Things Are Degraded
John:
do people still buy xboxes is this fight even still on yeah that's all three competitors are viable you know sony destroyed everybody the last generation but xbox is viable they have enough money to make a second one you know but and nintendo as we know definitely viable so the market can sustain three uh each generation maybe the winner will swap and nintendo won the wii generation and
John:
uh xbox won the ps3 generation see see what happens this time sega did not win it hasn't won anything lately no all right sega won the genesis generation and that was it no it did not win the genesis generation only in your mind no i think
Marco:
It depends on how you measure, but they did very well.
Marco:
Go look up the numbers.
Marco:
It did fine.
Marco:
It was viable.
Marco:
Viable?
Marco:
I think they were very, very successful during that generation.
Casey:
Sega didn't win, but they were very, very, very strong.
Casey:
But I still think Nintendo won.
Marco:
They won Marco's heart.
Marco:
They did win my heart, damn it.
Marco:
Sega was awesome for that one generation.
Casey:
I've said this many times on the show.
Casey:
I peddled so many Dreamcasts when I worked at Babbage's, and that just did not work out well.
Marco:
No.
John:
The Dreamcast was not viable.
Marco:
And it's sad, because the Dreamcast was a good system with good games, but Sega just blew it so hard after the Genesis that nobody trusted them anymore.
John:
I'm not going to say it was a good system.
John:
Dreamcasts had good games.
John:
The system...
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
It had the little Game Boy memory card.
Casey:
What did they call that?
John:
The controller was awful.
John:
The visual memory thing was dumb.
Casey:
There it is.
Casey:
Yeah, visual memory unit, the VMU, something like that.
John:
It did have a phishing controller, but still.
Casey:
That phishing game was amazing.
Marco:
Yeah, actually, this is not for this week, but I have a whole retro gaming setup now, and I'm super into this world.
Marco:
And one of these days, I will talk about it on the show.
Marco:
It's been quite a ride.
Marco:
aren't there sega games on on switch right you can buy them a virtual console yeah yeah sega became just like you know software for everybody now yeah so i feel like that's probably your best bet to get all your sega hopes and dreams is on nintendo consoles oh no i don't need to well i know you can do maim yeah yeah i had no i have my genesis running you'll see i i i don't have time to talk about this week so let's we can do next week if you want
John:
Is that less work than just running them in emulator?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
Oh, it's way more work, but it's way cooler.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
It has a warmer feel.
Marco:
I'll get there.
John:
It's all about the ritual.
John:
I don't have time this week.
Casey:
Save it for the show.
Casey:
Save it for the show.
Casey:
John, you guessed right about the A12Z.
Casey:
I'm very impressed.
John:
Yeah, we were talking about that when the new iPad had just come out and we weren't sure what the deal with the system on a chip was, except that it was one letter different from the previous one.
John:
And it turns out that one letter stood for something that I speculated about on the show, which is that all the parts on it are working.
John:
The A12X had seven GPU cores as an insurance policy to increase yields because if one core is a dud, then you can still use it.
John:
Apparently now they've gotten good enough at manufacturing this particular chip or they just saved all the high-bend ones for this particular thing, something like that.
John:
But anyway, this is a common practice in the industry.
John:
That's what the A12Z is.
John:
It's an A12X without any boo-boos.
Marco:
I wanted to very quickly explain what this is because I bet there are some listeners out there who don't know about this process and it kind of affects a lot of things about chip making.
Marco:
If you ever hear people talk about a chip having low yields or things like this or binning,
Marco:
roughly what this is, and please correct me if I'm getting any parts of this grossly wrong, and to any experts in the field, I'm sorry, because I only have a passing knowledge of it, but I just want to explain this.
Marco:
So basically, when you make, you know, silicon chips, like CPUs, GPUs, and everything, they're made on these giant silicon wafers.
Marco:
You've probably seen, you know, the big, circular, like, cool-looking, shimmery silicon wafer, and they're cut out.
Marco:
If there's, you know, there's, like, some rate of flaws, of either a flaw in the wafer itself, or a flaw in the process that is printing, whatever, you know, the chip on the wafer,
Marco:
There is some rate of flaws and it's like, okay, well, you might have like a couple of flaws per square inch or whatever the rate is.
Marco:
And so as you're cutting out those chip dies from that giant wafer, some of them are going to have bad flaws and you won't be able to use them.
Marco:
And yield is literally like the percentage of how many that you make can be used.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons why the larger a chip is, the more expensive it tends to be because you can fit fewer of them per wafer.
Marco:
And if there's an imperfection, there's a higher chance of each chip having an imperfection because it has more surface area, basically.
Marco:
And so if you think about if there's going to be a certain number of flaws on each wafer, there's a higher chance that fewer chips on that wafer will contain no flaws.
Marco:
One of the ways you can deal with some flaws is, all right, we're going to manufacture a chip that has eight GPU cores on it, but we're only going to actually spec it to have seven.
Marco:
And so we can crank these out more so and for lower prices because if there's a flaw and it happens to land on one of these GPU cores, we just mark that one as the disabled one and we enable the other seven and it's fine.
Marco:
And we can still use that chip.
Marco:
We don't have to toss it in the garbage.
Marco:
And so what they've done here basically is, you know, it used to be that used to be a chip that had eight physical cores on it for the GPU, which takes up a lot of chip real estate.
Marco:
One of them was just disabled and which one didn't really matter.
Marco:
So they would, you know, if there happened to be a flaw in that area of the chip, they could disable that one and still use the chip and still ship it and make their money.
Marco:
And so all that has changed with the A12X versus Z appears to be that they're now shipping all eight cores enabled.
Marco:
So they've gotten better enough at this manufacturing process or it's gotten cheaper or whatever it is.
Marco:
The economics are working out better so that now they don't have to leave that reserve where like they don't have to increase the yield artificially by having this one disabled area that they can move around as needed.
Marco:
They can just ship only the ones that have all eight that are flawless.
John:
They could have also saved all the ones that had all eight working.
John:
I don't know what the economics of that is, but these are small items.
John:
If this was a premeditated strategy and they really had awful yields, they could have said, everyone with eight cores working, just put that over there and we're going to use them later.
John:
That seems less likely than what you described, but it is a possibility.
Marco:
Yeah, definitely.
Marco:
And then the other thing I wanted to touch on while we're talking about this, because it's a very similar thing, is the idea of binning.
Marco:
A lot of people don't know that when you get a CPU that has the same CPU available in three different clock speeds, that's the same CPU.
Marco:
They're not making... Okay, now we're going to make the 2.5 gigahertz ones, and then next week we're going to make the 2.2 gigahertz ones.
Marco:
They're making one chip, and certain ones will have whatever...
Marco:
flaws or whatever whatever you know better or worse outcomes of their manufacturing certain ones will be able to run at higher clock speeds without having flaws and so they basically test them and they bin them they sort them into like this one passed the highest test so we're going to sell this one as the highest clock speed the ones that can that couldn't quite run at that speed without errors or flaws but could run at a lower clock speed
Marco:
We'll bin those down here.
Marco:
We'll set them by whatever method, like burning in certain things into them, whatever.
Marco:
We'll fix them to this one clock speed that they tested okay at, and so on.
Marco:
And as you can imagine, there are fewer that can run at the highest clock speeds.
Marco:
So the highest clock speeds are more expensive because they don't have as many of them.
Marco:
And of all the ones they make, they can make a whole bunch more that run at the lower clock speeds than the few that run at the highest clock speeds.
Marco:
So that's, if you ever hear the term binning, that's what that's about.
Marco:
And it's all between binning and this weird, like, you know, partially disabled chip thing.
Marco:
It's all about improving yields when you're making these chips.
Marco:
And it's directly related to cost and feasibility and everything else.
John:
And game consoles is one area where obviously it's very price sensitive.
John:
You're trying to, you know, sell what is essentially an entire gaming system for less than the cost of a really good PC video card.
John:
So in the past several generations, it's been a common practice to plan ahead and just assume that you're never going to get perfect chips for your game console and just assume that one or more cores are going to be bad.
John:
And GPU cores, there's usually more of them and they're more sort of like regular and equivalent to each other.
John:
Like GPUs in general are more, if you look at them, like,
John:
in the wafer view they have a more regular pattern it's just repeats of the same block over and over and over again so it's the perfect it's the a it's the area that usually takes up most most of the square millimeters on the chip and b it's the perfect place to say okay well we're going to allow one or two of these things to be duds and we're still going to ship it because that's the only way we're going to be able to sell people this thing for four hundred dollars taking a minimal loss on it or whatever yeah
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And we also have learned in the last week that all 2020 iPad Pros have six gigs of RAM.
Casey:
So on the 2018s, which is what I have, and I think one or both of you guys have, those only the one terabyte models had six gigs of RAM for reasons that I don't think were ever clearly explained.
Casey:
But one way or another, apparently in the 2020 iPad Pros, all of them have six gigs RAM, which is a small but potentially significant difference.
Casey:
And if you're really scratching at the bottom of the barrel to find a recent upgrade, Marco,
Casey:
then maybe that could be your get-out-of-jail-free card.
John:
Don't forget the supposed U1 chip that's in there as well.
Casey:
I've heard since that people are saying no, that's not there after all.
Marco:
I'm so happy that these iPads are really good and they're the best iPads we've ever made and all that stuff.
Marco:
I have no interest in this update and that's fine.
Marco:
I use my...
Marco:
11-inch 2018 model every day around the house, and it's wonderful, and there's nothing wrong with it.
Marco:
And the one thing that we all want to play with, which is the new iPad Magic Keyboard, isn't out yet, and the reviewers don't have it yet.
Marco:
And it's compatible with mine, with the 2018 models, which is awesome.
Marco:
I don't know yet.
Marco:
I know Gruber was talking about this in the talk show.
Marco:
I don't know yet if...
Marco:
the magnet arrangement might have been improved on the new one.
Marco:
Like maybe the magic keyboard attaches to the old one, but it's not as secure or it's not as good or it's more cumbersome in some way.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But it appears that the 2020 iPad is almost identical to the 2018 iPad and iPad Pro specifically.
Marco:
And that's wonderful because...
Marco:
On one level, it's a little concerning in the sense that, wow, they had almost two years and this is all they really changed.
Marco:
And I'm minimizing this.
Marco:
In the world of AR, I think the LiDAR sensor is actually a really big deal because it makes it so much faster to pair or to establish the AR room arrangement and it makes it more stable and everything else.
Marco:
That's wonderful.
Marco:
That's a feature I've never once used my iPad to do.
Marco:
So it's not going to be a thing that affects my life at all.
Marco:
And so the fact that there's literally like nothing else that's different except a RAM upgrade, which I also won't use because I don't multitask almost ever on my iPad.
Marco:
If you had an earlier iPad model and you want what was great about the 2018, great.
Marco:
This is a good time to upgrade.
Marco:
There's a slight improvement.
Marco:
Otherwise, though, I see no reason and that's totally fine.
Marco:
Man, what's wrong with me?
Marco:
I don't have the new iPad and don't want it.
Marco:
I don't have a Mac Pro and don't want it.
Marco:
Am I okay?
Casey:
I'm not so sure.
Casey:
I'm getting worried.
John:
I mean, you're going to get that keyboard when it comes out, so don't worry.
John:
You'll be able to buy something soon.
John:
Thinking about this update, though, last show, I think we characterized it as a speed bump, and it is, as we've described.
John:
But it makes you think why Apple has been content to not update the iPads for a long time.
John:
like with big gaps between them, and it never seemed like they were in a rush to get out of speed bump.
John:
And so I'm thinking, like, why this time?
John:
Why be in a hurry to put any change?
John:
Why not just make us wait until the A14X sporting, you know, the next big jump?
John:
Could be that the next big jump is not coming for a while.
John:
You know, it could be that...
John:
they always wanted to have a big jump now and they couldn't hit that date so they wanted to get something out and they had a bunch of these fast a12s hanging around but this is actually the new camera system from the one that will have the a14 in it i don't know um but it is it is actually a little bit concerning to me despite the fact that you know this is a good ipad and if you want an ipad you should totally get this one it's really good but if you've got the previous one it's not that compelling and and it does make me wonder what's happening there was i forget who was uh sending around the rumors like the
John:
the internal part numbers of the supposed next-generation chip.
John:
I think it was the A14.
John:
They have all these internal part numbers, and they've gone through the sequence where they've been increasing the number by one with each thing.
John:
And supposedly, again, these are all just rumors, supposedly the next major chip...
John:
does not increase the number by one of the previous internal code name model part number thing it's just an entirely different part number like it starts over it's like 101 again where they're up to like 108 or 9 or something like that um and that's making people think wow this is like it's a big change this next chip is not just a you know an iteration of the previous one or maybe it's the big chip that's going to power all the arm powered max and
John:
You know, all sorts of stuff like that.
John:
And if if that ends up being in remotely true, it makes me think that this model is a stopgap because the next iPad is not going to be out anytime soon because the next iPad is a big leap because it uses again, you know, speculating on these rumors.
John:
Maybe it uses a totally new a totally new chip that's suitable for use in Mac laptops and as well as iPads.
John:
And it's a new generation and yada, yada, yada.
John:
And if they and that could be coming out, according to the arm rumors now, what are they saying, like 2021 or something?
John:
And who knows if that'll be delayed by all the, you know, virus stuff.
John:
Right.
John:
So if they waited until 2021 to update the iPad, people would be getting a little bit cranky.
John:
Right.
John:
So that makes this A12Z make more sense.
John:
Like they need something.
John:
They couldn't wait that long because it would be too long.
John:
So give them a better iPad now because we know the next one's not coming along anytime soon.
Casey:
Yeah, I think that's an important point, that in years past, you know, when there were multiple years between iPad updates, and this was also exacerbated by the fact that I don't think they were really touching software either, but nevertheless, you know, they would go, Apple would go a couple of years between iPad updates if memory serves, and everyone would be like...
Casey:
dude, what's going on?
Casey:
Can we get a little love for the iPad somewhere, someway, somehow?
Casey:
And yeah, this is not a very interesting update in terms of the iPad itself, although I am so amped for that keyboard, I can't even tell you.
Casey:
But I think the alternative is all of us talking heads start raking Apple over the coals for not even doing a speed bump.
Casey:
So yeah, the speed bump may not be the most exciting thing in the world, but I do think it's important to recognize that they're giving us what we want.
Casey:
They're showing us that
Casey:
Yeah, even if they don't have something magical that changes our lives to offer, they're still doing something.
Casey:
Admittedly, this is very little something, but I will take something, some sign that something is happening, you know, rather than having the iPad somehow befall the Mac Mini timeline where it doesn't get updated, like you said, John, for two or three years.
Casey:
So I'm glad that Apple is doing something, even if the something they're doing is a little bit of a snooze to me.
John:
Yeah, I mean, you want the speed bumps to be like, you know, sooner, like speed bumps are good.
John:
It's better than nothing.
John:
But you'd have you'd like to see like a big release.
John:
And then the next one would be a speed bump and then a big release some kind of iteration like that.
John:
Whereas this was the normal gap that we would get for a big release.
John:
And then instead, we got a speed bump.
John:
That said, the last time they did a big update, it was the change to these flat-sided iPads, which everybody loves, and they're great, right?
John:
So they deliver when the big ones come down the line.
John:
By the way, someone in the chat found that thread that I was thinking of.
John:
It was Steve Trout and Smith.
John:
These are the...
John:
Are they part names or code numbers?
John:
Anyway, A10 was the T8010.
John:
A11 was the T8015.
John:
So I guess they didn't go by ones.
John:
Anyway, the A12 was the T82X.
John:
And the A13 was the T83X.
John:
And the next one is T8101.
John:
So forget about the T80s.
John:
This is the first in the T81 line.
John:
does that mean anything who knows like just you know this it's all just tea leaf reading from rumors and so on and so forth but it is excitement is building on in the in the world of arm on the mac and apparently on the ipad too because you would imagine that whatever the work they're doing to make cpus for laptops it's you know basically 100 overlap with the ipads which are already faster than their laptops in most regards so fingers crossed for 2021
Marco:
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Casey:
May I tell you gentlemen a story?
John:
Is it a happy story?
John:
Is it a story where awesome things happen and you're smiling throughout and it's just joy?
Casey:
No.
John:
That's the best kind.
Casey:
This kind of story still hasn't ended and it's been almost a week.
Casey:
So Casey, what computer are you using?
Casey:
Well done.
Casey:
I wish I could tell you that was a real deep cut, but it's not.
Casey:
No, I'm still on the iMac Pro.
Casey:
Oh, thank God.
Casey:
The iMac Pro seems to be fine.
Casey:
My phone seems to be fine, although I will say that there is a
Casey:
a very frustrating not i'm gonna say gouge but that's way overselling it like nick in the screen right where i scroll that's driving me batty this is by the way the one that's that i paid a hundred dollars to get you know the refurb that i got after i shattered the back like a moron but anyways that's also not the problem here so how did you gouge the screen by the way side i i i genuinely don't have the faintest idea i obviously i did something how do you not know when you put a
Casey:
It's not like I put the phone in the same... You put it in a pocket with your keys?
John:
I mean, what's going on?
Casey:
I was just about to say it's not like I put my phone in the same pocket as my keys.
Casey:
We're missing the point.
Casey:
We're missing the point.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
Remind me never to let Casey use my phone.
John:
It doesn't remember how he put a gouge in the screen.
John:
It's so big that it's annoying his thumb.
Casey:
Yeah, that's very true.
Casey:
All right, so I got to tell you a tale of woe.
Casey:
About my Synology.
Casey:
Oh, no!
Casey:
Things are not good at the Liz household right now.
Marco:
Did it hear me telling you that you should basically kill it and got upset?
Casey:
All right, let me set some ground rules for you guys and the listeners.
Casey:
The ground rules are, I am not interested in ways of getting rid of the Synology.
Casey:
We've covered that ad nauseum.
Casey:
I'm not interested.
Casey:
Things I should have or could have done differently...
Casey:
Don't want to know.
Casey:
It's too late.
Casey:
Doesn't matter.
Casey:
So don't even bother.
Casey:
Don't care.
Casey:
This gets real bad real quick.
John:
You're going to hear about things you could have done differently.
John:
I know you're going to set down rules, but you're going to – I mean from us.
John:
Oh, no.
Casey:
You guys all allow it.
Marco:
What do you think this show is?
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let me set the stage.
Casey:
In 2013, some very nice individuals at Synology sent all three of us DS1813 pluses.
Casey:
That is the particular model name of our Synologies.
Casey:
And it basically means that they were eight bay Synologies in the, I believe, small business line from 2013.
Casey:
And at the time, they were filled with eight three-terabyte, what are they, Seagate Reds, I think, hard drives?
John:
Western Digital Reds.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
What you said.
Casey:
I apologize.
Casey:
In the last seven-ish years, I don't recall exactly when in 2013 we got them, I think I've had to replace one, maybe two drives.
Casey:
The way I have set up my Synology, which I think was Marco's idea, maybe it must have been John's because I always think it's Marco and it's always John.
Casey:
Somebody told me, hey, take two drives, make them time machine, take the other six and make them one humongous volume for everything else.
Marco:
This time this is actually me.
Casey:
Okay, see, there you go.
Casey:
I actually remembered something.
Casey:
Look at me go.
Casey:
So anyway, so drives, I'm going to go one based.
Casey:
So one and two are time machine.
Casey:
3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 are all lumped into one big volume using Synology Hybrid, or I think it's Hybrid Rate, SHR, which basically means I can lose one of them and everything's fine.
Casey:
And I noticed that all of these drives, 4, 5, 6, and 8 were all OGs from 2013.
Casey:
So these are seven-year-old hard drives that have been running nonstop for seven years.
Yeah.
John:
I just want to interject here that I am using all of those same drives, those eight three terabyte drives that I got seven years ago, all working perfectly.
Casey:
Well, I hope so.
Casey:
And I hope you have some wood to knock on.
John:
I'm just saying, like, you know, I'm not going to blame it on the fact that you put it in the same room with you, but it's probably that.
John:
That's probably why.
Casey:
Well, yeah, yours is in the basement or something, isn't it, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Climate control, dark, nobody disturbs it.
Marco:
Mine is in my untemperature-controlled garage, and it's fine.
Marco:
I've never lost a drink.
Marco:
I cannot believe that.
Casey:
I cannot believe the ears are still working.
Casey:
But anyways, so be that as it may, I have four, five, six, and eight that are all the originals from 2013.
Casey:
Three and seven have been replaced with 10 terabyte Western Digital Reds.
Casey:
I'm slowly going to replace all these, put these 10 terabyte drives in.
Casey:
And again, 4568.
Casey:
I would like to replace one of these in order to try to get ahead of all of these eventually failing.
John:
This is the first part where we'll talk about what Casey could have done differently.
John:
What you're doing now is taking a thing that ain't broke and you're trying to fix it.
John:
Yes, that is correct.
John:
Like you did not have any bad drives, but you decided preemptively, I'm going to take my working Synology and I'm going to endeavor to upgrade it to stave off what I think is the imminent failure of my seven-year-old drives.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So why do you think I would have made that choice?
John:
Do you get the little emails from Synology that tells you how many bad sectors it's finding on your disks?
John:
Do you get those?
Casey:
Have those numbers been going up lately?
Casey:
No.
Marco:
Are any of those numbers non-zero?
Casey:
I don't believe they were non-zero now.
Casey:
So in theory, just to be clear, in theory, drives 4, 5, 6, and 8 were all fine.
Casey:
In theory.
John:
And by the way, I know we all talk about our Synology love, but the thing I just described is a real thing.
John:
The Synology has a feature where it will email you weekly or monthly or whatever updates on your drive health, and it will tell you if it has found any bad sectors.
John:
And if you get those emails and it starts saying that the bad sector count is increasing, your drive's probably going bad and you should do something about it.
John:
That happened to me on my other Synology, which it says bad sectors found or whatever, and it does a consistency check.
John:
My other Synology, which does not have Western Digital Reds, one of my drives said I found one bad sector, and the next week it found two, and the next week it found like 37.
John:
And I was like, okay, time to replace that sucker.
John:
So another cool feature of this NAS.
Marco:
Yeah, it also tells you how many SMART, you know, like the acronym SMART, how many SMART errors and disconnects there have been.
Marco:
Generally speaking, when it comes to this kind of thing from a hard drive, it's kind of like, you know, I was going down a hill with my car, and I pressed the brakes, and once they didn't work, anything besides zero on these numbers means replace it immediately.
Right.
John:
That's the Marco approach, but let me give you another story.
Marco:
No, I'm with you.
John:
One of my drives in my Synology has had one bad sector since like the first week I got it.
John:
That number is always one.
John:
It's been one for seven years.
John:
Like you're right that there is usually a cascade, but drives have bad sectors.
John:
And usually they're found and mapped out before you get the drive, but it is conceivable that you get one out of the box and it finds a bad sector and it maps it out.
John:
And if that number never goes up for seven years, like, I mean, it may go up someday, right?
John:
But, you know, if you see one and it doesn't change for months and months, fine.
John:
But you do have to watch them.
John:
Like, if it shows from one to two to five to 37 to 145, like, replace the drive.
John:
I don't think I've ever had a bad sector on a hard drive that didn't then die.
John:
No, I've got seven years with one bad sector on one of my drives.
John:
I just got an email the other day.
John:
It's still there.
John:
It's not going to go away.
John:
It's not going to go back to zero.
Casey:
So why would I try to do this preemptively?
Casey:
Why would I do that?
Casey:
Because you're home all day and you've got nothing to do.
Marco:
You're going to break your working computer.
Casey:
Go ahead.
Casey:
That's part of it.
Marco:
Maybe it's because you were worried that... So when you have to replace a drive in a RAID array, and yes, SHR is not exactly RAID.
Marco:
It's kind of like what drobos do.
Marco:
It's kind of software, expandable kind of thing.
Marco:
But it's close enough to RAID.
Marco:
So when you have to do a RAID rebuild, one of the common problems is...
Marco:
Arrayed Rebuild requires a lot of disk activity because you have to read the entire rest of every other disk to write what is necessary onto the replacement disk.
Marco:
So actually, one thing that can happen is kind of like the dead cat box thing of like, you might think everything's fine.
John:
Schrodinger's cat?
John:
Is that what you're trying to say?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Dead cat box is not what it's called.
Marco:
Go ahead.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
But like, so you might think everything's fine, but then the second you replace a disk,
Marco:
it has to, way more than usual, stress the other disks that were in the system to rebuild the array onto the new disk.
Marco:
So you actually kind of risk a bad cascade, which I hope this isn't what happened to you, where you might think everything's fine, replace one disk, and then another disk or two die during the rebuild because it's stressing them out so much.
Casey:
So, on Thursday, I say to myself, I've got four, five, six, and eight that I'd like to replace.
Casey:
I'm going to take five because it is physically in the middle of four and six.
Casey:
Sure, let's go with that one.
Casey:
Completely arbitrary.
Casey:
Seems like a reasonable approach, right?
Casey:
Why not?
Casey:
I replace drive five.
Casey:
I tell the Synology, okay, rebuild yourself.
Casey:
I go to sleep.
Casey:
I wake up on Friday, the 27th of March, and the volume has crashed, which is Synology speak for you have lost everything.
Casey:
Drive eight during the restore had one or more IO errors and died.
Casey:
So I replaced drive five in the process of fixing everything and putting everything back to where it was or where it should be.
Casey:
Drive eight shits the bed.
Casey:
Well, now I've got problems.
Marco:
So wait, quick question.
Marco:
Can you just put the old drive five back in?
Casey:
That's a good question.
Casey:
But, John, I'd like to hear your thoughts before I answer it.
John:
I mean, this is not shocking.
John:
And what Marco suggested is definitely what I would have tried first.
John:
But, I mean, in the list of things you could do differently in general because – if you're worried about your drives because –
John:
you know, whatever, I forget what the word is.
John:
The old raid word used to be called resilvering.
John:
I forget what the hell they call it.
John:
But anyway, because doing what you're doing, replacing a drive, is so taxing on any of the drives.
John:
If the reason you're doing it is you're worried about all the drives in your thing, in general, it's safer to try to do a one-time
John:
copy of everything off to another volume like it you know if if you insisted on doing this if you're in a situation where you're like i feel i feel bad i feel i feel like these drives are going to go at any minute what can i do if you don't already have a complete backup which obviously you should but if you don't already have a complete backup what you'd want to do is get something that can receive all the data and then copy all data off all the drives and put it onto this new place
John:
Then after you've successfully done that and you take that safe copy of all your data and you put it somewhere and you unplug it and you just sit in the corner of the room, then you go try to do this whole swap out drives things.
John:
And then when it blows up like this, you're like, oh, well, I tried.
John:
And now you've got your data in the other place.
John:
But anyway, continue.
John:
What did you actually do?
John:
Did you try Marco's thing of putting back in the five and swapping out the eight?
Casey:
Not exactly.
Casey:
And I have reasons.
Casey:
Let me explain my thought process.
Casey:
You may not agree, but I have a thought process here.
Casey:
So drive eight dies.
Casey:
I walk in and I am on the verge of tears.
Casey:
And that is no exaggeration because everything in theory is gone.
Casey:
Now I do have backup.
Casey:
I know I have a couple of backups of my photos.
Casey:
That is not up for grabs.
Casey:
And that is the one thing that I cannot lose.
Casey:
I would be, and in this moment in the story, I am devastated that I've lost other things.
Casey:
But I would be beyond repair as a human being if I lost all my pictures.
John:
Did you really lose other things?
John:
I thought you had – didn't you have online backup?
John:
Did you have like your parents' backup?
John:
Like what was your backup situation?
Casey:
Gentlemen, this is my story.
Casey:
I will tell it in my own time.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
So – But you were devastated.
John:
We're up to the point where you're devastated because you think you've lost stuff.
John:
That means at this point in the story, you think you don't have some of that data in another location, right?
Yeah.
Casey:
I am not confident that everything is the way I want it to be in terms of backups.
Casey:
So let me take you through my situation.
Casey:
I know I have my photos on an external hard drive that normally is at mom and dad's, but because of the quarantine is actually sitting in the garage.
Casey:
But I know they're there.
Casey:
I have confidence that I'm okay.
Marco:
That doesn't happen to be the drive you put into Bay 5, is it?
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
This is external sitting off to the side.
Casey:
And I don't think I've updated it in a month because I usually do that at the top of the month.
Casey:
But I mean, maybe I lost a week or two of photos.
Casey:
And even if that's the case, like, okay, it's not desirable, but fine.
Casey:
I would be okay with that.
Casey:
I still have the last 20 years of photos, whatever it's been.
Casey:
But everything else, I'm not sure.
Casey:
So I've been awake for 30 minutes at this point.
Casey:
It's Friday morning.
Casey:
I walk into my office and I go, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God.
Casey:
So I look at Backblaze, which I've been running on my iMac, and I know hadn't quite finished uploading everything, but I thought it was really close.
Casey:
and it turns out backblaze is not as close to done as i thought for my own for because of dumb things i've done that i'm not going to get into right now so okay next thing i need i need to interject again you're in the middle of running a gigantic backblaze backup right yeah this is a good time to rebuild my array you have the itch you have the itch to do this disc thing why didn't you wait for the backblaze thing to finish i agree no you're no argument that absolutely was a mistake on my part absolutely a mistake on my part no argument there's nothing i can say to defend myself
John:
This is like one of those situations where, you know, when they have like an analysis of catastrophes, it's never like one thing went wrong.
John:
It has to – if you do one thing wrong, like usually the system or whatever recovers.
John:
But it has to be a series of small errors that build on each other.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
John:
All right.
John:
Go on.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So CrashPlan, I haven't run in at least a month, maybe two months.
Casey:
And I have had a reminder for myself to cancel it for at least a week, maybe two weeks.
Casey:
But I didn't.
Casey:
Finally, procrastination pays off.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So in an absolute desperation scenario, I would lose a couple of months worth of other things.
Casey:
Again, photos, I'm confident I'm okay.
Casey:
But everything else.
Casey:
I'd lose a couple months of that, but I'd be okay.
Casey:
Now, restoring from CrashPlan would be a frigging nightmare because they don't do that awesome thing that Backblaze does where they'll just send you a physical hard drive and then you can send it back and no harm, no foul.
Casey:
I would have to actually download everything from CrashPlan, which would stink, even on a gigabit connection.
Casey:
But I could get it.
Casey:
That's all that matters.
Casey:
I could get it.
Casey:
So I know my pictures are safe, but at this point, I think...
Casey:
All of these TV shows that I've acquired by gray means, like using YouTube DL to download stuff off of NBC's website, for example.
Casey:
I'm not signing into anything to get it.
Casey:
It's available for anyone.
Casey:
Any one of you could do it.
Casey:
But it's work I've put in to download all these shows.
Casey:
And sometimes they take them off the internet, and I might want to watch them again sometime.
Casey:
And another great example is concerts.
Casey:
I really enjoy watching concerts with Aaron.
Casey:
And I will take the time to use an app called Subler to like go through and add chapters for all the different songs.
Casey:
So I can skip around if I want to.
Casey:
You can think that's crazy.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
This is what, this is me.
Casey:
This is the way I like to do things.
Casey:
All that stuff gone.
Casey:
So I think, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, what do I do?
Casey:
The thought did occur to me to turn this analogy back off, put drive five back in and just go from there.
Marco:
Turn it on whistling.
Marco:
Like,
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
Nothing to see here.
Casey:
So anyway, I didn't do that.
Casey:
And before you jump all over me, let me tell you why.
Casey:
What I thought was, okay, the first step is let's restart this thing as is and just see what the state of the world is.
Casey:
So I left Drive 5 with this new 10-terabyte drive and I reboot it.
Casey:
And it comes up and it says...
Casey:
I forget the term for it on the Synology.
Casey:
It's degraded.
Casey:
That's it.
Casey:
Things are degraded, but they're there.
Casey:
Drive 8's hiccup is just a hiccup.
Casey:
Everything is still there.
Casey:
Now, there is no Drive 5, according to Synology, because it's empty.
Casey:
That makes perfect sense.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
But it's there.
Casey:
And at this point, I have to make a choice.
Casey:
I'm not saying I made the right choice, but what I decided was, okay, at this moment in time, Drive 8 still works.
Casey:
And it has already failed once.
Casey:
I don't know...
Casey:
If breathing on this thing is going to cause it to fail again.
Casey:
So the very first order of operations, as far as I'm concerned, is get all this data off this thing as quickly as I possibly can.
Casey:
And that's what I did.
Casey:
So what I did, I will give you a chance to respond.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Just give me a chance.
Marco:
Just give me a chance to make it through the gauntlet of telling us the story at various points.
Casey:
It's not your turn, John.
Casey:
I have the talking stick.
Casey:
No, not yet.
Casey:
Just give me 30 seconds.
Casey:
I have the talking stick.
Casey:
So I decide to now remind you, we are in big time lockdown quarantine mode.
Casey:
We are the worst friends.
Casey:
I look at Amazon to see, what can I do?
Casey:
Is there a drive big enough that I can prime now on Amazon to get all this stuff off the Synology?
Casey:
The answer is no.
Casey:
But Best Buy is delivering to the parking lot of Best Buy, and they happen to have literally one 12 terabyte external available for purchase.
Casey:
And so that's what I did, and then I connected it to my Mac Mini and started R-syncing the entirety of my Synology to this external drive.
Casey:
And that is where I will pause and allow you two to beat the hell out of me.
John:
So I understand your thing.
John:
You want to get the data off, right?
John:
It comes back up.
John:
Drive 5 is empty.
John:
Drive 8, you're scared, is going to break.
John:
Again, why didn't you take it?
John:
Why didn't you take out the empty drive five and put back the full drive five?
Casey:
So that way, if eight breaks, you still have all your data, which is I 100% agree with you.
Casey:
And in retrospect, maybe I should have.
Casey:
But at this point, I was so nervous that touching anything would screw it up that I knew at this one moment, at this one moment, everything was working.
Casey:
So I have to capitalize on it while I still can.
John:
But you didn't know that you have your data on drive eight could be corrupt.
John:
You have no idea what's going on with Drive 8.
John:
You know it had some kind of IO error.
John:
You're assuming you can get all the data off it.
John:
Anyway, that's what I would have done differently at that point.
John:
If it came back up and if you wanted to get your data off of it, which I suggested earlier would have been the first step, but fine, you're going to do it now, I would have put the 5 back in.
John:
So that way the 8 could die and I'd still have all my data.
Marco:
Well, one minor complicating factor here, if the array was online at the time, it could have been written to in the meantime.
Casey:
And so we will come to a point where I will answer this question and I think that is exactly what happened.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And if that is the case, then your old Drive 5 is now out of date and is basically corrupt.
John:
Yep.
John:
There was no way to – I mean what's being written to?
John:
Do you have like jobs running in the background pulling down things from feeds?
Casey:
I honestly don't –
Casey:
think so?
Marco:
I don't know, but... Well, and regardless of, like, no matter what it is, even if it's one byte somewhere, if the RAID controller, like, keeps track of this, which it should, then it will say, sorry, this disk, this old disk 5 is now out of date.
Marco:
We can't use it.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
I will cut to the almost end of the story very quickly and say once I got all 12 terabytes off of that, or well, it was like a 10 and a half terabytes off the Synology onto the external, which seems as far as I can tell to have gone just fine.
Casey:
I did at that point, mind you, this is admittedly literally four or five days later.
Casey:
I did plug in drive five because at this point I thought I don't want to lose everything.
Casey:
But if I did, I now have a complete backup.
Casey:
So it's okay.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And I did try plugging in Drive 5, and it absolutely said, this drive is useless to me.
Casey:
Do you want to bring it back up as though it's new?
John:
Well, that was five days later.
John:
I can imagine stuff would have happened in five days.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
But again, my thought process was, the only thing I care about is getting this data off this box.
Casey:
That's all I care about.
Casey:
And as long as I can do that, anything else is secondary.
Casey:
So I am in this degraded state.
Casey:
I ordered this 12 terabyte from Best Buy.
Casey:
And within a couple hours, I have it.
Casey:
Within an hour of that, it's hooked up to the Mac Mini.
Casey:
The Mac Minis are syncing literally 2.2 million files and something like 10 and a half terabytes to this 12 terabyte drive.
Casey:
So at the same time, because I'm a moron, but I'm really freaking out now, I'm also manually are syncing a handful of things that I just really don't want to lose.
Casey:
So I'm getting a third copy of my photos, a second copy or third copy, I'm losing count now of some of the like kid shows that the kids adore that I've spent a long time amassing.
Casey:
I got another copy of Top Gear, literally 25 seasons of Top Gear that I have, and I do occasionally go back and watch some of all of these concerts and things like that, and just some other essentials that I really don't want to lose.
Casey:
So that was started on Friday.
Casey:
This past Tuesday, yesterday, the 11-ish terabytes and 2.2 million files are complete.
Casey:
So what do I do?
Casey:
And I already told you, I thought, all right, let me just try throwing in that old Drive 5.
Casey:
Obviously, it didn't work.
Casey:
I already told you it didn't work, but let me try it.
Casey:
So now what do I do?
Casey:
Well, the only real option I have other than just nuking it all from orbit and starting anew, like you were saying, John, is, well, I take that 10 terabyte that's been sitting in drive five all this time and just try again and hope that eight holds on long enough.
Casey:
So I thought to myself, what can I do to make this work?
Casey:
Or what can I do to improve my odds?
Casey:
And although this room outside of when I'm recording and the door is closed, this room doesn't get very hot.
Casey:
I thought to myself, well, heat is the enemy of everything.
Casey:
So I got a box fan and sat it on the filing cabinet that's like two or three feet away from the Synology.
Casey:
And I have been blasting this box fan up until this recording on the Synology for a day or so while it's rebuilding itself, hoping, hoping,
Casey:
hoping against all odds that drive eight will hold on long enough for it to repair itself.
Casey:
And then thankfully I actually have another 10 terabyte.
Casey:
That's brand new waiting just in case one of these dies.
Casey:
And I would put that in drive eight.
Casey:
And then hopefully, what did I say?
Casey:
The other ones were four, four and six don't die in the same way as I'm replacing drive eight.
Casey:
So it takes about a day for my particular synology to put everything back together.
Casey:
And I'm watching this like I'm watching the school clock at the end of the day on Friday.
Casey:
I'm watching it like a hawk.
Casey:
And just a couple hours ago as we record this, I see it tick.
Casey:
Well, a few hours ago, I see it tick past 50%, which is I know roughly where it was when Drive 8 died.
Casey:
I see it get past 60, 70, 80, 90.
Casey:
I even took a screenshot at 99.5% thinking, this is when it's going to die.
Casey:
And that will make for a hell of a great story, but I'm going to be miserable.
Casey:
So I want to get a screenshot so we can put it in the show notes.
Casey:
So when it dies at 99.5%, at least we'll all get a good laugh out of it.
Casey:
During this process, however, I realized, oh, today is April 1st.
Casey:
Guess what happens on April 1st, John?
Casey:
It's time for a smart test on all of my drives.
John:
The monthly, yeah.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So while I'm doing this restore, using a drive that is on the edge of death as far as I'm concerned, the Synology says to itself, you know what would be a great idea right now?
Casey:
Let's do a smart test.
Casey:
And as we're recording, which is in the evening on Wednesday, let's see.
Casey:
The smart test has only been completed on five of the eight drives.
Casey:
The other three are sitting at 90%.
Casey:
So, naturally, that's slowing everything down.
Casey:
It's further hammering these drives that are probably on the verge of catching on fire.
Casey:
And so, as I'm watching this tick up, finally, right around bedtime for the kids, I reach 100%.
Casey:
I get my email saying, the volume 2, which is the volume I'm talking about, has been consistent.
Casey:
The consistency check of storage pool 2 on disk station has ended.
Casey:
No abnormality has been found.
Casey:
And at this point, I expect to see the...
Casey:
degraded or repairing become normal and everything should be good right well no apparently for reasons that i don't understand it has decided to start its consistency check over at zero percent so as i sit here right now it has gone from zero to 100 back to repairing checking parity consistency 2.01 as i record right now
Casey:
So maybe in another day, it'll work this time.
Casey:
I don't even know.
Casey:
But I am so freaking miserable and annoyed and upset.
Casey:
And this is like the most ridiculous, just inconsequential problem in the world.
Casey:
But I'm about to rip all of my hair out and go crazy.
John:
Is the box fan off now?
Casey:
The box fan is off now.
Casey:
Here, I can turn it on for you.
John:
That's all right.
John:
Let's see if you hear it.
John:
You could be sacrificing your data to podcasts.
Casey:
There it is.
Casey:
Do you hear it?
Casey:
It's on now.
Marco:
Your data is fine now, right?
Casey:
Well, the data is fine.
Casey:
I've got to turn this back off before Marco kills me.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
The data is hypothetically fine insofar as the volume on the Synology is functional at this moment.
Casey:
Like, it's not happy, but I can pull data off of it.
Casey:
I guess hypothetically I could put data on it, although I'm trying my darndest not to.
Casey:
It is theoretically functional.
Casey:
Additionally, that 12 terabyte I got from Best Buy...
Casey:
does as far as i can tell have a complete duplicate of everything on the synology so what file system did you use uh apfs no i'm not on that on the on the synology oh on the synology i don't know whatever does it offer like zfs that would actually make this useful
John:
It has BTRFS and EXT4.
John:
I think it's EXT4.
John:
Here's the thing about you wondering about the state of all your data.
John:
Like, oh, I got that copy off on a 12 gigabyte driver.
John:
You know you have drives that are having some kind of problem.
John:
If you're using a file system like most file systems that doesn't do any kind of consistency check of the data, it's like I asked the drive to read it.
John:
These are the bits that came off the disk.
John:
Here you go.
John:
And you successfully copied those bits to another place and another place dutifully stored them.
John:
Are those the right bits?
John:
That's why, you know, file systems with data integrity checks like ZFS...
John:
are handy because it can tell when the data right off the disk is not the data that was originally written there and there are other applications that can store checksums off to the side so on and so forth ext4 which i think was the default when we all got our synologies does not have any features like that so if your data went bad i mean the good thing is with media files so you got a few bad blocks here and there you'll see a weird glitch or maybe you won't even see a weird glitch in the in the video because it's a lossy compressed thing and it can tolerate errors and it's not like it's an executable program where
John:
It might not even launch if the wrong part of it is corrupt.
John:
So for media files, it's probably not actually that bad.
John:
But not knowing, you know, and propagating bit rot is always a problem, which is why it's better to do these things before things go wrong or to go whole hog and have some kind of checksumming system.
John:
Which checksumming is more reasonable when you have a small number of very large files.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The fewer checksums you have to store, the better.
John:
But it sounds like you didn't have any of that stuff there.
John:
So you're just kind of crossing your fingers, hoping that nothing was corrupt, because otherwise you just successfully copied the corrupt data to your Best Buy drive.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
But I mean, I don't feel like I have a whole lot of other choices.
Casey:
So the funny thing about all this is, in the end, after going around and around for like two or three episodes with you two about what I should do to back up the Synology, the future, once I get the Synology itself squared away, the future backup approach is going to be hook up that Best Buy hard drive to the Mac Mini and have Backblaze back that up.
John:
You just did that.
John:
You just did the backup, right?
John:
Well, in theory.
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, yeah, but not to Backblaze.
Casey:
The Backblaze one is still in some sort of limbo for uninteresting reasons that I'm not going to go into right now.
Casey:
But as soon as I get the Synology to a good place, even if that means nuking it all from orbit, I will then be permanently hooking this external up to the Mac Mini and having that go to Backblaze and just calling it a day.
Casey:
But, gentlemen, it has been an adventure.
Marco:
Can I suggest some things?
Casey:
If it involves getting rid of this analogy, no.
Marco:
Well, okay.
Marco:
First of all, we'll get there.
Marco:
Step one, go get yourself a second 12 terabyte drive.
Marco:
I don't care if you want to return it in a few weeks.
Marco:
Just get yourself one.
Marco:
First thing you need to do is copy everything from this 12 terabyte drive to a second 12 terabyte drive.
Marco:
After you do that, connect it to a computer that will finish the online backup and back it up.
Marco:
During that process, so copy it onto the second drive so you have two new hard drives that have this.
Marco:
The second one, remove it from the computer and power it down.
Marco:
The Synology, turn it off and keep it off until you have an online backup of that entire data set.
Marco:
Just because if things are... I know sometimes powering things down can actually make them die next time you turn them on, but for the most part that's rare.
Marco:
Usually things wear with usage, and so for the love of God...
Marco:
freeze this data in place until it is securely backed up somewhere useful.
Marco:
After that, I want you to consider you mentioned recently that you don't use Dropbox or iCloud Photo Library anymore.
Marco:
The lack of iCloud Photo Library in your setup has just been made apparent by some of your descriptions of your photo status here.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
I know Apple's not wonderful at certain services.
Marco:
I know that the plans are not free to get enough storage.
Marco:
I know that iCloud Photo Library doesn't have all the features of things like Google or whatever.
Marco:
Who cares?
Marco:
But...
Marco:
In this case, this data is so important to you that I think whatever cost it would be, which, I mean, you could probably get away with, what, the $10 a month one, probably, right?
Marco:
Whatever cost it would be for you to have enough storage to have your entire photo library in iCloud Photo Library,
Marco:
...is probably worth it just for considering it as an automatic off-site backup alone.
Marco:
Not to mention all the other convenience features of it and the integrations and everything else.
Marco:
But just to have that be somewhere else that you know that your photos have one additional layer of backup safety...
Marco:
Whether it's iCloud or Google, I don't care which one you use, but one of those you should be using.
Marco:
I personally would recommend the iCloud one because I think Google Photos has a bunch of weird issues with their local uploader apps, but that's up to you.
Marco:
You know all this too.
Marco:
None of this is news to you, but I think this should inform that decision that you should probably have an online photo backup service in place because they exist, they're pretty good, and
Marco:
Even among Apple's reputation for weird service problems, most of those problems haven't hit iCloud Photo Library.
Marco:
It's been pretty good.
Marco:
For me, it's been perfect, honestly, as far as I know.
Marco:
I haven't even heard of major issues from other people with iCloud Photo Library.
Marco:
It seems to work very well.
Marco:
Whatever you choose to do,
Marco:
Your strategy, I think, should include one of these online photo services because they're well-integrated, they're automatic, and for something as important as your family photos, having that additional backup plus one layer I think is worth it.
Marco:
So moving on from that,
Marco:
you are running a whole bunch of seven-year-old drives inside of a seven-year-old raid enclosure.
Marco:
This entire setup is dead to you.
Marco:
Now, whether you want to replace it with a better, with like, you know, a new Synology,
Marco:
That's up to you.
Marco:
I wouldn't, as we've talked about, and I don't think you necessarily need it, but I buy stuff I don't need all the time because I like it.
Marco:
You only live once, so sometimes you just buy stuff because you like it.
Marco:
So I won't fault you if you want to replace this Synology with another Synology.
Marco:
But, you know, one thing people don't always consider when they're thinking about RAID or RAID-like things is the RAID controller itself as a potential point of failure.
Marco:
But this happens.
Marco:
RAID controllers die or flake out or have problems.
Marco:
I'm not sure I would trust any part of my storage infrastructure that was like critical primary storage that was seven years old.
Marco:
I think at that point, you're rolling the dice more than necessary.
Marco:
And if you're going to really count on something that is that old as something that is not well backed up, you know, I think that is taking too much risk.
Marco:
So A, for God's sake, get iCloud Photo Library.
Marco:
I know it's not perfect.
Marco:
Suck it up.
Marco:
Whatever problems you have with it, suck up those problems.
Marco:
If I can live in the same world as Dave Matthews, you can get iCloud Photo Library.
Marco:
You know, it'll be fine, right?
Marco:
And so A, do that.
Marco:
B, get yourself a second hard drive and copy all these files onto it and turn off the Synology.
Marco:
Because C, you need to preserve that until the online backup is done.
Marco:
And D, after that, you should really retire the Synology.
Marco:
And what you do to replace it, that's up to you.
Marco:
But you're playing with fire here.
John:
There's no evidence that the Synology hardware other than the hard drives is bad, right?
John:
Agreed.
John:
I know you're suspicious of it because it's old, but as someone who just got through using a 10-plus-year-old computer that worked fine the whole time, I...
John:
Hard drives, there's moving parts.
John:
They go bad for sure.
John:
He's got some bad hard drives in there, sounds like, right?
John:
But for a low-powered CPU that's doing the same task all the time with no GPU to speak up, like it's, you know, in the absence of any evidence there's anything wrong with his Synology hardware other than that it's got a bunch of old crappy drives in it.
John:
I don't think he needs to go and buy a new Synology.
John:
Now, that said, new Synology is cool, and I've thought about getting one just because they're cool, exactly for the reasons you said.
John:
There's nothing wrong with my Synology.
John:
In fact, all my drives are still working.
John:
There's no reason I should get a new one, but I look at the new ones every once in a while because they're cool, and they have better CPUs and fancier file systems and other neat features.
John:
uh at this point i'm still just waiting for mine to die but it sounds like uh casey may be in may have had enough pain and anguish that as a as a reward for himself as a treat he could get himself a new synology sounds like he's already getting a bunch of new drives right so once you're doing that you can get a new synology too uh and then you can use the old synology which i believe will be resurrected and uh and use it to back up the new synology
Casey:
that actually is not a bad idea in the money no object you know perfect world that is what i would do is i would get a new one and i keep saying oh i need a new eight bay i knew i need a new eight bay but now that i'm thinking about it more and listeners had said this to me um i could just put bigger drives in like a two or four bay probably like a four bay i'll get a two no four i think four is the minimum that you should get and probably the right number yeah we're
Casey:
We're saying the same thing, though, that I could get like a four bay Synology and that would probably be enough.
Casey:
And then I'll put more smaller drives in the existing ones, stick that at mom and dad's house.
Casey:
And then I have a live or nearly live duplicate of the one in the house.
Casey:
And I.
Casey:
I might do that.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It depends on how grumpy I am with all this.
Casey:
Whenever I come out the other end of it, be that if I have to nuke it from orbit, be that if it does finally repair itself, I don't know.
John:
Speaking of nuking it, by the way, that will be faster than letting it validate itself again.
John:
If you just wipe it clean and recopy the data onto it from one of your 212-derified backup drives, I think that will take less time than allowing it to re-verify, based on my experience trying to do re-verification.
Marco:
Yeah, because if you figure, like, verification is going to be a very, like, you know, a small block, read, write, rewrite, rewrite kind of cycle, whereas, like, you know, recopying onto it is going to be these, like, giant block transfers, and it only has to do, like, one pass for the writing, whereas, like, if you're rebuilding, it has to, like, you know...
Marco:
to write the parity back on one new drive, it has to read everything off of all the drives, right?
Marco:
Then, you're going to have to put in another new drive.
Marco:
It's going to do the exact same process again and read everything again for that next drive.
Marco:
And, like, you're going to have to go through the whole process, what, four times?
Casey:
Something like that, yeah.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I hear you, but at the same time, it took four days to rsync all of these files from the Mac Mini sitting literally underneath the thing.
John:
That's because you had multiple rsync jobs running at once.
John:
Lesson number one for copying large volumes of data off a spinning disk, just do one copy at a time.
John:
You think you're going faster by having five copies in parallel.
John:
You're not.
John:
You're just making the disk controller angry.
Yeah.
Casey:
I agree, agree.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
I didn't think I was making it go faster by any stretch of the imagination.
Casey:
What I was doing was getting redundant copies of the things that I really and truly couldn't miss.
John:
Right, but if you wanted to do that, do the small copies first.
John:
Like, do things and, you know, do the small emergency copies first, one at a time, serially.
John:
Because there's only one, I'm not going to say there's only one disc head, because there's multiple disc heads, but there's only one set of disc heads on a single arm, and that arm can only follow one instruction at once.
John:
Go left, go right, go up, you know, just let it do its, you know.
Casey:
No, I hear you.
Casey:
I hear you.
Casey:
You're absolutely right.
Casey:
And so sitting here now, we have moved to 2.15% in the time we've been talking.
Casey:
And so I figure in about a day, it will either finish or one of the drives will die or it'll finish and start over again.
Casey:
And if it starts over for a third time, then I think that's probably a sign.
Casey:
But yeah, I don't know what the final answer is.
Casey:
I don't see my life not having a Synology in it, but in contrast to the last we spoke about this, I do see a world where maybe what I end up doing is I get a smaller Synology, like I said a moment ago, and putting larger drives in that, having that local, and then sticking this one in mom and dad's garage and syncing to that and calling it a day.
Casey:
And then additionally...
Casey:
For now, anyway, I'm going to plan on doing some sort of replication onto that 12 terabyte once everything is squared away.
Casey:
Once everything's squared away and I know I'm good again, then I'll do some sort of replication onto the 12 terabyte.
Casey:
That will be backed up to Backblaze the way it's supposed to be backed up because it'll be physically connected to the Mac Mini.
Casey:
Backblaze has no issue with that.
Casey:
Everything will be right as rain once it spends all the time uploading to Backblaze, which is taking...
Casey:
quite a long time in and of itself, but be that as it may, then in theory, I will be in a much better place.
Casey:
And if Backblaze had already had everything, which is not Backblaze's fault, it's my fault.
Casey:
If Backblaze already had everything, I could have asked them for like, I don't remember how big the drives are they offer, but I could have asked them for one or two physical hard drives to be next day aired to me.
Casey:
And then I could nuke everything, put these hard drives, you know, attach them to some things, maybe the Synology itself, copied all that data back, like John was saying a moment ago,
Casey:
and then sent these hard drives back to Backblaze, and I have literally spent no money other than the normal Backblaze fees.
Casey:
So I'm feeling better about it now because of that 12-terabyte drive, which, by the way, I don't think I said I did disconnect and put it in the garage.
Casey:
So it is literally across the house on a different floor.
Casey:
So God forbid the house goes up in flames in the next 48 hours.
Casey:
It is as far away from the Synology.
Casey:
So hopefully one of them will survive this.
Casey:
If the house literally goes up in flames and it is not connected to any sort of power source or anything like that.
Casey:
But it has been a roller coaster.
Casey:
It has been a roller coaster, mostly of my own doing.
Casey:
And I appreciate you letting me get this off my chest.
Casey:
And I hope that this time tomorrow everything will be restored and everything will be in a good place again.
Casey:
And then I'll have to weigh whether or not I really want to replace Drive 8 preemptively or just let it sit until it explodes.
John:
You keep forgetting about or not mentioning the thing that you should do that seems like you're not going to do because you've already forgotten about it, which is what Marco said.
John:
Make a second copy of the 12 terabyte.
Casey:
Yeah, well, I should.
John:
And you can do it by buying a drive.
John:
Like you can do it in such a way that later you can reuse that drive into one of your synologies or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Speaking of new synologies, I was looking at it in my fantasy synology shopping.
John:
There's more variance in the CPUs these days, and it's not linear with the price of the device.
John:
You can get a big one with a Wimpy CPU, and you can get a small one with a powerful CPU.
John:
Shop around and see if you can get one that might actually be able to do all your transcoding for you.
John:
Especially most of your stuff is H.264, not H.265.
John:
It's possible you could get a 4 or 5-based synology that can do all your transcoding without breaking a sweat.
John:
So check that out if you're shopping.
Marco:
Yeah, just looking like the price differences for the bay count actually aren't that big.
Marco:
A 5 bay is $650 and an 8 bay is $931 right now on Amazon.
Marco:
Of the same line with the premium processor, the plus line and everything.
Marco:
If you're going to spend another seven years with whatever you might get next, it might be worth getting something a little bit bigger.
Marco:
But you probably don't need to
John:
Also, the new Synology lets you connect expansion bays to them.
John:
So you can buy one good Synology with a good CPU and four bays or something.
John:
And if you fill those four bays, you can buy another dumb Synology bay thing and use it to expand your existing Synology, which I don't think that feature existed in 2013.
John:
It did.
John:
R support it.
John:
Really?
John:
I didn't know that.
Casey:
I'm almost sure they do.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm pretty darn sure that Marco's right.
Marco:
I love how on their site, if you go to products, they have all these sections because they're all enterprise-y.
Marco:
And you have to choose whether you are a personal and home user or an IT enthusiast or a small and mid-sized business enterprise.
Marco:
But is Casey an IT enthusiast?
Marco:
I think so.
Casey:
I sure hope so.
Marco:
The funny thing is the models it shows you seem to be identical between whether you pick IT enthusiasts.
John:
That's the thing.
John:
If you pick the business one, they're not going to give you the ones with the good CPUs.
John:
It could be that the enterprise-y ones are the wimpier CPUs because they just expect to be doling out files to a large number of people.
John:
So look at the actual CPU options.
John:
They vary a lot.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
So that's my that's my tale of woe.
Casey:
And what I what I really want to do is throw a whole pile of money at this problem.
Casey:
But I don't want to throw a whole pile of money at this problem.
Casey:
So I'm trying to do this on the cheap.
Casey:
And that's half the half the issue right there.
Casey:
But I will update you next week as to where all this lands.
John:
But it's been after you after you copy the 12 terabyte to another 12 terabyte.
John:
Right.
Marco:
Yes, please do that.
Marco:
He keeps not mentioning it.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
I don't know why.
Marco:
Like, yeah, you know, because even if you can get back to Best Buy and just get yourself another, you know, 12 terabyte external from the parking lot, you can use that.
Marco:
Even if you don't want an external, just take the drive out of it.
Marco:
Like, I've done that before, where, like, you buy a drive versus that external.
Marco:
Later on, you want it to be internal.
Marco:
In fact, I think two of the drives in my Synology, I think, are this exactly.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
where I just took a screwdriver, took apart the enclosure that they came with from Seagate or whoever, and inside of those enclosures is a regular drive with a little USB controller board.
Marco:
You just unplug it from that.
Marco:
It's a regular SATA drive, and you plug it into whatever you need.
Casey:
Yeah, I probably should.
John:
that's why i always buy my my mechanisms specifically and i buy all these crappy external cases just so i get to pick the mechanism because if you buy some i mean obviously what you bought from best buy is like you got to do what you got to do you need to get drive hey sap you know situation i get it right but with more time to spare it's always better to pick the mechanism yourself even if you pick wrong at least you can you know skew towards drives that you think are have a better reliability uh
John:
reputation you can look at the backblaze stats i do that all the time they they have the hard drive stats of like their failure rates the problem is there are two problems with the backblaze stats one most people's use case is not like backblaze's use case yours might be similar kind of but not not really like i don't backblaze drives are running in a different environment than you know they're running in a data center they're running in these big racks and these machines right next to each other they don't have a giant box fan pointing at them
John:
Yeah, they might have better cooling than you.
John:
They might have worse.
John:
They might have more activity or less.
John:
But it's not a typical use case of like, oh, occasionally I watch Plex off of my thing.
John:
Like, that's calmer than Backblaze.
John:
And the second thing is Backblaze gives you the exact model numbers.
John:
By the time they do their readout to the exact model, sometimes it's hard to find those exact models.
John:
Or you can find them, but they only have three months' worth of data.
John:
And if you look at the past reports, you can say three months is not a long enough time to know if this thing is going to die in the first year.
John:
When you see one, it's like, we've had these drives for two years, and their reliability has been excellent.
John:
You can no longer buy those drives.
John:
So it's not a slam dunk, but at least it can give you a feel for...
John:
manufacturers model lines it's so hard because like it could be you know wow it looks like what you know western digital reds are doing really well but it turns out the 14 terabyte western digital red is a reliability disaster and you get it based on the reputation of the smaller ones and you make a terrible mistake so it's it's not an exact science but i don't know i always feel better being able to pick a magnet especially since if you buy one off the shelf it could have something in there that isn't even a drive uh
John:
a quote-unquote consumer drive.
John:
It's a drive that's not even meant for NAS-type situations where it's expected to be on all the time and maybe it has a little bit more redundancy.
John:
In theory, when you buy a spinning disk that's intended for use in a data center or intended for use in a NAS, A, you're paying some stupid premium for their profit margins.
John:
Just live with that.
John:
But B, in theory, there is something physically different about the drive that makes it slightly more suitable to this purpose.
Casey:
Yeah, I got to rethink my whole world, unfortunately.
Casey:
But one step at a time, we'll see how this restore goes.
Marco:
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Casey:
So there was some news today as we record, and it surprised me a lot.
Casey:
Apple has bought Dark Sky.
Casey:
And if you're not familiar with Dark Sky, I don't know, it started something like five to ten years ago.
Casey:
And at the time, it was its own weather app.
Casey:
And then they shortly thereafter provided an API.
Casey:
And especially early on, it was eerie how accurate it was.
Casey:
It's still very accurate, but I don't personally feel like it's quite as accurate as it used to be.
Casey:
But it would eerily predict when it was going to start to rain where you were sitting.
Casey:
So it would say something like rain in seven minutes.
Casey:
And, you know, five, six years ago, whenever it came out, I would look at my watch and it was, I don't know, 10 past 10.
Casey:
And sure enough, seven minutes later, it started raining.
Casey:
It was bananas.
Casey:
It was magic as far as I'm concerned.
Casey:
And over time, you know, I stopped using the Dark Sky app.
Casey:
I personally am a devout Carrot Weather user.
Casey:
But Carrot Weather, for Americans anyway, still uses Dark Sky for most, if not all, of its weather information.
Casey:
And, you know, pretty much all my favorite weather apps over the years, including Check the Weather by Underscore, and I forget what else I've used in the past, but almost all of them use Dark Sky in part, if not in whole, for Americans anyway.
Casey:
And Apple has bought them.
Casey:
And they, I believe they...
Casey:
either killed the android app or have said it's not gonna get updates do you guys remember i think it's removed from the store or something like that like but i think it still works okay and then uh on top of that they have announced that the the ios app is still no it's still available and it's still for purchase which is a little bit weird
Casey:
But the API is going away next year.
Casey:
And I think that's basically the summary of what's happened.
Casey:
Marco, any thoughts on this as the person who I think is most close to developing an app that would use, obviously you don't use Dark Sky, but you're the kind of person that would develop this kind of app.
Casey:
So how do you feel about this?
Marco:
Well, I do use Dark Sky.
Marco:
That's the thing.
Marco:
I have their app installed.
Marco:
I also use my usual weather app is Weatherline, and Weatherline uses Dark Sky data.
Marco:
It used to use it, I think, for everything.
Marco:
When they redid the app, they now use a hybrid that includes Dark Sky for certain things, but uses other data providers for other things.
Marco:
I really don't like this news, honestly, and we'll see what happens.
Marco:
Maybe over time, I will end up liking whatever Apple has in mind to do with this here, but
Marco:
I don't love this the way it is now because the DarkSky API has been so important.
Marco:
It has powered so many indie weather apps that I have really liked it.
Marco:
As you mentioned, Carrot, Weatherline, and including DarkSky's own app,
Marco:
And it's been really great.
Marco:
You know, there have been times in the last whatever it's been 10 years, there have been times where it is less accurate.
Marco:
But, you know, it's like a it's an algorithmic based thing.
Marco:
It's reliant on certain data.
Marco:
And I'm sure they've tweaked the algorithms over time.
Marco:
So, you know, some people try it and it doesn't work out for them or it works for a while.
Marco:
Then it's bad for a while.
Marco:
Then it's good again.
Marco:
It's always been good for me.
Marco:
And I use it all the time because I want to know like every day, like I'm going to go outside.
Marco:
I'm going to walk my dog for the next half hour.
Marco:
Is it going to rain?
Marco:
The whole concept of the app is a great, it's a great app.
Marco:
And it has really been important to me at, you know, at both as a user of dark sky directly and as a user and fan of third party, especially indie weather apps and,
Marco:
It's been great.
Marco:
I forget why, but I even had a couple of email exchanges with the founders forever ago, and I remember them being very nice.
Marco:
It's a wonderful app run by wonderful people.
Marco:
It's also been very successful.
Marco:
It has been the top paid app or within the top few paid apps on the App Store for years.
Marco:
Whatever they're selling to Apple for, it's probably not that their sales sucked.
Marco:
It's probably not that they needed the money, but
Marco:
And they also charge for the API and they make good money from that, I assume.
Marco:
So the reason for them going to Apple, I'm sure they're going to do great things.
Marco:
I'm sure, you know, Apple wants them to, you know, work on the weather team or whatever.
Marco:
That's great that the Apple weather app could use some love.
Marco:
But I would feel a lot better about it if they were still going to run the API for other apps to use as well.
Marco:
And maybe there's a way that they're going to do this.
Marco:
Maybe Apple will offer a weather kit API for iOS apps.
Marco:
Screw Android, but for iOS apps to use this maybe.
Marco:
That would be nice, but I don't know that they will.
Marco:
So if the idea is just for Apple to have their own weather source and I guess maybe not have to pay whoever it is, like the Weather Channel or Yahoo, wherever they're in the source now, if whatever Apple's value is getting out of this, if it's just to save on a license fee to some other data provider and to have local rain forecasts in the iOS weather app and screw everybody else and no one else can have this data anymore, that's no good.
Marco:
But if there's a way that third-party apps can continue to be good and have access to this kind of data, I hope they can manage to do that.
Marco:
But for now, I don't feel good about this because that's an uncertain future.
Marco:
And I really do like all of the...
Marco:
that the dark sky api has provided it also like they also have a website for a while it was forecast at io but now i think it's just dark sky dot something i don't know it's always auto completing for me and uh and what's great about the website not only can you see weather anywhere of course which is actually surprisingly nice on something like a mac where there really aren't a lot of good weather apps on the mac um but also you can look up historical weather data which is really cool
Marco:
All that for free on their website.
Marco:
It's just been a wonderful service and a wonderful app and a wonderful API that's been such a key part of so many people's daily usage.
Marco:
So to have Apple take it over and give it a shutdown date is concerning.
Marco:
I always wonder how Apple feels about these...
John:
uh situations where there's like an api or some other some other thing that uh third-party apps build on right from from our perspective as users and even as developers these all seem like clear wins right you just mentioned like oh this could go into some kind of weather kit thing or whatever but think about cases where apple has done this either by accident or on purpose right there's tons of calendar apps for the mac because apple provides a
John:
the apple calendar also those calendar apps access other calendars like google calendar and so on and so forth apple you know it was just a super plan for apple to say we want to have tons of awesome calendar apps on ios and the mac for that matter uh so let's do this open calendar api sure you know clearly you know they made whatever the calendar apis are called with that intention same thing with the address book contacts all that stuff like they made those apis with that intention uh
John:
But at various points, they could have made different decisions.
John:
They could have said, oh, great, well, you can make an iOS app that accesses the shared calendar, but your app can't access Google Calendar or something like that.
John:
That totally sounds like a thing that Apple would entertain.
John:
They do all sorts of stuff like that related to in-app purchase and other scenarios where they're trying to sort of steer the market through restrictions because they control the whole store.
John:
API stuff, CloudKit and all that stuff.
John:
They make a lot of essentially faceless services.
John:
The only reason they exist, aside from Apple using them themselves, is, hey, if you want to make an app for iOS that has an online component but you're not a server-side developer, we have a bunch of libraries that talk to our servers with a fairly attractive business model of, like, you don't have to worry about the service being up or anything like that.
John:
We will store your data.
John:
You know, they have this tiered thing where if you have a small number of users, it's not a big deal, and then the fees go up as you get more, you know.
John:
Those services exist so that people can write better, cooler apps with less, not with less ever, but with less people power, with less expertise.
John:
It makes their platform better for users because they get better apps.
John:
It makes it more attractive for developers because smaller developer teams can do better things.
John:
so you look at this scenario there's tons of cool weather apps for ios and less so for the mac as usual but anyway why are there all these weather apps is every one of these weather apps backed by some company that owns weather stations and weather data no sometimes they use commercial apis that exist out in the world and the dark sky api i'm assuming is just a wrapper around a bunch of commercial apis because i assume the dark sky people don't run a bunch of weather stations you know so it's just wrappers on top of wrappers are just fine but
John:
But if you want to make a weather app and your idea is it's going to be named after a vegetable, it's going to have snarky messages about the weather, you can implement that without worrying so much about, yeah, but how would I get the weather?
John:
Do I have to contract with AccuWeather?
John:
How do I do all this stuff?
John:
And if the dark sky API is a path of least resistance to do that, then that makes more weather apps available.
John:
So here Apple is faced with a choice.
John:
We want Dark Sky because basically I'm assuming because they want to make their weather app better because their weather app has been falling behind.
John:
Great, fine, buy them.
John:
It's great for the developers because they presumably get a big payday.
John:
As has been discussed anytime anyone gets acquired, a lot of the motivation for people going to Apple is often...
John:
So, yeah.
John:
but anyway it's you know it's all good for them and it's good for apple to get a better weather app but i really hope that like that apple looks at what they've acquired and the fact that it is an api right and says regardless of whether we shut down this api or not we should do the same thing that we have done again either accidentally or on purpose with things like cloud kit and like the the calendar and contact apis like it doesn't always have to be server setting but you know
John:
enabling there to be more competitors for their own apps.
John:
And that's why I started saying I wonder what Apple thinks about this.
John:
Because if I was inside Apple, I'd be like, don't you see in all the places where we have the most richness in the App Store, it's because we did things like this?
John:
On the other hand, I can imagine someone saying, how did our weather app fall behind?
John:
Well, it fell behind because we allow all these other apps to just have this ecosystem of sharing this API.
John:
And we need to nip that in the bud.
John:
And now we'll have the best weather app again, which is short-sighted and stupid.
John:
And I don't think they think that.
John:
But I also don't see, I never see them come out and sort of, other than in obscure technical WWC sessions, tout the idea that by making services and APIs available, we are making a better software ecosystem on our platform, right?
Yeah.
John:
I know they have a big services pitch.
John:
When we say services with the capital S, as in these earnings that we've been talking about for the past several years, it's like, oh, I'll pay Apple so I can watch TV shows.
John:
I'll pay Apple so I can store my photos for it.
John:
I'll pay Apple for more disk space.
John:
I'll pay Apple for a music service.
John:
It's all about just like paying Apple, consumers paying Apple, right?
John:
But this scenario where there are services, but the people who pay for them and use them are developers, like one degree separated from users, doesn't seem like something that Apple...
John:
It's not that they don't like it.
John:
They do it enough times, but it always strikes me as a little bit too accidental.
John:
They just found themselves in a situation like, why is it true for Calendar but not true for something else?
John:
Podcasts are a good example.
John:
They have this podcast directory, which accidentally or on purpose powered this entire ecosystem of podcast apps.
John:
But was that the plan from the beginning or did it just kind of happen and they were smart enough not to screw it up?
John:
Like, I think they should embrace this model because I think this model has been proven to work.
John:
It gives Apple control.
John:
Like, they have control over the CloudKit APIs.
John:
They have control over all these, you know, all the other things they offer.
John:
They have control over their libraries, right?
John:
They could make a WeatherKit and they could have essentially DarkSkyAPI v2 powered by Apple, you know, access through WeatherKit.
John:
And that would enable...
John:
someone else's great idea of how to make a weather app to be done or someone's bad idea for whatever either way a little track developers to the platform it'll make it a more you know more attractive place for customers to shop because they have lots of cool weather apps made by small teams with a good idea who didn't want to deal with the weather stuff so my fingers are crossed for that eventuality but
John:
If they just take the crew, make their weather app better, and stop the API after a year, it's not the end of the world, but it's not great.
John:
That's where we get into Marco being pessimistic about this.
John:
I'm choosing to think that they're going to do the right thing, and if not continue that API, then have a similar API fronted by a library or something so that we can continue to have tons of weird and ridiculous weather apps on iOS.
Casey:
Yeah, I totally think and hope that that's the case.
Casey:
And it vaguely reminds me of when Google Maps was the only mapping software on the iPhone.
Casey:
And if you wanted to put a map in your app, you had to jump through some hoops.
Casey:
I don't remember exactly what they were, but you had to jump through some hoops to establish a relationship with Google.
Casey:
And I think you might have even had to get a Google SDK in order to do it, which kind of makes sense.
Casey:
And then
Casey:
Apple starts providing its own maps, and granted they were garbage for a long time, but now I don't think they are for most people.
Casey:
And adding a map into your app is super simple because the API is right there.
Casey:
It's part of the system.
Casey:
And I feel like this feels as though it's an analogous sort of event.
Casey:
And this is exactly what you're saying, John, that maybe there will be some sort of weather API.
Casey:
Perhaps it could be even part of the MapKit API.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
But some sort of weather API that will allow you to get weather information for all sorts of different things.
Casey:
I mean, if you think about it,
Casey:
The weather information, I'm trying to think off the top of my head, on my phone shows up in Fantastical.
Casey:
It shows up in the Maps app.
Casey:
It shows up in my weather apps.
Casey:
You know, there are more places than you would expect.
Casey:
Oh, in day one, it shows up.
Casey:
There's more places than you would expect that have or show weather data and to be able to...
John:
Is there already a weather API?
John:
I don't even know.
John:
Maybe there's already a simple weather API.
John:
There isn't.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't think there isn't.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know where this goes.
Casey:
It's certainly... It could be another form of lock-in.
Casey:
You know, if the only way you get a really good weather report is if you have an iPhone, like, I hope that's not the case, but it would be an interesting and very unusual form of lock-in.
Casey:
Well, yeah, I really like that Android phone, but I can't get my weather app that I rely on because, I don't know, I'm a dog walker or something like that, like a professional dog walker or...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm a landscaper, and it's incredibly important.
Casey:
I know exactly.
John:
I don't think that's that bad of a situation.
John:
That's basically my optimistic scenario is that it is – that Apple uses it as a platform differentiator.
John:
Again, Apple, as far as I'm aware, you never know, doesn't own a million weather stations around the world.
John:
Like some – the weather data comes from elsewhere.
John:
This is all just about mediating access to that and providing a –
John:
nice interface to it and if it's a differentiating factor to say you know everyone anyone get like the weather from just some source or whatever but dark skies big thing as marco said is like it was super you know whatever they call hyper local like you can get the weather right where you're standing right now which was a differentiating feature and the reason it's a
John:
something anybody can do, having a really good weather API is harder.
John:
And that's, if Apple wants to use that as a differentiating feature for the iPhone, oh, the iPhone has, you know, they bought Dark Sky, so they have the current best weather API, whether it's because of the way Dark Sky processes the data that it's get or the data sources it has or whatever.
John:
But it's not like they're locking anybody out because...
John:
You know, the weather is information is publicly available, as in we can all see what the weather is and anybody can build weather stations or anyone can pay someone who has weather stations.
John:
So, like, I don't feel that there's any evil in them, you know, confining the best weather API and the easiest to use weather API to their platform.
John:
That's exactly what they should be doing.
John:
You know, Android and Google can do exactly the same thing.
John:
You know, that's how they should be competing with each other.
Marco:
The other angle to this is that weather apps are famously frequently bad for privacy.
Marco:
Not the ones we've mentioned, not like the nice indie ones, but there's a lot of weather apps out there.
Marco:
Weather apps, by their nature...
Marco:
need your location for most convenient features.
Marco:
You can always not give some of your location and maybe just type in your location or have it just always display that location or have it to change it manually.
Marco:
But for the most part, most people give most weather apps their location access so they can show the weather wherever they happen to be.
Marco:
Because weather apps have location access, they can sell that information.
Marco:
location data is very valuable in the ad tracking creepiness business not only do many weather apps just sell this data outright if you have a weather app that gets location access you will be approached people will email you from these scam companies offering you money to integrate their sdk and this might be more money than you might be making from your app sales if you're if you're not doing that well in the app store
Marco:
which is very often the case for a lot of apps, right?
Marco:
They will offer you money to build in their tracking SDK because your app has location access, right?
Marco:
By the user.
Marco:
So they'll give you money to put their SDK in that will measure your location that the app already has access to and tie it to ad profiles.
Marco:
And then they can sell that and make more money from you.
Marco:
So,
Marco:
That's a whole thing that's going on behind the scenes now, and that might be informing this decision by Apple as well.
Marco:
There's this whole seedy underbelly of weather apps that because they, by their nature, usually get your location permission, they have this valuable data, and many of them are being really creepy with it.
Marco:
Again, not the ones we've mentioned because we wouldn't use an app that did that, right?
Marco:
Like the ones we mentioned, you know, Carrot, Weatherline, like these are all good apps made by good people.
Marco:
They don't do this kind of crap, but many apps do.
Marco:
So it's a very big deal that weather apps are a notorious privacy hole for your location data.
Marco:
And Apple's very sensitive to that.
Marco:
So maybe this is part of some kind of play to crack down on that.
Marco:
I haven't quite thought about how they could do that effectively.
Marco:
One option would be they no longer allow weather apps to have your location and they just provide weather data for them.
Marco:
But that's a really aggressive move.
Marco:
And that would have a lot of other problems too.
Marco:
For instance, no one weather data source is good for the entire world.
Marco:
There's different data sources in different parts of the world and certain ones are better than others for different regions and everything.
Marco:
So like
Marco:
I don't think they would or should do something as drastic as prohibit any other weather API from having location access.
Marco:
That would be weird.
Marco:
So I'm just trying to think through, is there some kind of privacy angle on this that would lead to an actual possible and likely and enforceable outcome that they could maybe crack down on this incredibly seedy underbelly of privacy-selling weather apps?
John:
by somehow buying dark sky and again i haven't quite figured out how that can work yet but maybe there's something there i was thinking about all the other platforms that apple has where weather data is useful again apple has weather data like this weather it's a weather widget on your watch there's you know weather thing in the notifications whatever the hell that thing's called on the mac on the right side of the screen the today view that has a weather thing in it i believe and obviously in our phones and buying dark sky will give them
John:
better weather presumably gives them people who are experience making uh more advanced weather apps than apple zone and plus all the hyper local stuff with the local radar to say it's going to rain in five minutes but you know having your watch nudge you that it's going to be raining on your head in five minutes is pretty cool i don't dark sky app i already have a watch app that does that but uh you know
John:
AR glasses, you can look up in the sky and see which direction the rain clouds are coming from.
John:
There's all sorts of scenarios where even better weather than they currently have is an attractive thing to Apple.
John:
So this purchase doesn't surprise me in the slightest.
John:
I'm just really hoping that the path they take by this purchase is not simply to give Apple's platforms better weather stuff, but to...
John:
you know make an api and a service that everybody can use even if they discontinue the current one make a new api with like margo was saying perhaps with different privacy trade-offs hopefully not with too many different restrictions like what we don't want to see is like oh apple has a cool new weather kit that's very advanced and has all the features of dark sky plus an api and you can use it in the right to really reasonable and every other weather service is forbidden on the platform like i don't think they would do that but like that's yeah
John:
worst case scenario that's like the in-app purchase scenario where you know if you wanted if you want to sell things through your applications you know for this huge swath of stuff where you have to go through apple's thing and give them 30 and stuff so that's that's at one extreme and the other extreme is it's a free-for-all apple is going to compete in that free-for-all by having a really good weather service which they can do now that they bought dark sky and i feel like they should just be happy to compete about like they do with cloud kit
John:
you can use cloud kit or whatever you know core data i call core data maybe you don't want to use that but anyway apple has a bunch of services that you can use in your ios app or not by the way isn't it a shame that they already use the name cloud kit like wouldn't that have been perfect for this yeah and i don't know if they wanted to use dark for a dark sky but uh
John:
But like the only scenario where Apple has most recently forced its hand is in a situation like Marco was alluding to, which is where there's a privacy thing.
John:
So Apple has a thing that you can use for your sign in, sign in with Apple.
John:
And there they do mandate that if you have an app that allows you to sign in with Facebook, with Google, with whatever.
John:
You have to offer sign in with Apple.
John:
And the reason they're doing that is privacy related.
John:
It's part of it is, yes, OK, we want everyone to use Apple's things.
John:
But honestly, Apple has you already.
John:
The whole point is you're on your iPhone.
John:
You have an iCloud.
John:
You know, Apple's got your Apple ID.
John:
Like they're all set on that front.
John:
Sign in with Apple is, I guess, you know, partially so they can get you get their hooks into you one more way.
John:
But the reason I think they're mandating it is not just for adoption, but also because they have a privacy angle, as evidenced by the way the API looks, where you can use it without even giving people your email, which is unheard of on the other services.
John:
They want everything from you, right?
John:
So if there's a privacy angle on this, I can see Apple being a little bit more forceful.
John:
Perhaps not mandating the use of their API, but further restricting the other APIs to compete on a level privacy playing field with Apple's.
John:
They haven't done that with the sign-in stuff.
John:
You sign in with Facebook.
John:
Facebook gets all your everything.
John:
You sign in with Google.
John:
Google gets all your everything.
John:
You sign in with Apple.
John:
Apple is the one voluntarily saying, hey, when you use our API, you have to actually ask people for the email address.
John:
You don't get it by default.
John:
We'll make up a random email for you.
John:
All that stuff that Apple's is doing is...
John:
tying their own hands behind their back in terms of the amount of data they get.
John:
Apple doesn't want the data.
John:
They want to have a more private API, but they didn't require everybody else to do the same thing, at least yet anyway.
John:
The weather API, we'll see.
John:
This is an interesting thing to watch, not so much because we're interested in weather APIs and the ecosystem, weather apps and the iPhone, but because it shows where Apple's head is at currently in terms of the range of things that they can do, both policy-wise and tech-wise for their platforms.
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Casey:
Just today, apparently it's now possible, and I'm very unclear on where the dividing lines are, but it is possible to rent or buy or do something with video through Amazon Prime Video's app, but not using in-app purchase.
Casey:
Did one of you pay closer attention to this?
Casey:
Because I am deeply confused as to what the situation is.
John:
Why don't you read the very, very clear Apple quote that's in the show notes?
Casey:
Well, I would be happy to, John.
Casey:
Apple has established... Let me try that again.
Casey:
I would be happy to, John.
Casey:
Apple has an established program for premium subscription video entertainment providers to offer a variety of customer benefits, including integration with the Apple TV app, AirPlay 2 support, tvOS apps, universal search, series support, and, where applicable, single or zero sign-in.
Casey:
On qualifying premium video entertainment apps such as Prime Video, Altus One, and Canal+,
Casey:
Customers have the option to buy or rent movies and TV shows using the payment method tied to their existing video subscription.
John:
Wow, look what they snuck in there.
John:
That's a lot of words.
Marco:
What does that actually mean?
Marco:
So this is incredible.
Marco:
So forever, Amazon and Apple have been battling over in-app purchase rules.
Marco:
Basically, Apple has always, since the introduction of in-app purchase on iOS, they've always required that...
Marco:
apps are not allowed to collect payment information and have their own payment processing to buy digital goods in their apps without going through an app purchase.
Marco:
Amazon has not been allowed to have something like the Kindle app, where I believe we first saw this, and later on when they launched Prime Video, that Amazon will sell you videos to rent or buy or whatever, and
Marco:
Apple has not allowed them to do Amazon's own purchase system inside the app in their iOS app.
Marco:
They would require them to use Apple's in-app purchase system, but Apple's in-app purchase system charges 30% for most things and had other various limitations that Amazon didn't want to comply with.
Marco:
There's always been this battle of heads budding, and they've been going back and forth kind of quietly in the background for years, and Amazon and Apple had this pretty tense relationship for a while.
Marco:
And last year, I think, or whenever it was, they basically announced that they had come to some kind of agreement.
Marco:
For the first time in a while, Amazon would start selling Apple products again.
Marco:
Things had gotten so bad that
Marco:
It was actually tricky to buy Apple products on Amazon.
Marco:
That's how bad their relationship had gotten.
Marco:
And there was this whole thing.
Marco:
But the critical, the main thing that Amazon didn't like about Apple was this in-app purchase rule.
Marco:
That Amazon just wanted to offer their own purchases in their app.
Marco:
And Apple doesn't care if you do that for physical goods.
Marco:
like or for services like that's why you can you can use your own payment methods for things like you know lift rides or for you know amazon's shopping website because that's physical goods apple doesn't have you know a payment processing system for that but they do have for any kind of digital goods like buying or renting videos or songs or ebooks apple always is required that that goes through their system
Marco:
and amazon has always said basically no and that's why and and they have all these other crazy rules like you aren't even allowed to like link out to a browser to do it and that's why you have all these crazy things where you have situations like the amazon like the kindle app won't tell you that you can go to amazon's site to sign up or buy these things it has to kind of assume you'll figure that out on your own somehow and then all these crazy rejections spotify's been involved and all and
Marco:
HBO and Netflix have done their own things also.
Marco:
So it's been this whole thing.
Marco:
So what has changed today is that Amazon's app for Prime Video, not for anything else, but so far only for Prime Video, and I think there's a reason for that that we'll get to in a moment, now allows you to buy and rent or otherwise pay for video using your Amazon billing method that's already entered.
Marco:
So
Marco:
So you can't type in a credit card newly into this system.
Marco:
Otherwise, there's some weird exceptions that you might be able to do it some way.
Marco:
But for the most part, you can't do that.
Marco:
But most people with Amazon accounts have some kind of payment method already tied to them.
Marco:
And so if you have that, now you can use the Prime Video app on iOS with Apple's blessing.
Marco:
Maybe through gritted teeth, but with Apple's blessing to buy videos that don't go through Apple's payment processing at all and don't pay Apple's 30%.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of complicating factors here.
Marco:
For instance, 30% has not been 30% for people like Amazon for a while.
Marco:
Large companies like Netflix, HBO, way before Apple announced the whole 15% for years two and up thing for the rest of us, whenever that was, about two years ago, one year ago,
Marco:
Long before that, the big companies were already paying something like 15%.
Marco:
Apple had already cut deals with some of the big ones because they wouldn't do it otherwise, and they eventually made that public.
Marco:
So there is already a history of Apple having to negotiate with big companies exceptions to these rules here and there.
Marco:
But this is a really big one.
Marco:
And I think the reason why they were willing to do this for Amazon specifically, and apparently Altus One and Canal+, which I don't follow this business.
Marco:
I've never heard of those.
Marco:
I hear Canal+, is big, I think, in Europe or France or something, but it's fine.
Marco:
Whatever.
Marco:
I'm sure they're big somewhere.
Marco:
But the key part of this, of why Apple capitulated on such a massive thing they've stood so firm on for so long, I think is in the previous sentence.
Marco:
Apple has established a program for blah, blah, blah, video providers, specifically, not all apps, video providers, including integration with the Apple TV app, and then, you know, AirPlay support, tvOS, universal search, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, okay.
Marco:
That's it right there.
Marco:
Apple was willing to do this because they have something else they're trying to get off the ground, the TV app, which is really important to Apple's new subscription push, services push, TV Plus.
Marco:
It's very important to Apple that the TV app become the home of where everyone goes to start their TV watching.
Marco:
They want that to be where people's TV lives.
Marco:
And they don't have all the buy-in.
Marco:
The TV app is not new.
Marco:
All the APIs it uses, things like the Universal Search and the Siri support and all this other stuff they mention, and not to mention just the integration period with the TV app.
Marco:
Netflix still doesn't do that.
Marco:
I guess Amazon probably didn't before this, or I'm sure there were holes in the functionality.
Marco:
And so what Apple needs, like, you know, it was easy when, when Apple had all the power in the relationship, like Apple has iOS, this amazing platform that tons of people use and where lots of money flows through.
Marco:
And if Amazon doesn't want to play nice with iOS, that's mostly Amazon's problem, not Apple's problem.
Marco:
And so Apple was able to basically dictate the terms of this in-app purchase relationship for a long time because they had most of the power in that relationship, you know, from certain angles.
Marco:
But in the last couple of years, Apple needs something from them.
Marco:
Apple needs these companies in specifically certain areas like video to adopt Apple's APIs and to participate in Apple's TV app and that ecosystem and that whole integration and everything.
Marco:
Apple needs them to do this.
Marco:
And understandably, people at Netflix looked at this and were like, why should we do this exactly?
Marco:
Why should we not have our own app be the place to be?
Marco:
Why should we integrate with Apple's TV app, which is inferior in a lot of ways to our own app?
Marco:
And then we lose all these metrics and all this data.
Marco:
Like, why?
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Like, there's no reason, from Netflix's point of view, there's no reason to integrate with the Apple TV app.
Marco:
people's home for Netflix content is the Netflix app, period, right?
Marco:
Amazon probably, I haven't followed the Amazon situation closely in the video area, but they probably had similar feelings.
Marco:
Like, why?
Marco:
What's in it for them, right?
Marco:
Why should they adopt Apple's thing and go into Apple's playground if they don't need to, if they're powerful enough that they can have their own app and have all the advantages of that?
Marco:
By the way, the Amazon apps always suck.
Marco:
But anyway, that's a different story.
Marco:
So finally, Apple needed something from them.
Marco:
And Amazon had all the power on that relationship.
Marco:
And Amazon's like, well, no.
Marco:
Probably, like, why should we integrate your TV app, right?
Marco:
So because Apple finally needed something from someone else for something that's very important to Apple, their TV services push and TV app integration and everything else,
Marco:
That's why I think they finally made this deal specifically for this area.
Marco:
I don't think we're going to see the same thing in the Kindle app or Comixology because I don't think Apple is really trying really hard to make a home of all e-books on iOS.
Marco:
I don't think that's going to happen.
John:
I mean, Amazon can negotiate for that because it's always like give and take.
John:
What does Apple have to offer?
John:
Hey, we'll let you do sales and rentals through the Prime Video app.
John:
Amazon could say, and also please let us do it through the Kindle app.
John:
Like it's another thing that you can offer Amazon.
John:
But like that brings up the Kindle app and the iBook that brings up another point.
John:
There are strategy taxes all over this because despite what you said all being true, Apple also has a service that competes with Prime Video called Apple TV+.
John:
And that competes with Netflix, right?
John:
So Apple is trying to be a platform and have that TV app, just like you said, and
John:
And they need the services that people want to be in that.
John:
Netflix is big enough to still tell Apple to go walk off a pier.
John:
Amazon is apparently weak enough that they're willing to integrate.
John:
But in the end, Apple may have to decide, do you want to be the app that is the gateway for all of these video services except for Netflix because they're too big?
John:
Or do you want to be
John:
the biggest video service right apple tv plus is a sibling to prime video canal plus or whatever all these other sort of things like people that have video services apple tv plus is competing with them in the same way that the apple bookstore whatever the hell it's called now now it's not the ibook store competes with the amazon store with the kindle store right
John:
And it's like I understand this move from a strategic perspective, especially if you're trying to make Netflix feel bad about being left out.
John:
If you can get everybody but Netflix into the TV app.
John:
And maybe give advantages to apps that integrate with the TV app that aren't available to the Netflix app.
John:
Maybe you can use this as a wedge.
John:
But at a certain point, whether that strategy works or not, you've invited all the foxes into the hen house.
John:
And how well is your Apple TV Plus service doing that you're paying billions of dollars to make these TV shows for when you've got all these other competitors that you are helping by whatever you're trying to make Netflix jealous with?
John:
You're also helping competitors to Apple TV plus in the process of doing that.
John:
So it's, it's this balance where I do think that, you know, both efforts could just fizzle and go nowhere and we just get the status quo.
John:
Right.
John:
But if one of the things starts going really well, there may come a point where Apple has to decide what's more important.
John:
Right.
John:
apple tv plus becoming the next netflix or the tv or apple becoming the platform gateway for television viewing like what's what's the we have to sacrifice one or the other we can't have both of them because i don't see any scenario where apple tv plus dethrones netflix is the most important streaming service and all video services go through the the apple tv app and they become the gateway and platform for all tv watching on apple platforms like
John:
I don't see both of those happening.
John:
I barely see one of them happening, but certainly not both.
John:
So best case scenario, Apple has to choose.
John:
More likely scenario, they never have to choose because neither of them goes that well.
Marco:
Yeah, maybe.
Marco:
But I think the power dynamic is so different, though.
Marco:
You brought up the whole fox and hen house argument, but I think it's more like Apple walked into a fox house.
Marco:
It was already an established fox house, and Apple's walking in as a hen and being like, hey, can I hang out here too?
Marco:
Maybe you could do me a favor also.
Marco:
Apple had so little power trying to get this TV app off the ground, and Apple TV Plus is such a small player, really.
Marco:
I'm sure Apple's going to talk about numbers and how many people they have using it and everything the next time they get the opportunity to, but the reality is it's a very minor player in this game right now and will probably remain one for some time, if not forever.
Marco:
Apple had to come to these companies on their terms.
John:
and so i'm guessing that this has been in the works for a while uh possibly even before since before the apple tv plus launch well that's part that's part of strategy tax things right because you never know like like your organization is so big that someone's trying to work this deal of like you know as you said the tv world is different you do need to work with not just streaming services but also cable providers as a whole
John:
bunch of parties that apple has to deal with to do anything in this space right so there's one team working on that and then elsewhere in this giant organization there's another team saying we should have our own service because we could charge people for it and like you have to reconcile that somehow does it wouldn't surprise me at all if there was some tension between these two efforts because they are at odds with each other in many respects
Marco:
Anyway, I'm guessing this was in place for a while.
Marco:
This was negotiated a while ago, probably back when Apple and Amazon announced they reached some kind of settlement with everything like two years ago.
Marco:
I'm guessing this has been in the works since then because this also... So Guy Rambeau and Steve Trouton-Smith have been doing some spelunking on the Amazon binary, and it has a private entitlement to get extra data from Storkid.
Marco:
And so there's clearly some kind of like...
Marco:
software side of this that they had to do in addition and given that that software side of things involves the store kit api which is one of apple's you know largest most important and most creaky and old and infamously horrible things to work on uh web services i'm guessing that the software implementation side of this took some time
Marco:
and required certain rollouts of certain API changes and blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
So I'm guessing that this has been in the works for a long time as part of that big agreement that they made a couple years ago.
Marco:
And that's why it's just coming out now.
Marco:
But anyway, a lot of people, this is rubbing the wrong way because it's like Apple's treating these big companies separately and giving them separate rules than the rules that the rest of us have to follow within our purchase.
Marco:
And
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
It's wonderful that Apple doesn't do that most of the time.
Marco:
It's wonderful that for the vast majority of aspects of the App Store, big companies and small companies play by the same rules.
Marco:
But that's not true for all the rules.
Marco:
That's just business.
Marco:
Facebook and Uber get away with murder with what their apps do and the privacy things that they take.
Marco:
Facebook and Uber, big companies like that, they're so important that Apple can't ban them from the app store.
Marco:
That's business.
Marco:
That's the reality.
Marco:
Amazon is so important that no matter what Amazon does, Apple can't kick them out of the app store.
Marco:
Spotify probably also has this status, right?
Marco:
These big companies are super important to Apple's platform, way more important than Overcast or any other independent app that any of us work on and run and anything like that.
Marco:
Apple does make business deals sometimes with big companies behind the scenes that do change the rules for them.
Marco:
Or they do give them, like in the case of Facebook and Uber, they do give them like maybe a private heads up from an executive.
Marco:
Hey, you need to stop doing this rather than just ban them from the app store immediately upon their first offense.
Marco:
Big companies get special treatment because they're really important to Apple and because Apple doesn't have all the power in those relationships.
Marco:
Yes, Apple made a special deal with a small number of big companies.
Marco:
It's not the first time.
Marco:
It won't be the last time.
Marco:
And that's just business.
Marco:
I don't love that as any developer who, you know, I have to follow.
Marco:
Like, I can't implement my own credit card thing for, you know, my stuff in Overcast.
Marco:
I have to pay Apple's 30%.
Marco:
But that's the reality.
Marco:
That's business.
Marco:
Apple can live without Overcast.
Marco:
Apple can't live without Amazon and Netflix and HBO and stuff like that.
Marco:
So they have to make deals with big companies sometimes.
Marco:
That's just the reality.
Marco:
And so from that angle, again, I don't love this, but I see why they have to do it.
John:
Yeah, I think this is just... I keep fast-forwarding, like, a year and saying, like, how could this possibly shake out?
John:
And especially if this was a thing made before Apple TV Plus was announced, before the rumors of it were solid.
John:
Like, you know, there's been...
John:
There's always a possibility that Apple could do what they did with LTE Plus, but it took for the recent couple of years for it to really come to a head.
John:
So say this deal was negotiated three years ago, Amazon had to judge.
John:
If we do this, what if Apple just comes out with their own video service and competes with us?
John:
And the judgment could be, well, it's going to take them a while to do that, so we should just do this deal anyway.
John:
and you know we'll get while the getting is good we'll we'll sell stuff through our app we won't have to pay them 30 and if they come out with the service it'll probably take them a while to get up to speed and you know like you can always stop whatever i don't know what the contracts look like but i can imagine them doing this while they can making money while they can and reevaluate in a year or two because even for amazon amazon is also trying to compete to netflix they don't want to be just a little surf in the apple tv you know app kingdom and
John:
Everyone wants to be big enough that you can just rebuff Apple and say, no, we're doing our own thing.
John:
Right now, Netflix is big enough to do that and continues to do that.
John:
Netflix took all their purchases out of the Apple ecosystem and Netflix doesn't want to be in the TV app.
John:
thing that tries to to control everything right amazon would love to be in that power position but apparently they're not uh and also i think amazon has more things they want from apple which kind of surprises me they didn't get more concessions like you know the kindle store or whatever because amazon isn't just a video company they have all sorts of things uh they would love to not pay apple for book purchases to sell books on phones and not pay apple 30 and give apple zero percent right
John:
But apparently they couldn't negotiate for that.
John:
So as the balance of power shifts, and interestingly, in this particular scenario, the balance of power among these video services is influenced by creative output, right?
John:
If you get good TV shows, that puts you in a more powerful position, right?
John:
It's unlike many other scenarios where it's a technical concern or there's some other regulatory scenario.
John:
The reason Apple TV Plus has been successful, as it has been, is A, the free trial, and B, the fact that they made TV shows that weren't terrible, that people were interested in watching and talked about.
John:
that's what made netflix what it is today netflix started by just giving a bunch of content that they didn't make and they started making their own content in the beginning they had one or two good ones and now they make so much stuff that the percentage of stuff that's good uh you know may only be one percent but that one percent is a lot
John:
That is a weird scenario for Apple to be in.
John:
I mean, we talked about this when they were doing the service to begin with.
John:
Apple has a music store, but they don't have a bunch of bands that they started.
John:
Well, I guess the breakpoints, but they don't have a bunch of bands that Apple is fielding, but they're making TV shows.
John:
And so it's weird to see Apple suddenly in a scenario where
John:
you can really influence your odds of success by doing things that have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with creative output.
John:
It's like, how do you become a powerful movie studio?
John:
You make good movies that people want to buy or people want to watch, right?
John:
Pixar is Pixar because they made a bunch of good movies, right?
John:
So now Apple can, in theory...
John:
try to get a leg up on its competitors in the video market yes there's a technology stuff going on over here yes there's a tv app and there's all sorts of the angles of control we control the store and there's all there's all those things that they normally do but also a they have to make good shows and b if they make really really good shows and a lot of them it can give them an advantage which is you know a strange just a strange situation for
John:
a technology company to be in but it's a fact of life right netflix became netflix not because their app is awesome hell they were able to force stupid auto-playing you know trailers or whatever on us before they finally gave us a preference for that the reason they were able to annoy us to that degree uh and you know netflix is not netflix because of their app they're they're netflix these days because of their original content and that's what apple is competing with ultimately in the end because
John:
For Apple TV Plus to even be a contender, it has to have good enough content.
John:
And if it ever wants to get bigger and start taking market share, it has to have better content.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Eero, and Postmates.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They didn't mean.
Casey:
uh john do you want to tell me about consoles because i'm really excited to hear about it yeah this is console follow-up wait is this do we have after show follow-up
John:
That's right.
John:
Well, it's not really, Bob.
John:
I guess it is.
John:
It's stuff that I forgot to mention or didn't know.
John:
So last time I talked about the new Xbox and the PlayStation 5, and I hadn't watched the full Sony presentation, and so now I have.
John:
But I did talk about last time that Microsoft had decided against the trends in the industry to...
John:
lock the clock speed on their system on a chip essentially instead of you know having a turbo boost or you know going you know faster and slower clock speed depending on load and all this stuff that modern cpus do they had to just stay at a constant clock speed it's actually two clock speeds because if you enable symmetric multi-threading it goes slower or faster i forget which but anyway like the point is you're in a particular mode and it just runs that speed the whole time no no varying while it's running in whatever mode it's running in
John:
which is super weird and requires aggressive cooling, but it makes a very consistent experience.
John:
That was their pitch.
John:
We don't want you to have a console.
John:
If it's in a place where it can't get a lot of cooling, your game starts hitching.
John:
Sony took a different approach.
John:
In some ways, a more traditional approach.
John:
Their thing does change clock speed, but they spent a while in their presentation talking about how it doesn't change clock speed based on temperature.
John:
I don't think they didn't do a good job explaining or at least I didn't do a good job absorbing why they don't want to do it based on temperature.
John:
I think the idea was like, well, temperature is one thing, but it can be a false signal maybe.
John:
Like really, you know, we don't want it to – like here's the thing.
John:
This is the reason I'm confused.
John:
Yeah.
John:
you don't want your chip to melt.
John:
Like, temperature is important.
John:
Like, in the end, that's what you're controlling for.
John:
You know, if the thing is in the console under your TV and it's in a cabinet where it doesn't have good airflow and you're playing a game and, you know, the clock speed is whatever, 2 point something gigahertz...
John:
And stuff starts to get so hot.
John:
At a certain point, chips stop working.
John:
Like, there's a safe temperature for chips operating in.
John:
If they get too hot, they just don't work anymore.
John:
And worst case scenario, you could even damage them, right?
John:
So in the end, that's what you're controlling for.
John:
Heat is the enemy here.
John:
But I guess apparently...
John:
You can't get accurate enough or reasonable enough temperature sensing to just have temperature be the only thing that you're measuring.
John:
Or if you did, you would end up clocking yourself slower than you technically needed to.
John:
So it seems like what they're looking for is a situation where they run as hot as they possibly can, but not hotter.
John:
And they think the way that they can do that is instead of controlling for temperature, they have sort of assigned...
John:
uh cost sort of heat cost to certain operations and they have special circuitry to say if you're doing this type of operation it takes this much of the heat budget and this type of operation takes this much of the heat budget and they sort of real-time measure what the actual cpu and gpu are doing and from that come up with
John:
a you know that they they try to assemble that all together to come up with a profile of like how much energy are we using and then just they have you know sort of a balanced equation that says we can do this amount of work with this is the amount of cooling we have and this is how our cooling relates to our clock speed and we can do this amount of work with this amount of heat so they're trying to i guess get closer to that ragged edge uh you know use uh
John:
Don't back off just because this one part is going to get really hot for a second because we know based on the workload across the entire system on a chip that you'll be fine because overall we're not doing that much work.
John:
So a very different strategy from Microsoft, which committed fully to just constant clock speed.
John:
Again, two different clock speeds for whether symmetric multithreading is enabled or not.
John:
And the PlayStation 5 is saying, we're going to be variable, but we're going to do variable clock speed better than anyone else has done it.
John:
So, good luck to Sony.
John:
It was a little bit scary.
John:
I hope it works out better than my description of it made it sound.
John:
And the second weird thing Sony is doing, Sony being Sony, they have this big part of the presentation that's about 3D audio, or, you know, I don't know, audio that sounds more interesting in games, having more different audio sources.
John:
I'm fully sold on the idea that this can be more immersive, because...
John:
you know sound you don't appreciate until you've played a really good game with sound but like point sources and sound in games and first person shooters and stuff you want to hear like footsteps of like enemies coming are they behind me they're to my left to my right sound can be super important uh but there's a small number of those sound sources and localizing them is difficult most interestingly most uh
John:
like movie based surround sound things have only support a small number of sources because movie soundtracks when they're mastered like you you know i say a small number of sources like you know they have like seven speakers or whatever around you or whatever it is eight or nine you know there's a lot of speakers around you but it's not the number of speakers that determines the number of sources the sources are like how many different individual point sources of sound can there be in the scene and i think the movie ones are like 32 or something it's it's a big number but it's not a huge number
John:
And Sony wants to have a situation where you can have like 5,000 point sources of sound.
John:
The example they gave was like if you're in the middle of a rainstorm and each raindrop was its own sound source with a drop hitting the ground.
John:
That's what it's like in real life.
John:
Each raindrop that hits the ground is its own sound source.
John:
Whereas in games today, they just record the sound of the rain and put it in a channel or make it come from like all around you or whatever.
John:
But that rain sound is like flattened out.
John:
so anyway somebody's super into uh the 3d audio they want to have this new audio engine they have dedicated hardware for it it's very powerful they've spent time bragging about it marco you would like this part of the presentation you should watch it they talked about uh you know ring buffers and all sorts of i'm a stereo guy
John:
Well, that's why I think you'll like this part of the presentation.
John:
First, they talk about hardware that's tailored for processing sound, which you must be familiar with, like in terms of, you know, how is sound processing different than general computing?
John:
So they made a compute unit that technically has as much power as like the entire PlayStation 4 CPU, but it's just for sound.
John:
And because it's just for sound, you could remove all the caching and everything because you just want the data to flow through it, right?
John:
So it's very small and purpose built.
John:
Anyway, yeah, so they have dedicated hardware for the sound and allows them to have these thousands of sound sources and stuff like that.
John:
And they're also focusing on output devices, as you would imagine.
John:
And their first output device that they're focusing on is not a surround sound system or a soundbar or whatever.
John:
It is headphones.
John:
Because this system is not about, hey, how can we play sound on a bunch of different speakers?
John:
In fact, that makes it more difficult for them.
John:
You have two ears, and they just want the sound to go into your two ears.
John:
They can...
John:
all these sound sources and figure out the culmination of these sound sources what sound hits your ears at what time and you know that and that's their that's their first use case to make you feel like you're really there just with headphones just with you know stereo sound going directly into your ears the tricky part about that is how you know how do your ears tell sound is like exactly to my left or a little bit behind me or up or down like all the sort of fine details of where the sound comes from
John:
Uh, if you just try to do that with like timing or like when the sound hits your left ear and your right ear, it's, you can get pretty far with that, but it's difficult.
John:
Uh, there is a thing in the world of sound design that, uh, Sony talked about a lot in their presentation, which is called HRTF, which stands for head related transfer function.
John:
And it's basically, what does your head do to the sound that affects how you hear it?
John:
And your head being like all of the stuff that's attached to your body surrounding your eardrum, which senses the sound.
John:
In other words, it's the shape of your head and your ear.
John:
And to figure out every individual person has their own head related transfer function, which is like when sound comes and it hits your head, how does it bounce off all the little wrinkly weird parts of your ear and stuff and get inside your head to your ear hole, to your eardrum and you hear it?
John:
And so what they're trying to do is come up with a set of head-related transfer functions, kind of like the AirPod exercise.
John:
You've got to come up with a thing that fits in everybody's ear, but it can't fit in everybody's ear.
John:
So they've got to come up with a set of head-related transfer functions that is representative of most of the population.
John:
And they're thinking of maybe you could have a game where you try each one, and you try to pinpoint where the sound sounds like it's coming from, and the one that is closest to the real virtual sound source is the one that you pick.
John:
They even talked about maybe you could take a picture of your ear or a video of your ear and send it out over the network, and it would make a custom head-related transfer function for your ear.
John:
The way they make the real ones, by the way, they showed this in the video, is they put little sensors way deep in your ears, and then they make you sit in a fixed position in this giant sound chamber.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And they play point source sounds from all over the place and then they record from inside your ear what it sounds like to the inside of your ear.
John:
Right.
John:
And, you know, every different person has their own head related transfer function that's custom to them.
John:
So if they can do a custom one for individual people, like they're not going to put you in a sound chamber.
John:
But if they know the shape of your ear, they can sort of use machine learning to simulate.
John:
The head related transfer function.
John:
Who knows if they'll ever do that?
John:
I think what they'll just do is ship with, say, 20 different head related transfer functions representative of a range of human ears and then have some kind of game life experience where you pick the one that is closest to your ear.
John:
But it's fascinating.
John:
They spent so much time in the presentation on this.
John:
It could all come to nothing, but it sounds super cool.
John:
I'm all ready to be in a rainstorm where every raindrop is its own sound source, and I'm all ready to be able to hear footsteps of approaching people in a first-person shooter with much more accuracy than I can hear it right now.
John:
So I once again recommend all you people look into this.
John:
These videos, we'll link them again.
John:
If you're not interested in consoles, they may sound boring, but check it out.
John:
Cool tech stuff.
Marco:
Yeah, so first of all, I think there's two angles of this.
Marco:
I actually, both of these things, I think are actually kind of fascinating.
Marco:
So the heat management of the processor thing,
Marco:
I think actually, based on your explanation, I think I do understand what they're doing.
Marco:
And it's actually kind of ingenious.
Marco:
So, if you just fix the clock speed like what Microsoft is doing, you lose out on potential performance and potential power savings.
Marco:
Because, you know, you could...
Marco:
Most chips have a little bit of headroom.
Marco:
They can run faster for a short time, so they can do certain things faster for short times.
Marco:
And so if Microsoft is not allowing that because they can't sustain that in a predictable way, because the whole goal here is with a gaming console, you want extremely predictable performance for the developers.
Marco:
That way you can make games that work the exact same way on every console
Marco:
you know, Xbox 17 and every PS five or whatever, and it's fine.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And, and it's, that's one of the great advantages of working on gaming consoles is that you have predictable hardware, which you don't have in the PC world necessarily.
Marco:
So the way Microsoft is making theirs predictable sounds like they're just fixing the clock speed.
Marco:
So it always runs at this speed period.
Marco:
And, you know, the, the dev kit machines that you're going to write the games on are going to be running in the exact same speed as all the consumer machines out there.
Marco:
Well, Sony sounds like they're doing the exact same thing, just in a different way, but they're achieving the same result.
Marco:
What you want is predictability, not necessarily constant clock speed.
Marco:
So if they know that they can boost the CPU up to this rate to do this operation up to this many times per millisecond or whatever...
Marco:
they can build that into the CPU's power management unit or however this is working at the low level.
Marco:
They can have it run these heuristics and clock itself up and down instead of being based on temperature, based on what it's doing.
Marco:
So it achieves many of the benefits of dynamic clock speed.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
in a predictable, deterministic way so that every single PS5 will run this in the exact same way with the same performance characteristics.
John:
Yeah, that's exactly what they said in the presentation.
John:
Yeah, that sounds awesome.
John:
Right, so it does, but as I said...
John:
You can pretend that that's true.
John:
It's like, well, this will always be exactly the same because it's a deterministic state machine.
John:
I guess that probably changed the profile.
John:
But anyway, it's deterministic.
John:
But the thing that's your enemy is heat, and heat doesn't care about the repeatability of your game thing.
John:
If your PlayStation 5 is in a really hot spot and the power thing says, I'm going to do the same thing I did, the same thing I always do based on my estimation of the cost of these operations, I believe we can run at this speed.
John:
And it may be wrong.
John:
And you make it too hot.
John:
And getting your GPU too hot or your CPU too hot can make bad things happen.
John:
That's why people go off temperature, because ultimately that's what you're trying to control.
John:
So I totally get the pitch, right?
John:
But it scares me to think that no matter what temperature... I mean, I'm sure there's some temperature caught off on the top of it.
John:
But no matter what environment this chip is in...
John:
it is going to do exactly the same thing it did during development because, you know, whatever the fixed profile is for the cost of each operation.
John:
And that may not be the appropriate thing to do.
John:
Now, you could say it's the same situation for fixed clock speed because if it's fixed clock speed and you put that in a really hot situation, how do you know it's safe to go at that clock speed?
John:
Well, we think our cooling solution can handle yada, yada, yada.
John:
But you might be wrong.
John:
So I suppose it's in the end, it's the same tradeoff.
John:
It just seems to me that...
John:
What Sony wants is, like you said, to be able to use more of the flight envelope to use aviation terminology.
John:
There's a certain range of operations that are safe at any given time.
John:
Can I go a little faster now?
John:
Do I have to go a little slower?
John:
They want to fill that envelope from top to bottom.
John:
And Microsoft is the more conservative approach of saying we're going to draw a straight line.
John:
That's the envelope.
John:
We hope our cooling will always keep you under that line.
John:
But you're just going to be at that speed all the time.
John:
But, you know, it's...
Marco:
yeah it's in the end they're both trying to do the same thing but totally different approaches and honestly they're both a little bit scary to me now that i think about it well but you know like i'm sure like neither one of them would reach the point where it would kill itself right like i'm sure i'm sure like every chip talk to xbox owners well well yeah
Marco:
yeah the red ring of death was exactly a heat management issue that's true but like but you know in general like you know any modern ship from the last like 15 20 years has a thermal shutdown protection built in so that like if it's running above some maximum temperature usually it's like you know 100 degrees celsius something like that whatever it is like it has a thermal shutdown limit where it will just shut itself down it will you know the machine will crash and it'll just that's it it's just it will it will refuse to fry itself basically um
Marco:
But that's different usually from the temperatures that it's going to throttle itself back clock speed-wise at.
Marco:
But anyway, I think this works the same way, just using different metrics.
Marco:
Either way, when they're designing an enclosure and a system and everything, they probably have a certain heat budget of how many watts are we going to dissipate from the cooling solution?
Marco:
So how many watts can the CPU put out and remain...
Marco:
within the design here.
Marco:
And either way, it's like if we run this at a constant clock speed, we know it's going to be X watts maximum no matter what you do to it.
Marco:
And I think what Sony is talking about sounds like a very similar kind of system.
Marco:
Just they know...
Marco:
the power cost of everything.
Marco:
So they, they can know like roughly what wattage of heat they are generating.
Marco:
So it, it doesn't, I think it's kind of the same, like you get the same output or rather you have the same, you have the same design constraint of like, you need a cooling solution that, that will be able to dissipate X Watts of heat in most conditions to keep the temperature under Y, right?
Marco:
Like that's, that's the design no matter in either case.
Marco:
And if the Sony chips power management stuff is intelligent enough to not rely on measuring the temperature and to just be like, look, I know, I know that if I do this sequence of operations, I will generate this many Watts of heat output.
Marco:
And like, that's kind of cool.
Marco:
It's a very clever way to do it.
Marco:
And in a situation like this where like predictability of performance is more important than, than, uh, either eking out every last, like, you know, 5% of performance at the top end or, uh,
John:
having a certain like ideal temperature that you always stay at that actually makes a lot of sense it's kind of clever one one other factor to throw in here this is not the part of the presentation that sony wanted to emphasize but sony has way fewer gpu cores than the xbox they're both using like amd parts they're both using very similar you know if not exactly the same cpu and gpu cores with minor tweaks but sony has i forget what the numbers are but it's like
John:
They have 30-something, and the Xbox has like 50-something.
John:
So it's interesting that the machine with just more to cool and nearly double the number of GPU cores is the one using the fixed clock speed.
John:
We haven't seen what the PlayStation 5 looks like.
John:
The Xbox cooling solution is no joke.
John:
It is a really big heatsink with a humongous fan in it.
John:
So the PlayStation 5 seems like, with this variable thing, that they could get away with a console that...
John:
has a less gargantuan cooling solution.
John:
But we'll see.
John:
I don't think anyone knows what that machine looks like yet.
Marco:
So moving on to the audio thing.
Marco:
I haven't watched this presentation yet, but there's a lot of overlap here with binaural audio.
Marco:
This is something that's existed for a very long time, decades.
Marco:
I think people discovered binaural audio in the 70s or 60s.
Marco:
It's been around for a long time.
Marco:
But the idea is, as you mentioned, we have two ears, but we hear in 3D.
Marco:
how can this be when stereo sound is allegedly only two-dimensional?
Marco:
And the answer is very complicated.
Marco:
And the idea is, like, our ears...
Marco:
are shaped in a certain way the sound travels through them in a certain way our head has this volume in space that affects sound that we hear in certain ways it's it's all very complicated uh and but but if you if you place two microphones in a space like suppose you want to record a concert hall you put two microphones next to each other about a head's width apart and
Marco:
And you play that back on headphones or even on regular speakers, it'll sound roughly like there's an orchestra playing in front of you.
Marco:
It's not going to be incredibly precise, but it'll sound great.
Marco:
It'll sound, you know, approximately realistic.
Marco:
But it's not going to be super precise 3D sound.
Marco:
But if you have microphones that basically are in simulated or real ears...
Marco:
on the sides of a simulated or real head and that have like the shape of the ear around it.
Marco:
Like, cause you know, like obviously part of your ear is outside of your head that, that the whole shape of your ear affects the shape of the sound waves coming in and it alters the sound.
Marco:
So if you can have a very like human ear and human head, like recording device that,
Marco:
You can record binaural audio, which is a style of recording that like the two microphones are in these ears.
Marco:
And the idea is then if you play it back with headphones that are in basically the same spot in your ears, relaying basically the same sound that hit them, which was partially altered by the head and ears around the recording microphones.
Marco:
then it will sound much more precisely 3D.
Marco:
And this is a wonderful thing.
Marco:
If you just go to YouTube or wherever, search for binaural audio, and you'll find tons of recordings of binaural things.
Marco:
If you've never experienced this effect, it's...
Marco:
it's quite something like it's kind of mind blowing how incredibly 3d and realistic audio can be when it's recorded in this way.
Marco:
Now, the way this is usually recorded is either that you can actually buy a fake head with fake ears that have microphones in it.
Marco:
They're extremely expensive.
Marco:
I think they're there.
Marco:
They start at like $800.
Marco:
Like they're very expensive.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
And this is actually the market for these is actually increasing now with VR.
Marco:
There's like 3D microphones for VR stuff.
Marco:
But anyway, you can buy like a whole fake head or you can do what I did to play around with this for like less than 100 bucks.
Marco:
You can you can get what look basically like earbuds.
Marco:
But, and they are earbuds, but on the outside of each one is a microphone facing out.
Marco:
And on the inside is headphones, earbuds facing in.
Marco:
And these are inexpensive because they're basically just earbuds plus microphones.
Marco:
They're inexpensive.
Marco:
And they use your own head to make your own head transfer function because you're just having earbuds in your ears.
Marco:
And so you can, for not that much money, experiment with this where you can basically record, you know,
Marco:
yourself in a room or walking through the world or whatever, record exactly the way your ears inside your head are receiving the sound with those microphones that are on the outside of the earbuds.
Marco:
And then you play it back, wearing those same earbuds or pretty much any other headphones, but especially when you wear those same earbuds, and it sounds...
John:
remarkable like it you can't believe how much it feels like you are actually there again it's it's spooky how accurate it is it's really cool so sony's things were way inside your ears because the earbuds necessarily have to be like out of your ears so they're catching the sound in your ear right yeah so the sony ones and if you look at the video are like these little little wires going into the poor person's ear canal right so that's what they're using to build their standard set of 20 head related transfer functions um
John:
yeah you won't have one custom for yourself unless you go into that sony chamber but like i think it's games are an interesting scenario and you mentioned vr it's similar where like the positioning is the most important part like people aren't really cared about the you know the fidelity of the footstep sounds you hear you want to know exactly where the footsteps are coming from or even just like environmental you know stuff where like rain is falling on cobblestones car tire going across pavement versus going across wood someone crunching on gravel uh like
John:
are the walls made of wood are they made of metal how high is the ceiling in this room those type of things this is all about like the audio you know both how the sound gets into your ears where it's coming from but also how does the sound bounce around that's why they have this dedicated audio engine to have 5 000 sound sources so if you get if you're in an environment and something happens not only does it happen in a particular place but the room affects how it sounds games have had this forever like even go back to like mario 64 or probably earlier like
John:
Or think of any driving game where when you go through a tunnel and they change the audio, like they just put some filter on the audio so it sounds different when you're in a tunnel.
Marco:
Yeah, some reverb filter.
John:
Yeah, we're at the stage now where instead of just having a filter when you go through a tunnel, like every sound source will be affected by the surrounding geometry in the game at all times, right?
John:
And so the tunnel, you don't have to write any special code for the tunnel.
John:
You just make a tunnel and you drive through it and you get the sound.
John:
And so like...
John:
this part of the presentation it's hard to do a presentation about sound because people just want to see graphics or want to hear you talk about graphics but i honestly think that if this stuff works and developers actually use it it could be and this is certainly what sony hopes as big a differentiator for the sony platform as graphics have been in the past and sony better hope that's the case because their graphic power is significantly less than the xbox
John:
I mean, Marco's going to buy a PS5 just so he can hear this audio.
John:
And so he can play the head-related transfer function game.
John:
Pick one that matches his weird ears.
Marco:
I had such an amazing sound experience with, what's the Mario game for the Switch?
Marco:
Odyssey.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I kept thinking Galaxy.
Marco:
I knew that was wrong.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Mario Odyssey has amazing sound.
Marco:
And that's without doing any of this fancy stuff.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
That's just doing the old way of just programming it so that, oh, when you go into the 8-bit mode, it plays the 8-bit sound.
Marco:
When you go underwater, it muffles the other sound.
Marco:
It's just doing the old way, but man, that is such a great game for sound.
John:
Yeah.
John:
having having this technology is good because nintendo can afford to do that like the old the manual way essentially because they have a lot of money and this game is going to sell a million copies but if you got like basically for free by just placing sound sources and defining the materials you've got that you know without having to hire armies of people to manually set up all your sound that's hopefully will make every game have better sound not just the ones that can afford to manually mess with sound in every possible environment
Marco:
and record 500 different footsteps depending on whether you're walking on these different materials you know right like it's almost like back in the days like when 3d was just getting started like if you wanted to make a 3d game you generally had to write your own 3d renderer right and then eventually as cytology got better and the apis got better and the hardware got better you could then eventually just say all right just put a triangle at this geometry and put the camera at this geometry and you figure out how to make that happen
John:
right and then of course eventually now nobody writes their own engine anymore but you know the point stands like there hasn't been things like that for audio that were very advanced and so this sounds like a way to do that which sounds very exciting and the differentiator i think what sony hopes is like xbox can't do this because if you try to do this sound processing on a general purpose cpu you will use all your cpu power like i said their their brag was their audio engine on the ps5 and
John:
You'd have to absorb every compute resource on the PS4 to match it because it is a purpose-built sound processing engine.
John:
That's all it does.
John:
And I don't think the hardware exists at all on Xbox.
John:
So Xbox can't really compete with this because they can't spare the cycles to dedicate to audio if they don't have dedicated hardware for it.