Wobbly Goblin
Casey:
I have a tweet I would like to propose to you, which Aaron told me not to tweet, but I need somewhere to get out of my system.
Casey:
And this pre-show is all going to get tossed anyway.
Casey:
So I'm going to use you as my guinea pig.
Marco:
Are you suggesting that I tweet something or are you drafting a tweet that you're going to write and running it past your review committee here?
Casey:
That's correct.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I accidentally deleted it because Tweetbot crashed, but it was something along the lines of, I have found potty training Michaela to be less challenging than working with the HOA board in my neighborhood.
Casey:
I am on the HOA board in my neighborhood.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know if that holds together.
Marco:
As a piece of writing, it's fine.
John:
I don't see the connection between the potty training and the HOA board.
John:
I understand you're trying to compare two difficult things, but there's no connection there.
Casey:
Well, because that's the thing, is that Michaela getting potty trained has actually been pretty easy so far, so far, so far.
John:
Yeah, but the person reading the tweet doesn't know that.
John:
You've got to either connect those things or leave them aside.
John:
I think the idea of the HOA board being annoying and you being on it is solid.
John:
We could work with that, workshop that a little bit.
John:
But I think the potty training saved that for a separate tweet.
Marco:
All right, noted.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
Regardless of how you're going to phrase it,
Marco:
you are basically inviting lots of useless and annoying and high-friction comments from two different groups.
Marco:
Three, actually.
John:
From all parents.
John:
Toddlers as well, who are angry about your friends around you.
Marco:
toddlers are upset about being you know used in this way having to sit on the potty because they know it eats their bottom right so you already know the toddlers you've definitely you're gonna you're gonna hear from all the parents why this is you know wrong or stupid or whatever then you're gonna hear from all the people who are not in hoa situations who will ask you why you're in one and then you're gonna hear from all the people who are in hoas who both love them or hate them or both
Marco:
So you're basically inviting a whole bunch of useless, annoying comments that are all going to be completely unhelpful in whatever your problem is.
Marco:
I want to know why you're in an HOA.
Marco:
Is that a thing?
Marco:
So do I. Even we can't resist nitpicking the premise.
Marco:
That's the worst part when you're asking for help.
Marco:
Or when you're posing a question or something like that, like on Stack Overflow, this is the worst, right?
Marco:
Where it's like you say something like, how do I get this function to work?
Marco:
And the first three responses are, why are you using that function?
Marco:
Don't do it that way.
John:
But Stack Overflow at least has rules to try to stop that.
John:
That's not acceptable behavior.
John:
It is behavior, but the whole system is made to avoid that happening.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So, but in this case, you know, you're, you're, you're posing a funny tweet that is basically a rant about how, well, okay.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
Tough crowd.
John:
We already established the, the, uh, the humor disconnect.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So you're basically posing a rant because there's no way for people to actually help you with this.
Marco:
So you're posing a rant, and what you're expecting is to get it out of your system.
Marco:
This is what a rant is for.
Marco:
Get it out of your system and maybe have other people be like, yeah.
Marco:
But you're not going to get that.
Marco:
Instead, you're going to get other people who are going to just make you mad or in minor, annoying, paper-cut ways.
John:
This is exactly what Aaron said.
John:
See, now instead, if you were to describe what's going on in the HOA thing that's annoying you, that can be the source of humor because I bet it is annoying and I bet there's a lot of absurd things about it.
John:
Again, we're going to leave the potty training aside because that's not necessary for us to discuss the absurdities of your HOA.
Casey:
Ultimately, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
Basically, I'm trying to give the ultra-bridged version rather than the three-hour version of the story.
Marco:
First, can you explain what an HOA is for people who don't know?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Oh, God, that means this is probably going in the show.
Casey:
God help me.
Marco:
Oh, it's totally going in the show.
Marco:
This is the pre-show.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
So an HOA is the Home Owners Association.
John:
Is there any hyphens in that phrase, Casey?
Casey:
I'm going to go with homeowner being hyphenated, although I don't think it is in any of the documentation.
Casey:
Is homeowner one word or two words?
Casey:
Two.
Marco:
See, that's the question.
Marco:
I think homeowner is one word.
Marco:
If you were to write it as two, it would get a hyphen.
Casey:
Hmm.
Casey:
Interesting.
Casey:
Well, one way or another.
Casey:
So I don't know a whole lot about really anything, but particularly when it comes to HOAs.
Casey:
But I do know that my neighborhood, which is, I don't know, 50 houses, something like that, has a homeowners association and has since the neighborhood was built in the late 90s.
Casey:
We were told a few months ago that the existing board wanted to rage quit the HOA.
Casey:
And if we didn't find a series of individuals to step up and do it instead, some like boogeyman, dead man switch gets flipped.
Casey:
And then we have to give like the same management duties.
Casey:
And I'll explain what those are in a second, which is basically nothing.
Casey:
But the management duties of the HOA to like some third party management company and, oh, our HOA fees will go from effectively zero all year round to millions of dollars a month.
Casey:
That's the only way this could go.
Marco:
Is it kind of like Australia's thing, but worse?
Marco:
They have that like, you know, if you don't pass a budget, everybody gets fired thing.
Marco:
Isn't that how Australia works?
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
It's like that, but everything's worse.
John:
And unlike a budget, there's no actual reason for a homeowners association to exist.
John:
There's that too.
Marco:
But you didn't actually explain what it is.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
All you said is there is one and its rules are dumb.
Casey:
I apologize.
Casey:
So a homeowners association ostensibly is to make sure that the people within the neighborhood are self – not governing, but for lack of a better word, governing.
Casey:
Maybe managing is a better word.
Casey:
So that if one neighbor has way too much time on their hands and notices that another neighbor hasn't mowed their lawn very recently, they can go to the HOA and levy a complaint.
Casey:
And the HOA can say to that, you know, offending homeowner, hey, we would really like it to we would really like you to mow your lawn.
Casey:
And if you don't, we're going to
Casey:
you know, put a fee or whatever, like a penalty against your house.
Casey:
And then if you go to sell and you have one of these, what is it, a lien, L-I-E-N, something like that?
Casey:
No, that's not right.
Marco:
They can put a lien on your house?
Casey:
I think that's right.
Marco:
It's like if you don't pay your taxes, they put a lien.
Marco:
It's basically like an unpaid loan obligation or something, like an unpaid debt obligation.
Casey:
Yes, that.
Casey:
So again, I'm not a lawyer.
Casey:
I probably have the terminology wrong, but you and I are saying the same thing.
Casey:
It may be that I'm saying the wrong thing, but we're saying the same thing.
John:
Can you pop up on level, by the way?
John:
You gave a good example of a specific case, but can you pop up one or two levels?
John:
And this I really feel like gets to the heart of what the HOA is there for.
Marco:
John, can you explain the HOA?
John:
So, you know, what you described is like it's a governing body that the people who are governed participate in in some form.
John:
And what does it do?
John:
What is its purpose?
John:
Its purpose, like you gave the example of someone has an unkempt lawn and then it can levy fees if you don't follow the rules.
John:
What are the rules?
John:
Why do they exist?
John:
Essentially,
John:
These associations exist to enforce conformity to a particular standard set by the, you know, the worst people who live in the area.
John:
Yes, that's correct.
John:
But it is absolutely a sort of like a way of enforcing conformity to the
John:
to sort of the i don't know how best to say it the the ruling class has decided this is the way things should be and they want the power to enforce that over everybody who lives in the area around them so that they can maintain not only the way they live but also the way that everybody else lives and that is exactly right and ostensibly so
Casey:
So ostensibly, the reason this exists is because let's say I never mow my lawn.
Casey:
Let's just say, for example, I never mow my lawn.
Casey:
It is overgrown.
Casey:
It's half as tall as my house.
Casey:
You could make an argument one way or another, but one could make an argument that if my neighbor goes to sell their house and a prospective buyer to my neighbor's house sees that their future neighbor, me, has never taken care of their lawn, they're not going to want that house.
Casey:
Or if they are going to get that house, they're going to want to pay a lot less for it.
Casey:
So in summary...
Casey:
The ostensible purpose of an HOA, a homeowners association, is to maintain everyone's property values.
Casey:
If somebody is in charge of micromanaging, I mean nitpicking, I mean paying attention to all of the yards in the neighborhood, I mean the state of the properties in the neighborhood, then that makes sure that everyone's home values are as great as they can possibly be because we all look the same, we all act the same, we are all step for husbands and wives and so on.
John:
And more importantly, that there is a specific set of rules that determine high value in real estate, as in we have decided that having a lawn with grass on it equals high home value, whereas if you have a lawn with rocks on it and you don't live in Arizona, that does not equal high home value.
John:
There is no connection between the idea of what constitutes high home value and what does not.
John:
There is just a decision about what constitutes high home value and what does not.
John:
And that's the true nature of this.
John:
The true insidious nature of it is that, you know, we're trying to make sure we maintain property values.
John:
OK, well, what determines something that makes property values go up or down?
John:
Whatever I say.
John:
That's, you know, whatever we have decided as the social cultural norm that we will enforce.
John:
it, you know, ipso facto, it is, it leads to high property values and nothing else can possibly ever lead to high property values or higher property values.
John:
That's insane.
John:
It's just, you know, conform to our set of rules.
John:
So you can imagine what the rules look like.
John:
You can imagine what the rules demand.
John:
And it, you know, that's why they're generally frowned upon.
John:
Um, because no, no one likes the idea of their property values going down because their neighbor does something that makes the, the neighborhood a less pleasant place to live.
John:
But, um,
John:
The far opposite end of that spectrum is I have decided exactly what will make the neighborhood a nice place for me to live because I know what I want and everyone else will do that.
Casey:
One of the good things about Nature Way – well, make it air quotes good – things about Nature Way is you in most –
Casey:
cases and in the case of my neighborhood need to go to the hoa to get a to get approval on improvements you do to your house now that sounds bananas at first but the thought here is if you say to the hoa i would like my house to be fire engine red and be the only fire engine red house in the entire neighborhood they're gonna say no it's it's gonna look out of place it's gonna make everyone else feel weird it's gonna make that well you see here again we're getting to what you're driving at john like who's the arbiter of what weird of what is weird
John:
that sounds awesome yeah i mean you were talking about things like oh not mowing your lawn or i'm going to build a giant upside down crucifix on the roof of my house but no it's like what color is your mailbox and everybody knows that if you have a red mailbox property values will go down right uh right exactly like it's just and so again paint colors paint colors and not like oh i'm going to paint obscenities all over my house and have flashing lights but just like
Marco:
do you really want your house to be blue can this neighborhood really handle a blue house at this time it seems like like so many other things like you know like like governments or you know unions where it's like some amount of power is good and helps everybody but some i imagine many hoas go overboard and you know either have bad standards or have too overbearing of standards and that's where the problems lie
Casey:
Can you let me finish my story?
Casey:
You've just told me that you've told the punchline already.
Marco:
Oh, good.
Casey:
It's so true.
Casey:
I joke.
Casey:
I joke.
Casey:
I'm not actually upset because you hit the nail on the head.
Casey:
And the newest president of the HOA, he is ready and willing and able to throw violation letters at everyone who doesn't have utterly perfect manicured blades of grass.
Casey:
And if their driveway happens to be gravel and not like concrete or cement or something, you better not have a single weed in that driveway because, gosh darn it, that's going to make my home value go down if you have weeds in your gravel driveway halfway across the neighborhood.
Casey:
I've been dealing with that and trying – I don't know.
Casey:
Is it libertarians that are like, man, just let people live and do their thing?
Casey:
Is that the libertarian point of view?
Marco:
Ostensibly.
Casey:
Ostensibly.
Marco:
like most kind of political extremist concepts like it you know the details it really boils down to let me do what i want yes uh whenever i want and let me make you do what i want as well yes like like all like all uh dim political philosophies is it always what it boils down to there's always some reason it's just like hoas it's like look i'm gonna do whatever i want and i'm and i know what's best for everyone and my system will be flawless and will always work and will work for everybody
John:
And there's so many pathologies in it, like a weed in someone's gravel driveway 10 blocks away.
John:
Like that doesn't actually affect the value of your home, right?
John:
Even if you are across the street from it and this one little weed doesn't affect it.
John:
But in that person's mind, in the mind of a person who is very upset by weeds...
John:
They don't like seeing a weed in their neighbor's driveway, right?
John:
And you would think that the reaction would be, why don't you offer to go and weed their driveway every afternoon if it bothers you so much?
John:
But it would be much better if you could fine them for not removing that weed from their driveway, wouldn't it?
John:
Isn't this a better system?
John:
It's not actually a better system.
Casey:
So anyway, so there's a it's a five member board and I joined the board only because I didn't want this like mythical dead man switch to flip where apparently are I think it's literally 150 bucks a year, which as HOAs go is effectively free.
Casey:
And that's because, you know, we don't have like a pool in the neighborhood like HOAs can also.
Casey:
in some cases, manage a neighborhood pool that only your neighborhood is allowed to go to that pool, which in that case, that can be really nice.
Casey:
Or maybe some other athletic facility or something like that.
Casey:
But for us, we have a little teeny park in the neighborhood, and that's about the only common...
Casey:
property and again in a perfect world like an hoa is ostensibly going to do like social events when we're allowed to have social events and and that and they manage like the landscaping of the common areas and things of that nature but in reality a month into being on the hoa i'm basically trying me and one other person the two of us are trying to pump the brakes on like micromanaging everyone else's yards and driveways i think we have a good project here now a project that we can assign to you casey
John:
it sounds like you and your other uh friend uh right thinking friend the project should be to pull from the historical playbook of government in these united states and systematically change the rules that govern the hoa such that idiocy is no longer allowed i mean it's the opposite of what we do normally we change rules yeah i was gonna say this would be wonderful right but like uh you know it it
John:
You know, don't worry about fighting over individual sort of cases of is this allowed, is this not allowed.
John:
All you care about are like the bylaws.
John:
Like how does this body function?
John:
Can a single person objecting stop anything from happening?
John:
If not, maybe that would be a good thing to add because then you have complete control over this body as long as you stay out and just object to everything.
John:
Can the laws be changed?
John:
If the change is not unanimous, you got to put that in too.
John:
Just like construct a gamified system such that –
John:
you as an individual can stop anything from happening and then also get rid of like the dead man switch sort of you know you just slowly change that stuff without anybody noticing yeah okay maybe employ a lawyer to make some large thing that's too long for anybody to read that eventually gives you complete power and yes the law of the large pull request i'm right there with you
John:
And then maybe put in some kind of consequence of inaction that causes the HOA to dissolve, right?
John:
And for there no longer to be an HOA.
John:
And then see how hard people have to work to try to form a new one or something.
John:
That's the thing I don't understand.
John:
Once you have an HOA, can you ever go to a state where you don't?
John:
And if you don't have one, is there ever a threat of one appearing?
John:
I don't think there's any threat of one appearing where I live, and I don't think – because you have to get everyone to agree to be bound by it, right?
John:
I don't understand.
Marco:
Yeah, and why would anybody who didn't buy a house that had one of these, why would they volunteer to add restrictions to their own property?
Marco:
I would imagine this happens a lot in planned housing developments where you can kind of sell them all at once under the same terms.
Casey:
And that's what happened here, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, and that's so common in the U.S.
Marco:
I imagine that's probably where most of them come from.
Marco:
HOAs are probably similar or identical in function to things like condo boards, where if you have an apartment building, you have to work together with the other owners of the other apartments on certain things.
Marco:
It makes sense when you're building everything at once, but if you don't already have an HOA on your property, I don't see why a logical, well-thinking person would agree to have this imposed on them.
John:
Which is another way of saying that it's not actually about property values because everybody cares about their property values, but no one is racing to form an HOA with all their neighbors if they're in a situation where they don't have one.
John:
Basic social norms and shame mostly fulfill the same function.
Marco:
Well, and also, like, town ordinances are supposed to cover a lot of this stuff.
John:
Yeah, well, town ordinances cover safe things.
John:
You can't have a gigantic tank full of oil on your lawn.
Marco:
Well, but, you know, town ordinances and building codes and everything, they also do cover some of these aesthetic things.
Marco:
Not usually as much as an HOA can and often does cover, but, you know, things like, you know, you have to keep your lawn to some degree of, you know, keptness.
Marco:
And you can't cover your house in mirrors.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, like there are like building codes and local zoning boards and architecture boards like they do cover a lot of this stuff without an HOA and with a much more accountable system of government.
John:
But those are laws that have to pass like in a much more representative system of people who are sane and don't aren't just like the safety related ones and the sort of general upkeep are lenient enough that no one's going to yell at you for a weed in your gravel driveway.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And mostly it mostly boiled down to safety or, you know, very large issues of property values of like, look, if your lawn becomes a hazard because wild animals are living in it and it's in an unkempt jungle, like that would run afoul of whatever town ordinance says that you have to.
Casey:
maintain your property to some minimum standard otherwise you forfeit yada yada yada like that's the level those things work with those we already have a thing called government that does those things hoa is your mailbox can't be that color yeah no you're exactly right and as an example this is an honest to goodness example of the hoa uh what are the standards or whatever they are in our bylaws we are not allowed to have our trash cans visible from the road
Casey:
Now, granted, 90 percent of the neighborhood has their trash cans like on the side of their house, perfectly visible from the road.
Casey:
But like this sort of micromanagement, I just find completely distasteful.
Casey:
Another great example on all our mailboxes, we are apparently we must have screw in numbers on our mailboxes to indicate our home numbers.
Casey:
So our home number can't have a sticker.
Casey:
That's where we can't have stickers.
Casey:
One, two, three, four.
John:
Because it was.
John:
Think of what it would do to the property values if that was a sticker case.
Casey:
John, the property values would plummet if I had stickers.
John:
Someone would be going to buy your neighbor's house and they'd be, oh my, we're going to knock 50 grand off this.
John:
That guy has a sticker on his mailbox.
Casey:
Easily 50, probably 75.
Casey:
Now, fun fact, I also have stickers on my mailbox.
Marco:
because i don't care see this but anyway i'm leaning more towards john's alternate plan for you here of just like slowly dissolve the hoa's power from within like you know now that you have power you just like slowly reduce what they can do like reduce the scope of the types of things they can regulate and make it make it much more difficult to to actually do anything like require unanimous uh consent for every single thing oh that's that's a good one it'll never pass but that's a good one you
John:
You start by making bylaws that say the number of people who need to be present for things to be passed is very small and all you need is a majority of the people present.
John:
It's a long system.
John:
You build your way up to it.
John:
Wow.
John:
You've really thought this through.
John:
I've had good examples of how to destroy a governing body's ability to do anything by looking at our own government.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
And Tom Hurtnett is writing in the chat.
Casey:
And I think it's tongue in cheek, but it's a fair question.
Casey:
I probably am painting my neighborhood to be this like super swanky, super amazing.
Casey:
It's not.
Casey:
It's a regular schmoes neighborhood.
John:
That's the best part about the choice.
John:
It's always it's not in the neighborhood where everyone is a bazillionaire because those people don't have problem keeping appearances.
John:
They hire giant staffs of people to maintain their houses.
John:
There's no right.
John:
It's always the ones that are like we would like to think of ourselves as the good people.
John:
So, A, don't let any minorities buy houses here, and B, make sure we have an HOA that enforces a standard of beauty that very often is difficult to maintain and expensive to maintain, thus also keeping out those people who we think don't have enough money to live here, right?
John:
I mean, before when you said your neighborhood had been created in the late 90s, I laughed at that because in the Northeast where it's, you know, as you know, coming from here, like all the land is already taken, right?
John:
So there's not a lot of housing developments that have been created from scratch in the 90s.
John:
And these type of ideas are definitely, you know –
John:
uh attractive to anyone who is buying up a bunch of previously uh barren land and turning into a planned housing development right because they do want to have a sales pitch and have something that looks like uh what is it hill valley from back to the future where they're planning to have a big happy family uh smiling yeah i know what you're thinking of yep yep
Casey:
Let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Tell me about Mac Pro wheel stability.
Casey:
I genuinely would much rather talk about this than spend any more energy on my stupid HOA.
Casey:
So, John, tell me about the Mac Pro wheels.
John:
You're in luck.
John:
Look at all this Mac Pro follow-up.
Casey:
I'm so excited.
John:
This was a suggestion by several people based on our continuing discussion of the Mac Pro wheels and how expensive they are and how slidy they are and how they don't have little brakes on them.
John:
Lots of people suggested the idea of putting wheels on just two of the feet and then leaving the plain feet on the other two.
John:
So you'd have two wheels in front and those little stubs in back or vice versa.
John:
That's very clever.
John:
That way when you wanted to roll it, you could lift it so the little feeties are off the ground and roll, roll, roll.
John:
And then when you wanted to stop, you could put it down.
John:
The problem is I have no idea if the wheels are the same height as the feet.
John:
I imagine the wheels are way longer, way taller than the feet.
John:
And so that wouldn't quite work.
John:
So what I'm hoping is that
John:
Some YouTuber with more money than cents, not talking about anybody in particular here, but, you know, will actually do this and put on two wheels and two feet and see how it goes.
John:
I mean, I think the feet might need a little extenders.
John:
Again, I hear there are a lot of YouTubers with more money than cents that also have 3D printers.
John:
So maybe they could mock something up.
John:
So then you can get the best of both worlds, a Mac Pro that rolls when you want it to and stays put when you don't.
Casey:
And HeadEffects on Twitter has some thoughts about your video card, which also apparently has some drama associated with it.
Casey:
So take this in whatever order you would like.
John:
Yeah, my video card has not yet arrived.
John:
It's supposed to come tomorrow.
John:
Unfortunately, we didn't quite wait long enough for that to arrive.
John:
But anyway, it's the Radeon Pro W570X, whatever the hell it's called.
John:
And I was saying...
John:
previous show that it's you know you could get an equivalent pc video card the radeon rx 5700 xt or whatever for way less money for like less than half the price uh and head effects was saying that actually uh thousand dollars for this w 5700x is actually a pretty good deal because the pc equivalent is actually an 800 card and you know just allow for the 200 mpx module overhead or whatever um
John:
It's not the same as the RX 5700 XT, right?
John:
Because that's just a gaming card, and this is the W model, which has more cores enabled, or I don't know, has a bunch of other features.
John:
But anyway, the bottom line is, for my purposes, if I'm going to use it to run games or whatever...
John:
uh it is actually about the same speed or potentially slower depending on the game than the roughly 300 card so in some ways head effects is right if you wanted to get exactly the same card on your pc it would cost you about 800 bucks but i would never want this card on my pc i would just get the gaming card that costs way less money so it's the eternal struggle buying a machine that i shouldn't be buying that has video cards for uses that i'm not going to use them for and i'm just trying to find one that uh
John:
has decent gaming performance and doesn't cost $2,500.
John:
And so I have, I found it.
John:
I didn't complain about the price.
John:
I ordered it the day it came out.
John:
I'm excited to install it.
John:
Um, but apparently, uh, it's not as bad a deal as I thought it was.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Now what happened with your order?
Casey:
You said it's supposed to arrive tomorrow.
Casey:
So I guess everything's good.
John:
Yeah, mostly.
John:
It's just I had some weird experiences with this.
John:
So when it came out, I was in, you know, I just, I don't know.
John:
Through whatever channel it came through, a Slack channel, Stephen Hackett messaged me.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Like, the second it came out, I knew that this video card was available for order.
John:
Oh, I remember it was like the whole day it was not available for order, but then it was available in the UK, and then it was available.
John:
Anyway, um...
John:
I was like on my bed or something when it came out.
John:
I'm like, Oh, I'm going to order this right away.
John:
Cause I didn't want to be like getting in a line and who knows what the coronavirus stuff, but there'd be shipping delays.
John:
I need to order this right away.
John:
So I'm like, order, order, order, use the Apple store app, try to order it.
John:
I don't even remember how I actually ordered it, but I did, you know, use my Apple card, get the 3% or whatever orders done.
John:
I get an email that says, here's your order.
John:
Here's the expected ship date, yada, yada.
John:
Um,
John:
And then, like, I think that same day I tried to go to my orders in the Apple Store app to see when the expected ship date does again because I'd forgotten.
John:
And the top item in my orders was my little bent piece of metal for the hard drives.
John:
I'm like, I did just order this card, right?
John:
So I go back to the email.
John:
Yeah, sure enough, this confirmation email says, here's this thing you totally ordered.
John:
Here's the estimated ship date or whatever.
John:
So I got my answer.
John:
I'm like, why didn't it show up in my orders?
Yeah.
John:
um and being a multi apple id person i'm always like never never keeping track of exactly which apple id i'm signed into because all of mine like the name is is my first and last name and the apple id and apple doesn't do a good job of showing you the actual apple id in various places it just says my first and last name and so i can't i never know in what browser in what tab and what whatever
John:
uh you know incognito window versus on which what apple id am i logged into here are you saying you might have too many browser windows open john no i have too many i have too many apple ids is the problem oh yeah that's the problem it is um the fact that i use two browsers helps because i tend to segregate this apple ids in this browser and this apple ids in that browser right but sometimes i cross the streams a little bit i know where they all are i can find anything
John:
Yeah, it's true.
John:
Um, but, uh, yeah, so I have, there's an app store connect angle here that I'll get to in a second, which is another exciting, uh, Apple ID thing.
John:
So I'm like, well, my, my Apple ID that I normally order all my stuff on is the one that I'm signed into on my phone.
John:
It's my, like my phone, Apple ID or whatever.
John:
And the apps, it's obviously I didn't order it through that Apple ID, but I'm like, I got the email at that Apple ID email.
John:
I got like the order email, that Apple ID email.
John:
So how did I manage to order something such that receipt comes to my Apple ID's email, but it is not associated with that Apple ID?
John:
So anyway, in the email, I click on the your order status link and it opens it.
John:
You know, I click on the link, it opens a thing and then I get a screen that says something went wrong.
John:
There was a problem with your request.
John:
Please try again.
John:
That's not good.
John:
And I see that pretty frequently.
John:
when looking at order status, but I don't understand why it appears.
John:
And I'm like, well, maybe I'm logging into the wrong Apple ID on this thing.
John:
I tried on my phone to click on the order status link.
John:
And at first it was taking me to the Apple Store app and then it was taking me to a browser and getting the same thing.
John:
And like it's I don't know how a regular person who doesn't who's not a web developer would deal with this because basically it was like impossible for me to see the status of my order.
John:
All I got was a something went wrong page.
John:
If I if I got an order page on my Apple ID would just wouldn't show that order.
John:
But I'm pretty sure I actually ordered it.
John:
uh my phone could apparently do nothing with my other apple id because my phone like the apple id and system and system whatever called settings is like my phone's apple id just try doing anything with a different apple id than the one your phone is actually signed into on an apple website because it constantly sends you back and expects you to be in the apple id that your phone is connected to it's like no i don't want to use that one i want to sign into the other apple id and look at that apple id's orders and the phone's like no that's never going to happen
John:
I suppose I could have signed out of my Apple ID on my phone, but I would never want to do that because it would just destroy all my data.
John:
Anyway, back on my Mac, I'm like, okay, well, we're going to nuke and pave.
John:
And so I went and deleted all of the cookies related to everything having to do with Apple in one of my browsers and signed into my other Apple ID and didn't see the order there either and did the same thing and signed into my first Apple ID and didn't see the order there either.
John:
But I'm like,
John:
But I've got an email that says I ordered this thing.
John:
So what the hell is the deal?
John:
Eventually, after deleting more cookies and local storage and all sorts of other crap in ever wider targets of just Apple.com and bigger things.
John:
Anyway, eventually I got to the point where I could click on the link to check my order status.
John:
And instead of a something went wrong page, I got a page that said something to the effect of, would you like to link this order to an Apple ID?
Yeah.
John:
I was like, what the hell?
John:
How did I order it and not be associated with an Apple ID?
John:
How did I even physically do that?
John:
I was like, fine.
John:
That's pretty much exactly what I'm going to do.
John:
Please do connect this order with an Apple ID.
John:
So I click on the link to connect this order to an Apple ID, and I get a page that says something went wrong.
John:
There must be a problem with your request.
John:
Please try again.
John:
So it was a couple of days of this where I would click on the I would try in every browser and every device with every set of things cleared to try to use their helpful link that's a blue button or whatever that said connect this order to an Apple ID.
John:
Eventually, I don't know why, you know, trial and error over many days and many browser cache clearings and stuff.
John:
I got it to associate this order with the Apple ID that I wanted to.
John:
And now when I go on my phone and I go to the Apple Store app and I go to orders, I see the order there.
John:
But boy, how long has Apple been selling things online?
John:
I don't even know what happened.
John:
And I don't understand how I could have screwed things up.
John:
And I don't understand why their website doesn't work all the time.
John:
And the little corollary to this is App Store Connect, everyone's favorite website.
John:
I never got to use iTunes Connect.
John:
I just started developing in the App Store Connect world.
John:
But anyway, spoiler alert, it's the exact same thing renamed.
John:
Yeah, well, I never saw the old one.
John:
The new one, as far as the website goes, it seems okay.
John:
Like it mostly works and does what it's supposed to.
John:
But for the past week or so, I've been trying to load App Store Connect in my App Store Connect browser, in my App Store Connect browser window in a particular place that I have, you know, hanging around.
John:
As you do.
John:
And it would load, and my apps would be there.
John:
I'd click on apps or whatever, and then it would show like a spinner, and the spinner would just spin forever.
Yeah.
John:
i'm like huh maybe apple site is weird sort of slow today then i try the same thing the next day and be like huh spinner in the same place eventually after several weeks and i was like look does app store connect not work anymore seems like something i would have heard about from my developer friends why can i get to app store connect but anytime i want to do one particular thing i just get a spinner forever what's the solution every web developer knows delete all cookies and local storage hey app store connect works again
John:
this is not healthy behavior for a website i don't know why like like it should not be possible to have a series of cookies or things in in my local storage that cause your website to spinner forever over the course of weeks so anyway there's uh casey was ranting about homeowners association i'm ranting about apple's various websites that just really seem like they should be better about doing basic functions
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
That's why I wanted to get them as a sponsor so I could tell you
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
I have a new toy, and I think Marco has a new toy, and John doesn't believe in toys, so he didn't get a new toy.
John:
Before you two talk about your new toys, I have an opening statement about your new toy because I don't have this new toy, and you guys are going to tell me about what it's like.
John:
But I wanted to open this conversation with a brief note about a thing that thus far I haven't heard anybody else talk about in relation to this new toy.
John:
but I think is extremely relevant.
John:
It's something that I brought up multiple times over the many years that we've been doing this show.
John:
It never seems to get any traction with anybody except for me, but every time I hear a discussion of iPad keyboards, spoiler, I think this, and I think it's so much more strongly now, and I don't understand why it's not everyone's first reaction to every single review of this device, including your reviews that you're going to give in a moment.
John:
right the ipad magic keyboard the magic keyboard whatever every time i see stuff like this i think to myself is it two words i guess two words two words that have been discussed in this program many times ios laptop
John:
Now, I know people used to freak out a lot about this.
John:
I think they should be freaking out much, much less as the days pass.
John:
When I say iOS laptop, what I'm thinking of is a laptop where there's a keyboard that contains a battery, a CPU, a GPU, and a couple of ports.
John:
And then there's a hinge.
John:
And then there's a screen.
John:
And you open it up.
John:
And the hinge is on one side.
John:
You open it up.
John:
And there's a keyboard and trackpad and everything.
John:
And those are on your lap.
John:
And that's where the heavy part is.
John:
And there's a skinny part where there's the screen.
John:
People used to freak out about that because they would say, you don't understand, man.
John:
That's not what iOS is about.
John:
iOS isn't about keyboards and trackpads.
John:
It's about being a tablet.
John:
It's about being a touch device.
John:
You can't have a touch laptop.
John:
It doesn't make any sense.
John:
Stop talking about iOS laptops.
John:
You're making me angry.
John:
And then they slowly added everything that you would want in a laptop to their existing iOS device upside down and backwards.
John:
So now we have this thing, this wobbly goblin with this huge heavy thing that contains an incredibly powerful CPU and GPU combo and an amazing screen.
John:
Uh,
John:
And all those guts are suspended on some weird magnetic thing with the skinny little keyboard underneath it that whole thing has to weigh as much as the device itself.
John:
And it's still wobbly and it can't open at an angle and it's thicker and bigger than a MacBook Pro.
John:
And it's just driving me insane.
John:
Why can't they just make an iOS laptop?
John:
Now, the one remaining argument is going to be, you don't understand, man.
John:
I need to be able to use it as a tablet.
John:
How the hell am I going to use a laptop as a tablet?
John:
Right?
John:
This is a solved problem in the world of very bad PCs, and I think Apple could solve it in a nice way.
John:
You can just either A, have the thing fold back on itself, or B, have the screen both twist and fold back on itself.
John:
And why do I think this is a good idea?
John:
Aside from it being a sane laptop with the weight in the right place that would be a much more pleasant experience as a laptop...
John:
You save so much in terms of volume and weight when you don't have to make... This is a naked robotic core thing.
John:
When you don't have to make a thing with a shell and an innards and a second thing with a shell and innards and then have them connect to each other with magnets.
John:
That burns so many millimeters.
John:
That burns so many pounds.
John:
There's a reason this monstrosity weighs more than a MacBook Pro, whereas if you made it like a laptop, it could be like Casey's terrible one-port...
John:
12 inch MacBook it would be so much thinner and so much lighter so thin and so light that it would be perfectly good as a folded back on itself or twisted around and folded back on itself tablet like it wouldn't be too heavy to be a tablet with the keyboard with it all the time and when you want to use it as a laptop it would be a way better laptop so
John:
We will discuss this as a really cool device that you can connect your existing iPad to, and I think that type of thing that's a convertible, transformable thing has its place.
John:
But I really, really think we're getting to the point now where an iOS laptop is a device that makes sense, and Apple could make a really good one that would still be a really good tablet and be a way better laptop.
John:
Maybe they could charge $350 more for it and that would, you know, maybe people would pay that.
John:
They would.
John:
They absolutely would because it would be lighter and a better laptop and it would just, anyway.
John:
So go on.
John:
How are your toys now that I've ruined them for you?
John:
So Casey, I want you to go first.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So this has been a little bit of a journey for me.
Casey:
When this was first announced, I was super excited and I have been using the word amped to describe it.
Casey:
And I'll probably overuse that word in this episode, but I will try to avoid it.
Casey:
But I was really amped to get this in no small part because I really just want a more flexible display stand to
Casey:
than the Smartfolio.
Casey:
Now, I like the Smartfolio, but as everyone has said a million times, there are two angles on the Smartfolio and they both kind of suck.
Casey:
There's basically vertical, which is only particularly useful if your head is at eye level with the device itself.
Casey:
So maybe if you're on your back and you've propped it on your belly to watch a movie or something like that.
Casey:
And then the other angle, I don't know how many degrees it is, but it's just barely acceptable enough to not actively piss you off constantly, but it's not good enough to make you happy.
Casey:
A glowing review.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Casey:
It's still kind of like, ugh, can I just get a little bit more, please?
Casey:
Just a little.
Casey:
However, the thing is super light.
Casey:
I actually find it to be—this is a Smartfolio—I find it to be a pretty nice keyboard to type on.
Casey:
It's kind of weird.
Casey:
You know, it's not like that kind of fabric-y, cloth-y covering over everything, but I like it.
Casey:
Mine is looking a little bit rough a year and a half on, and I don't—
Casey:
I've treated it egregiously.
Casey:
I don't even know how to describe it, but it's looking like it's got some age to it, more age than I would have expected, given that I've only had it since the end of 2018.
Casey:
But I really like that thing, and it keeps the iPad super-duper light.
Casey:
Taking the iPad out of it is actually not...
Casey:
It's not hard by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not convenient.
Casey:
And flipping the keyboard around to the back, it's fine.
Casey:
I think it's a little weird, but it's not great.
Casey:
But I was super, super excited to get this new Magic Keyboard.
Casey:
And then I start hearing reviews, both from people who know and from just random people who happen to get theirs early.
Casey:
And everyone's saying, well...
Casey:
It's really heavy.
Casey:
And, oh, well, you can't really open it as easily because it's, like, really, really stiff.
Casey:
And, oh, well, it's kind of thick.
Casey:
And there's a lot of, like, grumbling and hemming and hawing.
Casey:
And then I kind of got sad because I was really excited for this.
Casey:
And now I'm like...
Casey:
I don't know if I want this after all.
Casey:
And the other thing I should note is I don't really care sitting here today.
Casey:
I don't really care about a trackpad for the iPad.
Casey:
Like that doesn't seem to solve a problem I have.
Casey:
Remind me of this in like a week when I decide it's the best thing ever.
Casey:
But sitting here today, I don't really feel like it's doing much for me.
Casey:
But I really just wanted a much more flexible way to view my iPad.
Casey:
And I didn't really care what kind of keyboard is attached to it.
Casey:
And as it turns out, this is just a very clever and interesting looking, like as a piece of engineering, I think it's extraordinary.
Casey:
Whether or not you like it, I think we can all agree.
Casey:
I think I can speak for you guys that it's a very interesting and cool piece of engineering.
Casey:
Now, I got it this afternoon.
Casey:
I haven't spent an overabundance of time with it, but I've spent some time with it for sure.
Casey:
It is heavy, I think, for—and I should state I have an 11-inch iPad Pro, again, from 2018.
Casey:
I did not get the brand new one.
Casey:
It is certainly heavy.
Casey:
It is heavier than Smart Folio, unquestionably.
Casey:
I think it's
Casey:
It's really it's just that it's a laptop keyboard, which everyone has been saying, to be clear, like this is not news.
Casey:
But for some reason, I didn't I never really grokked that and I never really accepted that in my brain.
Casey:
I still thought of it as like the smart keyboard folio style, but with a much cooler mount.
Casey:
And that is not the case.
Casey:
It's much more like a laptop keyboard with this very clever mount.
Casey:
The mount, I do like it a lot.
Casey:
I still want like five degrees more tilt, maybe even less than that.
Casey:
It's definitely way better.
Casey:
And having more than two positions is delightful.
Casey:
But it's still, I would, God, I would just kill for a little bit more tilt, just a little bit.
John:
And you know why you don't have it, right?
John:
You know why you don't have that tilt.
John:
Like, it's been discussed to death.
John:
It's because all the weight is in the top.
John:
It's because it's a wobbly goblin.
John:
If you tilted it back more, the thing would fall over.
John:
And then you'd be like, oh, this stand sucks.
John:
It keeps falling over.
John:
You can't, like, you have to, you know, it's a fight between.
John:
If you tilt it over more, then to get it not to tip over, you need to bring the front edge forward more.
John:
And now the front edge isn't just covering the number keys.
John:
It's floating over, like, the home row.
John:
Like, it starts to not work out because that's where all the weight is, right?
John:
They've struck a reasonable compromise.
John:
In fact, it's pretty amazing how good the compromise is, even though you want just five more degrees or whatever.
John:
I think the range of motion and the fact that you can adjust to any position within that range is pretty good.
John:
I think they struck a nice balance between the floating idea, as we said when we first saw this thing, that's there so that the front edge of the iPad can extend over where the keys would be and still let you type on them by sort of reaching under it.
John:
It's very clever.
John:
but they've gone about as far as they can with the weight distribution the way it is.
John:
Laptops don't have this problem, but this is the problem they're trying to solve.
John:
We've got an iPad.
John:
That's where the screen is.
John:
We want it to be tilty.
John:
We want to have a nice keyboard.
John:
We want an overall package not to weigh too much, and it just compromises all around.
Casey:
Yeah, and you know it's the end of days if John Syracuse is arguing in favor of a laptop, but be that as it may.
Casey:
I really like typing on the keyboard.
Casey:
It took just a smidgen of time to get used to the new feel.
Casey:
I really like it.
Casey:
The keys are a little bit small in a couple places.
Casey:
I actually forgot to bring up my smart keyboard folio into the office with me tonight to compare.
Casey:
It is inverted T, which I love.
Casey:
Uh, the track pad, I think is where this, this thing really falls down on the 11 inch.
Casey:
I can't speak for the, the aircraft carrier size, but for the 11 inch, I feel like the track pad is way, way, way to squat.
Casey:
It is reasonably wide, not even in the ballpark of tall enough.
Casey:
I think some of that is because some of the reason I feel that way is because I'm used to these like mutant, you know, seven story tall or the humongous, uh, track pads that, that Apple's putting on everything these days.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
And this is probably exacerbated by the fact that, as I think I've said a few times on the show, for the last 6 to 12 months, I've been full-time on a Magic trackpad on my iMac Pro.
Casey:
You know, I used to use a mouse on my iMac, and then I would use the trackpad on my laptop only if I had to.
Casey:
You know, if I didn't have the occasion to use a Magic mouse with it.
Casey:
But in this case, I like the idea of having a trackpad.
Casey:
I was wondering before I received the Magic Keyboard if I would use the trackpad a lot, like as a legitimate alternative to stabbing at the screen.
Casey:
But I think on the 11-inch, it's going to be me just using it for text selection and a few other things.
Casey:
smaller use cases like that i don't really see myself using it a whole lot as an input mechanism more than i do like how one would potentially use like a wacom tablet attached to your computer like certain cases it's really good but generally speaking you don't touch it um overall i when i opened the box today i was unsure given the reviews i had heard whether or not i was going to keep it
Casey:
I am not 100% sure, but I'm like 90% sure I'm going to keep it.
Casey:
I do like it a lot.
Casey:
I went from extraordinarily excited to kind of a tepid, well, it'll probably be nice, to, no, this is pretty good.
Casey:
I think I like it.
Casey:
And we'll see where I end up after another week or so, or I guess two weeks when I would have to return it.
Casey:
I'm not even sure how that would work these days, but whatever.
Casey:
uh but overall i like it oh the other thing i will say is it is legitimately like i think that the weight is overblown like it is certainly heavier no argument but i don't think it's quite as dramatic as people are making it out to be or at least not for the 11 but it is definitely like uh not a production but it's it's a thing opening and closing it i'm not trying to say it's difficult it's not that it's difficult
Casey:
But, like, you could whip that smart keyboard folio around with, like, momentum and, like, a flick of the wrist, you know, Wingardium Leviosa or whatever.
Casey:
And you could get that thing whipping around and it would be fine.
Casey:
And you could, you know, put it behind the iPad just with momentum or whatever.
Casey:
This thing is stiff.
Casey:
Now...
Casey:
In the grand scheme of things, I think that's probably a good, not a bad thing, but it was a little bit off-putting at first because it just wasn't what I was used to.
Casey:
As I'm getting used to it, you know, I think it's fine.
Casey:
And as I'm getting used to it, I like the fact that it feels really freaking sturdy.
Casey:
Like, really freaking sturdy.
Casey:
Surprisingly sturdy.
Casey:
Even on my lap, you know, mashing on the iPad screen itself, it's still pretty darn sturdy.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
Overall, I think I like it.
Casey:
Oh, and the other thing I forgot to mention, I'm sorry, Marco, I promise I will give you a chance here.
Casey:
The second USB-C port, you know, it turns out, fellas, on a computer, it's nice to have more than one port.
Casey:
Who knew?
Casey:
It's like super cool.
Casey:
I wish I'd known this six years ago.
Casey:
It is really nice.
Casey:
For no other reason, just to have the ability to plug in power on the other side, first worldiest of first world problems, I'll be the first to tell you.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I have a USB-C power charging cable strung through our sofa because I'm typically using either the iPad or the laptop down there at some point in the evening.
Casey:
And it just so happens to be on my left side.
Casey:
And there was enough slack to it that I can certainly drag it across the front of the couch and stick it on the right-hand side of the iPad.
Casey:
But now, I don't have to do that.
Casey:
I can just stick it right on the left-hand side.
Casey:
No problem.
Casey:
And it occurred to me like...
Casey:
I could plug in a phone and charge it if I wanted to on the other USB-C port.
Casey:
I don't know why I would do that, but just go with me here.
Casey:
And it also occurred to me, like, hey, I actually don't think Xcode is coming to the iPad in any meaningful way, although there's been rumors about that lately.
Casey:
But, you know, you could power the iPad through the keyboard and then have a single cable going from iPad to iPhone if you wanted to make an iPhone app.
Casey:
Like that's, that's the thing you could do hypothetically.
Casey:
Cause you got two ports now.
Casey:
So overall, I do think I like it quite a bit.
Casey:
I am not as overjoyed as I thought I would be when I was super amped about it early on.
Casey:
Um, but I do like it and I am now bracing for impact as Marco tells me why he hates everything about it.
Marco:
I wouldn't say that.
Casey:
This is a really good start.
Marco:
Yeah, but I will say that you said a few moments ago that you're like 90% towards keeping it.
Marco:
I think I'm about 90% towards returning it.
Casey:
Tell me why.
Marco:
First impressions.
Marco:
I pick up the box off my porch and I think, uh-oh.
Casey:
Yes, I agree.
Casey:
I absolutely agree.
Marco:
Because if you look at the box and it's like, uh-oh, this is heavier than I expected.
Casey:
Yes, I completely agree.
Casey:
I'm sorry, are we on an 11 for you or are you on the 13?
Marco:
Yeah, I'm on an 11.
Marco:
Okay, okay.
Marco:
And I think it's important, I'm going to mention this later, it's important to realize that all of those pre-release press reviews were all sent 12.9s.
Marco:
So keep that in mind.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So, so I pick it up and I think, oh no, this, this feels pretty heavy from the box.
Marco:
Take out of the box.
Marco:
Maybe the cardboard is heavy.
Marco:
Take out of the box.
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
It's, it's just really heavy.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Now for context, I use an 11 inch iPad pro.
Marco:
I have used it with the smart keyboard folio, which is still for sale.
Marco:
And I hope they still keep making them for reasons I'll get into.
Marco:
I've been using that full time since it came out a year and a half ago.
Marco:
And before that, I used the 10.5-inch iPad Pro with its smart keyboard cover.
Marco:
And before that, I used the 9.7-inch iPad Pro with its smart keyboard cover.
Marco:
So I've been using keyboard covers on iPads in this size class, 9.7, 10.5, 11, since the 9.7 Pro came out whenever that was, four or five years ago.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
my context of using it is it's my like kitchen and living room and downstairs computer when I'm not like at my real desktop.
Marco:
So it's usually, usually like based in the kitchen or the dining room table.
Marco:
And that's where, you know, we play podcasts with breakfast and I have to, if I want to look something up while, you know, while I'm in the kitchen or wherever else.
Marco:
So it's doing a lot of like casual home tasks, maybe responding to some emails, like as I'm like drinking my coffee after breakfast is over and like,
Marco:
you know tiff tiff and i are on our phones and ipads sitting at the table we haven't gotten up yet that kind of thing so it's like you know casual or casual but very frequent use and i love keyboards and ipads ever since this this has before the ipad pro with its keyboard cover i i would buy each ipad telling myself this time i'm really going to use it i just never would and the keyboard changed it for me completely i i absolutely love ipads with keyboards
Casey:
I really need to just interrupt you and say that I could not possibly agree with you more.
Casey:
If you're still a person who has not tried an iPad with some sort of keyboard permanently attached to it, and that can be the smart keyboard folio.
Casey:
I'm not saying this $300 monstrosity.
Casey:
Just having a keyboard always attached to it dramatically changed the way I feel about the iPad and made it considerably more useful to me.
Casey:
And I just wanted to say that I completely agree with you on that.
Marco:
i'll also say my my you know year and a half old smart keyboard folio is showing signs of wear but not the keys only like the rubbery part of the rear cover yes basically when i where i where where my fingers touch when i pick up the ipad by it by the cover like by itself as it's open i pick it up and move it as it's open all the time like to go from kitchen to dining room or whatever like that's my i'm constantly picking up and moving it from one room to the next room very very frequently every day
Marco:
And so I'm getting oil and rubbery stretch marks almost on some of the rubber.
Marco:
Anyway, it doesn't affect the functionality at all.
Casey:
Same thing.
Marco:
It looks kind of bad from the back now.
Marco:
But it looks kind of like a black plastic MacBook after six months of use.
Marco:
Roughly that level of weirdness.
Marco:
Anyway, so I get this new Magic Keyboard today.
Marco:
I've had about half a day of playing with it.
Marco:
I wrote a bunch of notes using it.
Marco:
I use it a lot this evening.
Marco:
So it is...
Marco:
As people have reported, significantly heavier than the smart keyboard folio.
Marco:
The way John describes how he doesn't use covers or keyboards with his iPad, he just picks up the naked iPad and it's so light.
Marco:
And that's true.
Marco:
When you pick up a naked iPad and you're not used to that, it's so light.
Marco:
And then you put it before in the smart keyboard case and it just feels so much more bulky.
Marco:
This is like taking that same step again.
Marco:
So it's like going from the way no case to smart keyboard makes it significantly heavier and bulkier.
Marco:
Going smart keyboard to magic keyboard makes it about that much more bulky and heavy.
Marco:
So it's a significant increase in heft.
Marco:
And this is not to say this is heavy in absolute terms.
Marco:
I'm an adult.
Marco:
I can lift it up.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
I have no ability that would prevent me from doing this.
Marco:
So it's fine, but it's inelegant.
Marco:
Where the smart keyboard cover, I kind of grew to find that acceptable...
Marco:
this i'm not sure i ever would because it's it's just so dense you know so getting on to actually using it the magnets are as people say they are extremely strong the hinge is very stable there is like as you're tapping the screen when it's open there is a bit of wobble like the ipad kind of vibrates i think to improve that they would probably have to make it a heck of a lot heavier or makes that make the hinge even tighter so i guess i understand why they don't improve that but
Marco:
It's something to realize that like when they're up on these stands, they do occasionally wobble when you touch them.
Marco:
It's a little bit annoying.
Marco:
I, like everyone else, wish the range of motion tilted back a little bit further.
Marco:
It doesn't need a lot more, but yeah, a few more degrees would be nice.
Marco:
We went to the keys.
Marco:
The keys are a snappier feeling.
Marco:
They provide better feedback.
Marco:
The smart keyboard cover before, as far as we know, we think it's a butterfly mechanism.
Marco:
And so it kind of makes sense.
Marco:
It's what you'd expect.
Marco:
However, what made it so good was that fabric covering before.
Marco:
And the keys have this covering, so all stuff is kept out of it.
Marco:
And then the key caps are...
Marco:
on the old one are smaller and more rounded in the corners.
Marco:
And so you have more space between the keys.
Marco:
And this is something, again, I've argued about this forever with the butterfly keyboards on the laptops, that when you have bigger keycaps in the same physical total footprint and you have to shrink the margins around them, it makes it harder to type accurately because it makes it harder to find the edges of the keys with your fingers.
Marco:
And it's easier in my experience to accidentally slip off the side and hit the key next to one that you mean to hit.
Marco:
key margins are important for typing especially on a smaller keyboard so you can just kind of feel where the keys are and the key margins got smaller with this move to the magic keyboard so the key switches i think are nicer key switches they move from butterfly to scissor and everything but in the context of an ipad smart cover i think it was actually okay before the keys on the smart covers weren't great but they were way better than than a butterfly key switch would suggest because of the
Marco:
So I'm finding myself making a lot of typing errors on this in day one.
Marco:
And I don't love that, especially because it's not that the total dimensions changed.
Marco:
It's just the key shape got bigger and flatter, and the other one I think was more accurate.
Marco:
The key feel difference, while it's nicer...
Marco:
I don't think it's that different.
Marco:
I'm surprised how different it isn't.
Marco:
Like the way, like the travel and the feedback, it's not that much different.
Marco:
The new Magic Keyboard is noticeably louder in typing.
Marco:
Typing on an iPad smart cover is almost silent.
Marco:
The new keyboard, because it's like the key mechanism is more open, it doesn't have that fabric cover like muffling everything.
Marco:
It is louder.
Marco:
I don't know if that matters to you.
Marco:
It isn't, you know, it's about the same loudness as a laptop.
Marco:
So it's not like, you know, super loud, but it does matter.
Marco:
It feels because of the, I think partly because of the trackpad and partly because of the shrunken key margins, it feels more cramped than before.
Marco:
And this applies to both the keyboard, and also I find the trackpad feels very cramped on the 11-inch.
Marco:
And I haven't tried the 12.9, but I think there's a good reason why Apple seeded all the reviewers with the 12.9 instead of the 11.
Marco:
Part of that is because they tend to do that with any new iPad hardware.
Marco:
They tend to seed the biggest size to the reviewers.
Marco:
So it could have just been that.
Marco:
But I think also this is something that on the 12.9 probably feels a lot closer to a laptop,
Marco:
whereas on the 11 where the the previous keyboard cover felt like it was exactly the right size like the 9.7 felt like it was a little cramped and then once they moved to 10.5 it was like ah okay this that was a little bit extra we needed and now it feels right you know now it feels good and when they went 10.5 to 11 i think it was about the same it wasn't it wasn't a big difference so again the 11 it felt great right
Marco:
maybe this is because i'm used to it for so long but this it looks like the keys might have the same overall footprint like the key area i think i don't think they've shrunken it or if they have shrunk it it's only by a millimeter or two it's not it wouldn't be by a lot but it feels cramped and so again i don't know if that's key if the key margins have gotten so much smaller i don't know if it's because of that or because of the different shape of the keys compared to the old cover but this now feels cramped
Marco:
And I think on the 12.9, it probably doesn't.
Marco:
That, I think, is telling.
Marco:
It's one of the reasons why I think this is probably an easier sell or an easier recommendation for 12.9 users and a little bit iffy for 11-inch users for that reason.
Marco:
It just does feel a little bit cramped.
Marco:
So going on, the trackpad, actually using it,
Marco:
i find like casey i i find it a bit strange it works well in many ways it works weirdly in some ways uh i i never actually used the trackpad support in ipad os like when it came out like last month or whatever i never plugged in a trackpad to try it i i wanted to wait for this to really get like the full experience so this is my first day doing it maybe maybe that's why i i did find it a little bit odd
Marco:
the trackpad click it's not a four-struck trackpad it's like a real click trackpad and it's a very like loud kind of cheap sounding click it kind of sounds uh you know inelegant ungraceful it's not a good click i tried it for a while and i hated it so much that i eventually switched to tap to click mode to switch to tap to click mode i decided all right let me go in and change some keyboard and trackpad settings so first i wanted to change some keyboard settings i hit command space
Marco:
great it brings up spotlight you know that i you know i've used a keyboard on an ipad for a while i knew how most of this works but just to give you some idea so command space brings a spotlight great uh so i typed in settings well first i first typed in system preferences and then i realized oh that's wrong back by fact settings and great settings up hit enter good then what i what i would have done on a mac is hit command f and type keyboard
Marco:
So I tried that on the iPad.
Marco:
The settings app has a search box.
Marco:
So I entered settings, hit command F, and nothing happens.
Marco:
Because they haven't mapped it.
Marco:
They didn't just bring over macOS.
Marco:
They're doing everything from scratch.
Marco:
And so the people making iOS have to both...
Marco:
know what the Mac does, appreciate what the Mac does, and have the time and permission to actually add that behavior to iOS.
Marco:
All of those are not givens.
Marco:
So many macOS behaviors have not made it over.
Marco:
Some of them, it's just a matter of time.
Marco:
Some of them never will.
Marco:
But there is no Command-F in settings.
Marco:
It doesn't bring up the search box.
Marco:
So you have to go up, tap it, and this is where the trackpad really falls down.
Marco:
It feels kind of like using the iOS simulator for developers.
Marco:
You have to...
Marco:
move over to a scrollable area that you know is scrollable and then you get wait can i scroll this with my fingers on the trackpad maybe many of them work some of them don't it depends on certainly depends on the app some in some cases but like you might be able to scroll with your fingers i found i just eventually just like reached up and dragged it with my finger normally because i like i'm like i don't know how to do this with the trackpad or it doesn't feel right doing up the trackpad or it's slower doing it with the trackpad so i you know go up to search box
Marco:
I start typing in keyboard.
Marco:
The only things that show up are the accessibility settings for keyboard.
Marco:
None of which are like the, the key repeat rate or, you know, stuff like that.
Marco:
I wanted to change cap lock to escape, which now you can do, but I wanted to find that setting.
Marco:
And eventually I just had to go like to general and to keyboard.
Marco:
after i had done that trying the same process again when i would type in keyboard in the search field would then bring up the general keyboard pane so i don't know if it wasn't indexed before or if it's doing some kind of predictive what i might want kind of ranking i don't know but it just didn't work right the first time and the second time it worked right so again ios this is like again like ios weird software issues are holding back things right but
Marco:
I also had a reliability issue.
Marco:
Within the first half hour of using the keyboard, I invoked Siri to turn some lights off, and then after Siri had come up, the keyboard and trackpad totally stopped working.
Marco:
Nothing worked.
Marco:
No, I tried going in and out of apps, going to the app switcher, going in and out of Siri again.
Marco:
Nothing would make the keyboard or trackpad work again until I pulled the iPad off the keyboard and put it back on.
Marco:
I've had occasional keyboard bugs like this with every smart keyboard for every iPad Pro.
Marco:
So I don't know if it's a hardware flaw with the smart connector.
Marco:
If so, it also applied to the 10.5, 9.7 smart connectors.
Marco:
It's more likely, I think, to be a software bug.
Marco:
But again, iOS bugs, I think, are holding back the quality and consistency of this experience.
Marco:
But anyway, they do seem to be prioritizing this more and more over time.
Marco:
So hopefully this gets better.
Marco:
Overall, I just...
Marco:
I don't think I like navigating iOS by trackpad.
Marco:
It is unquestionably a win for text editing.
Marco:
You know, people who do a lot of writing on their iPads are going to love this thing.
Marco:
And the press reviews that are so glowing about it are largely that group.
Marco:
It's largely people who write a lot on iPads.
Marco:
Of course, Apple enthusiasts who oftentimes are iOS enthusiasts and iPad enthusiasts who want to do as much of their work as possible on iPads who are also professional writers and many of whom were already using keyboards like the bridge that are big and heavy.
Marco:
Of course they're going to love this thing because it's a really good implementation of that.
Marco:
But for me, as more of like a prosumer or middle-of-the-road iPad power user, I'm not doing most of my work on it.
Marco:
I am answering a lot of emails and tweets and stuff like that on it, but I'm not really doing significant work other than that on it.
Marco:
I don't think I like the trackpad.
Marco:
Not only because it's so small and the click sucks, but I don't think I like navigating iOS by trackpad.
Marco:
It feels like it's slower than using the touchscreen a lot of the time.
Marco:
And it feels bolted on to the iOS.
Marco:
Apple did a really good job integrating trackpad pointer stuff with toolbars and buttons and everything, but it still feels bolted on.
Marco:
Exactly the same arguments when people say, you can't just take macOS and add touch to it.
Marco:
uh because that would be clunky this feels clunky in the exact same way it feels like i'm navigating the simulator like it just it feels like in some in like a couple of contexts like text editing it's great when navigating uis i don't think it's great at all i do like having the um the multi-finger gestures for app switching and for you know getting getting back to the home screen that's nice
Marco:
but the home indicator on the screen is not so far away that that's that big of a difference.
Marco:
So ultimately, it still feels like this is not a pointer device.
Marco:
This is a hack on a touch device.
Marco:
So overall, if you want your iPad to become a laptop and you've already used big, heavy keyboard covers and you're really interested in the trackpad stuff, and maybe if you do a lot of text editing on your iPad, maybe this is for you.
Marco:
I don't think it's for me because I basically paid $300 to make my iPad a little bit better in some ways and a lot worse in a couple of important ways.
Marco:
And I don't think that's a good tradeoff for me.
Marco:
So I don't think I'm going to keep it.
Marco:
And I hope for that reason, I hope they continue to make the smart keyboard folio, not only for this iPad, but for future iPads to make something like that.
Marco:
Some kind of like, you know, thin light keyboard that is not as fancy as their full hinge and trackpad model.
Marco:
Because I just like the old way better.
John:
I think the thing about your usage that I hadn't thought about until you described it in more detail now is that it's not just a thing you use in the kitchen where I thought this would be ideal, but that you take the entire thing, keyboard and all, to other places.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Even though it's not a lot of other places, it is other places.
John:
And that's where I think this really runs afoul.
John:
I'm thinking of it as your kitchen computer.
John:
It's like perfect for that because you would put this in the computer.
John:
Like lots of people are describing this and I think it's a good way to conceptualize it as a stand for your iPad.
John:
So you'd have this stand in the kitchen.
John:
right there stiff sturdy ready to receive your ipad and when you wanted to go to another room you just yank that ipad off and you'd take it to another room but you don't want to do that you want to take the whole thing including the keyboard to the other room because you're going to use the keyboard in the other room too and now you're picking up the whole big conglomeration and now the weight becomes a factor and now you start thinking about whether you really want that trackpad and the keyboard differences and everything else you talked about right so that's exactly i think i think if you if you think you have a place in your life
John:
for an ipad stand that has a really good keyboard connected to it and a trackpad or whatever then this is for you but i look at this thing and i guess for traveling too like if you're going to travel with something and you like ios better than mac os and you want to essentially have a bad laptop then this is the best bad laptop you know you know compromise because then it's in your it's in your backpack yeah it weighs as much as macbook pro but you're taking it instead of a macbook pro right so i can see those use cases for it but the the folio the
John:
fills the need for you which is like i want this light thing that i can kind of bring around my house with me and also it's nice to have a keyboard and the trackpad if the trackpad was better both in terms of the hardware like imagine if it felt like a laptop trackpad you'd like that better and also the software and the software thing has obviously got to evolve this is the very first cut at this right hopefully if things go well application developers can now up including apple can update their applications to be better about the keyboard right
John:
And if the trackpad itself got better, it may become more attractive.
John:
But yeah, like as someone who doesn't even like to have a keyboard attached to his iPad, this is definitely not for me.
John:
But I did think about it and sort of, you know, the case you described perhaps like having it on your lap and just using it as a stand to like watch video on it.
John:
I think this is way overkill for a video stand, but my current solution for watching video on my iPad, it does not have an adjustable viewing angle, and this does.
John:
So even that makes it somewhat attractive.
John:
So I'm, despite both of your reviews, I'm still curious.
John:
I mean, God.
John:
If the world ever returns to some semblance of normalcy and I can actually go to an Apple store, I would love to try this thing out and see what it's like.
John:
Because I'm not above... As you know, someone sitting next to this ridiculous computer, I'm not above paying $300 for a thing that makes it easier for me to watch a video on my iPad.
John:
Neither am I. Well, it sits on my lap.
John:
I think there are probably better applications to that.
John:
But anyway, like I said before, I think this is...
John:
a very well-engineered solution within the problem space that they have been presented, with the possible exception of the trackpad, which I'm kind of disappointed to hear is as janky as it is.
John:
But everything else about it, the functionality, the way they were able to get more tilt angle out of the thing, the way they were able to fit a trackpad at all while keeping the keyboard essentially the same size and have it all basically be sturdy and work well without lots of fasteners and everything,
John:
it's a very clever and interesting product it's just that they're fighting an uphill battle and what they should really make it as is an ios laptop which which i think would be extremely popular if done well extremely popular like i don't i don't really see why anyone would ever want the combination of this and this stand when they could get the ios laptop that i'm describing that is essentially like
John:
the same weight as the 12 inch uh macbook was and you can also fold over on itself or twist and fold do you know what i'm talking about when i say twist and fold i'm afraid someone's going to they used to call them convertible tablet pcs yeah like someone it's the folding back people understand like oh if you had a hinge it goes all the way around but then the keyboard is on the back and some people don't like including me don't like the keyboard on the back so that's not great it's like i how am i going to use my ipad as a
John:
so that the monitor is facing backwards and then fold, the keyboard is now sandwiched between the very skinny screen surface and the other thing.
John:
Anyway, the product I'm describing is not easy to make.
John:
If you look at the convertible PC ones, there's a reason they weren't popular products, right?
John:
But the same very clever, very skilled engineering that allowed this conglomeration to exist, I think would allow Apple to make a pretty good iOS laptop
John:
that has basically none of the hardware compromises you just described.
John:
The software compromises are a separate issue.
John:
That's a separate team.
John:
But none of the hardware compromises you described, and it would weigh less.
John:
And I think it might fulfill your – like you mentioned the floppy, rubbery parts of the folio wearing out.
John:
I've seen that with my kids too because they're monsters, and they all have covers on their iPads.
John:
That's the weak point of all of these sort of smart cover type things.
John:
They don't expect –
John:
like the rubbery the rubbery parts start to wear right and i've seen my kids and myself pick up a an ipad that has one of these things on it whether it's in stand mode or it's a keyboard full you kind of pick it up in a way where you're trying to pick up two things at once right you're trying to pick up the ipad and the thing that's attached to it and there are magnets and they mostly hold together but you're aware that they're two separate items so there's very often the grip you do that's like i'm gripping the ipad and also a little bit of the case because i'm afraid that the keyboard might fall off if i yank it too hard or whatever
John:
That's where the super strong magnets and the new one come in handy.
John:
But having that structure, trying to lift and carry that structure from room to room, laptops also do that better because they're just so much simpler and more appropriately designed for the task.
John:
Heavy part on bottom, thin part on top, strong hinge in between.
John:
I mean, my kids do this, again, see, monsters.
John:
They pick up laptops by the screen and carry it from place to place, which is terrible and no one should ever do.
John:
But practically speaking, it actually works and nothing falls apart.
John:
Most people will pick it up by the base and carry it from room to room.
John:
Civilized people will close it first before carrying it from room to room.
John:
That's the approach I recommend.
John:
But the point is...
John:
that a laptop will endure all manner of being carried from place to place in any form without, like, coming apart at the seams, without the loose rubbery bits falling apart.
John:
And never will the keyboard separate from the screen when you're carrying it in that way unless you're really being rough with it.
John:
Whereas with any of these iPad conglomerations, it's a concern.
John:
And that's another area where I think the new one seems like it does better.
John:
The magnets are so strong and have so much surface area that I think...
John:
I mean, you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but do you feel more confident picking up this collection of items just by the iPad screen part and being feeling more?
John:
I guess you can't because the thing goes all the way up the back, right?
John:
Like, do you do you still feel the need to do like the three finger pinch where one finger, two fingers are pinching the iPad and two other fingers are like pinching the case?
John:
Or do you feel like you can pick it up by just the keyboard or just the screen and it feels secure?
Marco:
I always pick it up basically as if I'm covering up the camera with my palm.
Marco:
I put a thumb on the front of the screen, I wrap my hands behind it, and so I'm picking it up, touching both the iPad and the keyboard.
Marco:
And that's true of both the Magic Keyboard cover and the Smart Keyboard cover.
John:
would you feel comfortable pick if you have it in front of you now like if you just grabbed it but from the bottom part let's say let's say just just grab it from the bottom part and carry it from room to room would you ever do that or would you think no way um it feels like it is secure enough to do that but i would never do it also it needs two hands to do that because you need to like get you need to like get under it to get a good grip and it's so thin on the bottom half it doesn't have the little curved
Marco:
Yeah, it has that little hard plastic seam lip, so you can't really get under it without using a second hand to help lift it up.
John:
That's another thing, by the way, laptops, if you look at them, they all have curved edges, and the reason they can afford to have that curve is because they are one solid unit on the bottom.
John:
They aren't two separate hardware products that must mate to each other, right?
John:
So that's why they can afford to have a curve, because that curve would be...
John:
uh, taller than the bottom part in total on, um, you know, you don't even have enough room to complete a MacBook style curve in the bottom of this, of this case.
John:
It's too thin.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like I always pick up my iPad and keyboard combo with one hand and it's always by picking it up like by the top half, like on the side.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
That's typically how I grab it as well.
Casey:
Um, holding it now.
Casey:
And I will say that in terms of stability, keeping the iPad to the keyboard, um,
Casey:
When grabbing by just the keyboard, it is stable enough to do that.
Casey:
I feel, though, that I'm on the edge of bending the keyboard.
Casey:
I don't think I actually am, but that's what it feels like.
John:
The keyboard is the way it is elsewhere.
John:
Right.
Casey:
The keyboard is too flimsy and that I'm going to bend it if I carry it this way.
John:
The keys are going to pop off and hit you in the eye.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
I don't think that would happen, first of all, that it would actually bend.
Casey:
But it just feels wrong to carry it that way.
Marco:
Yeah, it doesn't feel like something you should be doing.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
But in terms of will the iPad stay connected to this keyboard thing, yeah, I think it absolutely would.
Casey:
It is surprisingly sturdy.
Casey:
And people have said, oh, you can totally rip it off with one hand.
Casey:
I mean, you can.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
but you know like wedge your finger between the two layers to pop it off you can't just like if you don't touch the keyboard cover at all here let me see if i can do it is there a twist maybe try a twisting motion i'm wondering like in what in what direction is it weak you can do it if you basically like peel upwards on the bottom it's really hard to do though to like to separate it without touching the keyboard part
Marco:
yeah that part i agree with casey it is it is very it seems much more stable than i would have guessed it would be uh like it and much more securely attached i was afraid that like if you pick it up or shake it around a little bit that it would that the ipod would fall off the stand because that's kind of how the magnets always felt with the keyboards if you would like disconnect the you know like unmount it from its base uh that always felt like that's what that would happen and that's not the case here at all it is surprisingly strong uh so that i'm not worried about it's it's just like
Marco:
as i'm operating it now it's just so damn heavy and bulky and i i think john you're right and everyone else is right when they're comparing this to a stand if you think about it as a stand with with like an ipad that you rarely move that is mostly like stationed or that you move without you move without the keyboard you move the ipad but the keyboard thing stays right like it would be great for that but yeah that isn't how i use my ipad
Casey:
So all in all, it sounds like I like it.
Casey:
Marco is kind of meh.
Marco:
Yeah, I think I'm going to return it.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Marco:
But I see the market for this.
Marco:
Like, I'm not it.
Marco:
Just in the same way, I'm not the market for the 12.9.
Marco:
Like, the 12.9 is way too big and heavy for me.
Marco:
I don't like it at all.
Marco:
And I, yeah, I don't think this is for me.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
I've personally used Linode for almost a decade now.
Marco:
They host all of my stuff that needs servers.
Marco:
So it's my blog, the livestream server for the site, and all of Overcast.
Marco:
I probably run something like 27 or 28 servers there total.
Marco:
I've been with them for almost a decade, and their pricing is amazing.
Marco:
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Marco:
They are always competitive whenever I look around.
Marco:
Linode is either beating everyone, or at worst, they're the same as everyone else.
Marco:
Usually they're beating everybody.
Marco:
As technology gets better, and they're able to offer you more for less money, they do.
Marco:
They offer you free upgrades.
Marco:
You click one thing in the control panel, your server reboots, and it's upgraded for the same price.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Of course, you get root access to your server, and you can do stuff like run game servers, run apps, run testing servers, whatever you need to do on a server.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Let's continue with some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Andreas Beyer-Bowden writes,
Casey:
But I found that whenever I woke my computer that my cursor would beach ball like I'd never seen before.
Casey:
Now that I've disabled this feature, what I'm wondering is, am I significantly shortening lifespan of my drives and my USB RAID array by not allowing them to sleep whenever possible?
Casey:
Should I just live with the sluggish performance that I experienced after waking my computer, or is deselecting it like I did fine?
Casey:
Do you guys leave this on or off?
Casey:
I don't really ever attach platters to my computer except to make a backup and then it gets disconnected.
Casey:
But that being said, I mean, the drives in my Synology, probably not a good example right now, but nevertheless, the drives in my Synology have been running for some as many as seven years nonstop and it's fine.
Casey:
So I don't really have strong opinions about the surprise surprise one way or the other.
Marco:
I turn that off, so I do not let my drive sleep.
Marco:
Because first of all, I'm pretty sure it does nothing with SSDs.
Marco:
And I think all of my Mac-connected drives now are SSDs and have been for a while.
Marco:
So, you know, maybe a bad example for me.
Marco:
But even back when there were hard drives, the problem is, and the reason why Finder beach balls for a while when you are waiting for a drive to wake up, is that, you know, when hard drives power down, they literally turn off their motors.
Marco:
Like, they don't spin anymore.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And it takes hard drives usually a good five or ten seconds to fully spin up and be ready.
Marco:
And so if you think about it from like the programming perspective, think about like, all right, so you're doing an operation and normally you can expect hard drive I.O.
Marco:
to take what maybe five or six nanoseconds.
Marco:
I don't know what modern access times are probably longer than that.
Marco:
Who knows?
John:
Nanoseconds?
Marco:
you're you're you're in the wrong unit sir what is it is it milliseconds i forget it's been a long time the milliseconds is the seek time but that's what the how long it takes the head on average to move from one place to the other that assumes it's already spun up and it doesn't account for transfer time right right that's right yeah so sorry it's been a long time since i looked at hard drive uh seek times and access times okay so suppose it's like you know 10 milliseconds in a good case uh for you know for waiting for a hard drive transfer
Marco:
But sometimes it takes 10 seconds, right?
Marco:
And that's what the programs are dealing with.
Marco:
And so typically, lots of stuff will beach ball if it's waiting for a hard drive to spin up because you can do asynchronous tasks to a certain degree.
Marco:
You can say, all right, cue this IO to happen.
Marco:
And then call me back on some thread when it's ready.
Marco:
And that's a harder way to program in some cases.
Marco:
But you can argue that when you're dealing with slower storage, that's the right way to do it a lot of times if you can.
Marco:
But even then, during that 10 seconds, the app is probably going to hit some other thing that it has to wait for.
Marco:
because it's still waiting for the IO operation or something.
Marco:
And it's like, all right, when you can do no IO for like 10 straight seconds, you're going to get a lot of things that just beach ball.
Marco:
There's no way around it or the way around it would be so complex.
Marco:
No one's ever going to program around that, especially now in the age of hard drives, you know, going out of fashion.
Marco:
So that's why that happens.
Marco:
And I always found that so annoying back when I would have direct-to-touch hard drives to my Macs that I would turn that off because I would like open up a drive and, you know, just sit there and wait.
Marco:
And wait, and you hear, and you just sit there and wait.
Marco:
Oh, now it's going, okay.
Marco:
And it was just so annoying.
Marco:
So whether it actually has any impact on drive lifespan, the answer is probably it depends.
Marco:
Certainly there is a savings of drive wear and tear for it not to be spinning a lot of the time.
Marco:
But there's also a wear and tear cost to it spinning up and down to go in and out of power save mode.
Marco:
So it probably depends a lot on your access pattern.
Marco:
If you're only going to be accessing the files, you know, rarely, relatively rarely, and it can stay power down most of the time and not go through a lot of power up, power down cycles, it's probably going to lengthen the drive lifestyle.
Marco:
But if it's going to be going through a lot of those cycles, it might actually make it worse.
Marco:
So the answer, of course, is it depends.
Marco:
But the real answer is go to SSDs as soon as you can.
John:
John, thoughts?
John:
So the spinning down thing, I've tended to like that because, of course, spinning disks make noise and I don't want them to make noise.
John:
But in macOS over the years, it's become more and more common for the application you're using or some component of the operating system to want to get some information about all attached drives.
John:
uh to give an example it's like it's not you're not doing anything like i'm not going to that disc i'm not looking for something that disc i'm not accessing that disc at all why am i sitting here looking at a beach ball waiting for that disc to spin up uh just opening an open save dialogue even if the open save dialogue is not going to show a folder on that thing it's just the open save dialogue and it's like pointing to your desktop right that's not a spinning disc
John:
That could cause all of your disks to have to spin up because the open save dialog box or some component of it wants to know stuff about all attached volumes so it can populate menus so that when you click on them later, the menu will display and show you all of the volumes or wants to populate the sidebar or whatever.
John:
Tons of stuff that you don't control that you might not think is important may want information about all attached volumes and may need to get that information by causing your thing to spin up.
John:
And that takes a long time, it makes noise, and it's kind of annoying.
John:
This is kind of like the whole eternal debate that used to be about – there's lots of silly debates that have no bearing in fact or more sort of myths of like, does it take more gas to start a gasoline engine?
John:
No.
John:
No.
John:
than to just leave it idling or how long would you have to idle for it to be worthwhile for you to turn the engine off and to start it or whatever which maybe made some more sense in the days of carbureted engines but today the answer spoiler alert is turn the engine off because it uses way more gas when it's idling than it does to start the engine it uses nothing to start the engine in a modern car anyway um wear and tear is the same thing is it better
John:
for me to have a hard drive that uh is spinning for a short period of time during the day but goes from spinning to not spinning five times or is it better to let it spin all day long even though i'm not using it but at least it never has to go from spinning to not spinning and this gets into the more modern question of stops auto stop start systems for car engines when i come to uh a stoplight and is it good for my engine auto start stop system to turn the engine off and then to turn it back on again and then turn it off and then turn it back on isn't that destroying the engine
John:
And again, the answer is not as simple as people think because modern car engines that have start systems are made to do that.
John:
But on the other side, there's no fighting the fact that there is more friction and wear and tear from doing stop start than it is for it running all the time.
John:
Anyway, all that applies to hard drives, too.
John:
All right.
John:
Depending on your scenario, how many times you stop and start and how much that hard drive expected to be stopped and started frequently is how well it's going to fare.
John:
If you applied an auto stop-start system to a car engine from the 80s, it would probably destroy it, right?
John:
But modern car engines know they're going to be hooked up to a stop-start system and have certain parts that would wear out or whatever, beefed up to handle better the situation that they know they're going to be in where they're going to be constantly stopped and started.
John:
If I had to pick a kind of hard drive that doesn't expect to be stopped and started frequently, it's like a data center or NAS hard drive.
John:
They don't expect to constantly be spun up and spun down.
John:
They expect to be running all the time.
John:
That's the use case they're used for.
John:
If you have them in your thing, don't allow them to spin down.
John:
My preferred solution to all this these days is to not just keep them spun down, keep them unmounted.
John:
Because then your open and save dialogue box, if everything goes well, can't possibly spin those drives up.
John:
They'll just always stay spun down, and they'll stay unmounted.
John:
macOS is very clever, though, and very often it can mount your drives behind the scenes in a way that is not even visible in the finder, and somehow you'll hear them spinning up, and you're like, wait a second.
John:
I unmounted that.
John:
Why is that spinning up now?
John:
That can be managed for the most part.
John:
So anyway, that's my recommended solution.
John:
If you have a hard drive connected to your Mac that you mostly don't use, leave it unmounted.
John:
And when you want to use it, mount it.
John:
There are many utilities and menu bar things and all sorts of other stuff right down to just having an alias in your sidebar that will allow you to quickly and easily mount a drive.
John:
Like I even have stuff in Quicksilver.
John:
I have like command space and then drive names to get them mounted quickly.
John:
I have a million ways to quickly mount and unmount drives.
John:
That's the answer.
John:
I would recommend against the spin-down thing, except maybe in laptops with spinning disks.
John:
But honestly, who has one of those these days?
John:
So, yeah, the answer is don't leave your drives mounted.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Nate J writes, I recently graduated with a computer science degree.
Casey:
As I look for a job and sharpen my skills, I find it easy to become overwhelmed and discouraged.
Casey:
My level of skill seems puny compared to what is out there.
Casey:
With seemingly thousands of frameworks, languages, and technologies that are all built on top of each other, I find it hard to know what to focus on.
Casey:
So the questions are, what were some experiences you gentlemen had right after getting out of school, and what advice would you give to a programming newbie?
Casey:
Everyone says to build projects and put them on GitHub.
Casey:
I'm a decent coder, but I always hit a wall when trying to think
Casey:
of what novel problems what novel projects solve a problem while being within my skill level so my favorite story to tell about this which i'm sure i've told a couple of times during the run of this show is when i got to my first job out of school so i went to virginia tech for computer engineering which at the time was basically half electrical engineering half computer science and
Casey:
Uh, I did plenty of, you know, computer science stuff and I got a job writing software and I got there and my first day they said, okay, well, we're using Perforce for source control and here's the server and all that.
Casey:
Why don't you go grab the source and take a look through it?
Casey:
And I said, I'm sorry, what's source control?
Casey:
Because I had never had the occasion to use it in college.
Casey:
And at that point, I'm sure it's different now, but at that point, Virginia Tech didn't teach it because, you know, source control was a thing.
Casey:
It had very much been a thing for decades, but it just wasn't part of the curriculum.
Casey:
And it was quickly apparent to me that I had a whole lot to learn.
Casey:
To give more concrete advice, though, yeah, you know, I as Marco discussed last episode, there are so many levels and layers to everything that's built today.
Casey:
It's daunting.
Casey:
Like even for me and I wrote my blog engine in 2014.
Casey:
it scares me to think about doing that again in 2020 because there's so many layers and so many levels and so many things.
Casey:
Now, the reality of the situation is you don't have to use any of them.
Casey:
You know, as Marco said last episode, you can use JavaScript without jQuery.
Casey:
Like, it's a thing.
Casey:
It's a thing you could do.
Casey:
So you don't necessarily have to go that deep into all these bananas, you know, multi-layer cakes and whatnot.
Casey:
But ultimately...
Casey:
In order to learn really anything, and I've said this for years, and I'm not the only one who said it, you need to have a specific problem to solve.
Casey:
And yeah, you may not be able to come up with novel projects that solve a problem, but you'd be surprised how difficult a to-do list can be once you get past it only being on one computer and the to-do list only existing in memory.
Casey:
You'd be surprised how complex something as simple as that can be.
Casey:
And so I would say find something that you would like solved or maybe some app that you use but isn't exactly the way you want it and try to make it better.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Marco, thoughts on this?
Marco:
First of all, I should disclaim that with a few exceptions, like meeting my wife, I did almost everything else in college wrong.
Casey:
Same.
Marco:
Like in retrospect, or even at the time I knew it was wrong.
Marco:
Like many things I just did wrong.
Marco:
What matters in the job market, especially when you're first starting out, more than anything else, is who you know.
Marco:
We all like to think everything's objective when it comes to applying for jobs, but it's not.
Marco:
Not even close.
Marco:
What matters is who you know.
Marco:
So the best thing you can possibly do as a college kid are get internships or other work experience during the summers or even during the years if you can so that you know more people in the field.
Marco:
Because when you graduate and you're ready for a full-time job,
Marco:
That's going to be the people who are going to be most likely to hire you by far.
Marco:
You can apply blindly, as I did, to all the big companies, and all of them will probably ignore you like they did for me.
Marco:
Part of that was because my grades sucked, but that's another story as well.
Marco:
One of the other many things I did wrong in college also didn't quite grow.
Marco:
graduate on time anyway so there's a lot of things wrong but this is the biggest thing is that basically every summer i would just go and work a regular job somewhere like at staples or whatever i wouldn't actually try to get work in the field part of that was because it's hard because a lot of internships are unpaid and that's a really crappy thing in general for society to have these unpaid internships because that basically creates an opportunity gap where people who can't afford to not get paid all summer therefore can't get any job opportunities and that's a whole thing
Marco:
So I hate unpaid internships.
Marco:
I was fortunate enough never to have to take one.
Marco:
The one internship I got was just basically doing Excel macros and nationwide insurance in Columbus, Ohio, where I lived.
Marco:
And that wasn't really anything software engineering related.
Marco:
It was just a computer-y job loosely at an office building.
Marco:
You know where they hired me?
Marco:
Because my mom knew a guy who worked there.
Marco:
Again, it's all about who you know.
Marco:
After college, I got hired not by...
Marco:
Google, Amazon, Apple, all these companies I was applying to, nope, they all ignore me.
Marco:
I didn't even get a call back from most of them.
Marco:
Amazon dicked me around for a while, but it ended up going nowhere.
Marco:
None of those places would hire me.
Marco:
The place I got hired was because someone I knew in my comp sci class
Marco:
got a job at this little company in Pittsburgh.
Marco:
She knew that I was decent at CS stuff from, from school and she recommended me and I went and interviewed and I did okay in the interview and, and that's why they hired me.
Marco:
It wasn't anything about my resume or anything cause I didn't have anything useful in my resume.
Marco:
Like I was a college kid.
Marco:
Later on, I talked to the people who hired me at that first job, and for some reason, the subject of hiring came up.
Marco:
And I learned one of the reasons they hired me and were willing to overlook my terrible grades is that I had done side projects.
Marco:
And all I had to show them at the time was a half-working Scorched Earth slash Tank Wars demo that I'd written in C++ in DirectX for Windows.
Marco:
And I'm like, here, look, here's something I did.
Marco:
And it kind of works, and it kind of puts some rendered polygons on screen.
Marco:
That's about it.
Marco:
It didn't do much else.
Marco:
But it did something.
Marco:
It was pretty basic.
Marco:
And I also, during the interview, they had given me a fairly straightforward programming test.
Marco:
It was one of those like, you know, because the job was going to be programming in C. That was the job.
Marco:
So it wasn't unreasonable for them to ask me stuff to program in C. And they asked me during the interview to write.
Marco:
It was one of those things like, you know, one of those exercises of like, write a quick function here that counts the number of duplicate lines in the input.
Marco:
So it basically involves, you have to do memory allocation.
Marco:
You have to do realloc, potentially, because you don't know how many lines of input there's going to be.
Marco:
Realloc might fail if it's out of memory.
Marco:
There's all these little implementation details they can check for to just kind of gauge your level of, do you know what you're doing at all?
Marco:
This was not on a whiteboard.
Marco:
They actually sat me in a private office, gave me a computer with a compiler, and said, take as long as you need.
Marco:
So it wasn't a super high-pressure thing.
Marco:
Here's a text editor and a C compiler and a command line.
Marco:
Just write this and let us know when you're done.
Marco:
so it was a very like humane way to do this i'd been in other interviews before that were not that humane that were more like you know google style like do this hard math problem on this whiteboard in front of us right now and i failed all those miserably so i like you know the one thing i didn't check during the program i didn't check the result of reality to see if it failed but otherwise i got everything else pretty much correct and they said that i was the only applicant who even came close
Marco:
And I thought that was absurd because these people were all way smarter than me.
Marco:
I thought I was hot shit when I got out of college because I was a programmer and I was smart.
Marco:
And boy, did I learn how much I didn't know during those first couple of years of that job.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
The people I was working for were way smarter than me.
Marco:
People I was working for and with were way smarter.
Marco:
They're all way smarter than me.
Marco:
Every 22-year-old has to kind of have that beaten out of them.
Marco:
That kind of like, I think I'm hot shit.
Marco:
I know everything.
Marco:
This is stupid.
Marco:
Why do you do it this way?
Marco:
All that stuff.
Marco:
I had to have all that beaten out of me slowly with just...
Marco:
embarrassment and being put in over my head a little bit.
Marco:
But anyway, I learned throughout that job and throughout some experience later also that most programmers who apply to most jobs don't know how to program.
Marco:
And I don't mean well.
Marco:
I mean at all.
Marco:
And part of, you know, we were discussing during last week's intro my whole complaint about the PHP stuff.
Marco:
Was that last week?
Marco:
Whatever that was.
Marco:
Part of the feedback that we got both from you guys during the show and then from the audience is that testable systems and hierarchies and hierarchies of classes and everything are in part made
Marco:
to be able to take a large number of very low-skilled programmers and try to get some kind of useful output out of them and try to control them in some way and try to make their code somewhat usable as output.
Marco:
And the reason why is because most people programming as a profession, as the job, they're being paid full-time to do it, can't program or barely know how to do it.
Marco:
So what most people don't realize is that if you know what you're doing at all,
Marco:
you are in the top 5% or 1% of applicants that any job opening is going to get.
Marco:
How you compare to the people within that 5% or 1%, you're comparing yourself to the whole world.
Marco:
It's like when you look at Instagram and you're like, man, that person is a really good photographer.
Marco:
I'm never going to be as good as them.
Marco:
I am just crap as a photographer.
Marco:
You don't realize that you are comparing yourself to
Marco:
to the top echelon of everybody in the world whose stuff is showing up or who got popular on something or whatever, you don't have to be the best programmer in the world.
Marco:
You just have to be the best programmer in the room sometimes.
Marco:
Not even all the time!
Marco:
You just have to be the best programmer in your office of one.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
There is so much potential of making good things, being a good programmer, being a useful programmer, having a full-time job as a programmer, where if you're just an okay programmer, you'll do great.
Marco:
You don't have to be the best of the best.
Marco:
I'm not.
Marco:
I've made my entire career being a decent but not amazing programmer.
Marco:
That's all I think.
Marco:
I'm not trying to be overly modest here.
Marco:
I think I'm a decent but not amazing programmer.
Marco:
And if you're looking at stuff and you're saying, I mean, I know some of this stuff, but a lot of this is over my head.
Marco:
You're still way ahead of everybody because you care.
Marco:
And that is more important than any other thing.
Marco:
Like, again, you'd be surprised how many people applying for how many jobs don't even really seem to care.
Marco:
So if you show up to a job interview, first of all, try to get to know as many people in the field as possible, as I said earlier.
Marco:
It's much more about who you know.
Marco:
Who you know will get you into the interview.
Marco:
It won't necessarily get you the job, but it will get you to be called or interviewed at all.
Marco:
That's like the main challenge in most of these, you know, most big companies.
Marco:
Like you can't even get them to call you or to consider you or to look at your resume.
Marco:
But if you can actually get somebody to look at it through whatever connections you might be able to pull, do that.
Marco:
And once you're in the interview, realize that if you just care, if you just show that you are enthusiastic about the field, that you actually are genuinely interested in this, you're not just doing it because you want to make money, you genuinely are interested in this, and you show that you have the capability to learn,
Marco:
then don't worry, and they won't worry if they're any good, about whether you know the specific stuff they're doing.
Marco:
Because whether or not you know the framework they're using or the specific technology they're using, first of all, it's going to change next week anyway.
Marco:
And second of all,
Marco:
It doesn't really matter to good programmers.
Marco:
You can learn it.
Marco:
You're going into a new job, you're going to have to learn their code base anyway.
Marco:
Even if it's a language and a framework that you're familiar with, you're still going to have to learn their code base.
Marco:
So there's going to be a learning curve to any new hire, to any programming job, no matter what it is.
Marco:
No matter what their skill level is, no matter what the language and everything is.
Marco:
So don't be intimidated by that if you can help it.
Marco:
And if they care about that, then they don't know what they're doing.
Marco:
Now,
Marco:
There are many companies who hire for programming jobs who don't know what they're doing, who aren't good at hiring, who are not good interviewers of candidates.
Marco:
Don't take it personally when you run into these because if you apply for more than a couple jobs, you're going to run into these.
Marco:
I applied to so many crappy, terrible companies because I didn't have anything else to apply to for a long time.
Marco:
I had so many – I must have had at least three or four hilariously bad interviews from companies who barely knew what they were doing.
Marco:
One company wanted me to rewrite their entire product from, I think it was Pascal to C++ or C in two weeks.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
And the question they asked me for the interview was, what kind of computers do I have at home?
Marco:
Please list them and their specs.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
Yeah, that was a company here in Westchester.
Marco:
Yeah, I didn't go to work for them.
Marco:
But yeah, so there's a lot of bad tech jobs and bad interviews out there too.
Marco:
So anyway, do what you can to be an enthusiast, to care, to show that you can learn, to have side projects at all.
Marco:
That's going to put you in like the top 1%.
Marco:
The hardest part is getting that interview.
Marco:
Once you get it, if you have any of this stuff, if you are interested, if you care, you're going to have a pretty easy time getting the job or at least getting an offer.
Marco:
So the hard part is just getting that interview in the first place.
Marco:
And that's where people you know, internships you can have, that will help you in that kind of thing.
Marco:
The good thing also is that this is mostly only temporary.
Marco:
This is mostly only for your first job.
Marco:
Once you have your first job, you will meet a bunch of other programmers who will have worked with you and possibly for you.
Marco:
So you will have a bunch of people who are now contacts in the industry.
Marco:
And you might be working on something people have heard of or you might be able to do stuff on the side or release libraries or make blog posts or talk at conferences, something like that.
Marco:
There will be ways to get your name out either to the general public in some kind of public way like that or to at least the people you're working with.
Marco:
And then once you have that one job and have worked there for a while, as long as you don't totally mess it up, which you won't because you care, then you can use those people to get all future jobs.
Marco:
And you can use that resume and that work experience to help you get everything else.
Marco:
So this is mostly only a challenge for your first job or two out of school.
Marco:
Once you have that, that is much easier to build upon because you start building that professional network and you start building that resume with more important stuff than just, well, I was in college, you know.
Marco:
So good luck.
Marco:
This will work.
Marco:
You will probably run into crap situations and crap offers like my like weird rewrite our whole product with your computers that you listed at home job.
Marco:
Thank God I didn't take that job.
Marco:
But but this will this will work out just care and you'd be surprised how far ahead that puts you.
Casey:
When I was interviewing to have somebody join a team that I was either working on or in charge of, one of the things that I was always looking for – and again, this is not unique.
Casey:
This is not a new invention.
Casey:
One of the things I always looked for was an eagerness, an eagerness to learn.
Casey:
Because just like you said, Marco, no matter who is coming into –
Casey:
to interview for this job unless they had worked there before, left and came back.
Casey:
At the very least, we're going to need to learn the code.
Casey:
And if somebody's coming in thinking they're hot stuff and saying, oh, React Native is the only way to go and all this like Swift and Objective-C stuff, it's garbage.
Casey:
Well, let me talk to you about how we've architected our Swift code base.
Casey:
Are you ready?
Casey:
You know, like it's as long as you're not hyper opinionated and you're willing to learn that will put you in front of a lot, a lot of people.
Casey:
John, what are your thoughts?
Casey:
As the oldest of the three old men, what do you think about this?
John:
And the person who's had the most jobs, right?
Casey:
I don't know if that's true, actually.
Casey:
I've had my fair share.
John:
No, most jobs, yeah.
John:
How many places have you worked, Casey?
John:
I've never got more than Marco.
John:
That's not easy.
Casey:
Let's see, one, I think five, six.
John:
something like that but you tend to stay places for a pretty long time you might it might be a tie i think i think i'm around seven uh anyway i should look at my resume and see how many i can't actually enumerate them anymore because i'm too old um so the the bit about making something a project or whatever the reason that's such a useful thing not not the whole idea of like you got to have this amazing github resume with a thousand things and a million stars and whatever like the
John:
but just the idea that you have literally ever made anything ever is because that's a quick way for people in the industry to tell essentially whether you can program at all, like Marco was saying, right?
John:
Because if you do any project that,
John:
you will you know if you actually do it yourself right you will be forced to deal with all the things that have to do with the project oh uh some language thing is stumping me the build system is being weird i found a bug and i can't figure out how to fix it uh does this feature work is this feature any good like tackling all those annoying details yourself and getting something anything literally anything out the end that does a thing and you can say here you go it's like okay
John:
Well, we know now that you can actually program.
John:
Again, assuming you did that all yourself, you will have had to tackle all these tiny little problems to make basically any application.
John:
In the absence of that, it's surprisingly difficult to tell in the moment whether someone can program or not.
John:
That's why they make you type things and write programs, either on a whiteboard or on a computer.
John:
They're trying to figure out if you can program.
John:
But that, even the one where they give you a computer in a room, I feel like even that's unfair because...
John:
To get a finished, completed, working, non-trivial program often takes more than the amount of time you're willing to sit in a room and do a thing, right?
John:
That's why having done a project is a good proxy for that.
John:
So I don't think it should be a prerequisite, but I think it's important to you, not to the person who's going to hire you, but to you just to show yourself, A, do you like being a programmer?
John:
And B, can you actually do it?
John:
Make a thing that does a thing, not a school assignment, not a homework problem set.
Marco:
something anything that does a thing and polish it like it's an actual finished product of some kind that will be informative uh for you so uh an experience i had i would say it's it's not even that high of a bar like one time i was we were trying to hire somebody at tumblr and we were interviewing a bunch of programmer candidates and we asked everybody please bring in some code you've written any code that you can show us any code just bring it with you
Marco:
I think one applicant did.
Marco:
It was shocking.
Marco:
Nobody could bring any code they had written.
Marco:
And you could say, well, maybe their code for previous jobs they weren't allowed to bring.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
You've never written and can't now write any code that you can show us.
Marco:
Literally anything.
Marco:
Shockingly few people could even do that.
John:
Yeah, and a working thing is even better than just the code.
John:
It's like, here's the code, but also, by the way, here's the thing.
John:
Even though it's Marco's weird thing that throws polygons on top and does a thing, he had an idea for a thing and he made it.
John:
And the number of weird little hurdles that you had to overcome to get to that point is surprisingly high.
Marco:
We weren't even asking for that.
Marco:
We were asking for like two pages of code, just something we can look at.
John:
Yeah, like they couldn't even do that.
John:
So for the experience I had getting out of school is related to this question.
John:
I started working for the company that I eventually got a full time job at when I was still in school.
John:
Again, to Marco's point about contacts or whatever.
John:
How did I get the job out of school?
John:
Because I'd already been working for them part time as a student.
John:
It's a great way to get a job out of school.
John:
And I was doing web development and I knew everything there was to know about web development because there was like nothing to know because the web was brand spanking new.
John:
It was like 1991, 1992, whatever.
John:
Like the web was new.
John:
Nobody knew anything about the web.
John:
Tim Berners-Lee didn't know anything about the web.
John:
There was so little information at the beginning that if you got in on the ground floor, it was possible to know everything there was to know basically about the web.
John:
And so that's where I'm coming in as I certainly didn't know everything I was to know about all these technologies that predated me.
John:
I was still learning the basics of Unix, the basics of C and C++, the basics of Perl.
John:
I didn't know how to do decent X Windows programming.
John:
All my X Windows applications would crash and I didn't understand why and it was a mess, right?
John:
But because the web was new, I knew like everything about it.
John:
So I was primed to have a crisis just like is being described in this question.
John:
It's like, oh, it just seems like there's so many things out there, right?
John:
Because I was doing web dev, I'm like, oh, well, I feel overwhelmed by other stuff, but I'm going to be a web dev and I know everything about web dev.
John:
So I'm all set, right?
John:
So I get my job out of school and I'm doing web dev and I'm doing it with the
John:
comment you know the technology the cutting end technology of the time pearl cgi scripts right that's like where it's at right apache pearl cgi was super cutting edge stuff and i knew all of it from top to bottom right and written my own web servers and c had written you know cgi engines i knew all the nuts and bolts i knew who http worked and all you know
John:
And the three web browsers that were out, I knew all about those, right?
John:
Everyone's good to go.
John:
But then, sure enough, you know, the next wave of web tech came, and it was like, forget about CGI scripts, forget about Perl, forget about Apache, forget about, certainly forget about C and C++.
John:
the future web development is all about Java and XML and this thing called SOAP and WSDL and a million other accurate SOAPs.
Casey:
And it was like... Trigger warning.
John:
Right.
John:
And I was like, well, wait a second.
John:
I already know everything about web dev and you're telling me you're going to throw...
John:
17 pounds worth of phone book-sized tech manuals of new technology that I've never heard of on top of me and saying, guess what, supposed web developer, do you know this stuff?
John:
And my answer was no.
John:
I don't know that stuff.
John:
I mean, I know a little bit about Java.
John:
Isn't that that thing that was going to run on set-top boxes?
John:
What the hell are you talking about?
John:
And it's like...
John:
do you know about XML?
John:
And do you know about all the... I was like, and do you know about SOAP?
John:
And I, you know, as an actual working web developer, I took one look at SOAP.
John:
I'm like, are you kidding me?
John:
Like, what... So, A, it didn't appeal to me.
John:
And B, it was like, there's all this knowledge.
John:
So I panicked.
John:
I bought tons of books about XML.
John:
I bought XML, the annotated spec, so I could not only learn XML, but learn what the people who made XML thought about XML.
John:
I brought the big Java books.
John:
I got the Java in a nutshell.
John:
I got the big Java Enterprise Edition.
John:
I got the Java Beans thing.
John:
I got like...
John:
Because I'm like, oh my god, if I'm going to do this as a career, suddenly I'm miles behind.
John:
I thought I knew everything and then I don't know anything.
John:
And the lesson I learned from this experience was that
John:
Two things.
John:
One, new technologies will always come along to replace old ones.
John:
Two, it's not the end of the world if you don't enter a field knowing everything about it.
John:
In fact, it's almost impossible to ever do that unless you happen to be at college just as the web was appearing like I was.
John:
That's never going to happen.
John:
Probably not going to happen for you and your technology.
John:
So don't worry about that.
John:
And then three...
John:
very often new technologies come and everyone thinks it's the next big thing and they suck or they're awesome and you never learn them, but you're still okay.
John:
Like it's not possible to know everything.
John:
So that overwhelmed feeling you have, you both need to get used to it and also not worry about it.
John:
Like it's,
John:
It's not like you can ignore it.
John:
You can't just be like, well, I never lean to learn a new thing.
John:
Because you will.
John:
But the whole point is, you will learn new things.
John:
Like, it's okay.
John:
You'll learn them at the pace that regular humans learn them.
John:
It's unreasonable, getting to Marco's point about bad jobs, it's unreasonable for any employer to expect you to immediately know everything about a new technology that comes down the pike, right?
Right.
John:
you won't and you can't and if they expect you to they're a bad employer and that's the place you don't want to work right so don't worry about that just worry about the basics can i program do i enjoy it and am i able to learn new things in any capacity and then my final point that hasn't been brought up here is
John:
for getting jobs and having done a lot of hiring especially for like big companies that need to hire a lot of programmers the bigger your company is especially if you're not one of like the big you know top three brand name companies if you're just like a big company needs to hire a lot of programmers and there are a lot of them out there right because big companies have a lot of code and they need a lot of people to wrangle it but they're not apple google or amazon right or facebook um
John:
you can't hire for you you just can't say we need someone who knows insert technology platform framework or whatever here because you will narrow your pool of potential applicants so much if you demand that you well you have to know angular and you have to know but it has to be angular too right and you have to know this version of node and you have to know this version of unix and you have to know this database and like you'll never find anybody you little you can't hire that way
John:
Instead, what you hire for are things other than A, can you program, which is really important criteria for programmers, right?
John:
That's always there.
John:
But B, are you someone that the other people who work here want to work with?
John:
Are you a decent, nice, reasonable human being?
John:
Are you pleasant to work with?
John:
That's one of the most important questions is like, would you want to work with this person?
John:
Would you want this person on your team?
John:
And that question has nothing to do with if you can even program.
John:
It has everything to do with what are you like as a person?
John:
How are your communication skills?
John:
Do you seem like you're pleasant?
John:
Do you seem like you'll be able to show up on time?
John:
Just basic sort of human factors.
John:
In practice, if you are – Marco had a good phrase six months ago.
John:
If you are reasonably smart and care –
John:
then you're you're way ahead of almost everybody and again i didn't mention any skills there and part of caring is do you care how other people are feeling do you care about how you present yourself and you know so you just need to be you need to be a nice person like if if no one wants to work with you in group projects at school this is a bad sign
John:
Because work is a never-ending group project, right?
John:
Unless you want to be a lone wolf and start your own company and just do your own thing, fine.
John:
But if you're going to work in a place with other people, you need to be able to get along with other people no matter what you're doing.
John:
It's nothing to do with programming.
John:
And I feel like the longer I spend in companies doing hiring –
John:
the more important it is to me to say, all right, this person is never programmed and never seen a computer, but I'll hire them any day if they are smart and can communicate and I would like to work with them because, again, in big companies, we'll teach you whatever.
John:
We'll teach you, for example, working in a company to use Perl.
John:
We'll teach you Perl.
John:
We don't expect you to know Perl.
John:
We know nobody knows Perl.
John:
You're a new graduate from computer science, but are you smart and personable and seem like you can learn things?
John:
No.
John:
you'll learn our stupid technology stack like that's no problem like as long as you're willing to learn it welcome aboard we'll teach it to you right it's just can you program and are you a nice person so i would concentrate more like after you do your first project and say yes i can program and it's a thing i vaguely enjoy doing i really do want a job in this field find that out for yourself and once you find that out make sure that your performance in the interview is
John:
Like there's only so much you can do on the tech side.
John:
So delve into it as much as you want, but make sure that you come across as a person that people say, I'd like to be on a team with that person.
John:
It seems like they would be nice to work with.
John:
If they're not thinking that you're not going to get hired unless the company is really bad at hiring again.
John:
Cause lots of companies say, well, I hated this person, but he solved our programming quiz.
John:
So I guess we have to hire him again.
John:
You don't want to work with those companies.
John:
You really don't.
John:
Uh, and you don't want to work with those people either.
John:
So yeah,
John:
Be excellent to each other, as they say.
Casey:
What's the Joel software guide to interviewing or something like that?
Casey:
It is excellent.
Casey:
And one of my favorite takeaways from it, and not everyone can do this, but one of my favorite takeaways from it was in so many words, and he does a much more eloquent job of it, default to no.
Casey:
And if you're really just bowled over, say yes.
Casey:
And like one of the things that he drills in in this post, I'll put it in the show notes if I can find it, is, you know, oh, this person's good for that team over there.
Casey:
Nope, that's a no.
Marco:
I got one of those.
Marco:
I got one of those.
Marco:
Like, this team doesn't want you, but this other team might take you.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
You can come here and work on a trial basis.
Marco:
Yeah, I got one of those.
Marco:
That was fun.
Casey:
Yeah, that's a no.
Casey:
It's a very well done post.
Casey:
Like I said, I'll see if I can dig it up.
Casey:
But you should read that.
Casey:
But even if you're interviewing, to get a job rather than being the interviewer, it's a really, really good post.
John:
And we have to mention FizzBuzz again because I'm all mentioned if we don't.
John:
That's the whole point of the FizzBuzz thing is that people are always trying to find a quick way to answer the can you program question, and FizzBuzz is one of them.
John:
I still forget what the details is like if it's divisible by 15 type Fizz, if it's divisible by 5 type Buzz, and if it's divisible by both type print something else.
John:
It's like the simplest program you can have, and you would say, surely there is nobody who cannot program this, but that's not the case.
John:
So that's their quick litmus test of
John:
Can you program?
John:
Unfortunately, it being so popular, people just probably memorize how to do FizzBuzz and they can still fake you out, which is why it's even better if you've made something yourself.
Marco:
I would also say just kind of career direction wise, you know, John mentioned a lot about like, you know, when he was entering the workforce, like the web was just getting going and that was like a big deal.
Marco:
And that was a big deal for a while.
Marco:
I was entering the workforce in 2004 and moved within the workforce in 2006.
Marco:
And that was like peak time for Web 2.0.
Marco:
That was like when all the Ruby on Rails movement was happening and Web 2.0 was a really big deal.
Marco:
it's always a good idea with your career to enter a field that is in its ascent.
Marco:
And computer science and programming, this field is so big, there's always going to be different ways of different types of things.
Marco:
I would say today...
Marco:
is probably not a good idea to enter the field of writing generic web apps.
Marco:
Because that era, while it's still here and it's still big, the ascent of that has long since passed.
Marco:
And it is now in the stable state, maybe a decline over time.
Marco:
I haven't followed it too closely recently.
Marco:
10 years ago, apps were really young and were taking off like a rocket.
Marco:
And I think they have probably
Marco:
probably leveled off.
Marco:
If they haven't already leveled off, they're going to shortly.
Marco:
They're in a stable state now.
Marco:
There's lots of jobs writing app code, but
Marco:
What would be best, ideally, is definitely try not to enter something that's declining.
Marco:
Unless you want to be a COBOL programmer.
Marco:
In most cases, you'll be employed until the end of time.
Marco:
But otherwise, don't get into something that is declining.
Marco:
First of all, if you want to make a lot of money, you can get stock options and growing stuff and make more money there.
Marco:
But also, if you just want better job security and more exciting jobs to do, getting into something while it's young is generally better for that.
Marco:
but so right now I would I don't know what that is because I'm now old and boring and I'm no longer looking for those like young things but it's probably something more related to like ML and data analysis kind of stuff if I had to guess but I don't know but if you can get into something that's like it's it's earlier in its in its growth cycle and its lifespan that's generally better than hopping on something that's already in its like golden years
John:
Well, it depends on what you want.
John:
Like if you want that experience of the excitement of the new and the more risk reward, but some people come out of college and they want to just get a stable job so they can go work for a bank, which I wouldn't recommend because I hear horror stories from it.
John:
But anyway, banking is not an industry that's going away anytime soon and they always need people who know how to program.
John:
So if that appeals to you, go for it, right?
John:
But if you want excitement and a potential upside, yeah, look for an industry that's young and in the upswing rather than going to work for a bank.
John:
Again, I can't stress this enough to not work for a bank.
Marco:
i have so many friends programmer friends who have gone to work for banks i have never heard a single one tell me a good story about working in finance with computers it is just actually the uh the company that gave me the terrible interview with where i felt all the math questions that they had me do on the whiteboard which was the same company as the one that told me their team didn't want me but some other team would take me on a trial basis yeah they were a bank they were a big new york bank that became a mayor at some point
John:
sometimes like boutique band like if you work for like a hedge fund or some other weird like super rich person thing occasionally they have interesting programming jobs and they pay lots of money and it like makes up for it but like just a generic bank like the sort of base level of finance too many people i know in an industry and they just all tell me bad bad stories i mean i've worked you know in health care and that also has a terrible reputation well earned for computers but there's lots of good
John:
companies in the healthcare computer space the products aren't great but the companies are reasonable places to work so and knowing people as we can ask them hey you work for a insert company here of whatever whether it's a gaming company also a terrible industry but you know like you can ask them what's it like to work for a bank what's it like to work for a hotel chain what's it like to work doing data analysis for a fast food chain what's is your fast food chain difference from other places you work like
John:
That's why another reason knowing people is good, not just because they can get you an interview or a job, but because you can ask them what it's like and get the real answer and not just like – like from the outside, before you get any real jobs in the industry, it's very difficult to gauge what a job would be like.
John:
Like when you're in college having not had a real programming job, you might think, what would it be like to work –
John:
at you know apple and facebook maybe you have some idea from like you read articles and stuff and you're like what would it be like to work for a bank for example for work for a high-speed training company what would it be like to work for a networking company what would it be like to work for akamai and you have an idea in your head of what's that like
John:
And I almost guarantee that unless it's a very public company like Apple or Google or something where you constantly see what it's like to work there, you have no idea what it's actually like until you talk to somebody who really works there.
John:
And even if you talk to somebody, it's like, well, I work in the whatever department and that's a hellhole.
John:
But the other department in the same company is much better.
Casey:
You know, it's funny, what you're describing is Capital One, which is, it might be officially based out of the DC area, but effectively is based out of Richmond.
Casey:
And from what I understand, Capital One is reasonably forward thinking when it comes to their tech stack, but it's still an enormous, enormous business.
Casey:
And from what I've gathered...
Casey:
Typically, people are well compensated, both in terms of salary and total comp.
Casey:
But beyond that, I've heard from many different people in technology and outside that it's all about what team you're on.
Casey:
And some of the teams are really great and really lovely.
Casey:
And some of them are just frigging nightmares.
Casey:
CarMax as well, actually.
John:
we heard the same thing about apple for that remember there was just a story going around of like whatever it was like that that wing of apple that that handles like it stuff and like they hire a bunch of contractors that like that was the group you did not want to work in and apple was really bad right but of course we all know other groups in apple that are awesome to work in right so the bigger the company the more likely it is that there are pockets of terribleness or maybe pockets of greatness or whatever so yeah it's
John:
Assuming you can ever leave your house and search for a job, it's a tough old world out there.
John:
It is.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Final Ask ATP.
Casey:
Asajj writes, hypothetical.
Casey:
PHP is killed off from support tonight, and tomorrow you realize you need to write a new server system.
Casey:
Marco, what are you writing it in?
Casey:
I'm partial to Ruby or Go myself, says Asajj.
Marco:
So this is an interesting question.
Marco:
I mean, in reality, this would never happen for lots of reasons.
Marco:
I mean, not only is PHP very popular and widely used, but also like, what does it mean to be killed off from support?
Marco:
PHP is open source.
Marco:
And enough people use it that somebody, some company or companies or entities would pick it up and would just start, they would fork it or they would maintain it or whatever.
Marco:
And so it would be maintained for a while.
Marco:
And so that would be fine.
Marco:
But if I go with the spirit of the hypothetical and actually assume that I really shouldn't be writing a new PHP code immediately because it will never get updated again and eventually that will cause probably security issues, then what do I do?
Marco:
The very first thing I would do is really consider whether I need to be running my own servers anymore at all.
Marco:
I wrote the Overcast backend before CloudKit was released.
Marco:
right before, which is kind of frustrating.
Marco:
It was like a year before.
Marco:
Now that I'm pretty much only focused on Apple platforms, I'm never going to make an Android app.
Marco:
I don't care about the web app that much.
Marco:
So
Marco:
Really, if I'm just going to serve an iOS app, and by the way, frankly, most podcast app users don't need sync at all.
Marco:
Most podcast app users use it just on their phone.
Marco:
And that's why a lot of leading apps don't even have sync.
Marco:
And it's fine.
Marco:
They don't really lose a lot of customers over it because most people don't even need this feature at all.
John:
Also, you can use CloudKit from the web, by the way.
John:
The CloudKit team wanted me to tell you that.
Marco:
Yes, I have written a CloudKit web login.
Marco:
So you can actually, it's not linked publicly yet, but if you go to overcast.fm slash login underscore iCloud, you can log in with CloudKit instead of using an email and password.
Marco:
Anyway, I would very much first investigate, do I need a backend anymore at all?
Marco:
Can I do most or all of what I need to do with CloudKit?
Marco:
And just whatever small features I would lose from not having a web backend, oh well.
Marco:
I would be saving thousands of dollars a month and would not have this giant backend to maintain.
Marco:
So maybe that would be worth it.
John:
I thought you were keeping to the spirit of the question.
John:
The spirit of the question is, you need to write a new server system.
John:
And you're keeping to the spirit of the question, you said, but what if I didn't?
Marco:
Yeah, well, if I need to totally start over with my server-side system, the first thing is that Stack Overflow answer, do I need to be doing this?
Marco:
Why am I using a server-side system?
Marco:
The spirit of the question is, you need to write a new server system.
Marco:
He wants you to pick a language.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
There are things about... So, Ruby... I don't love the Ruby style.
Marco:
I don't know if I would choose Ruby.
Marco:
One thing I love a lot about PHP is that running the servers for it is incredibly easy.
Marco:
Because PHP does not have persistent processes for each request, or for different requests.
Marco:
So, like, you make a request, and even though it's optimized and has opcaches and everything...
Marco:
The way it seems to you as the programmer is there's no shared state in memory of the PHP process.
Marco:
So when you make a request, you get a PHP process that happens for that individual web request, and then that's it.
Marco:
So there's a whole bunch of stuff you don't have to worry about.
Marco:
For instance, memory leaks are just not a thing in PHP.
Marco:
You don't have to worry about that unless you're writing long-running scripts, and I have some, but for the most part...
Marco:
there's things like that that you don't have to worry about.
Marco:
There's things like shared mutable state and parallelism.
Marco:
PHP has no built-in parallelism.
Marco:
There's no multi-threaded code support at the language level.
John:
Don't forget my favorite thing from the P languages, Python, PHP, Perl.
John:
If it's segfaults, it's not your fault.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
There is basically nothing you can do in your PHP code to make it segfault on a regular basis unless there's a serious bug in PHP or a module you're using.
Marco:
And that is not your fault.
Marco:
Yeah, it's not your fault.
Marco:
It generally isn't your problem.
Marco:
And chances are Facebook has already hit it and fixed it way before you did.
Marco:
What I love about PHP is that there's a lot of classes of problems I don't have to think about.
Marco:
just by running PHP servers that in other languages where there's an app process that handles multiple requests in parallel or in series or whatever, when you have persistent long-running processes, you have to think about a lot more things that in PHP I don't.
Marco:
And a lot of problems that other things have, like, oh, the app server crashed.
Marco:
That literally never happens to me.
Marco:
I've never had that problem.
Marco:
It can't really happen with a properly configured and running PHP instance.
Marco:
So there's a lot of stuff that I just... It's just easy to run PHP servers from a practical standpoint.
Marco:
And a lot of the new languages don't have those luxuries because they're more sophisticated, they're more advanced.
Marco:
They're not just made for answering web requests.
Marco:
They're also made for writing whole applications and everything else.
Marco:
So they have larger scopes of what they do, but that also means that when you're running servers, you have more types of problems to worry about.
Marco:
So I would want to pick something that is simpler, that doesn't necessarily have all that baggage.
Marco:
At the same time...
Marco:
I really do like old established languages like PHP, like Perl even if I have to say it, and Ruby, Python.
Marco:
These would all be certainly worth considering because the ease of running servers for old established, and I've talked about this many times before, I love running old boring server code.
Marco:
or server packages and languages and stuff.
Marco:
Because old, boring software tends to work a lot better and with less fussing from me.
Marco:
Because I hate being a sysadmin.
Marco:
I do it because I have to to do the rest of my job.
Marco:
I don't love any sysadmin type work I do.
Marco:
I do it because it's required to do other stuff I care about.
Marco:
And so I want to spend as little time doing sysadmin work as possible.
Marco:
I don't want to have to babysit the servers.
Marco:
And I don't want to have to be woken up in the middle of the night by some process crashed and something is broken now, you know.
Marco:
I don't want to do any of that.
Marco:
And so sticking with older, more boring, more established tools, not using cutting-edge frameworks or languages or OSs or anything like that, databases certainly, that's my style.
Marco:
So I would look mostly at the old stuff.
Marco:
I like...
Marco:
go for certain things i do use go for my crawlers not for the whole stack just for like the part that pulls the web pages and tells the php code hey this feed has now updated go check it but go is weird in a lot of ways and i find it cumbersome to write significant go code like there's a reason why i kept only a very simple part of my app in go and the whole rest of it's still php
Marco:
So I don't know if I would pick Go.
Marco:
And then there's the question of Swift because I'm learning Swift slowly anyway because I have to for this other half of my job that I care more about.
Marco:
And I certainly would love to only learn one new language instead of two and really master that one instead of splitting my knowledge continuously and splitting the tools continuously.
Marco:
So I would actually – even though it goes against everything I just said, I would consider Swift –
Marco:
simply so I could consolidate language knowledge and tools and just master one new language.
Marco:
But again, because it would be like cutting edge and weird and not meant for this task at all, I'm not sure I would stick with that.
Marco:
There's also the option of going for the more abstract like app platform kind of languages where, you know, you write something in JavaScript or something and it just runs in some weird abstracted like node language
Marco:
not the language, but some kind of app server node, Casey's weird showbot thing, wherever that runs.
Marco:
There's that kind of, run it on Google App Engine.
Marco:
There's always those kind of options.
Marco:
Frankly, what people do with those never strikes me as anything compelling.
Marco:
Not that your server sucks, but the experience of running it sounds awful.
Marco:
The problems people have to deal with, those things crash.
Marco:
They don't seem like they're particularly performant or economical.
Marco:
uh so i i probably wouldn't do that either um one of the things i care a lot about is hosting things cheaply and it's not because i'm a cheapskate it's because i i want to keep the cost of the entire business low enough that i don't have to outsource things to other services and that i i don't have to like charge for sync and stuff like that um like i wrote i wrote my push notification stuff last week that's what i was talking about i can send push notifications for nothing
Marco:
because I write my own low level code.
Marco:
I don't bring in a whole bunch of packages.
Marco:
I'm using fast, easy languages that don't need much, you know, like I don't need to call it to some other service.
Marco:
It's going to charge me a fee or take a percentage of my income to do simple stuff like push notifications, subscription management, stuff like that, you know,
Marco:
So anyway, to still not fully answer the question, I guess, I think the first thing I would ask is, do I still need the server backend?
Marco:
And if I really, really need one, I would take a quick look at Swift, probably run away screaming, and then go to something boring like Python.
Casey:
I think that's reasonable.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode and Mack Weldon, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because 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, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't
Casey:
So long.
Marco:
We did delay this week, partly for my kid's birthday and partly because of Magic Keyboards arriving for me and Casey today.
John:
It wouldn't delay for my new Mac GPU.
John:
I know.
John:
It's fine.
Marco:
When the hell is it going to come?
Marco:
Tomorrow, right?
John:
Although I don't know if that's actually true.
John:
I ordered a car battery, too, and that car battery is having a lot of delivery exceptions.
John:
It's hard for me to tell whether anything is even in motion, but someday I might get a car battery.
John:
Delivery exception.
John:
What does that mean?
John:
Well, it means there's been an exception to delivery.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, is it ever going to come?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Delivery exception.
John:
I am kind of surprised that you can get a car battery delivered.
John:
I was surprised that, what do you call it, my local dealership wouldn't deliver a battery.
John:
I'm like, they'd deliver anything.
John:
I've ordered all sorts of parts for my cars, but they wouldn't deliver a battery.
John:
So I had to go, I mean, every place online.
John:
They'll probably deliver a whole car.
John:
Yeah.
John:
the battery is 30 pounds and filled with hazardous materials and i had to pay a hazardous material fee but it was still cheaper than the alternatives and i didn't want to leave my house so yeah i found this out from i've been driving my car every like week or two just to keep it driving but uh letting it sit i let it sit a little bit too long in my driveway wouldn't start so i had to uh jump it and then realized oh slow down slow down slow down why'd you jump it
John:
To get it started?
Casey:
Why wouldn't you push start it, man?
John:
I'm not going to push start it off my driveway into the street.
Casey:
No, no, no, no.
Casey:
You just let it roll.
Casey:
I remember your driveway having a small incline.
John:
I know how to push start a car.
John:
I've done it before, but given the choice, I would much rather start it the civilized way with electricity.
Casey:
Oh, but where's the fun in that?
Casey:
That's like one of the few advantages anymore of having a six-speed.
John:
I was all excited to clean the battery terminals, but you know what?
John:
You could eat off of them.
John:
They're so clean.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
no but seriously that's like one of the only fun things about having a stick anymore like on like obviously i prefer it for a lot of fun reasons but academically speaking you know that's one of the only fun things you can still do with the stick that you can't do with a regular car i don't like that it seems it's mean to do to the car i don't like so much empathy for the machine but exactly anyway um but yeah my battery is what six years old now so it's it's time
Marco:
so i've never actually done a push start so do you literally just like get it rolling and then how do you start the spark plugs compression uh the magic of compression will ignite it's like a diesel so you still you still are turning the key to start at some point just to turn on the start the spark plugs and everything like how do you do that yeah yeah so well so first of all have you never seen the karate kid second of all uh
Casey:
Have you not seen the karate?
Casey:
Holy shit.
Casey:
I haven't, no.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Marco:
I don't know how you thought you would.
Marco:
I'm surprised you saw it.
Marco:
Are you surprised?
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
I shouldn't be.
Casey:
But this was like our time to watch those kinds of movies.
John:
No, it's a little bit before your time.
Casey:
Yeah, it's the thing.
Marco:
I was a little young for it.
Casey:
No, you're right.
Casey:
Anyways, so yeah, so you put – well, back when we had cars with keys – And engines.
Casey:
Well, for some of us, engines.
Ugh.
Casey:
Yes, yes.
Casey:
This is a problem I don't have.
Casey:
And you skateboard out the side.
Casey:
Well, actually, at this point, you would not be in gear, hypothetically.
Casey:
Or you have somebody push behind you or you're skateboarding out the side or both.
Casey:
Then once you've gotten to like five-ish miles an hour, you know, enough that you're getting a pretty good clip for having pushed the car, then you get in the car if you're not already in it.
Casey:
Push down on the clutch, put it in second gear, make sure it's in run, dump the clutch, just pop the clutch, and if necessary, give it a little juice as well.
Casey:
And hopefully everything will start coming to life and you will start the car.
Casey:
Because if you think about it, what does a starter do?
Casey:
A starter is spinning the flywheel with an electric motor.
Casey:
Well, if you connect a spinning transmission to the flywheel by taking your foot off the clutch, guess what you're doing?
Casey:
You're spinning the flywheel and hopefully starting the motor.
Casey:
It's the same thing, just a much more aggravating process.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
And then I guess that's driving the alternator, so that's okay.
Marco:
Or whatever, sparks.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Are spark plugs DC or AC?
Marco:
I don't even know.
Marco:
DC, I believe.
Marco:
Why is something called an alternator that generates DC?
John:
That's a good question.
Marco:
Because I guess everything that's in a car is DC then.
Marco:
So why is it called an alternator?
Casey:
I presume it's about the power generation, not the consumption, but not to say it's generating AC.
John:
Or we could be entirely wrong about whether it's DC.
John:
Who knows?
John:
I don't know that much about that part of it.
Marco:
I think everything in a car is DC, but I don't know how spark plugs work.
John:
The interesting thing about push-starting a car and the excitement of it, well, first of all, I think the idea that KC, that you could like...
John:
have your foot out the thing and be pushing your car along is a fantasy for my youth because to get my cars moving at all you have to be outside the car pressing against like the a pillar with all your might you know totally outside the car two feet on the ground to get it rolling and then you have to jump in the hopefully now just starting to move car which is the way more exciting part and then so you pop the clutch and you're hoping the the engine roars to life but what if the problem wasn't just that it was a bad battery but
John:
What if there's something else wrong with your crap box?
John:
Now you have a car that you are now rolling in that has not started even though you dumped the clutch.
John:
And then hopefully your brakes, you're able to stop the car with either the parking brakes or whatever force you can muster into the hydraulic system.
John:
Old cars are a little bit better in this regard than new ones.
John:
These are all reasons not to do this.
John:
Use jumper cables attached to your battery and it'll work much better.
Casey:
Now, do you go do you I haven't jumped a car in a couple of years now, but do you connect all four cables to the batteries or do you do the right thing and actually ground on one side?
John:
So there's the thing about the right thing that we learned as kids.
John:
Good luck finding an unpainted piece of metal in the engine bay of a modern car.
Casey:
Good luck.
Casey:
You say that the BMW had a post, a specific post specifically for grounding, specifically for jumping.
John:
If there's a specific place in my Accord for it, I could not find it.
John:
Like, there's only painted metal.
John:
And in case you're wondering, no, it does not work through the paint.
John:
Like, I tried it.
John:
I'm like, well, maybe they just... Maybe it'll work and maybe the little... No.
John:
I had to do it to the terminal because I couldn't find an unpainted piece of metal on the engine.
John:
I didn't look at the owner's manual.
John:
Maybe there is some post that I'm supposed to look at, too.
John:
But bottom line is the reason they're telling you to do that is, like, outgassing and exploding batteries and yada yada.
John:
And it's like, again, in modern cars, much less likely than before.
John:
Not that I...
John:
you know kids read your owner's manual that's the actual way to do it but i i couldn't be bothered the real challenge was the real challenge was hey do you know where the jumper cables are i was so excited i found the the jumper cable box guess what was in it not jumper cables like oh come on it's like a trap set i think my dad did i think he was he was cleaning up in my garage and he he found a bunch of cables and he found a box and it was like just a bunch of household extension cords it was like the exactly right weight for it i opened it up it's just a
John:
like finding stuff that you haven't used in years and years, especially in my house is not easy.
John:
So that was the hardest part of the whole thing was finding the stuff.
Casey:
Where were they?
Casey:
Did you not have them in the, in the, the note or whatever it was?
John:
I didn't have them on the squirrel list.
John:
I looked, you know, I haven't seen them in ages.
Casey:
So where were they?
John:
No, actually I didn't, I didn't even end up finding the jumper cables.
John:
What I found was my car starting thing that I had from, it's even, it's even older that basically has the equivalent of jumper cables in it.
John:
So yeah, six and one half a dozen the other.
Casey:
I cannot see you push-starting a car today.
Casey:
I could totally see you doing it in your 20s.
John:
I totally want to see you push-starting a car.
Casey:
Oh, I definitely want to see it.
Casey:
I just don't see it happening.
John:
If I had to, I could do it, but I would only do it in an emergency situation.
John:
That's the only time I did it in the past, too, emergency situations.
John:
like the stupid the dome light in my stupid volvo wagon just leaving the dome light on while you're at the the beach at night when you're not supposed to be like you come back to the parking lot and the dome light drains your battery that's i don't know if that dome light was like halogen i don't understand how it was like you're not leaving this beach unless you push start this car and that's you know in the dark oh that's fun no hills no hills this is pancake flat parking lot you know what it's like you know you're out on uh
John:
The barrier beach and it's just one big flat parking lot.
John:
That's why you got to be pressing against the day pillar with all your might and running as hard as you can and jump in.
Casey:
I'm not about to try it, but I want to know what happens with a push start car like mine, for example.
Casey:
I don't have a key.
John:
Put a push to start with a button.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
Yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
You know what?
Casey:
What if I literally don't have enough juice to even get it to run?
Casey:
Like presumably there could be a state where it has enough juice to activate it, activate like the car computer and so on and so forth, but it just can't turn over.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
But what happens if I don't even have enough juice for that?
Casey:
Like, could I push-start it?
John:
Yeah, that's the problem with modern cars.
John:
You need some minimal amount of electricity for anything to work, whereas old cars were so mechanical.
John:
Like, I don't know if the compression ignition is a real thing or just I'm imagining it, but I always imagined in cars with primitive – in older cars, like from the 70s with primitive systems that –
John:
You really didn't need much electricity at all to get the party going, right?
John:
Whereas now, like you said, what if you can't even boot up the systems that are required to disengage all the interlocks to allow electricity to flow to the spark plugs?
Marco:
At this point, any modern car, you have a similar situation as if something goes wrong with your Apple product.
Marco:
The answer, if anything goes wrong, is contact your nearest service center.
John:
You can still jumpstart cars if you can find the battery.
John:
In fact, I looked at the battery terminals on my wife's car were not clean.
John:
I'm like, oh, let me find what the state-of-the-art technology in battery terminal cleaning is.
John:
That was a YouTube rabbit hole that was not fruitful.
John:
because like if you if you want bad advice about things to your car just look at youtube like you name it it's in there as you look at stuff you're like this can't be the way to do it this is the way that you're doing it person on youtube but you do not seem authoritative let me continue searching marco's car doesn't move when his battery's dead either you know
John:
That's true.
John:
There's nothing you can do about that.
John:
Try jumpstarting that.
John:
Push it all you want.
John:
It's like going anywhere.
John:
I would just contact my nearest service center.
John:
They'd come and bring you a second Tesla that you could get in and drive away.
They would.
John:
That's the funny thing.
John:
But they painted it ugly red stuff on the side so you won't keep it.