology from here to there.
And this is kind of a call for recommendations from the listeners and from the two of you.
Hey, what about us?
What does one do with this?
And the other thing I've heard decent about is Glacier, I think it's called from Amazon.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
Okay, well, this is what I want to know.
Oh, Glacier's terrible.
Well, so the other priority I have is I want something that's as close to turnkey as possible.
And that B2 very much counts as because B2 is built into the Synology software.
And I can just say, hey, please back yourself up to B2 now.
And if I'm willing to throw money at this problem, which I'm getting ever more willing to do.
Then that that is an acceptable answer and a very easy answer.
But what am I not considering?
Like, should I just pony up literally three thousand dollars to bring a new version of my current Synology into my house and move this one to dad's house?
Or is there something else I'm just not thinking of?
We had this long discussion last time about how maybe you don't need all that media.
You don't need to be storing all that.
You might be able to access through streaming services and so on and so forth.
I really feel like, especially, you mentioned this is the media I think I care about the most, but it's not really.
I know you spent a long time organizing everything and it's good to have a collection, but you care so much more about your family photos than you do about any of that media, right?
Yeah.
Well, that's a subset of that eight terabytes, but yes, what you just said is accurate.
Right, but it's a tiny amount.
It's less than a terabyte of that as photos.
I think it's about a terabyte, but still, I'm quibbling over minor things.
Your point is still completely fair.
Yeah, so one way to save money is to...
not back that up no no don't not back it up but like decide uh what part of it you really want to back up right so i i feel like the most important thing is the metadata in the database the plex database which is tiny right that you know any organization you've done any custom poster images you've done maybe you're like your watch counts or your progress or like you know that that is the stuff that you've invested time in dealing with right
The actual media files behind the scenes, if they disappeared, you can probably replace them, right?
Many of them, at least.
Some of it.
Yeah, but not all of it.
What I would do is I would choose what subset of that you actually want to back up.
If you want to save money, I feel like you could cut your storage in half.
just by being judicious about which media do I want to back up versus which media do I not want to back up.
And that would involve having to categorize things in some way.
I know it's annoying, but that's a lot of data.
And if you're going to have somebody...
who's not you, store 13 terabytes of data for you, there's no way around that being expensive or a hassle or both.
Like there's no magic solution that's going to be like, I have a way for you to do that for three cents or $5 a month.
It's not going to happen.
Like you're already doing that.
I have a way to do it.
You're taking advantage of it the best you can with the crash plan thing.
Or if you did like iSCSI with Backblaze, you know, that is the cheapest way to do it.
But both of those things are sort of
not using the services for their intended purposes and really pushing the limits.
Yeah, I hear you.
That's a simpler solution.
Yeah, I very much want to hear Marco's answer, but just to address a couple of things you said, your point is overall very fair.
But the thing I just really – I really don't want to lose any of this media.
And I think the reason I'm harping on this so much is because for the stuff that's on the Synology –
that is the only place, well, with the exception of pictures, that is the only place it exists.
So like all of my TV shows and movies and things like that, well, some of them actually I do have Blu-ray sitting downstairs, but for the purposes of this discussion, that's the only place it exists.
It's there in CrashPlan.
And so I'm so scared that if this synology just fries and I can't salvage the drives for some crazy reason, that all of that media just goes up in a puff of smoke.
Again, the pictures are different.
But the other good thing about the media stuff is it's basically immutable.
Like the media files themselves, once they're there, don't change.
Right.
So you can if you if you want to pinch more pennies.
I know Marco is making groaning noises about Glacier, but there are various there are various temperature storage options in S3.
Yeah.
that can let you hold a bunch of data that you don't need access to and it's not going to change for less money than B2 maybe.
I mean, you have to look at the pricing.
Glacier is a pain in it because to get anything out of it is like pulling teeth.
And maybe that's acceptable if you really just, like, you know, again, if it's a super-duper emergency backup type thing.
But that's, you know...
Pairing down the data you're backing up is one way and then using slower storage with the knowledge that you don't need to access that.
It's like write once and read never, right?
That it doesn't change.
Now, the difficulty is trying to use backup software.
A lot of backup software doesn't expect that scenario.
It expects to be able to sort of
crawl your data and then confirm that it's backed up and diff the two things and doing that with glacier is going to be unfriendly probably because it doesn't expect that type of thing but we know that the nature of your backup is i'm going to back up these terabytes of data and they're never going to change in the backup they're just going to sit there unmodified for years and years never being updated and so those can be fairly distant you know
access time wise you just need a piece of software that understands that um but this is all like all ways to to pinch pennies can i get my bill down to 50 like that's the best case scenario and you're still paying 30 a month so yeah i agree and and i promise marco i'm gonna give you a chance i promise but
The other thing that occurred to me as I was talking to you guys is one of the backup strategies that I have is that a super-duper clone of the iMac on a physical hard drive, one of the portable USB drives, and a physical clone of my entire photo library on a separate physical hard drive, a USB drive, that gets handed to mom and dad sometime after the beginning of the month.
And then they bring it back right around the end of the month.
I'll update both.
But why do they need to bring it back?
All you're ever doing is adding to it.
You know what I'm saying?
Like you need to implement your own system of write-only media where you write a bunch of stuff to it and then it gets stored.
And then, you know, anyway, Marco's solution is going to be to get a 14-terabyte hard drive.
But anyway, that's exactly what I'm driving.
That's exactly what I was going to say is that it occurred to me as I'm talking to you guys that I'm filling my Synology.
So let me back up a half step.
Several of the drives in my Synology, which are Western Digital, whatever the NAS Reds, I think Western Digital Reds, which are whatever it came with, um,
literally six years ago, almost seven, about half of the drives in there are the six-ish-year-old drives.
And I have been replacing them bit by bit.
But it occurred to me that, you know, I am really playing with fire.
I think I have three six-year-old drives in there right now.
And I really, really should try
try to get those replaced sooner rather than later.
And as I'm replacing them, I'm putting more pressure on every drive that remains.
And so I'm really, really, really playing with fire.
But it occurred to me as I'm replacing them, I'm swapping from 3 terabyte to 10 terabyte.
And
I just told you my entire backup set is like 13 terabytes.
So presumably I could get one of these humongous, what are these two and a half inch drives?
It doesn't matter.
One of these humongous physical platter drives.
Three and a half inch.
They have 14 terabyte, three and a half inch drives.
They have 16 terabyte drives now.
So you see where this is going is I could add that to the physical package that I'm transferring back and forth to dad, you know, and just give that to mom and dad once a month and have them bring it back.
And I do a quick update and then send it back to their house.
And that's honestly, that's probably going to be the best solution.
All right.
So, Marco, with all this in mind, tell me what I need to be doing because I have not hit the right answer, apparently.
Okay.
So.
This all goes back to the problem you have is that CrashPlan is the only online backup service that will back up unlimited space, including network shares, for a low price.
And most of your data lives on a Synology.
So the only computer that you have where that data is local, on local disks, is the Synology.
I get around this with my stupid eye scuzzy setup, which I would not recommend to anybody.
And as soon as any part of it breaks, I'm not replacing it.
But the real solution here is to take advantage of the other backup service that has way better software, is a frequent sponsor of our show, and that will back up any drive connected to your computer locally, which is Backblaze.
And the way you switch to Backblaze is by making this data local to a computer that runs an OS that Backblaze clients will run on.
You already have one.
We already mentioned it.
It's the Mac Mini that you just turned on.
So the way to fix this problem, the simplest way possible, is to buy a giant hard drive.
Yes, they come up to 16 terabytes now.
Buy a giant hard drive or two.
Connect them as local disks to the Mac Mini.
Have the Mac Mini share them on the network itself if it wants to.
And have Backblaze back them up.
And then you don't have to do this craziness with your parents.
You have online backup.
You can even put two of them in RAID 0.
You have online backup and drives last pretty long these days.
You could literally just do two external drives or one giant external drive, plug it into your Mac Mini, and have Backblaze back it up for the $5 or $6 a month that it is.
That's it.
And I know that you no longer drive a white BMW.
No.
And I know that your identity is being challenged here.
I'm not going to tell you to give up Plex.
I'm not going to tell you to cut back your library.
But I will tell you, retire the Synology at this point because it is old.
It is not providing you the computing power that you want for things like Plex because it's old hardware.
And it was made right before they did a whole bunch of those transcoding acceleration stuff.
So it's old.
It's full of, by today's standards, small hard drives.
It's probably costing you a decent amount in just electricity every month.
So just plug in an external hard drive to the Mac Mini because you have six wonderful years of incredible hard drive capacity expansion that you can take advantage of now.
Like the technology has gotten better for spinning disks.
They're way bigger now and they're, you know, not that much money for very giant ones.
So just do that.
And it's like, I think that, that right there is your solution.
Just switch to a local disk connected to that Mac mini, make that Mac mini run all the software that your Synology was previously running.
Like just, you know, use the Mac clients of these things, use Mac Plex, use, you know, the Mac sharing stuff, whatever it is like.
You might give up a few things that your Synology was doing that were kind of cool that you occasionally used.
But overall, I think this is a better solution, and it is way simpler.
And while it requires a bit of investment up front, first of all, it's way cheaper than if you wanted to replace your Synology.
It's way cheaper if you need to replace a bunch of the drives in your Synology.
And it's probably cheaper to operate with electricity and stuff.
And it's definitely way better on the backup front because then you can simply use any Mac backup software.
So you can use Backblaze for their flat fee.
You can do what I do and use Arc, which is fantastic.
And I actually use Arc backing up to Backblaze B2 storage.
I just kind of prefer the Arc UI for certain things.
But like
You have so many more options then because you're running what appears to backup software to be a regular consumer operating system on a regular PC slash Mac.
But then you have options then.
And you have this one great option, which is Backblaze Unlimited.
And that, I think, solved your problem in a pretty simple, elegant way.
And you can retire a Synology.
I do wonder how long Backblaze is going to allow these type of things to go on.
I saw recently a tweet where Backblaze was sad that someone was using their service to back up many large numbers of terabytes directly connected to their computer.
I don't know if they're using the iSCSI trick that you're using, but similarly, like,
It's meant to be a single computer thing.
If you're backing up 13 terabytes, I know hard drive sizes are increasing, but still it's kind of like an outlier.
So Casey may be ruining it for everybody if someday Backblaze says, you know what?
It used to be unlimited, but a few people have been abusing that privilege.
So now there's a cap at 10 terabytes.
even then like like what's great about the solution is that right now you can do it right now it's very simple and and simple in this case is you know is a big benefit here like making this not a convoluted complicated fragile setup like just make it a very simple thing and you right now it works like in the future who knows but right now it will work and
And in the future, if you have to spend a bit more on backing up all your media files, oh, well, like you can also, you can kind of do the exercise of like, all right, so of all those eight terabytes of what's probably what, like movies and TV shows mostly, right?
So like of all that, what percentage of that can you just re-rip if you lose it all?
And then whatever percentage of it that fell off trucks or was not available in the U.S.
or whatever the case may be, how hard would it be to either re-download it from somewhere or buy it all legally?
And what would that cost versus what it will cost if you have to pay somebody per gigabyte to back this up indefinitely?
What are you paying over time if you have to pay one of those $70 a month fees?
what is that costing you over time versus what would it cost to actually just replace all this if you lost it?
So do that math if that comes up.
But honestly, you can avoid all that entirely right now by just plugging in a giant hard drive to your Mac Mini using Backblaze.
Yeah, I am not in a position that I am willing to give up my beloved Synology.
And I agree with everything you said on paper, but it also does some things that I know I could do on my Mac Mini, but I like the way the Synology works.
I have a very good workflow for it.
I don't want to mess with that.
But I take your point, and I agree with you, that getting one of these $400 or $500 16-terabyte drives and just physically hooking it up to the Mac Mini, even if I just run an R-Sync or equivalent...
and pull everything off of the Synology onto that drive, and then Backblaze is now backing that up as a regular old computer.
That is, far and away, a much better answer than anything else I've come up with so far.
So I already like where this is going.
Why are you pulling it off the Synology?
Why don't you just put it on the hard drive as your primary location?
Or you can do things like move the 8 terabytes of Plex data to the Mac Mini giant hard drive option and leave other stuff on the Synology, which would be way smaller.
Stuff that you might care about data redundancy, so you can redo your RAID scheme to add more redundancy on the Synology and put your photos on there so you have protection against double drive failures or something, you know what I mean?
Yeah, I hear you.
I think what I'm looking for now is the least disruptive way to improve my world.
And I think, Marco, you hit it that you're just getting a big friggin' drive, at least for now anyway.
Yeah, because they're really big these days.
Yeah.
I mean, I don't know that would work forever, but certainly for now.
I mean, if I got a 16-terabyte drive, I am well over – or well – I have at least three terabytes of headroom.
And so –
As much as I am slowly filling up this this analogy over time, first of all, there's certainly stuff I can get rid of and call absolutely without a shadow of a doubt.
And secondly, you know, that that that's plenty of extra space or plenty of headroom that I wouldn't have to worry about it anytime soon.
And presumably, there's no reason I couldn't just attach another one if necessary.
right that's like once you get into this habit like you know if you get like a fancy external drive enclosure that has like built-in raid or like you know there's a giant these giant metal boxes with you know multiple connectors those get expensive or a power supply that doesn't fail yeah but but like you know single drive enclosures are basically free like they're really cheap and they're really cheap but they're also kind of garbagey
If you want, you can invest in a nice big one, but if you keep it relatively simple, you can buy a 12 or 16 terabyte drive and say, this is the most I'm going to keep.
And when you need space on it, you force yourself to go delete something that you're not going to need anymore.
That's another option.
That's honestly not a bad solution because you probably don't need to keep more than 16 terabytes of various media files that are mostly like movies and TV shows.
You probably can get rid of a lot of that.
So maybe capping it at a certain size that is one drive, which keeps everything a lot simpler, maybe that's all for the best.
Yeah, I was talking about potentially abusing Backblaze by backing up so much, but it occurs to me that when my additional hard drive arrives, I'll have 16 terabytes inside my Mac Pro, so they can't really complain I'm abusing it.
You're supposed to just back up one system.
It is one system.
These are all inside the computer, and I can fit eight more drives in there, so watch out, Backblaze.
To get ahead of the email that we will receive and to answer Jay Stretch in the chat, just off the top of my head, things that I want to keep on my Synology.
I absolutely acknowledge and believe that a lot of this, if not all of it, could be done on the Mac Mini.
I am not debating that.
I like it on the Synology.
I want to keep it on the Synology.
It makes me happy being on the Synology.
And I wrote a post about this.
I'll link in the show notes that talks about a lot of this stuff.
But things like VPN server, the Docker container for HomeBridge, obviously I can do that on the Mac Mini.
I like it on the Synology.
I like it over there.
Off by its lonesome.
What are some of the downloading torrents if I ever do that or stuff from newsgroups if I were to ever do that, which obviously I wouldn't.
Your Dropbox replacement thingy.
My Dropbox replacement is the biggest one of all because for those who haven't been keeping up, I am almost entirely off of Dropbox and I use Synology Drive as a replacement.
I'm sure there's something I could put on the Mac Mini that would be an equivalent.
But again, I'm not looking to disrupt my entire world.
I am looking to disrupt my backup strategy.
And I think Marco...
If it's that I just, you know, sneaker net a 16 terabyte hard drive to my dad, if it's that I... No, I'm saying even stop that.
Use online backup.
That's what it's for.
No, no, I agree.
I'm just saying that even if I did that, which I agree with you is not the best answer.
My point is that that's still a much better answer than paying...
$500 a year to backblaze B2, or at least it's a better answer for me.
But again, I couldn't agree more that I think the bestest answer is to just stick a big, fat hard drive on the Mac Mini.
And I just kind of like having the Synology being the one source of truth for my data that just makes me happy that I know it's all right there.
It makes me happy in no small reason, because if, God forbid, the house went on fire, I would know just
Grab the Synology, after the kids, grab the Synology, and it has all the stuff I need, which is silly, I know.
You know what's a lot smaller?
A single hard drive.
That's true, that's true.
The Synology, it's like a mid-tower computer full of hard drives.
It's heavy and huge.
I understand.
No, I'm with you.
But, you know, my point is just that I like having the Synology be the center of my storage world.
It makes me happy.
It doesn't have to make sense to you, the listener, or you, Marco Armand.
It just makes me happy, and that's the way I would like to keep it.
But be it a sneaker net, be it just connecting it to the Mac Mini, which, again, I think is the bestest answer.
One way or another, just putting a big, fat hard drive somewhere and duplicating all my data on it, and that's the difference between what I'm saying and what you're saying.
I would want that to be a redundant copy of all this data.
You're saying just make it the canonical data.
Yeah, make it the primary storage.
You're probably right.
Yeah, you're probably right.
And on paper, I think you are right.
And if I was a sane individual, I would do what you're saying.
But because I'm just weird like this, I think I would have that as a redundant copy.
And then, yeah, if that gets sent up to the cloud, that's the best of all answers.
If for some reason I don't do that or that doesn't work, which I don't know why it wouldn't, then I could sneakernet it to dad.
And it's still an improvement over the world I have today where I'm relying on CrashPlan, which I frigging hate.
So I hope this isn't a waste of time for everyone else listening, but I'm glad we talked about it because this is a much better plan of action than I had before.
And just to reiterate, if I were to replace the Synology, I would want to take the one I have and stick it at Dad's.
And so I can't take the drives out of this one and put it in the new one because, again, I would want a redundant Synology.
And to do that, the way I would want to, which again, this is all my own choices, is over $3,000.
That is a lot more money than a $500 16 terabyte hard drive.
So I think, Marco, you hit the nail on the head.
Over time, the threshold for like, do you need a giant NAS box?
goes up with how high your storage needs are.
Over time, that threshold goes up because hard drives get bigger.
You would never recommend in 2020 that somebody who needs to store four terabytes of data get a NAS because hard drives or SSDs can store that locally really easily.
If it's just going to be a few terabytes, there's no need to have a giant drive enclosure and a whole second thing to maintain and update and everything else.
And I think for you, when you first got the Synology, you were within the range of like, okay, you have enough data, it's reasonable to need like a big multi-drive thing.
But since then, the drives have gotten so big, and the backup situation has become more important, and a few things have changed about it.
And so like, now I think you're at the point now where if you were starting from scratch today, we would never say you should get a NAS.
Because...
While there are people who still need NAS boxes because they have massive storage needs, your storage needs no longer qualify.
You are no longer one of those people.
And this is why I don't think almost anybody should get a NAS.
I think the time for them is mostly behind us, and most people don't need them.
And I think the number of people who need them is going down over time.
I think 13 terabytes is still close to that territory.
For Casey, I don't know because he has this incredible tolerance for terrible noise very close to him.
But for me, the biggest advantage to the NAS is it's in the basement.
I don't hear it.
And if I had 13 terabytes of media, like I was just talking about keeping my hard drive spun down inside my big Mac Pro.
I can have 16 terabytes of storage in there, but the storage that is not on an SSD, I do not want spinning.
I want them not spinning and unmounted.
And you can't do that if you actually need that data.
Like if my photo collection was on spinning media, it would not be tenable.
I don't have to mount it every time I launch photos.
My photos are on my SSDs.
I don't have to deal with that.
But if you have 13 terabytes of data that you need online all the time,
You better be ready to deal with the sound of spinning discs fairly close to you or you get an ass.
Yeah.
And again, I love my Synology so darn much.
I love it.
It's the sort of thing I would have never spent the money on at the time.
And now that it's a part of my world, I cannot – today anyway.
I can't get rid of it.
Yeah.
I'm not arguing with you, Marco.
You're so right in so many ways.
But it has become the center of my computing world.
And I like it there because it makes me happy.
It is not knock on glass.
It has never failed me.
It has always worked.
It has never caused me problems.
It's done better than my iMac Pro has.
And I've had the Synology for six years.
I've had the iMac Pro for six weeks.
But nevertheless, your point is, again, is certainly very fair, if not correct, that for a normal person, this is not necessary.
But there are many like it, but this one is mine.
That's a reference, Sean.
And if you want to throw money at the problem and you have a Mac Pro, you can get one of those cards that you can put four or four terabyte SSDs on or four or two terabyte SSDs and you can get two of those cards.
Like you can have 16 terabytes of internal solid state storage.
Then you solve the noise problem and the access problem and the storage space problem.
And it only costs you probably what?
20, 30, 40 grand?
And the Backblaze will back it up.
Yeah.
He's like, look, it's one computer.
Yeah, you spend 40 grand once and you can save 70 bucks a month.
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As we record this, it is the evening of March 4th, and WWDC is still a thing, in theory.
Well, it hasn't been announced yet.
WWDC is never a thing until it is announced.
Previous WWDC was announced, we attended, and then it ended.
And at that point, WWDC ceases to exist until there is a future announcement that says, hey, guess what?
We're doing WWDC and here are the dates.
So right now we're in the in-between time when WWDC does not exist.
It only exists as a thing that happened in the past.
It's like doing a show with two lawyers, I tell you what.
Everyone loves lawyers.
You're right.
You are right.
I'm just saying, like, it's just the, you know, the unknown.
Like, what I'm saying is that the current period we're in is not that dissimilar from...
And so the reason this is potentially going to be a thing is because of the coronavirus or whatever the correct term for it is.
COVID-19.
Thank you.
It is certainly going around the world.
It's going around the U.S.
now.
It sounds like Seattle in particular, a lot of things are happening out there, and that's a lot closer to California than, say, Marco and John and I are.
So a lot of other conferences have also said they're canceling.
The Geneva Auto Show got canceled.
Google I.O.
got canceled.
That usually happens about a month before DubDub.
There's a lot of smoke saying that WWDC is probably going to be canceled.
And
I noticed, but I have not yet had a chance to listen, that on Under the Radar, you and in front of the show, David Smith, covered this and kind of alternatives.
And so I don't know if you want to rehash briefly some of that.
But I guess let me start by asking, starting with Marco, do you suspect that WWDC will happen in person this year?
And let's leave aside like a press event.
I'm talking about like the
The regular people, you know, the thing that we're allowed to go to, the regular people, you know, Worldwide Developer Conference.
Do you suspect that that will happen in person in California this year, Marco?
Almost certainly not.
I'm 90% sure it's going to be canceled.
They just haven't announced it yet.
And I tweeted this to the effect of the day.
My theory is basically that I'm pretty sure they've already made the decision internally to cancel it, and they're just trying to make alternative arrangements for things like online sessions or whatever else so that they can announce at the same time.
Instead of just saying, no WWDC this year, I'm guessing they want to do an announcement that says, WWDC will be online only this year,
and here's all the great things we're going to have to offer.
Something a little more upbeat.
That I think is much more likely to happen.
And I did talk about this for the entire Under the Radar episode with our friend underscore David Smith.
So check out Under the Radar from today.
I'll link to it in the show notes.
That is certainly worth
If you want to hear us talk for almost exactly 30 minutes about this exact topic and what it means and what Apple could do instead.
And we're going to recover some of that here, of course, but certainly check that out if you are interested in this topic.
But yeah, I think...
The chances of Apple holding this conference are extremely low because this is a significant virus that's going around the world.
It is causing deaths, and it's not killing everybody who gets it, but it is a serious problem, and it's not something that can be taken lightly.
It's something that everybody needs to be very cautious about, and Apple is a cautious company.
And Apple is a company that tries to avoid bad press whenever possible.
And no company wants to put on an event that, you know, at the event, exposes people to this virus and one of them dies.
Like, that's horrible.
Nobody wants to risk that, understandably.
And so there is no way that I think Apple is going to put this conference on.
I think they are way too smart to do that.
And anybody who's running a big event right now for a high-profile thing, if they're not canceling that event, they're not thinking right.
Because it's a big enough...
The virus is a pretty big problem.
The effects are still largely unknown.
The gestation period is long, and so you don't really realize how bad it is for a couple of weeks after it has gotten that bad.
And these are all events that have to be planned months ahead of time that are gathering a whole bunch of people from all over the world in confined spaces.
Yeah.
It's just ludicrous to think that any of these major events are going to happen, or that they should happen.
There are some conferences that are happening in the near future that are still going to go on, allegedly, but I think that's a mistake for those conferences, and I think they're hearing from it.
sponsors and participants are pulling out of these conferences.
Companies are restricting their employees' travel.
They're saying they're not allowing their employees to travel to conferences anymore for a lot of things like that.
It's a big deal.
And Apple's not going to take any risks.
Apple's not stupid.
They're a conservative, smart company.
There's no way this conference goes on.
John, what do you think?
I was thinking about, you know, I haven't heard the end of the radar, but, like, various options you can do.
You know, WC has been streaming live online for the past couple of years.
Not only do you get the sessions, but you can, like, watch them at the same time as the people in the room, maybe with a seven-second delay or something.
And then they have the recordings of the video and, you know, all sorts of things that they could do over the Internet.
And, of course, obviously the press-only keynote that you could do the same way they do all the other press-only keynotes.
But the thing that occurred to me is...
It's a very Apple move to also find some way to charge, quote unquote, attendees $1,600 to attend it online.
But I'm like, what would be the distinction between the people who pay $1,600 and the people who don't?
Because already, if you pay nothing, you can stream the sessions live for free.
What would you be getting?
Would they mail you a jacket and some pins?
LAUGHTER
They mail you some terrible box launches?
Yeah, I don't think the ticket price comes close to paying for, like, the massive cost that Apple endures for this conference.
Like, you know, when you combine all the various factors, you know, the ticket price probably pays for the venue and your box launches.
If they add in our hotel fees, it pays for everything, but Apple doesn't get the hotel money.
I'm sure to Apple, from their point of view, the most expensive part of this conference every year is probably the massive amount of time it takes to prepare for all the employees, all the engineers that have to go there and prepare presentations and be there for the labs.
That's a massive amount of labor that goes into that.
That is probably way more expensive to Apple than
the actual nuts and bolts of the conference center costs this much, the lunches cost this much.
That's why, assuming they don't hold this conference, I think what they are most likely to do is to just do a bunch of online sessions, just like they've been doing.
As you said, they've been live streaming
I think they're just going to release a bunch of session videos and have a small media event where they live stream a keynote.
And I think that's going to be it.
Now, I would like to see them do more.
This is what we talked about on Under the Radar, this part of it.
I would love to see them invest more heavily in things like documentation, sample code, and possibly, this is a bit of a reach, but possibly staff up DTS and expand some kind of form of the labs to be online and public.
where you get to actually talk to Apple engineers about specific questions and problems you have with specific APIs and your code, and they'll look at it.
Similar to what DTS incidents do when you have a developer account, but free and easier.
DTS is famously a very, very, very, very, very small staff, and I would love to see them staff it up.
I would love to see them take the resources they are saving by presumably not having this conference and use that to really beef up the documentation and really beef up the sample code and really beef up DTS and just give more developers more access to stuff without having them fly across the world to stay in a very expensive hotel and go to this one thing in person for these few days a year.
Because if you think about it, that whole system is incredibly inefficient and incredibly exclusionary.
It's very exclusive.
The percentage of Apple developers that can actually go to the conference is such a tiny percentage of all the Apple developers out there in the world.
It's a few thousand people out of hundreds of thousands or millions of iOS developers around the world.
We're talking a lot of people here.
It's a very big field.
And so anything they can do to make that more accessible to more people has way more value than anything they could possibly change about the conference itself, like how it is for local attendees.
And I like the conference.
I've been fortunate enough to be able to go to every one of them since 2009.
And I consider that a privilege.
and yet i also look at it as you know every year i kind of think wow this is this is kind of wasteful this is very expensive like and this that's one of the reasons why i stopped getting badges a couple years ago too is like you know because i'm going mostly for like the community events and and occasional like occasional like find a way to sneak into a lab and ask like one question to a lab person but otherwise like i'm mostly going for the for the community events and everything but um
But, like, they would have so much more value to more people if they beefed up all of the online resources.
And if they're not going to have a conference this year, I think that is a – like, if you can find a silver lining –
in them canceling this conference, that's it.
They should redirect that energy and that time to making things that everybody can use, making all that stuff better.
The documentation's in a terrible state.
Sample code has been decimated by all the changes in Swift.
Most sample code doesn't work anymore.
They need a lot of help in documentation and all that supporting stuff.
It needs help, and I hope it gets it.
That being said, I don't think most of that is likely to happen.
I think what's most likely to happen is the conference gets canceled and we just get videos and a keynote from a media event and that's it and no other changes.
That's much more likely, I think.
Well, about the videos, though, you mentioned the cost of putting on WWDC.
The cost to the engineering org is the engineer's time that they take out to prepare and perform the presentations.
And that time doesn't probably shrink at all.
for them doing it, you know, on a stage versus not.
If anything, maybe they have to do more takes in front of a camera, right?
Because they still have to prepare the presentations.
They still have to make sure they have slides and sample code and a rehearsed presentation that it has corrects, you know, all the art on it is correct and all the information is correct and it matches up with the WWDC build.
And like that engineering time
is absorbed whether we're there or not.
All the people whose time gets back are the people who plan the event, deal with the venue, deal with meals, deal with security.
Those people don't have to do anything.
They're freed up, but they're not going to suddenly hop on to making the documentation better, right?
So it is still a fairly large cost to Apple's engineering org.
the part they say for the engineers is you don't have to be in this building for a couple of days or the entire week you know you don't have to actually physically be there once you're done with your video you can resume your regular work and then the videos go out to the world right and then as for like labs and remote labs i think it was making me when you were saying that it was making me think about do you remember when iChat video conferencing first came out one of the features it had is you could sort of
share a document.
Like you could see the little faces on these screens in this little 3D kind of view and then you could also share a document and your two little faces would be looking at the document.
Do you remember that?
No.
So they had multi-person conferencing, right?
And the way they did it was instead of just seeing, instead of in the window just seeing like the other person, right?
You would see...
the other person would become like a little tile that would sort of move back into the screen, kind of like a bunch of picture frames sitting on a table or whatever.
And then when you shared a document, that document would be another little picture in the sort of setting, like a cover flow type setting.
Anyway, the point is it would let two people
you know, let you see the other person's face and a document that they can also see on their screen.
And I can't tell you how many times I'm usually doing stuff with my parents on FaceTime or whatever.
And we essentially want to share a document.
Let's all look at the whatever thing together, like in this context, not, Hey, I'm going to open up another window and I'm going to look at this document and you look at it too.
And like, so we could both be looking at it together.
And I know with like Google docs or whatever, you interactively see each other's cursors and both be looking at the same document or whatever.
It's just,
It's so much easier if you can just say here in this multi-person FaceTime chat with the whole family, let's look at this thing or let's look at a bunch of pictures together.
I have a slide show to show you.
Let's go through it.
Oh, look at all the pictures and you can see the pictures and the people's reaction to them.
Something like that would go a long way towards making things like labs possible, right?
Interactively over some Apple product or communication protocol that Apple feels is secure and you're all happy with or whatever.
Let's all be sort of collaboratively working on a thing.
Something better than, oh, I'm going to let Apple control my screen with screen sharing or I'm going to let Apple view my whole desktop with screen sharing.
Just to selectively share documents or a single window.
Or to be, you know, tools that Apple's generally not good at.
It's a company that tends to frown upon people telecommuting.
They like things to be in person, and they don't have a lot of collaborative tools to be able to have a bunch of people working on something together.
As terrible as things like WebEx and Zoom and Microsoft Teams and Slack and all these other things are, almost all of those tools have as table stakes.
A bunch of people can communicate through audio and video and also can all be looking at a single document or a screen at the same time.
And if you're going to do anything remotely like labs, remote, you know, when people aren't in person, you need something like that.
And Apple has nothing like that.
I can't really imagine Apple instructing everyone to download Zoom or WebEx.
So remote labs, unless it's all going to be over like, do what I do with my parents, which is we're all on FaceTime.
And then I like hold up like a phone or a laptop screen in front of the camera so they could see.
It's just, I don't see that working.
Whereas in the labs, you're both hunched over the same laptop and everything works out.
So, yeah, I'm not optimistic about that.
But getting back to my earlier point about cost of money, I'm also not optimistic about the idea that once there's no longer a conference, suddenly engineers will have a bunch of time to sharp their docs.
Now, it could be that one of the announcements at WWC is since last WWC, we've had a concerted effort to improve our documentation and it's all rolling out this week.
And that's like revealing work that they had done over six months or a year.
That if that's what they had done.
that happens whether or not they have wwc it doesn't have nothing to do with freeing up engineers time it has to do with the thing they already did in the past and i'm hoping that's the case i'm hoping the reveal is we made a big effort to improve this aspects of the developer and experience and we are revealing it at wwc not doing it while you're watching a bunch of pre-recorded videos yeah i wouldn't hold my breath on that
nope never know i mean even if they don't really do it do it they tend to make announcements like that uh if they know it's a thing that people want they'll want to have an announcement that says we've heard your complaints about documentation and we've improved documentation in x y and z way whether or not is it a significant improvement or they you know make it sound better than it is very often there's some effort to
help with that you know even if they don't come out and say it they'll just say here's a new framework and we're really proud of the documentation there's lots of different ways they could spin it to try to sort of address the issue in some way and i think that might happen i don't know it's so hard to predict wwc because very often there's something big and shiny that they can throw out and we'll just distract everybody from any issues any boring issues like documentation and sample code
It's like an arm transition.
Can you imagine if this was the year for the arm transition?
That would be brutal.
I don't know.
I just want to reiterate, though, what Marco had said earlier on, that for the three of us, this is our job –
I think, especially for me and Marco, maybe for John, it's our job to go to the conference or at least to go to the event, I should say, and be there for it and make an appearance.
And, you know, I think to some degree it is kind of a responsibility for the three of us to have a live show there when it happens.
But it is extremely expensive.
Not only is the ticket $1,600, but any even slightly reasonable hotel is easily another $1,600, if not $2,000 plus.
And I will never forget, I don't remember who said it to me, but I will never forget when it started to get really and truly expensive when it was still in San Francisco proper.
Somebody looked at me, and I think it was the year that the Apple Watch had just been released or announced or whatever.
I believe this was Underscore who said it.
Was it Underscore?
I think so.
Underscore looked at me and said, you realize that this $400 a night hotel is you buying an Apple Watch every single night and then throwing it away.
Ha!
my mind exploded and I just couldn't believe it.
And I was like, no, no.
Oh, God.
Oh, oh, oh, God, you're right.
Oh, that's not good.
I mean, that is preposterous.
That is utterly preposterous.
I mean, I could go on a three-hour tear about how obnoxiously expensive everything in the valley is and I don't understand how anyone can afford to live there.
But be that as it may, to go to this conference as someone who lives in the United States
You're probably going to need to get on a plane.
So that's between $500 and $1,000 in most cases.
If you want a ticket to the event, that's $1,600.
So call that an even $2,000.
Then you want to sleep somewhere and preferably somewhere that has all the walls, this floor, and the ceiling.
So that's probably another $2,000.
So you're looking at $4,000.
You haven't eaten anything.
You haven't drank anything.
And I'm not even talking booze.
Just in general, you haven't eaten or drank anything.
You do get those sweet, sweet, sweet box lunches for quote-unquote free.
But you haven't had breakfast.
Oh, I guess you could have their crap circular bagel-like things at the conference.
But you certainly haven't had dinner.
I mean, you're looking at between $4,000 and $5,000 for a week.
And it's just insane.
It's just bananas that it's that expensive.
And, you know, somebody in the chat is saying, well, that's just what hotels cost.
Absolutely.
absolutely not it is like a hundred dollars a night to get a really decent room where i am yeah and these aren't nice hotels they're like really mediocre hotels that if they were anywhere else in the country would be like 150 bucks a night and instead they're 400
Or more.
Or more.
It's preposterous.
And so, as we have said, I love WWDC.
I really do.
I love the event, the conference.
I love the actual conference that takes place in the convention center.
I love, love, love, love, love all the superfluous and other things that happen around it.
When I had the chance to go to layers, I loved that.
There's so much good to be said about this, but I also feel like
there's been some tension building over the last several years as things are just getting insurmountably expensive.
And to the point that the only people who can afford it are people who are billing their employer.
And maybe that's okay with Apple, I don't know.
But for someone like the three of us, it's tough, it's hard, it's frustrating.
And so I would love to see it, as much as I would hate to see it go away on a more permanent basis, although it seems like we all agree that maybe this year we should sit this one out.
As much as I would hate to see it go away on a permanent basis, I would love to see a lot of things change.
And I'm really looking forward to listening to that under the radar to hear what you and David had to say about it.
And I would even go a little bit further.
I would push a little harder on the angle of making – that this is kind of ridiculous now.
If you look at the landscape of tech conferences as a whole –
There was a period, kind of a golden era of tech conferences that were mostly smaller conferences.
It started about 10 years ago and ran until probably about three or four years ago.
And this was an era when there were lots of conferences, big and small, at all different price points all around the world.
And they were due...
pretty well like you know it was always a lot of work to put them on a few of our friends put them on and you know it's kind of like throwing a wedding but every year and so it was certainly you know work but like it was it was a fun little community it was a fun you know thing to do for the group of people who was lucky enough to be able to do it basically and travel all over the world and go to go to these fun things or hope that one was came up near you and it made things a lot more accessible to more you know localities but
Something changed a few years ago, and it started to become increasingly difficult to sell conference tickets.
It started to become increasingly difficult to run a conference and break even and not just lose all your money, and not to mention all the work you put into it.
Running conferences is a terrible way to make money.
And so it's even worse than writing books.
And so it became – like kind of the market for conferences seemed to really crumble apart a few years ago.
And most of the conferences that were going strong five years ago are gone now.
And there are very few that seem to be left.
Yeah.
And I wonder, my theory at the time, for the most part, has been like, it used to be that you could get somebody like John Gruber to speak at a conference, and that would sell tickets.
You could go, and if you wanted to hear John Gruber talk about something, you could go to the conference, pay whatever the ticket fee is, and travel there, and you could see people that you liked online, you could see them talk, and it was interesting, and you could like...
meet them afterwards maybe or hang out or have this little community of other people who were there and hang out with them and that was great for a while and then everybody got a podcast or everybody got it and then everybody got a youtube channel and now you can hear the people who you're interested in you can hear their thoughts for free and
all the time in podcasts or on YouTube channels.
And you no longer need to go to conferences to, you know, hear what these people sound like in real life or to see like what, you know, to kind of get an idea of their personality beyond like just their words they write on a site somewhere.
You can actually just listen to their podcast or watch a YouTube channel for free and everybody can do it.
And preparing conference talks as the presenter
That format has a certain expectation of formality and preparation that makes it a very time-intensive thing to make.
Preparing conference talk is a ton of work.
Making good slides, rehearsing the talk, giving it a nice story arc and everything, it's a ton of work for the presenter.
And you do all that work.
and all you get out of it is at the end, maybe a hundred people or a couple hundred people see it.
Maybe if you're lucky, there'll be a good video, and it'll live on for a while outside of the conference, but usually that didn't happen.
Usually you're giving it to the room, and that's it.
Or you can do a podcast or YouTube video, which is usually unscripted or less scripted.
There's not the big expectation of the formal slides and nicely designed everything.
You have the opportunity to edit if you want to.
And it's just a different format.
It's a much lower work-to-output format than a conference talk.
So you have...
All of us who used to go to conferences and speak, we now do other things because, frankly, it's less work.
And we reach way more people with way less effort.
And so you have that side of the market.
Then on the other side, you have people just not seeing the need to pay hundreds or thousands, usually, of dollars to go to conferences to see people when they can just listen to their podcasts.
And so I think the market for conferences in general has mostly evaporated for that kind of community, small kind of thing.
What's left are these mega conferences that usually the platform owners run for the people on their platform.
So things like WBDC, Google I.O.
And I'm not talking about conventions, like Comic-Con.
That's a separate thing.
I'm not in that world.
I don't know anything about that world.
But I'm talking about conferences.
It's like instructional talks to people or here's my origin story.
That's mostly what I'm talking about.
The market for that is really hard now.
The small conferences are mostly gone.
You're mostly looking at just the big platform vendors.
And people go to these things basically just to hear about the new APIs and go to the labs and try to get time with developers.
That's mostly what these big things are for now.
And so the more of that I think that we can remove the need for, the better everybody will be because the way that the smaller conferences died has resulted in way more availability of these people's wonderful content available to everyone all around the world anytime for free.
So how much can we do to make WWDC and conferences like it more like that?
How much can we do to reduce the need for these to make their value available to more people all the time everywhere for free?
I feel like the kind of conference you're talking about definitely is undercut by podcasts.
But there is another kind of conference that lives on and, in fact, has sort of blossomed in the shadow of the other kinds of conferences for good and for ill.
And that's the more instructive sort of like –
classroom type of thing where it's like a little miniature school um so it's it's you can't replace it with like a one-way communication because it's interactive like a classroom where there's a room full of students and a teacher and you're going through some curriculum and you get to ask questions and stuff and that doesn't happen in a podcast or youtube setting it's educationally focused so people and or companies are willing to pay for it as a
And these ones tend to be, I mean, they're also the big ones, but the big ones tend to be less instructional.
The smaller ones can get away with being more instructional.
It's because we're not a platform owner.
In fact, our business is teaching you how to use insert technology and or product here so that you can be, you know,
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, one form of it is someone will come into your company and teach a bunch of people a thing, but there are ones you go to at a particular location and to learn about stuff.
There are some scammy ones that are, you know, come to this 10-day boot camp and will turn you into or whatever, and you pay all this money, and it's like, I could have just learned this online.
But I feel like that type of – that interactive nature –
uh lends itself to an in-person uh room full of people it's where the the math starts to make sense of like well why would i why would i spend all this time on this polishing this message to tell it to a room 100 people but you wouldn't have that same question about why would a room of 50 people and one or two teachers spend their time narrow casting to each other it's like well it's interactive it's a classroom you don't want a million people in a classroom a million people in a classroom can't learn that way you need some sort of give and take some sort of question and answer you know
That's why education tends to work that way and has not turned over entirely to just a one-way blast of a YouTube channel that teaches you math or something.
Although there's a place for that as well.
So I think that type of conference is more durable and maybe has a better business model.
Because you feel like you're getting value out of it.
uh, you know, F eight, uh, uh, AWS reinvent, whatever the hell that thing is called.
I think they're still doing that giant Oracle thing.
There's a giant Salesforce conference, uh, WWDC.
Yeah.
It's just all, it's all the big giant platform owners.
Um, and the networking, the sort of in-person networking is still definitely a real thing.
I think that same networking happens at those educational things as well, but certainly happens much more.
Let's say the Salesforce conference or whatever.
Um,
I think that is, well, I don't know.
I'm saying this as someone who doesn't like to, as an introvert, you can do a surprising amount of networking online, but I think as we all know, it's easy to say these in-person conferences have been replaced by podcasts after we have all gone through a phase where we went to a bunch of them and met a bunch of people who are now our friends.
That type of in-person networking is really valuable.
And just because we've established a friend group in our industry already doesn't mean that
now we no longer need those conferences because we don't need them therefore nobody should have them i think first time wwc attendees come away with connections that are super important for the future of their career and it'll be a shame in particular in the apple community to lose that because without i mean just think about how did i how did i meet casey how did i meet you in person add to wwdc would we ever have met if wwc didn't exist and we weren't there in person no you don't go anywhere yeah
Exactly.
And I knew of Marco online for a long time before that, but we had never interacted until we had occasion to be in the same place at the same time.
It's the way that works.
So in some ways, I mean, we have the problem of scale here where it's like, well, that's great.
When Apple is a smaller company, they made sense.
But your point earlier, Marco, is totally true.
There are so many developers that the fraction of them that gets to WWDC just keeps going down and down.
And so...
Me saying that there should still be WWDC because other people need to have the same opportunity to network that we had is true, but their opportunity is so slim because they have to enter a lottery to get a ticket for crying out loud.
It used to be that Apple would call you and say, hey, you have a free WWDC ticket that comes with your ADC Premier membership.
Do you want to use that?
And people would go, no.
Yeah, like Apple would nag you to try to cajole you into using your free ticket as part of your, you know, thousand something dollar ADC premiere.
Times have changed.
There is a lot of demand.
There is very little supply.
But I still think for for developers, for new developers or developers new to the Apple community.
That in-person contact with the group of other Apple developers is actually really valuable.
And it would actually be great if they could expand that rather than contracting it.
You probably talked about this on another radar, but the whole tech talks thing where Apple would come to your city with a smaller crew and do a bunch of presentations to a limited subset.
Before I ever went to WWDC, I went to a Boston area tech talk thing and didn't meet anybody because I don't like people.
But they were there if I wanted to.
I could have talked to Paul Kafasis, but I didn't.
You were near the people at least.
I was.
I was near them.
So that type of thing where maybe in a post-coronavirus world, providing a place where people can actually meet each other physically does still serve a purpose, I think.
Well, but I do want to touch on one aspect of the whole networking and meeting people angle here.
So I spent a large part of my coming-of-age years on the internet on discussion forums, you know, like Ultimate Bulletin Board, PHP BB, like that kind of, you know, forums.
And it became clear to me over time that forums have a certain ideal size, right?
And then if you are below that size, it's just kind of too low traffic and there's not much reason for anybody to go check it regularly because there's not enough new stuff.
And then when you're in the certain size band, it's great because there's good traffic and you can visit the forum throughout the day and see new stuff and people can play off each other and get responses fairly fast and it's really nice.
But if it grows too large, there's also an upper bound beyond which it's just too much.
And it's actually, it doesn't function very well as a community anymore.
It doesn't feel very community-like.
The community mechanics start to break down.
It becomes like, you know, just more hectic and too much volume.
And the entire forum mechanic just has this like higher, this upper bound where it just kind of falls apart and isn't very good anymore.
Conferences have that too.
And there like, I actually don't think there is like a minimum size below which conferences like suck.
I like, I've been to conferences that have like 50 people and I've been to conferences that have 5,000 people.
And I wouldn't say that 50 people, the 50 people ones were bad.
In fact, they were some of the, some of the best ones.
Um,
I think the value of networking and meeting people at a conference goes down as the number of attendees goes up.
Because it becomes harder for people who don't already have their friend groups to actually find and meet the people they want to meet.
Or to find and meet even just like-minded other people who, even if they weren't people they knew before...
as the number of conference attendees goes up, and especially as you don't get as many repeat visitors every year, because the number of people trying to get in is so high that they try to give a lot of first-time tickets, so it's hard to get a ticket multiple years in a row.
So the odds of building up community that actually is meaningful, and networking that's meaningful over a year or two or whatever else,
I feel like that gets harder as the conference gets bigger.
And I think WWDC these last few years has crossed that threshold where it's actually pretty difficult to network with people because it's almost like there's just too many people there.
It's like a little bit too big.
And I don't think the move to San Jose has actually helped that much, although I don't know if it's really hurt it, but it seems like
The conference is so big now that even that aspect that's supposed to be really good about conferences is harder now.
It's harder to get value out of that.
See, I disagree with you slightly.
I think networking is just as good, if not better, because you're getting a new batch of people – well, largely a new batch of people every year.
But the thing that I struggle with and the thing that was so great about early WWDC – so I started going in 2011 –
The thing that was so great about that is, you know, in 2011, I met maybe five or 10 people that I really hit it off with, John included.
And then in 2012, I met another couple of people.
And over the years, I've met more and more people and have made more lasting relationships.
And that I think you're absolutely right.
It is harder to to to build a lasting and meaningful relationship.
across several wwdc's because a it's unlikely that you yourself will go to several in a row like you said and b even if you dedicate yourself to going maybe you're going to layers if not the big show or maybe you're just hanging out then you know joe smith or or mary smith or whomever that you met last year maybe they didn't make it this year and that makes that sort of thing differently but if you just want to meet a whole bunch of people at random places you know in the traditional businessy
way of networking i don't think that's really any worse but i do i do find for me it's it's very hard to effectively and appropriately manage my time because and i don't know maybe this is inside baseball maybe this is first world problems and if it's really terrible mark will just cut it hooray but for me it's very hard because i want to spend time with you and john for example and mike you know my co-host across my shows and
uh i want to spend a lot of time with you guys because i don't get to spend time with you guys in person really ever except in june but i also want to spend time with people that i don't see often and so like on the occasions that jelly is in town i mean he's coming from the future he's coming from australia so it is not easy to get him and i in the same spot and i want to spend time with jelly but then at the same time
I want to spend time with Apple engineers that I'm friendly with, sometimes just as friendly with, that I don't get to see very often.
So I want to make time for them.
And then while I'm there, I also want to make time for people I don't know, you know, and try to be available for people who are strangers to me, but maybe I've been in their ears for the last five years.
And I want to make time for them.
And so what ends up happening is, for me, I'm always saying to somebody, oh, I can meet with you for 20 minutes or...
Oh, yeah, I'd love to hang out, but I got to go.
Or, oh, I didn't realize what time it was.
I'm sorry, we're in the middle of a very deep and important conversation.
I really got to go.
And that sort of thing has also become very hard.
And I think a lot of that is because I've come to know a bunch of people over the years, but I don't think that's unique to being a podcaster.
I think it's just unique to having gone several years in a row.
And it's just...
I don't know.
It's all really tough.
And I would like to see a change, but darned if I know what to recommend.
And, you know, I don't know how to backseat drive this conference.
That's part of the reason I think that Apple's kept WWDC relatively small.
Yeah.
wwc hasn't like it's gotten bigger in that more people want to go which means there's more turnover from year to year but like to your earlier point like even if you don't see any of the same people very often you maybe your first or your second year you meet a particular group of people and then you kind of that becomes your friend group after the thing you don't need to see them again the next year at wwc for that to stick i mean i think that's been true of
a lot of first-time or second-time attendees, certain people you meet there you still know and are friends with, and it's not because you saw them again the second year, although maybe that helps or whatever.
But for WWE being 5,000-ish people, and by the way, when you said early WWE season, reference 2011, I'm sure lots of people were rolling their eyes.
Another reason that WWE is going to be a big change is Apple's been running it for a long time.
This is going to be the first year they skipped since the...
80s 90s i have a vhs tape of uh of a wwdc upstairs um but yeah it's like it is possible to have and most of these big conferences platform conferences 10 times as many people as wwdc and i think if you were to ask somebody at the 60 000 person salesforce conference do you find it difficult to network because there are 60 000 people i think i mean granted it's a different group of people i think they're gonna say no it's great tons of people i mean love meeting the people and doing all the networking and so on and so forth like
Smaller conferences are more intimate and you're able to connect in a more reliable fashion with a smaller group of people with less effort.
But I don't think 5,000 is too big.
And even though the demand is so great –
That there's turnover.
I think it's still I mean, I think you have to look at it from the eyes of a first time attendee, like not from a multi year attendee who has a bunch of people they know and whose time is in such demand, like, you know, ours or Casey's or whatever.
Like, it's just it.
If you're if you're maybe first or second year attendee and you're just overwhelmed by the sessions and you go to labs and you meet one or two other people.
Doing that just once can be incredibly valuable to just sort of get you started on your career, which is why – I'm not saying that I think WDC needs to continue exactly the way it is, but I think there needs to be some kind of – it would be a shame for that to go away without any kind of replacement.
And I'm not sure what could possibly replace it, but I think it –
it's been valuable in my career in life and I hear from people who have attended for the first or second or third time that they also find it valuable even for people who say I don't go anymore but I'm so glad I went that one or two times because it really you know set me on my path right there's
As much as I don't like going out into the world, being face-to-face with people is extremely valuable.
Again, would we be doing this podcast had we not met face-to-face?
Despite the fact that we, you know, at least Marco knew of me and I knew of him online, but it never led us to start a podcast together, right?
And nobody knew Casey, so...
who the hell is that guy anyway i feel like meeting in person was an essential catalyst and it's very difficult for me to say uh but we don't need that anymore because it's too big and it doesn't work like there there are limits but i feel like wwc is one of the things apple has done with wwc is tried to keep it from getting big because if they wanted to make wwc a 50 000 person conference they could probably do it but they haven't and they don't
And 5,000 may be a little bit crowded, but I still feel like it's it's tenable.
I see the people who are there and, you know, are first time people hanging out and maybe they're start off in a group with the people from their company.
But then they talk to some other group like I think it still works at that level.
I couldn't agree with you more.
It has been such a valuable portion of my life and career that I would I would hate to have somebody else miss out on that since it made such a big difference for me.
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All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
And Roar Lokar writes, kind of paraphrased, the command option click dock shortcut to open a Finder window is amazing.
What are some of your favorite Mac OS shortcuts?
I think I have a ton, but I can only think of a handful off the top of my head.
So I have three for Finder and two for Xcode.
First of all, for Finder, Command-K to get to a window that will let you open a VNC session, which has been very critical now that I'm using the Mac Mini remotely a lot, or an SMB or a network share to, say, your Synology.
Shift-Command-A for applications, that is to say to go into the applications folder.
Shift-Command-4 to take a screenshot or Shift-Command-4 space to take a screenshot of a specific window.
And then for Xcode, option command forward slash for creating documentation.
So, you know, the method summary parameters, et cetera, et cetera.
And shift command O for quick open.
So to open a file very quickly by typing the file name.
I really like those.
I should steal one or two of Marcos that I also agree with, but I will let you actually have your own moment in the sun.
Thank you.
So one of my favorites that I use all the time is paste and match style.
This gets you around the problem of if you copy rich text and you're pasting it somewhere where you don't want to paste its formatting that it came with.
You want it to match the formatting of what you're pasting it into, which is usually no formatting.
uh so paste and match style does that in my opinion this should actually be the default behavior on both platforms it's not um in on the mac you have to do the special shortcut on ios there is no built-in method of paste and match style i actually ios i use a an app called i believe copy plain text and it simply offers a uh a share extension that
copies what you have selected only as plain text.
So that way you can go paste it effectively unformatted.
Oh yeah, so the app is simply called Plain Text.
I'm sure that'll be easy to find.
I'll wait to it in the show notes.
Anyway, so on iOS, you gotta do some crazy thing.
On the Mac, the way to do paste and match style, it's a menu item.
You can see it under the edit menu if you don't want to remember this.
But you basically hold down Command-Option-Shift...
Yeah, so, you know, Command V is paste, and then Command Option Shift V is paste and match style.
I would also, I love, one of the things I turn on on every Mac I use is if you go into the Accessibility Preference pane, you go to Zoom, and...
And you check the box that says use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom.
And I use the control key.
What this allows me to do is hold down the control key and do either a mouse wheel scroll or whatever the scroll gesture is on your mouse or trackpad.
And that allows you to zoom in and see the entire screen zoom in and out simply by holding down control and scrolling.
And this can be very useful to simply very quickly make something big or to check like if you're a developer working or a designer working on pixel stuff, you can like check like alignment a little bit more easily this way.
And it's so fast.
You just hold down control, zoom in, zoom out.
It's awesome.
And finally,
One of the most common awesome power user things to do on a Mac is take screenshots really quickly with, as Casey mentioned, with the Command-Shift-4 thing.
And there's all the different variations of that that you can use to either copy a selected region or output it directly to a file or whatever else.
Any of those, including number four, any of those that make you select a region first where you drag out the box to select...
if instead you hover over a window with your mouse and you hit the space bar it turns the cursor into a little camera and if you click it will capture just that window it'll capture an image of just that window with a drop shadow behind it and nothing else and it's actually there's some weird prefs thing you can do to disable the drop shadow if you want to look it up but uh
It's really, really nice if you want to take a screenshot of just a window to hit Command-Shift-4, whatever it is, hit Spacebar, click the window.
It's awesome.
Yeah, that's what I usually do.
There is a Command Shift 5 now that I think is new in Catalina that lets you do some even more advanced stuff, but I always forget it exists.
And it's become just such muscle memory for me to do Command Shift 4 space.
I also was thinking as you were talking, there's another one that we talked about very recently that is specific to Xcode.
It is, let me get this right, it is Shift X.
command option control c which uh what is it called in the menu it is called copy qualified symbol name and what that lets you do is if you have a function uh or a message or whatever uh it will let it will copy basically the type that it's a part of
the name of the function, and then the parameters to that function.
So let's say you're putting something in, I don't know, like a GitHub PR or something like that, or a GitHub issue.
You can say, oh, you know, foo class dot do stuff, parenthesis stuff, colon, or whatever.
It's a terrible example.
This is an audio show.
It's very hard to describe.
You get my point.
Um, it's, it's a really, even though it's like the claw, I think that's when we were talking about it for the, whatever it was claw, the safe for web claw or whatever it is.
Uh, it's a very similar motion, but it's really, really convenient to get a summarized version of a method that you're working in.
And I also want to double down on the control mouse wheel for zoom.
I always turn that on almost immediately and it comes in handy every single day.
John, do we have enough time to go through your list?
Could you perhaps bring it down to about a hundred entries if possible?
Yeah.
I don't know.
One of the options you might be interested in if you're taking screenshots is the Command Shift 5 thing has a little options menu that lets you set it whether you want the cursor to be visible or not.
Sometimes you don't want the cursor to be visible, which I think is the default, but occasionally you do if, say, you're making a screenshot for the App Store and you're pulling down a menu.
If you don't have the cursor visible, it looks like a disembodied menu coming down with no...
oh that's cool um there used to be a utility might still be there called grab that would give timed screenshots but i think you can also do that from the command shift five thing now too the reason why you'd want timed is because you want to like manipulate the ui and get it into a state where if you were to hit a keystroke it would screw up the state so you have a timer countdown anyway uh lots of options for screenshotting um paste to match style uh there are a couple of apps i think it might have been microsoft apps i don't want to blame about checking but
I ran across a couple of apps or a suite of apps that didn't use the normal paste and match style keyboard shortcut.
They did command shift V. I'm like, what the hell?
Because I kept trying to do paste and match style and nothing would happen.
I know a lot of people who, you know, are just sick of working this way.
remap paste and match style to command v if you do that it actually covers a surprising amount of cases like if you you know so in system preferences in the keyboard preference pane believe it or not there's a shortcuts area where you can set keyboard shortcuts to a corresponding menu command in any application you just type exactly the keyboard command as it appears even if it's buried 20 levels deep you just type the name exactly so
the name of the thing which means you'll have to learn how to type an ellipsis it's command semicolon um you may have to learn to type an ellipsis exactly match that text and you can set a keyboard command so if you do paste and match style with the same case and spacing and everything and assign it to command v and unassigned it from paste every time you hit command v in an application that supports paste the match file it will paste the match style i don't go that far i'm so used to doing the big you know multi-key thing that i don't bother with but some people do um
Shortcuts that I enjoy, let's see.
I'm trying to think of things that people might not know because they're old, because those are things people tend not to think about.
Some of these are less reliable over the time, but they still mostly work.
One of them is, since the days of classic Mac OS, if you begin a drag, in theory, in any application, but in practice, this is less and less reliable.
If you begin dragging something from somewhere to somewhere, you can drag things from applications, you can drag something to the Finder, any time you're doing a drag thing.
And you find yourself in the middle of the drag operation and you're like, I need to bail out of this.
I've spring-loaded my way into a bunch of folders or I've command-tabbed while I've been dragging.
That's another thing you can do, by the way.
If you hit command-tab while you're in the middle of a drag, you can actually drag the thing you're dragging over the icon of the app you want to switch to in the command-tab switcher.
There's a whole bunch of command.
This is...
this is the thing about this.
I don't want to be like, I can't believe people don't know this feigned surprise.
Like, Oh, why does everybody not know all these shortcuts?
But it really does surprise me.
Like the subset of things that each person uses.
Right.
So like the things that you use every day that you think everybody knows about, but then you see somebody else using a Mac and they're using none of your things, but they're using a whole different set of things that you don't know, you know, anyway, to finish my point about the drag, um,
if you want to bail on that drag it's very sometimes difficult to say what do i do i'm holding i'm basically holding this thing in my mouse cursor and i can't get back easily get back to where it was like it's like it's a file or something you want to like put it back exactly where it was but if you don't find exactly where and you release like it'll land on your desktop or something and you don't want to move it to your desktop and the finder has undo and all sorts of things but anyway
trying to find a safe place to let go of a thing that you're dragging can be somewhat fraught this happens on we talked about this on ios like you begin a multi-finger drag or something and you're in the middle of it it's like what do i do if i release that performs an action but there's no safe area in the screen for me to release and say but just don't do what i was doing just abort abort well on the mac if you hit the escape key while you were dragging in theory in a well-behaved mac application it will do exactly what you want you
you're still dragging you're still holding down the mouse button hit escape and it'll just be like oh never mind i'm not whatever it is you were doing i'm going to stop doing it you don't have to find a safe region to dump things if you are by the way looking for a safe region and escape is not supported you can very often drag it onto the menu bar and that will be a safe place to get rid of things um
Another shortcut, again, works spottily, but I used it for many, many years and still do.
If you're in a Finder window and it's in ListView, or you have a ListView Finder window, and it's filled with a bunch of folders, some of which are disclosed, some of which aren't, you know, like it's just a giant forest of folders.
And you want to drag something into that folder.
But anytime you drag it over the window, it starts highlighting one of the folders.
You're like, no, I don't want it to be in one of the folders that's inside this folder.
I want it to be a sibling to all of those folders.
I want it to just be in this window, but it's just filled with too many folders.
How do I get this thing that I'm dragging into this list view finder window, but just in the folder that that window represents, not in any of the nested ones, when every single pixel that I can drag it over would have it ending up inside some other folder that's either disclosed or not disclosed?
if you drag the item onto the column headings like name date modified or whatever again in well-behaved variants of the finder and well-behaved used in situations that has historically been a way to drag something safely like a safe drop region and it will say oh i see you want this to be in this folder and you're not hovering over one of the other folders that are in it but you are within the realm of the window so just drag it onto like the name column or whatever and it will go into that window
Let's see.
Are there any other good ones I can think of?
There's a bunch of stuff with the option key that I'd do without thinking about it.
In Switch Class and front and center, I have all these, you know, if you go to the websites for them, you can see all the different key combinations.
This is very difficult to convey in the app.
I don't have, like, an overlay that tells you about them, but...
Basically, there's tons of modifier keys that you can hit when switching windows and when clicking on things in switch glass.
And almost all those are copied from things that are already in the OS.
So, for example, if you hold on the option key and click on a window belonging to another application, it will hide the previous window or application behind you.
Like, as you leave, the thing you just left will hide and the thing you're going to will appear.
That's, you know, you can do two things in one motion that way.
Right.
Again, combined with my applications, you know, modifies that behavior.
But that's extremely handy.
There's all the keyboard commands for doing window hiding showing in the window menu.
If you look at the window menu in most applications, they'll have like hide and hide others.
Command H, Command Option H. Very handy.
Again, if you don't know those commands exist, it can sometimes be frustrating to have so many different windows, but there are commands you can type to make windows appear and disappear.
You know what really blew my mind that hearing you talk about Finder made me think of?
What is the icon at the top of a window?
Is it the proxy icon?
Is that the right term for it?
So if you're looking at a Finder window, and this is not unique to Finder, but let's pick on Finder for a second.
It's any standard document window in macOS.
Yeah, there you go.
So again, I'll pick on Finder just because it's generic and everyone has it.
You know, I'm looking at a folder and it happens to be called development.
And so at the top of the Finder window, there's a little blue folder.
Next door, there's the word development.
If you click and hold and then eventually drag that folder, you are clicking, holding and dragging everything.
that development folder or whatever it happens to be called.
So you can do things with it.
Like Marco said, you know, that's also true of like a word document or pages document and a whole bunch of other things.
And that I forget that that exists a lot of the time, but every time I remember it ends up saving my bacon or making something a lot easier than I, than it would have been otherwise.
Yeah, I saw some, you know, this is me being doing exactly what I said before, being shocked at things that people don't know.
But there was some article, I think it was actually talking about non-obvious things in iPadOS.
And they were like, yeah, well, there's a bunch of non-obvious stuff on the Mac, too.
Like, I just found out recently that you can hold down the command key and click on the title of a finder window and get a pop-up menu that shows the hierarchy.
And it's like...
aren't people born knowing that?
And the answer is no, they're not born knowing that.
The only reason you know it is because you've been doing it on a Mac for an umpteen million years.
But if you don't already know that, it's not discoverable.
And it's this thing that I rarely see people do, but old school Mac users take it for granted that you can do it.
Now, this was in the context of an article saying like,
There was some feature like – I forget.
I think Ruber couldn't find like – or thought ListView didn't exist or something on the Files app on iPadOS.
And like, oh, if you swipe down from the top of the screen, it shows a toolbar where you can pick the view.
And he's like, how would I discover that?
There's nothing on the screen indicating that I could do that.
And so someone was throwing this command click on Finder title bar thing back at it.
But the thing is –
You don't need to know that shortcut to perform that operation in the finder.
Just by clicking with a single mouse button, you can navigate around and selecting from the menu command to go to the computer item and drill down like there.
It's not the primary way to navigate in the finder.
You can never know that that command click menu is in the finder and still successfully use the finder and use all its different views.
Whereas...
The Files app and iPadOS, if you don't know to swipe down from the top of the screen to pull down a toolbar, you will think the app literally doesn't have a list of your feature.
Again, getting back to what we were talking about many times in the past, the menu bar as a place to say, I don't know what this app can do.
Let me look at some of the things that it can do.
And you just go through all the menus and you'll see a menu called view, which you might have, you know, might be able to change the way windows look.
And you'll see in view a bunch of options for different, you know, list view, icon view.
And that's how you'll discover it.
It totally is discoverable.
The fact that, you know, there are shortcuts.
And by the way, it's discoverable with shortcuts, of course, because when you see the, you know, in the view menu, you'll see, oh, look, there's
as icons as lists as columns and they all have command keys command one command two command three and so not only do you learn those features exist but you also learn the shortcuts um yeah i just spent all day on just on finder ones command up and down arrow for navigating the hierarchy command option up and down arrow to hide the thing behind you holding the option key when you double click a folder to again close the previous window behind you this is all old school way of navigating i know everybody uses browser mode anyway i'll stop myself i could go on for ages but
There are tons and tons of shortcuts in macOS.
The help in macOS, there's some kind of help document in the built-in help that comes with the OS that is just two pages of shortcuts.
I highly recommend people hunt that down and just read it because you'll probably learn something.
John Mitchell writes, is there a difference between using a Mac apps open whatever at login setting and its preferences versus adding it to system preferences, user in groups, login items?
I feel like I'm fighting against the tide by wanting them all in one place, preferably in login items.
I would assume that the open, you know, the apps own open at login setting does not necessarily need to go in login items, but I don't know of any specific differences here.
So perhaps one of you guys do, maybe John.
Yeah, this is a little miniature war story because both of my applications, I wanted to have that little checkbox that says, uh, launch on login or open when I log in or whatever, because they're both the kind of application where you'd want to do that.
And everyone knows login items or everyone, whatever.
A lot of people know login items.
If you go to system preferences and the user and groups thing, like, and you go to your user, there's a little login items tab and there's a list of things that are going to launch when you log in and you can drag things into it and a little plus minus keys.
Right.
Um,
But sometime a couple years ago, you started to see applications, Mac applications, that would have a little checkbox in their preference that said launch on login.
But then if you went to your login items, you wouldn't see it there.
I'd be like, huh.
Why is that not showing up there?
It does launch on login.
The checkbox works, but I don't see it in that thing.
So when it came time for me to add launch on login to my app, my first app, front and center, I looked it up.
Hey, how do you do launch on login?
And you find a bunch of older answers that say, oh, here's how you do it.
Here's how you add it to the login items list, right?
it's just a plist you just add your thing to it and you go to system preferences there'll be your little app icon and it'll launch and log in right like so many things having to do with the mac uh the reason this change is good old sandboxing in a sandboxing world uh it's not a situation where all these random mac applications can access this plist that is not in their containers
The login items plist doesn't belong to any one application.
It's, you know, community owned.
And if you wanted to get at that plist and wanted to have permission to edit, you'd have to throw up a permission dialogue or have full disk access or do all sorts of things that sandboxing makes much more difficult.
So to get around that, Apple came up with a new way for you to make your application launch on login.
And it's an API that you can call.
But it's not as simple as like, oh, I'll just call this API and my app will be launched on login.
The API that you call, the app that you're calling it from, you cannot call that API to make the app that you're calling it from launch on login.
You can only call that API to make some other app launch on login.
I'm sure there's some security... I'm sure there's some kind of security region for this.
Honestly, I don't understand it.
I'm 100% cargo-culting this.
I'm Googling for the answer to my question.
I'm finding it.
The actual answer is you have to make...
another target in your application it will be a launcher application whose sole job is to launch your actual application and you embed that inside your app bundle so if you look inside front and center or you look inside switch glass you will find a tiny application inside both of them called front and center launcher or switch glass launcher and the only thing in the code of that application is code that will launch the real application so you've actually made four apps yeah exactly i totally did
and then and then kill itself and then from the main application you tell the other application to tell it that it should launch your application uh tell it you for the main application you tell it to launch the launcher application on login so the thing that's actually launching a login is not my application it's the launcher application and the launcher application launches then it launches my real application and then my real application kills the launcher
oh my goodness it's a hell of a you know this was like i'm gonna add this one little feature right this is why this is a miniature war story i'm just gonna add that checkbox really easy to do okay now i just gotta call whatever api to launch on login it's like i have to make an embedded target what and then how do i make sure the signing works and then you know the one of the many rookie mistakes i made was the deployment target for my embedded launcher was different from my application and
right i hadn't decided on the deployment targets or whatever so like the deployment target was the default which was like 10 15 on front and center so front and center's uh minimum version is like 10 12 so front and center could run on 12 but the launcher could only run 10 15 so anyone anyone who was running on earlier than 10 15 like i clicked the launch on login and it never launches because the launcher would would start to run and it would be like up your version of the os is too old i won't run um
Anyway, all this is to say the current system is bad.
Having everybody group edit a random shared P list is also bad.
I just hope they come up with a better system that, you know, because what you want is you want it to be secure in whatever ways they need to be secure.
You don't want to have to write an embedded launcher application, but also it would be nice to this person's point that
to be able to look at login items or a single place in the GUI and see, here's all the things that are going to launch on login.
Because now it's like dark matter.
You have no idea other than by going to the application and seeing that checkbox.
I don't know where to find a list of things that are configured to launch on login but not using login items.
So that is, let's say, in a transitional period, and I hope they improve it.
And finally, and this is either going to take three seconds or another hour.
Nicholas Gaffney writes, you have to use one of your co-host's main work machines for a week with minimal changes to preferences, apps, etc.
Who do you choose?
Bonus, which host would you trust more to use your main Mac for a week?
I will start.
I will get everyone angry at me first.
I think I would want to use Marco's iMac Pro because I think it's going to be most similar to my own setup.
Now, I saw John unmute, so I have a feeling he's about to argue with me.
how dare you how dare you uh i i screen is bigger and brighter yes i have more internal storage i have more cores you have more ram yeah you have more ram i'm too scared of your setup though john like look at you why do you have a second dock in the corner of your screen there's no need for that you don't need that john you don't need it
You want me to see the screen so big, it'll be in your peripheral vision.
You can turn on auto-hide.
Yeah, that's also true.
So I think it is most likely, because it's been a long time, but I've seen Marco's computer, and I've seen him use it very, very briefly, and it looked like a reasonably vanilla macOS installation, to the point that I feel like I could work with it.
Whereas...
I think John is probably customizing his setup to the ends of the earth and back, and it scares me.
And more important than anything else, I think John would be a lot less forgiving to me changing anything on his computer.
Not to say Marco would be excellent about this, but I think, Marco, you would be more forgiving about me changing things if necessary.
Who would I trust most to use my main Mac for a week?
I am actually going to continue to pick on John and say I would trust Marco because I think John would not be able to control himself.
That's the thing.
John would not be able to control himself.
But it would be fixed when I was done.
Yeah, by whose definition of fixed?
Exactly.
As in you'd be able to use it to record podcasts without it screwing up on them.
Oh, sick burn.
That's what I mean.
I'm not meaning I would change your settings.
I mean I would debug your problem.
All right.
If that's the case, if that's the deal, then I'll switch my answer to John.
But in general, I'm too scared that – and I think Marco knows exactly where I'm coming from.
I'm too scared that you would fix it for the definition of now I'm running front and center and switch glass and I've got all sorts of things.
I've got Perl installed.
I would fix your scroll.
I would change your scroll direction to the problem.
Oh, no.
You monster.
I mean –
It says minimal changes to settings.
I think we're allowed to change the scroll direction if any of us are using the terrible quote-unquote natural direction.
You mean the correct direction, which is natural.
Anyway, that is my answer.
All right, Marco, it's your turn to get picked on.
What would you do?
I was basically going to say you for both of those exact same reasons.
Both directions.
You using my computer and me using your computer for the exact same reasons of like, you know, A...
I do run a fairly vanilla setup, and I think John runs a much more customized one than either of us.
And so I would both want my setup to be altered as little as possible, and I think if John was using my computer, I think he would have a lot more complaints, and that would result in him fixing my computer.
And secondly, I wouldn't want to use his because I'd be afraid of messing it up.
Yep.
You'd both be on guest accounts.
It's not like you'd be on my account.
Like it says, it doesn't specify, but I'm assuming it means like you're not using that person's account.
Like you'd have your own account.
No, I took it as you, you know, obviously we would never want to share passwords or whatever.
But in this hypothetical scenario, I am sitting down on the Marco user on Marco's computer or the John user on John's computer, whatever the case may be.
And so I am literally using your setup.
But then how, if we don't have each other's passwords, then how would we update our, how would we update our Apple ID settings, which would be prompted for at least once or twice during the week?
I guess, I guess.
Are you both getting that prompt or is that just me?
Just you.
Yeah.
It comes up occasionally.
You know what I'm talking about, right?
Oh yeah.
It'll, it'll be like a notification that says your Apple ID settings need to be updated and it will, if you click on it, it will launch system preferences and it will go to the Apple ID thing.
and there'll be a thing that says you need to update your thing, and then it'll make you enter your Apple ID password, and then you wait a little bit, and then it'll make you enter your Mac password, and you wait a little bit, and then it goes away?
I have had that happen for sure, but it doesn't happen as frequently as it sounds like yours does.
I kept meaning to ask about this on Twitter, but I'll do it now on the podcast.
If you work for Apple...
on iCloud and you know what the hell that thing is, please tell us.
Because I do it every, you know, few weeks.
And every time I do it, I'm like, what are you doing thing?
I haven't changed anything related to my Apple ID.
I don't know what you're prompting me for.
I mean, okay, I'll enter my Apple ID password and then I'll enter my Mac password and then you'll go away.
But I don't know why you were ever here.
And it makes me think it's server related because I think like when Catalina first came out, there was a day where everyone was getting prompted for it like 100 times a day.
Like you do it and then it would come back five minutes later.
Right.
And I'm like, this has got to be a server side thing because this is not client cycle.
Anyway, so if you know what that is definitively and can tell us and, you know, as an extra credit can tell us if there's anything we can do about stopping it, although I assume there isn't because I assume it's a server side thing.
Please tell us.
All right, John.
So who's who's getting in trouble?
Well, you know, I think this is what's going on said, but I'll say it.
No one wants to use Casey's computer because it's broken all the time.
No one has picked your computer yet.
I know it's just.
But I'm also I'm also not going to.
It's just three of us as limited choices.
I can't pick my own computer and I'm sure as hell not going to pick yours because nothing works.
like the os constantly has to be reinstalled and then the trackpad is stuttering and you can't record podcasts on who wants to use and then and then when it was working you can't do swift ui with the live preview because it's some hobby like no one wants to use that thing oh come on man i mean that's true like and i was assuming we'd be on our own account so i'd have to say i'd be on margo's and like honestly i don't customize my computer you know like there's i have fewer menu bar icons than you do casey so there's that right i mean
If I look at my menu bar right now, I've got Mountain, Pacebot, my two apps, Twitterific, and the stupid Skype thing that I can't get rid of.
And then I have a time machine, Wi-Fi, like, sound, and then the sidecar thingamabobber.
Plus, like, my name and the date.
Like, I'm not running any kind of system extensions other than I think I'm running Typenator as my autocomplete thingy.
Is there anything else?
No, I mentioned pay spot.
That's it.
I customize new folder to command N in the finder because I'm a sane person and I have the proper scroll direction.
That's the extent of my customization.
It's not that weird.
Anyway, I'd pick Marcos.
I've used Marcos' computer briefly.
I would really dislike his mouse, but what can you do?
And his weird keyboard.
I can't type on split keyboards, but I would survive.
But I have some confidence that it would stay up and be reliable during the time that I was forced to use it.
You're so mean to me.
Hey, this computer hasn't barfed yet in the last two hours, 10 minutes, and 24 seconds.
You may have solved the problem.
That problem.
I feel like this question is limiting because there's only three of us, so you only have the choice of two other things, and one of them is Casey's computer in our case.
Yeah.
Wow.
I just can't believe neither one of you picked this thing because it is a champion.
It's because of you, John.
It's because of you.
Use a guest account.
There's limited damage you can do.
Also, the other problem at using your computer, John, is that I might get used to the 6K and then I'd have to buy one and I really don't want that to happen.
No, you'll totally get used to it.
I mentioned the day that I got it, it was so big I don't know where to look and then it just becomes normal so fast.
And then I go to my wife's iMac and I'm like, what is this little 12-inch computer here?
It's not that much smaller, but I go over to it and it looks small.
The chin looks bigger, the screen looks smaller.
It's so depressing how instantly you get used to even a slightly bigger screen.
I do wonder what the limits are, though.
I feel like if...
42 inches at this distance?
Would that be outside my peripheral vision?
Oh, my goodness.
I could use more height.
Oh, my goodness.
Thanks to our sponsors this week.
Squarespace, Collide, and Away.
And we will 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.
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-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-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
So long.
So in the last 24, 48 hours, there has been a discovery, maybe an announcement, about a new BMW logo.
Now, it is not clear to me, maybe it's clear to others, that is this just for their new i4, which is like their new electric car, or is this going to be embraced across the line?
I'm not sure.
If you look at the image, we'll put a link in the show notes.
If you look at the image as presented next to the current logo,
It looks like garbage.
But when you see it on the hood of a car, I don't think it looks bad.
And I seem to be in the minority.
I think pretty much everyone hates it.
But I think it's pretty good.
I like it a lot more than I like the flattened Volkswagen logo, which just does not look right to me.
John, how do you feel about this?
So, first of all, I think it is official everywhere.
If you go to the actual BMW page and not the umpteen stories about it, you'll see their explanation, presumably translated from German.
And they show the history of the logo.
Here's the good.
The good is the BMW logo has not changed much over the years.
It's always been a little circle with the propeller thing in it.
It's got the letters BMW has basically been the same.
They've changed the details of like, are there little rings around the rings and what color are the letters and how dark blue are the little propeller things on the inside of
but it hasn't changed that much.
The new one, exactly the same shape, letters BMW, the propeller thing, right?
The difference is that, and they don't say this in the thing, but I can see in the application of the logo, the outer ring that says BMW is basically now transparent, like a transparent ping.
Whatever the background is shows through and the ring around the outside is white and the letters are white and the propeller is still blue and white and then everything else is transparent.
So when they put it on the car, you see body color through the ring.
But when you see it and their little logo thing, it shows it next to a bunch of other logos where that ring used to be black.
And they put it on a gray background, so what you see is a gray ring with white letters and then the propeller in the middle.
And I think that looks bad.
Not super bad, because it's still, like, it's basically the same logo.
It's not like they stylized it and made it all 90s and added drop shatters or whatever.
It's fairly straightforward, but it's weaker.
It has lower contrast, it has less personality, and it looks somewhat incomplete.
When you see it on a car and the body color shows through...
it can kind of look cool depending on the body color now suddenly the body color you choose for your car influences how the logo looks in context on the car i think still think it looks mostly okay especially like did you see the new eye logo they have a new logo for the eye series of cars and it's a nice matchup for that it's all very 2d and flat like if you look at the last logo revision did in 1997 it's filled with 3d shading and all sorts of sort of uh
people would say skeuomorphic details but they don't know what the word skeuomorphic means but it looks like ios 6 let's put it that way the 1997 logo looks like ios 6 and the new logo doesn't look like ios 7 but it's closer everything is flat there is no shading everything is solid color i am not sold on the transparency i think someone came up with that idea and thought it was you know interesting and clever and got convinced people it was a good idea i am not convinced it's a good idea
Yeah, because you mentioned how this logo progress image here is showing it against a gray background, and it doesn't look good against gray.
You know what's a really common color for cars?
It's so true.
Shades of gray.
Oh, what is it going to look like on white?
Right.
I think it has a pretty good chance of looking good on black because that will most closely approximate the way it's looked forever.
But it'll be weird, though, because the black will be sunken because that'll be like body metal.
Yeah, I think it'll look okay on black and very dark colors.
It might look okay on straight white, but it probably won't look good on any silver or medium gray, which they sell a lot of.
And yeah, I don't know.
I see this and I think this is an interesting idea to change the logo, to modernize it.
But this isn't how I would have done it.
And I don't think it works.
I don't think it's successful.
I don't think it looks good.
The good news is that when you see it on the i4, the rest of the i4 is so hideous looking that you immediately forget about the logo.
It's not so bad.
It's all right.
It looks better than the i3.
Well, the grill is truly and utterly terrible.
Like the grill, it's not quite Lexus bad, but it is right on the edge of Lexus bad.
But in the grand scheme of ugly grills, have you seen like the new Genesis grills?
And like there's a whole bunch of just really awful grills that are coming out.
The i4 is not great, but like –
Of all of the usually awful BMW concept car treatments of the kidney grille, this one is about middle of the road because I've seen some worse ones.
But yeah, this is a big trend.
And I don't understand it because like in the i4, the actual physical trend is you don't need air coming in when you have electric cars.
So why do you need a big gaping hole in the front?
And yet people still want to put a big gaping hole and they plug it like the first Tesla Model S, which...
With this big black thing that says, yeah, there's a hole here, but we don't need the hole, so let's put a plug in it.
Tesla figured that out at least fairly quickly and said, no, we're not going to do that.
But all these other companies, their signature is the front grille, or they want it to be the front grille.
Like Lexus, their new design trend of having this massive gaping mesh thing in the front –
uh genesis with the similar style where they're trying to define their style by this massive gaping grill this is not the time to have a huge grill you know when you go electric it's going to be pointless don't make that your brand identity you know i'm watching this is now on the bmw concept i4 page there's a 30 second video i didn't realize that on in the ridiculously huge grill there it says i4 within it which is whatever fine
It lights up like the god-awful, terrible Mercedes logos that light up.
I'm seeing that now.
Oh, that's bad.
I mean, yeah, this is not the actual car.
This is a concept car.
I know, I know.
But yeah, they better not ship that.
Yeah, the Mercedes logo is so bad when it's illuminated.
Like the regular Mercedes logo as is fine.
It's good.
I like it.
But illuminating it is just a look at me and my fancy ass Mercedes.
Aren't I cool?
I feel like Mercedes has the... I mean, BMW has the wisdom to not change their logo radically, but even now I feel like they're giving in a little bit.
Mercedes, like, understands.
You can do lots of different treatments with the three-pointed star, but don't one day say, you know what?
We're adding a fourth point or we're making the star fatter or whatever.
Like, it's more or less... I don't know if you saw the Mercedes, like...
uh three three prong logo it would look like the bmw thing and like over the years it more or less stays the same but if you look at any individual mercedes those wide variations in how they treat that logo and i feel like bmw had the same advantage and that they lots of you know their logo was a little circle that was basically a neutral colored black circle with letters bmw and a slight accent of blue in the middle and
And that was fine and it matched everything and it looked good.
Like it was not broken.
It did not need to be fixed.
It says BMW Concept i4.
It is lit up in the grill.
It is lit up.
The word BMW Concept i4.
I'm thinking that's not going to ship.
I hope not.
But I mean, would you want to drive a billboard?
I mean, the illuminated Mercedes logo makes me so angry.
But this is so much worse.
A lot of cars have shipped with the thing where you open the door and it projects like the name of the car company or the model on the ground.
Have you seen those?
Yeah.
Oh, God.
Cars shipped with that.
That's not just a concept car thing.
But yeah, if you look at this concept car, there's a lot of those things in this car that are not shipping for sure.
Yeah, I hope not.
It's also too bad to me because one of the things that I always admire BMW for, which is silly, but I really thought their angel eyes were amazing.
So if you're not familiar, early on, it was maybe late 90s or something like that.
I don't remember exactly when, but...
uh bmw headlights they were all they for a long time were four circles and what they did is they had like a ring around the outside of each of the headlights that would light up and that was their daytime running lights and they called them angel eyes and they were to my recollection anyway the first manufacturer to do a treatment of their lights particularly daytime running lights that was a signature thing right so you saw those four circles coming at you you knew that
that that was a BMW.
And it was within five or 10 years that basically every other auto manufacturer in the world started doing the same thing.
But they seem to have given up on the four circles.
And I suppose that probably makes sense from a technological point of view.
But to me, I actually almost feel like, especially in the age of electric cars, coming back to what you were saying, John, like, can the kidney grill, like, yes, I know that's blasphemous, but can the kidney grill and keep the angel eyes?
But now they've got lights that don't look too dissimilar from my, my golf.
Yeah.
They still do the four lights.
That's still their signature is the four lights, not the fact that they're circular.
Just look at the i4.
When you see headlights on a BMW, it's always each headlight has two major distinct things.
I'm with you, Casey.
Here we are talking about they changed the logo.
and yet they kept this giant kidney grill that is totally unnecessary on this car.
By the way, it has an air intake.
It's below the kidney grill.
It's like in that little slot.
There is an air intake there, but the grill isn't it, which is even more ridiculous that they have this ridiculous styling element here.
I think if they're going to change something that's been this long-standing icon of their brand,
drop the kidney grill from electric cars that don't need it you're both fired they can't drop the kidney that's the defining styling element of the entire brand you cannot drop that uh you can make it you can decide to minimize it instead of maximizing it instead of in every model make it bigger instead of smaller that's what i was getting at before but i don't think you need to drop it especially since at various times if you look at the 850 uh you can make the kidneys really small
smaller than the openings that are smaller than the little t in the in the model s and the current tesla even like it's not a problem for like you can't use the kidneys if you have electric car all i'm saying is if you know you're not going to need air intake don't keep making those kidneys bigger and bigger because that's dumb and it doesn't look good that's the whole point it doesn't look good it's perfectly fine to keep the kidneys just you know find a way to make them look nice because now that's all they have to do is look nice they have to look nice and not add too much drag
um i like actually like the headlights on the this i4 concept you know they're not they're like angel uh under eye that use shapes bags under yeah i think that's that great i think that's actually a fairly you know i don't again i don't think that's going to ship as is but it's a fairly nice aggressive looking headlight that still looks like bmw to me if i could just blank out the giant schnoz in the middle there if i could blank out that kidney or replace it with a smaller kidney i like the way the front of this car looks
The back, much less so.
The grill is just so bad.
And we have a concept car.
Are you going to pick brown?
I know they're going to call it gold, but this is not... They call it like champagne or something.
It's not a looker.
No.