Monogamous Gaming Lifestyle
Casey:
I've had a dumb idea.
Marco:
Oh, I can't wait.
Casey:
I want to know when my garage door has been left open in the evenings.
Casey:
It doesn't happen often, but it's something that does happen.
Marco:
Isn't the whole purpose of your smart home garage door opener to alert you to this?
Marco:
When you mentioned that you got one of these smart garage things probably three years ago,
Marco:
I believe you specifically said this is what it's for.
Marco:
It's to alert you if you leave it open unnecessarily.
Marco:
So is it not doing that in its own app or automatically?
Casey:
Well, here's the thing.
Casey:
As with everything in my life, nothing can ever be simple.
Casey:
It always has to be difficult.
Casey:
So I did have the Chamberlain MyQ add-on, almost daughterboard, if you will.
Casey:
And so what that is, if you're not familiar, is it's two pieces.
Casey:
It's a, I can't think of the term, but it's like a thing you stick to the back of the garage door so it knows whether it's up or down, right?
Casey:
It has like, I don't know if it really has an accelerometer, but it has like mercury switches in it or something like that.
Marco:
Chances are an accelerometer is probably cheaper these days than Mercury.
Casey:
Actually, you're probably right.
Casey:
I don't even know.
Casey:
But you get my point, right?
Casey:
It's something that sticks to the garage door so it knows if it's down, which is to say vertical, or if it's up, which is to say horizontal.
Casey:
And then there's another box.
Casey:
That basically proxies a network request to RF.
Casey:
So you can come in via the Internet and say to this box, I would like the door to open, please.
Casey:
And then it just emits the same radio frequency signal that a traditional garage door opener that you hold in your hand would emit.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Does that make sense?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So you can add it to almost any garage door opener.
Casey:
And I had that for a while and it was great.
Casey:
And then when I was at WWDC two years ago, maybe even three years ago now, our garage door, which had ever, ever, ever so slightly buckled, really buckled.
Casey:
And it wouldn't open or close anymore.
Casey:
And so when I came back from WWDC that year, and again, this is like two or three years ago now, I decided that, or we decided to get a new garage door.
Casey:
And with that became a new garage door opener.
Casey:
Now,
Casey:
I thought to myself, self, you have this new fancy garage door opener.
Casey:
You have the opportunity, I should say, for a new fancy garage door opener.
Casey:
Why wouldn't you get a new fancy garage door opener where all of this functionality is built right in?
Casey:
You don't need the little dingus on the door because the garage door opener is fully aware whether the garage door is up or down.
Casey:
And the garage door opener is internet connected.
Casey:
Everything will be peachy and great.
Casey:
As it turns out, the particular vendor that we used for our garage door sold us the most awful smart garage door opener in the world.
Casey:
So it does have an app.
Casey:
And it is possible I might be able to configure that app to alert me whether or not the garage door is open when I go to bed.
Casey:
But the app is so bad that I don't trust it to do so.
Casey:
And so I have gone down the path of trying to like man in the middle of this thing with Charles on the phone to see if I could like figure out their API and just kind of work this out myself.
Casey:
But as it turns out, the one and only thing the linear pro access app does well is
Casey:
is some sort of certificate pinning or something like that, such that I can't sniff it with Charles.
Casey:
Like I'm talking a bit outside my comfort zone at this point.
Casey:
I'm not entirely clear what I'm talking about, but it does seem clear that Charles doesn't want to show me what I want to see.
Casey:
So now what?
Casey:
Well, I've got a hammer, and it's called the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
And everywhere I look, there are nails.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Casey:
So what I've decided, the only reasonable answer is to get two more Raspberry Pis.
Casey:
Because why would I use the one I have when I can get two more?
Marco:
To be fair, they are so cheap that you can do that.
Casey:
Well, right.
Casey:
That's the thing is I don't need like the big honking Pi 4 that I have for like – well, I don't even need that for Pi Hole, but that's what I'm using it for.
Casey:
And I don't need it for my VPN.
Casey:
Like I'd probably use one of the Pi Zeros for any of these things.
Casey:
But I do want the Pi 4 for emulation as we talked about a few episodes back.
Casey:
So I thought to myself, well, I could get a Raspberry Pi Zero –
Casey:
wireless or zero w whatever they call it which is literally ten dollars for the board this is an entire linux computer for ten dollars plus you know potentially plus shipping and so on and so forth so i thought to myself what i can do is i can put a pi zero somewhere near the garage door and get one of those magnetic i forget the term for it but one of those magnetic switches where there's a piece on the garage door and a piece on the door frame right and when those pieces are very close to each other the circuit is closed and then when the
Casey:
door moves away, thus the door is open, the circuit is opened.
Casey:
Then what I can do is in my bedroom, I can put a second Pi Zero, and then I can hook that up to an LED, and the LED will come on when the door is open, right?
Casey:
This is flawless.
Casey:
And so this afternoon, I started like...
Casey:
writing Python for the first time in probably 10 or 15 years.
Casey:
And I figured out how to do like multicast UDP between two computers.
Casey:
Like I don't have any of the PI zeros yet.
Casey:
I haven't actually committed anything yet in terms of financial investment.
Casey:
But I could send UDP messages between the two computers so that they can talk to each other.
Casey:
And then just before the show, I figured out how to flip one of the GPIO, which is one to say...
Casey:
one of the pins on the Raspberry Pi that you can use for input or output.
Casey:
I figured out with Python how to make it go high or go low, which to be fair is extremely simple, but I've never done this before.
Casey:
And so now I'm looking into like, okay, how do I on the sensor side, what script do I need to write such that it'll see when like the voltage is falling or perhaps if the voltage is peaking.
Casey:
And so I can get a call back and interrupt, I guess, in order to figure out, okay, now I need to send this multicast message to the other Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
And I am sure that there is an
Casey:
infinitely simpler answer to this.
Casey:
However, the one thing I'm not terribly keen on is having to wire something from the garage to my bedroom, which is silly because I won't mention publicly that the bedroom is literally right over the garage.
Casey:
But I don't want to have to go through walls and whatnot in order to wire everything.
Casey:
So why not just put two $10 computers, one on either end, and poof, it all works via the magic of wireless.
Casey:
Problem solved.
Marco:
Why not just install two $1 mirrors?
LAUGHTER
Marco:
because that what am I gonna do cut a hole in my floor or like stick one out the window yeah do like a like a basically like a periscope kind of arrangement like have one out the window you can see that's angled you know 45 degrees and then below it have another one angled 45 degrees it looks at the door
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I guess I could.
Casey:
But that's no fun, man.
Casey:
It's not as much fun.
Marco:
It'll work 100% of the time.
Marco:
Never need software updates.
Marco:
Doesn't depend on your connection.
Casey:
It's just no fun.
Casey:
And a lot of people are saying, well, why not use HomeBridge?
Casey:
Well, I'd love to use HomeBridge, but there is no HomeBridge interface for linear garage door openers.
Casey:
There is for the Chamberlain MyQ that I used to use.
Casey:
And before everyone asks, we'll just use the Chamberlain MyQ in concert with the linear ProAxis.
Casey:
And number one,
Casey:
No, I don't want to do that.
Casey:
Number two, I gave them IQ away.
Casey:
So either way, I can't.
Casey:
So yeah, so in my effort to use a Raspberry Pi for even the things that it is so unbelievably unnecessary for, I have considered doing exactly this.
Casey:
And you can't put any of this in the show because I don't want to get well actually for the rest of my life.
Marco:
So Ryber in the chat has an even better suggestion.
Marco:
You can just use one mirror.
Marco:
If you install it at the end of your driveway, you could just look at that and then you could see, you know, you wouldn't see it as closely as my Prism setup, but it would be even easier.
Marco:
You could probably put it on your mailbox as long as you screw it on instead of stick it on.
Casey:
Possibly, yes.
Casey:
Although given our last week's conversation about the Homeowners Association, I'm sure they would have things to say about a mirror showing up on my mailbox.
Casey:
Anyway, I just really want to... All kidding aside, I have every confidence that I could do this without any sort of computing hardware whatsoever and probably have some sort of magnetic switch and a power supply and an LED and wire that all through the house some way, somehow.
Casey:
And it would be way more reliable and it would probably work forever.
Casey:
But I don't know, it just seems like less fun.
Casey:
And one of the things...
Casey:
that makes the Raspberry Pi so appealing to me.
Casey:
And presumably an Arduino would work for this too.
Casey:
I just don't have any experience with that personally.
Casey:
But one of the things that makes it so appealing to me is the idea of just doing something that's unusual and different for me.
Casey:
Like, I never play with hardware.
Casey:
I think both of you potentially or certainly... Marco, you've played with hardware a lot more than I have with, like...
Casey:
your rfid scanner that you did a couple years back and i'm sure there's other other examples i'm not thinking of well like all your retro gaming stuff yeah but nonetheless this is just this is an itch i have never really scratched and i kind of want to try it just to see if i can do it and it may end up that it doesn't work for beans maybe there's something that i'm not thinking of that will cause it to not work at all maybe it'll be deeply unreliable or maybe i'll just realize okay this is
Casey:
really cool.
Casey:
I like having this led in the room that shines when the garage door is open, but why do I need to, you know, internet connector?
Casey:
Well, network, you know, intranet connected computers to do this.
Casey:
I could just use a couple of fricking wires.
Casey:
So I don't debate that there are better ways of accomplishing this goal, but I do debate if there are more fun ways of accomplishing this goal.
Casey:
So here we are.
Marco:
Never underestimate the smart home for the ability to introduce needless complexity and unreliability into what should and always has been very simple tasks and roles of objects in your home.
Casey:
Yep, it's so true.
Casey:
I don't know, like, all kidding aside, if not a prism scenario, if you had to do something that involved some amount of electronics, now that doesn't necessarily mean, you know, an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi or something like that, how would you solve this problem?
Marco:
I just don't leave the garage door open.
Marco:
I mean, first of all, how often are you leaving the house right now?
Casey:
Well, that's true, too.
Casey:
That's also true.
Marco:
Yeah, I just I mean, we have a garage with, you know, with an electric door and we, you know, move the car into it when we arrive and then we close the door behind us.
Marco:
And when we want to leave, we open the door, back the car out and then close the door and then leave.
Casey:
But that's the thing, is that oftentimes we will open the garage door for the purposes of letting the kids play or maybe even pull a car out so the kids can play in the garage and the driveway.
Casey:
So I take your point that our cars are not leaving the driveway very often, but the cars are leaving the garage semi-often.
Casey:
And occasionally the cars won't leave the garage.
Casey:
We'll just open it up, play for a while, come in and maybe just leave it open because there was no compelling reason to close it at that moment.
Casey:
And it's very rare, truth be told.
Casey:
I think it's only like three or four times a year that we have left the garage door open overnight.
Casey:
But it annoys me.
Casey:
And this would be a neat way to fix it.
Casey:
A neat, uselessly complicated way to fix it.
Marco:
That will sometimes mostly fix it for a little while.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Until something breaks.
Casey:
A very good question also from Ryber in the chat.
Casey:
Do I have any old phone jacks in the house I could piggyback off of?
Casey:
I do in general, but I don't anywhere in the vicinity of the garage that I'm aware of.
Casey:
So it's a good idea.
Casey:
But no, I don't think I have anything.
Casey:
So I am not looking for, I am not necessarily looking for input about this because really it's an excuse for me to do something stupid.
Casey:
I acknowledge it's stupid.
Casey:
I acknowledge it's uselessly complicated, but I think it would be fun.
Casey:
But so what, so other than just not forgetting, you haven't really given me an answer.
Casey:
Is there any electronic equipped way that you would consider doing this?
Marco:
Me?
Marco:
No.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Or John, but I'll start with you.
Marco:
I don't think... I mean... So, okay.
Marco:
One thing I've wanted for a while, which could solve this problem, but it's not really meant to be like a fixed thing.
Marco:
I've wanted basically a... Something that was... It's almost solvable by a baby monitor.
Marco:
And I don't know if this exists.
Marco:
I've looked around a little while and couldn't find it.
Marco:
So what I want is a battery-powered camera...
Marco:
that I can stick somewhere with a suction cup, like a GoPro, a small battery-powered camera that I can move around the house easily, and a small video monitor that can show what's on that camera live.
Marco:
And they're both portable, wireless, and just have batteries.
Marco:
And the idea here is sometimes I need to keep my eye on something,
Marco:
and it's somewhere around the house or something but it's not always the same place so one example might be if you're doing a load of laundry i would stick the camera in the laundry room looking at the machine so you could see whenever you want i mean how much time is left what's the status of the machine similarly if i'm like roasting coffee and i want to like you know go you know do some work during the during the boring first 10 minutes of it uh or if i'm like you know cooking something in the oven or on the
Marco:
Yeah, they have wireless thermometers.
Marco:
They suck.
Marco:
And I have a nice wired one.
Marco:
So I could just like, you know, have this looking at the thermometer screen and I could be in the office watching the video screen.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
Common needs.
Marco:
And there's lots of like IP cameras and then you run an app on your phone.
Marco:
That all is garbage and it sucks and I hate it.
Marco:
I've tried those.
Marco:
They're terrible.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And what I want can almost be solved by a baby monitor, except that usually the camera side of it is like AC powered only.
Marco:
And then the monitor itself is kind of free to roam around with batteries.
Marco:
And I want this product to not use the internet at all.
Marco:
I want it to just be based on RF.
Marco:
Like just give me like 2.4 gigahertz, just like good baby monitors are.
Marco:
um so it's just instant there's no service involved there's no giant latency there's no service fee you know just just a freaking piece of hardware and hardware is so cheap these days i assume that has to be easily possible but i haven't looked too much into it anyway that same thing could do this if i had one in the garage that being said i just closed the garage door
Casey:
Well, and generally speaking, we really are pretty good about this.
Casey:
This isn't like a chronic affliction, but it's something that, I don't know, it happens once in a while, and this would be a fun little challenge to see if I could fix it.
Casey:
This is very MacGyver-y, but for those of us who are old, a very MacGyver-y solution, but I just think it'd be fun.
Casey:
John, you've been very quiet.
Casey:
I can hardly wait to hear how you would solve this problem.
John:
I need a Raspberry Pi to let me figure out how the hell to get logged into their stupid IRC server with my supposedly registered Nick.
John:
I can't.
John:
It's because of this new IRC client.
John:
It's a disconnection between me and IRC.
John:
I do slash Nick and put a name in it, and it's just like nothing happens.
John:
Sometimes something happens.
John:
It's driving me nuts.
John:
For your garage door stuff, just close the garage door, Jake.
John:
How much do you have to remember in life, really?
John:
Make sure both of your children are accounted for.
John:
You have two of them, so count heads.
John:
One, two.
John:
That didn't work on Home Alone, man.
John:
Remember to feed them.
John:
Remember to clothe yourself.
John:
Bathe.
John:
Do all the things.
John:
Do you remember to close the front door to your house?
John:
Or do you leave that open a lot too?
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Close, yes.
Casey:
Lock, very rarely we forget to lock it.
John:
I think we just got to climb the ladder of things the Casey has to remember.
John:
He remembers to close the front door, not always to lock it.
John:
The garage door is still working on the remember to close.
John:
What I would look for is a solution for this that would just, instead of being like, let me know if the garage door is open.
John:
Just close the garage door at the time in which you think the garage door needs to be closed for the day, whatever time that is.
John:
Like I have a thing on my lights that says just turn off all the lights at like a certain time when I'm like, look, the day is over.
John:
And if I've somehow forgotten to turn the lights off, just turn them off.
John:
Right.
John:
And I know that is complicated because it's like, well, it just has one button.
John:
And when you press it, when it's closed, it opens.
John:
And when you press it, when it's open, it's closed.
John:
But I believe in your ability to solve this problem.
John:
That's what I would do.
John:
I don't want to know if the garage door is open.
John:
I just want it to close itself if I've left it open.
Casey:
That's fair.
John:
I don't even have a garage door opener, by the way.
John:
Mine opens with the power of muscles.
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Because it's broken or because that's the way it's always been?
John:
Because it's broken, yeah.
John:
Spoken like someone who lives in a development made in the 90s.
John:
No, not because it's broken, Casey, because there has never been a powered way to open and close my garage door.
Marco:
So remember that Mac Mini that I was going to order for my Studio B upstairs?
Marco:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Got that in.
Marco:
Long story short, I had to return the first one.
Marco:
I had a problem.
Marco:
But I got the second one today.
Marco:
Installing, setting everything up.
Marco:
I, for the first time in a while, set up a completely new installation of Mac OS without importing from anything, without importing from your previous laptop or anything like that.
Marco:
And I had to install from scratch for the first time in a while Dropbox.
Marco:
Now, Casey, I know that you have not had the Dropbox app installed for some time.
Casey:
Yeah, a few months now.
Marco:
And it had been a while since I had seen the fresh install.
Marco:
The way I run Dropbox is, first of all, reluctantly.
Marco:
Second of all, I run it without its stupid kernel extension.
Marco:
So I don't use Smart Sync or any of the other stuff that requires the kernel extension.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't give it accessibility full permission over my entire system.
Casey:
Wait, pause.
Casey:
How do you not install the kernel extension?
Casey:
Is there a point in which they give you the option not to?
Marco:
I'll get there.
Marco:
Okay, carry on.
Marco:
I don't install the stupid kernel extension because that sounds crazy to me and it's not worth the risk and instability that I could introduce.
Marco:
Dropbox is not a company that I trust to write good software.
Marco:
Simple as that.
Marco:
And also...
Marco:
So no extension, no accessibility full access, because again, it has no reason to need that, in my opinion, for the things I need it to do.
Marco:
And there's also a dialogue every time you reboot, usually, where it tries to get you to give it your system password automatically.
Marco:
in a dialog box that looks like the system password dialog authentication box, but isn't.
Marco:
Basically, it's tricking you, and it's horrible security practices, right?
Marco:
So I never give it that password.
Marco:
On a fresh installation...
Marco:
doing this fresh, they have made it harder than ever to achieve this setup.
Marco:
That's not surprising.
Marco:
The stuff they do is so misleading, so incredibly unethical.
Marco:
It's just so many dark design patterns.
Marco:
It is so hard to get through that installation without giving them full access to your entire system at the kernel level and giving them your admin password and giving them accessibility, full permission to look at everything you're doing in the system.
Marco:
It's absurd.
Marco:
So I have never in my life been more angry at Dropbox than I am this morning and today.
Marco:
I've decided I'm done with them.
Marco:
I am going to quit Dropbox.
Marco:
So I wanted to ask you, Casey, how you've done it so far and how it's working out.
Marco:
Because really, it's just malware at this point.
Marco:
It is more invasive to your system than most malware would be.
Marco:
Most malware wouldn't have the guts to do what Dropbox does.
Yeah.
Marco:
it's so bad like i i'm so i'm i'm literally i'm so offended by the horribleness of what dropbox does and how much it tries to insert itself into every single part of your system for reasons that mostly benefit them and not you uh that's it's just absurd and so i'm done so what is the world after dropbox like for you how did you get there and how have you been finding it
Casey:
It is important to understand the context for what I'm about to say, which is, as I've said many times over the last couple of months, one of the best worst things that has come from all my computer problems is that my computers are basically ephemeral at this point.
Casey:
I could lose one of them and really...
Casey:
I don't doubt there would be some file somewhere that I would miss.
Casey:
I'm sure there would be.
Casey:
But in the grand scheme of things, I would be fine.
Casey:
Like if this iMac Pro just took a dump right now, I can't think of anything that I literally could not live without.
Casey:
And I do have backups, but at the same time, even leaving those backups aside, I can't think of anything that I would be like...
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
And that's the same with my laptop.
Casey:
And, you know, other than not having a phone, it's really the same on my phone, too.
Casey:
I think on my phone, I would lose a couple of weeks worth of pictures, potentially, if they're not in in my photo stream.
Casey:
But that that's about it.
Marco:
So you still aren't using iCloud photo library?
Casey:
No, because reasons.
Casey:
We can belittle me about that another time.
Casey:
We can belittle me about that another time.
Casey:
I deserve it.
Casey:
But we're going to set that aside.
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So, my computers don't really have anything extremely critical on them.
Casey:
And the only stuff that's really, really critical that is on my computers is either in a Git repository that is, you know, synced with GitHub or
Casey:
Or in Synology Drive, which is my replacement for Dropbox.
Casey:
Now, Synology Drive suffers from the same problem as Apple TV.
Casey:
When I say Synology Drive, I can be referring to one of 34 different products and 75 versions of those 34 different products.
Casey:
And it is infuriating.
Casey:
But there is a client that you can install on Mac OS and the UI is not stupendous.
Casey:
It looks like it's a Java app or something like that.
Casey:
But the good news is I never see the UI for the most part.
Casey:
Like I see the little thing in the menu bar.
Casey:
And that's it.
Casey:
I never really see the UI.
Casey:
I never really interact with the UI.
Casey:
Because why?
Casey:
Because it just magically is part of Finder, like Dropbox used to be back when it was good, back when they didn't give a shit about work chat or whatever the stupid things are that they're doing that's like Evernote, which also went down the toilet.
Casey:
So it's very similar to Dropbox in the days of yore when Dropbox was still good.
Casey:
It is not perfect.
Casey:
The iOS apps in particular, they function fine, but their integration with the iOS Files app is very janky from what I can tell.
Casey:
To be fair, I haven't tried this in a few months.
Casey:
But as an example, I am a super nerd and I like to keep a log of every time we put gas in our cars.
Casey:
You see, Marco, some of us put old liquefied dinosaurs into our cars and that's how we propel them.
Casey:
I know that's very barbaric, but...
Casey:
Some of us are still living in the past.
Marco:
That's not the part that sounds like the past.
Marco:
The part that sounds like the past is you're keeping a gas log.
Casey:
Well, that's true, too.
Marco:
It's one thing if it's part of your work that you get reimbursed for fuel.
Marco:
That's not true for you.
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
and go to my numbers spreadsheet that is stored in Synology Drive and edit it using the files app.
Casey:
So, you know, I'll load the files app, go into the Synology Drive section, find the numbers file I'm trying to edit, open it up in numbers on my iPad or iPhone.
Casey:
And like eight times out of 10, I'm looking at a several version old version of that file because I think that was the last time that the files app within my iOS device opened it.
Casey:
Does that make any sense at all?
Marco:
Yes.
Casey:
So that kind of sucks.
Casey:
So if you're relying on integration with the Files app, last I checked, not great.
Casey:
But for Macs and for the Synology Drive app on your iOS device, if you're not involving the Files app...
Casey:
it works pretty much flawlessly.
Casey:
And I probably should be a little clearer about what it is.
Casey:
It's basically hosted Dropbox where the host is your Synology.
Casey:
So all your files exist on your Synology.
Casey:
It'll replicate them between all your devices in real time.
Casey:
And it seems to, as far as I can tell, work extremely reliably
Casey:
in that capacity the only downside i see well there's two i suppose one you don't know which friggin thing you have to download and what what you need to install in the synology to get this version of drive and it's very frustrating in that regard because there's there's so to speak not literally there's drive drive plus drive the hardware to drive device drive the software drive the old software drive the new software drive for ios you know what i mean it's like the same thing as apple tv
Casey:
Oh, the Apple TV, the hardware Apple TV, the software Apple TV plus the service.
Casey:
It's preposterous in that regard.
Casey:
That's the one downside.
Casey:
The other downside is files app integration iOS is a little eh.
Casey:
But other than that, like especially if you're just viewing this from a keeping my Macs in sync perspective and then maybe every great once in a while I'll look at something in the Synology Drive app on your iOS device, chef kiss.
Casey:
It's good to go.
Casey:
I don't know why I haven't done it already.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
The question I really need to ask you two is, are we going to choose to move to iCloud shared folders to pass MP3s between each other?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
I just, I don't trust it.
Marco:
I just don't trust it.
Marco:
It had such a rough launch.
Marco:
I think it's going to need even more time of it just being boring and working for everybody all the time before I will really trust it.
Casey:
Well, then you can do what I do and load Dropbox.com every time you need to upload a file.
Casey:
Because that's how I do it.
Casey:
I do not have Dropbox installed on any of my Macs.
Casey:
It might be on my iOS devices.
Casey:
It's been so long since I've touched it, I don't even know, to be honest.
Marco:
Well, on iOS, it's safe, right?
Marco:
Because I know, one of the advantages of the iOS extreme security sandbox approach is you can trust that there's not that much bad stuff that any app can do.
Marco:
And if you wanted to get rid of it, you could just delete it and it's all gone.
Marco:
But I as a developer know that the Dropbox iOS app can't do almost any of the stuff that I have a problem with.
Marco:
It really can't do any of it, actually.
Marco:
There's very little ability for it to do anything that would even be remotely shady on iOS.
Marco:
Yet on the Mac, it basically behaves like a rootkit.
Marco:
And it's like one of the most popular pieces of software in the world.
Marco:
And it's gotten worse and worse.
Marco:
So the good thing is, they have recently rewritten their sync engine.
Marco:
So whereas before, it would just consume one entire core when you're doing anything else in the file system that isn't even in Dropbox directory, like unzipping a new Xcode in your downloads folder or whatever.
Marco:
It would just consume one core.
Marco:
Now, they've made it so that it can consume multiple cores of your computer when you're not even doing anything with Dropbox.
Marco:
delightful yeah so they've really they really expanded the scope of the amount of resources that can suck from your computer for no good reason yeah i'm getting rid of it like i've already decided i'm done the only question is like what do i do to fix to alleviate some of these other some of these needs for it that i've had
Casey:
Oh, and the other thing I'll say with Drive is that I haven't explored doing any sort of public file sharing, so I don't think it would be easy for you and me to share, or the three of us, to share files unless I created accounts for you guys on my Synology, which, I mean, I'd
Casey:
I can, but it seems a little bit overkill.
Casey:
And then you would have to like point drive because it seems like you can point drive at several different destinations concurrently.
Casey:
And so you would have to point drive at my Synology at our shared folder, which again, like we can do that, but it's nowhere near as easy as Dropbox where you basically say, take this folder, share it with that email address and just make magic happen.
Casey:
Because again, back when Dropbox was good, that was one of the great things about it.
Casey:
You could just say, share this folder with Marco and John and poof, it's shared.
Casey:
And that I do miss, although in my case, the only thing I'm ever really sharing with anyone, I guess because I'm a jerk or because I work alone, is files with you, you two, or files with Mike.
Casey:
And I'll just go to the Dropbox website for that.
Marco:
So this may seem like a dumb question, but...
Marco:
Why don't we just use FTP?
Marco:
I have a server.
Marco:
I have many servers, actually.
Marco:
Why don't I just set up a folder on my market.org server and just set up an SFTP server there, and that's where we put our files?
Marco:
Obviously, this kind of solution doesn't work for people who need to interact with a whole bunch of other people, but for us, we're mainly interacting with the same very small handful of people who are all nerds.
Marco:
Why don't we just do that?
John:
i mean you certainly could doesn't the finder have native integration like couldn't you literally have like a thing in your finder sidebar that just was we just call it the atp dropbox or whatever and it would just go there like wouldn't that work you're afraid of using a dropbox offer and you want to use the finders ftp integration you make a good point i don't know if that still even exists but i would really not trust that code i would use transmit or something and then i'd have to launch another app
Marco:
oh yeah i would use transmit too but but you know it would it'd be nice if there were if there could be like of all the many different um protocols that finder does support for various network and and internet shares it would be nice to use maybe like does webdav is that still a thing that exists it does exist it does exist yeah so like you know maybe we could just do whatever whatever the heck webdav was
John:
I still am not entirely clear.
John:
SFTP is the homegrown solution, but, you know, whatever.
John:
Like, it gets annoying if you're not just using it as a literal Dropbox, you know, where you're just dumping things in.
John:
The two-way singing and the always liveness is the feature you want.
John:
I mean, you can use OneDrive from Microsoft.
John:
Google has a solution.
John:
Lots of companies make products similar to Dropbox.
Marco:
But see, I feel like if I'm going to finally leave the experience and network effect of Dropbox, I don't think I really want to just go to another thing that's just like it, also run by a giant enterprise-y company that wants probably to do more stuff with my system, at least now, if not in the future.
Marco:
So like, first of all, I'm not going to install Google software because even trust issues aside, I've heard nothing but horrible things about Google's like system demons that you have to install for things like their photo uploader and stuff like that.
Marco:
Like everyone says they suck.
Casey:
Yep, they do.
Casey:
Or they did a year ago anyway.
Casey:
I can't speak of recently.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, maybe they're better now, but probably not, right?
Marco:
Like, just like, you know, maybe iCloud Drive is better now, probably not.
Marco:
So, like, I'm not super keen on that.
Marco:
And, yeah, Microsoft, too.
Marco:
It's like, you know, Microsoft probably does a better job than Google, but I can't imagine it's good, necessarily, like, in absolute terms.
Marco:
So if I can avoid having some kind of always-running persistent daemon by one of these giant companies that has a lot more interest than just syncing a folder, I'd rather avoid that if I can.
Marco:
So that's why I like looking at something like either just using the Dropbox website or using transmits built in Dropbox client functionality.
Marco:
If that still works, I got to investigate that or, you know, using just like an FTP server.
Marco:
I'd rather do options like that.
Casey:
You know, if all you were doing is sending MP3 files with shared iCloud folders, I personally would be fine with trusting it as long as that was not the only place that these files existed.
Casey:
You know, so as an example, when I upload something to Dropbox, I am uploading a duplicate of that file to Dropbox.
Casey:
So if Dropbox just...
Casey:
went poof in a cloud of smoke it's not like that file disappears you know and if we made a gentleman's agreement that we weren't moving the only copy of our recordings into the into the iCloud shared drive but rather a duplicate like whatever I don't think that would be a problem yeah copy not move no it would be a problem because the problem would happen is that you'd you'd
John:
copy it into there and then you'd go to sleep and then marco would be like doing an all-night edit and your file would have been corrupted or half written or overwritten itself or missing entirely and then he's trying to wake you up for you to try again to copy it because your copy didn't work and of course you don't see those because you're asleep and have do not disturb and then you wake up in the morning good 20 frantic messages from marco couldn't make the show
John:
Isn't the potential for that the same no matter what option you pick?
John:
No, no, because that's the whole thing with iCloud Drive, that half the time your files disappear or were there briefly and aren't there or are replaced with older versions themselves or disappear entirely or stop updating on your end.
John:
That's the whole thing.
John:
the reliability aspect of it just because casey thinks he's successfully copied it and it looks like it's done doesn't mean it shows up on your end that's the whole you know occasionally you have to like sign out of icloud and nuke all your data and log back in and you know that's that debugging procedure especially if you use icloud photo library you don't ever want to sign out of icloud on your mac oh forget it no right so that's
John:
He goes, oh, I don't know why it's not syncing.
John:
I copied it on my side, and then Mark was like, well, I don't see it over on this side.
John:
And then, you know, no.
John:
No to iCloud Drive.
John:
SFTP, yes.
John:
iCloud Drive, no.
Casey:
Well, for what it's worth, I would hope that Marco would be privy to or at least aware enough to call me twice in short succession if he needed to wake me up to get this file in an emergency.
John:
I would never do that.
John:
And then you'd still have to get the file.
John:
You're like, well, I copied it.
John:
What else should I do?
John:
And then you'd say, I don't know.
John:
Let me just try Dropbox.
John:
And then it would sink and then get your phone.
Casey:
Well, that's true.
Casey:
I should say that a lot of people, when I was exploring this before I started running Synology Drive, to my recollection, and I'm seeing it a lot in the chat, other than the like Google Drives and Office, Microsoft Live, whatever thing that Microsoft does.
Casey:
A lot of people said both NextCloud and OwnCloud.
Casey:
To be clear, I know basically nothing about either of them, but I did hear a lot of people say that both of them are very good.
Casey:
So if you wanted something, Marco, that was not self-hosted, or I'm assuming they're not self-hosted.
Casey:
They very well may be.
Casey:
It ultimately doesn't matter.
Casey:
If you're interested in this Marco slash listener, look it up yourself.
Casey:
But those are other options.
Casey:
I think personally for the three of us, yeah, I
Casey:
I would be okay to try iCloud Drive, but I would also be perfectly fine to SFTP it or, you know, or SCP it or whatever somewhere.
Marco:
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Casey:
Ready to start the show?
Casey:
Let's start with some follow-up 39 minutes in.
Marco:
I mean, technically, that was Mac Mini follow-up for me.
Marco:
Good job.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
John, tell me, how was your new video card?
John:
It's big.
John:
My new video card is big.
John:
First, you know, waiting for this package to arrive.
John:
It got delayed again.
John:
It actually came today as opposed to like almost a week ago that I expected it to come.
John:
And I knew it arrived today.
John:
Hearing it like land on my doorstep, apparently thrown from the curb.
John:
I'm not sure from how far away this thing was thrown, but it landed on my doorstep so loudly that I could hear it across the house.
John:
I'm like, I guess my package is here.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
Thank goodness for Apple's very sturdy, very cool packaging and double boxing.
John:
Anyway, it seems to be intact.
John:
When I was installing it, just for people to know, this is the Radeon Pro W5700X with 16 gigs of RAM.
John:
It's a single GPU.
John:
It's AMD's newish GPU architecture, but it's a workstation-ish card.
John:
Anyway, you can look up the specs.
John:
So it's it takes up.
John:
I don't know what the it's for you.
John:
It takes up four slots on the back of your poor PCI.
John:
That's how high it is.
John:
Right.
John:
So the card just goes in one.
John:
It's an MPX module.
John:
So it's got PCI connector and then it's got this other connector that it gets like power and other crap through.
John:
Anyway.
John:
There's two of those things inside of Mac Pro.
John:
There is an MPX slot at the very, very bottom, and then kind of in the middle-ish, there's another MPX slot.
John:
Those are the only two places in the computer you can put one of these MPX modules that has the two big honking connectors on it, right?
John:
Lots of other PCI slots are plain old cards, but these MPX modules can only go in those two spots.
John:
So right away, I'm faced with the decision, do I put this thing in the bottom slot where my old 580X was, or do I put it in the middle?
John:
so first i took the 580x out so there's nothing in there i'm looking at the options and i'm like hmm if i put it at the bottom like it's right next to the power supply maybe it would be better if i put it in the middle because then it would be like power supply empty space big honking gpu empty space cpu with it you know what i mean
John:
And I decided to do that.
John:
I took out all the little spacers, which are really cool, by the way, the little black covers for your PCI slots.
John:
Those are nice.
John:
Those will be worth a lot on eBay someday.
John:
I'm going to save those for my kids' college fund slash retirement.
John:
And I put it in the middle, but once I had it in the middle, I realized it's not really well lined up with the middle fan.
John:
I was hoping the middle fan would blow directly onto it, but it was more like it was catching either the top or the bottom of the middle fan, and I didn't really like that.
John:
So I took it out.
John:
After putting it in the middle, I took it out of the middle, and I said, all right, you're going to go in the bottom.
John:
It's the only other choice.
John:
So I put it in the bottom, and that seemed better lined up with the bottom fan.
John:
The bottom fan is blowing right on the new GPU.
John:
Even though it's up against the power supply, that's the best option.
John:
Which is interesting because if you think about, you know, the three fans are sort of evenly spaced in the front of the computer.
John:
The top one is very well aligned with the CPU heatsink.
John:
It's that big giant fan and then your CPU heatsink.
John:
But the bottom two are not really well aligned with any of the slots.
John:
Um...
John:
anyway so i've got the thing in the bottom and then i've got the 580x outside the thing i was going to pack away the 580x in the packaging that the big one came in and just put it in my attic but i was like you know what let me try sticking in this computer too and of course i only have one choice of where it goes the other mpx slot which just so happens to be you know basically touching the thing so it's like
John:
the the 4u thing and then the 2u even even the 580x is 2u because both of these uh gpus have gigantic front to back top to bottom heat sinks right there you know there's no fans or anything in there they're just all giant heat sink vents so i put the 580x back in what the hell closed the whole thing back up turned everything on uh the absurdity of my computer now
John:
is that if you look at the back of it, I have, by my count, 10 places where I can plug in monitors.
John:
10.
John:
And I can drive 10 monitors.
John:
Like, no problem.
John:
I've got two GPUs in there, and I can drive 10 monitors off this thing.
John:
I think, I don't know, how many 6Ks can I do?
John:
I think I can do three 6Ks.
John:
And then seven 5Ks maybe?
John:
I don't even know.
John:
Anyway, there's an absurd amount of places where I can plug in monitors.
John:
And I have one monitor to plug into it.
John:
The interesting thing is I can plug that one monitor into a lot of different places.
John:
My new video card comes with four Thunderbolt ports on the back.
John:
right plus one hdmi so i have the four places just on that card where i could plug in the monitor i assume all those ports are the same i hope i'd have it in the fast one anyway uh then the 580x interestingly has no uh thunderbolt ports on the card itself whatsoever just has two hdmi and then i have the whatever three or four or uh thunderbolt ports that are part of the little io card
John:
And apparently I can plug in my Pro Display XDR into any of those ports as well.
John:
And when I plug it into those ports, the W5700X runs the monitor, right?
John:
Even though I'm not plugging it into the card, right?
John:
Now, with both GPUs installed, if I stick my monitor into any port that is not directly on the 580X, then the 5700X wins and gets the monitor, which is confusing to me because I was like, what if I want to run my 6K monitor off the 580X?
John:
Apparently, there's no way for me to do that.
John:
Period.
John:
You know, I can drive other monitors off by connecting it directly with HDMI.
John:
But anyway, so I'm not quite sure if I'm going to keep it in this config.
John:
It's running this way now.
John:
My monitor is actually connected directly to the 5700X in one of its many Thunderbolt ports.
John:
Seems fine.
John:
Doesn't seem like it's any louder.
John:
I checked the fan speed with a beta version of iStat menu that shows me fan RPMs.
John:
They don't seem to be any different than they were when I just had one GPU in there.
John:
You are running iStat menus?
John:
I'm not running iStat menus.
John:
What I do with iStat menus is I install it, check the fan speed, and then I uninstall it because that's the only way to really turn.
Casey:
Oh my god, John.
Marco:
No, there's a giant switch in their settings thing.
Marco:
You can turn it all off with a master switch.
Marco:
I don't think so.
John:
I can't check because I don't have it installed anymore, but I'm sure you can't ever actually turn it off, off, off.
John:
Only on installing.
John:
Anyway, it's not installed anymore, but I...
John:
I took screenshots of fan RPMs and graphs and everything.
John:
Maybe I'll try it differently with just one thing.
John:
But I'm assuming the 580X is literally doing nothing now because it doesn't have any monitors connected to it.
John:
It's not being asked to do anything.
John:
And I'm hoping there'll be some piece of Apple software video toolbox that Handbrake will use.
John:
I'm hoping something somewhere will use this extra GPU that I have in my computer.
John:
If not, it's just sitting there.
John:
probably wasting electricity so too bad so what did i do with my fancy new graphics card i booted into windows which was an adventure in itself because of course i boot windows uh it shows the little windows 10 logo you know the blue teal logo that windows 10 shows on boot then the little teal logo disappears and nothing ever appears on my screen ever again so that was great um i i used to think and this used to be true that
John:
Windows has to handle all sorts of weird exotic hardware.
John:
So worst case, it'll just like fall back to VGA or some crap.
John:
Like, look, I can't make heads or tails of any of your hardware.
John:
I'm just going to fall back to the safest of safe, safe modes and just, you know, just show you something on the screen.
John:
windows 10 under boot camp anyway does not behave that way i actually looked at microsoft support articles for like hey what do you do if you've got windows 10 and you just you turn it on and you get a black screen and there's a bunch of solutions for you know here's how you turn on safe mode booting yada yada they all require you be able to see something on the screen if you just have a black screen their solution is it's a very scary support document it's like uh
John:
hold down the power button for 10 seconds and then until your machine reboots and then as soon as you see anything on the screen hold down the power button again for 10 seconds and then machine reboots and then as soon as you see anything like it makes you like force forcibly turn the thing off like three times in a row and then supposedly a real windows computer would be like oh i see you need you want to be in windows recovery mode and then you have a bunch of options but
John:
despite me doing this very abusive thing to my computer it never went into it never went into windows recovery mode like i was i was uh holding down the power button as soon as i saw the windows 10 logo up here all it did would make it was make it angry it never actually put me into win re or windows recovery environment whatever the hell it is so that didn't work for me so then i had to use the the good old fallback which is connect the crappier monitor through a different interface so i connected my
John:
4k monitor through hdmi lo and behold that worked then i downloaded amd's new bootcamp drivers for my newly installed gpu which again i'm kind of surprised windows didn't like find for me or didn't fall back to some default graphics driver like just get me to the point where i can launch a web browser and do it myself but no that didn't work so i installed the new drivers which is nice that amd had on their site hey here's the new drivers for uh
John:
uh you know the newly released uh 5700x w5700x that you have in your computer and it's specially designed for boot camp yada yada so that's all that problem so i could boot into windows and why was i putting into windows so i could play games and of course what game do i care about i want to play destiny uh i played destiny uh you know through steam that i already had installed and everything
John:
And the answer to the question of whether it can run Destiny 2 at full 6K resolution with all settings on high at 60 frames per second with this card is no, it cannot.
John:
That is above the capabilities of this card.
John:
It's okay.
John:
You get like 30 frames per second or whatever.
John:
So I was kind of sad to not be able to do that.
John:
This is, you know, the best MPX module that I can get for less than $2,000, and it still can't quite hit 60 with the highest settings.
Marco:
now to how does that compare like i don't i don't follow the pc gpu market that well like suppose you had like you know a 2080 1080 what's the big uh that could that could definitely do it okay so like so and so what are those what does one of those cost like 400 bucks yeah something like that yeah all right so or maybe maybe 600 if you get a fancy one i don't know
John:
okay so but so basically what you're saying is that this thousand dollar you know workstation-ish card for the mac pro uh cannot achieve gaming performance that a 400 gaming card could yeah although i don't think that gaming card could drive the protosplay xdr native res period because the only interface to the protosplay xdr is thunderbolt 3 and they don't have thunderbolt 3 out so that's always the problem like that's why i'm in this situation is i want to drive this big fancy screen
John:
So anyway, I turned it down to 4K, which is perfectly fine for Destiny.
John:
Like, honestly, the assets in the game probably don't stand up to much more than 4K.
John:
So I turned it down to 4K, and then I turned all the settings to max except for a few of them.
John:
So it's like a hybrid of the max setting, and I turned to, like, the foliage draw distances on high instead of highest or whatever.
John:
and that's locked at 60 frames per second so oh that's pretty close yeah yeah it's really close it's just like you know you know what it is like with pc games the super duper ultra settings no one should ever run them because you cannot really discern any discern any visual distance between the super ultra settings and the merely high settings so i have everything on high with half the settings on highest uh at 4k in hdr and it looks and plays great like especially the hdr with all the you know destiny's got also some lighting effects for explosions and
John:
space magic and all sorts of stuff like that looks amazing like it's really very impressive you know because i haven't really done hdr gaming before so it's very impressive very sharp very fast uh and the first uh crucible match i played i uh ended up randomly uh landing on a team with mtashed who is a semi-famous uh
John:
Destiny YouTuber slash streamer.
John:
And we both had crap games, and that was exciting.
John:
He only got three more kills than me, and our team lost.
John:
I did much worse than he did, but seriously, he should be getting way more than three more kills than me in a match.
John:
So that's my video card stuff.
John:
So far, so good.
John:
I'll continue to investigate the weirdness, see if I can actually get the 580X to run my screen if I wanted to, because that's the other thing I was thinking about.
John:
It's like, well...
John:
If I'm not playing games or I'm not using something GPU intensive, remember the 580X doesn't have display stream compression and the fancy new video card does, which means that my USB ports in the back of my monitor are now faster.
John:
They're now USB 3.0 with the new video card or the USB 2.0 with the old one.
John:
So, so far so good.
John:
For the most part, I'm happy with it.
John:
I'm still debating my options, but I had some good fun in Destiny.
John:
Oh, and I re-signed up to Apple Arcade just so I could play
John:
play through sayonara wild hot at 6k uh that was really nice how is apple arcade are we following that at all like is there anything good on there that like since launch i've never played it most of the games like if you look through the games there are no bad games the game all the games are like this is a good quality implementation of this type of game the question is are you into that kind of game and there's a wide variety of games they're not you know yes as you usually like racing games and platforming games there's lots of very interesting games um i
John:
i think that is it's a bargain like for five dollars a month you get access to a pretty big collection of games that are mostly pretty good and remember none of them have in-app purchases or anything like that i think it's a great deal but it depends you have to know what kind of you know gaming lifestyle you are leading i am at this point mostly in a monogamous gaming lifestyle where i'm just playing destiny and i'm
John:
you know i'm just waiting for you know last of us part two and a few other sort of flagship once every year and a half type games that i will divert myself into but if you if that's the type of gamer you are maybe apple arcade doesn't make sense for you but if you graze or if you're just like i'm just in the mood to see what a game is like i just did today hey i wanted to try some games on my um on my new fancy gpu on my mac where do you find mac games basically nowhere or apple arcade
John:
And I went to Apple Arcade and guess what?
John:
There's a ton of Mac games because Apple Arcade forces these people to make their games run on the Mac.
John:
And the games are all pretty good.
John:
Like it is a lot like the consoles where Apple has a hand in selecting and managing the games that appear on the platform.
John:
And I've played, you know, maybe...
John:
10 12 apple arcade games you know when it launched um and today i just had the urge to play one again you know i ended up going to sign our wild hearts just because i hadn't played it in ages and i really loved that game five bucks five bucks and now it wasn't five bucks for me to play that one game i have access to the entire library until the end of the month again so i think it's a good deal if you are the type of person who doesn't just play one or two games all the time uh it seems that a lot of people in our circles have been falling more into the
John:
If not monogamous, then, you know, sort of serial monogamous type of strategy where it's like, oh, everyone's playing Animal Crossing or, you know, the Armit family is playing Minecraft, you know, or like rather than sort of dedicating a week or two to one game and then a week or two to another game.
John:
You know, something like that, which I think is more of a thing that you do when you were a kid because you basically burn through a game in a week or two or finish it.
John:
Whereas now I think most adults are looking for like a lifestyle game where you if you have any gaming time, you know exactly where you're going to spend it and you have some fun and then you set it aside and you come back to it.
Marco:
The thing that has me concerned about Apple Arcade is that everyone has basically said that exact same thing about it.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, the games are nice.
Marco:
They're good games.
Marco:
But I'm not hearing about many specific games.
Marco:
In fact, I haven't heard of a single specific game after the launch that everyone says, oh, you've got to play this one game.
John:
Well, that's because most of the people you know are playing some single game.
John:
You certainly heard a lot about Animal Crossing, right?
John:
Lots of people are just playing Animal Crossing.
John:
They're not playing anything else, right?
John:
Sayonara Wild Hearts by its nature is a short game where it's not like an ongoing type of thing.
John:
It just is a certain number of levels and you play them and you're done with it.
John:
So you heard about that at launch, but now everyone has played it.
John:
I think a lot of the games in there are like that.
John:
You can play them and finish them.
John:
And once you've played them and finished them, you're done.
John:
The key value proposition for Apple Arcade is you don't buy a bunch of individual games.
John:
You pay $5 and get access to all of them.
John:
So your value for that $5, if you finish one game, you've got your $5 worth for the month, right?
John:
If you try 12 other games, you've gotten way more than your $5 worth, right?
John:
So you just have to know, is that a thing that you're ever going to do?
John:
Or are you just going to play one game?
John:
You know, I just paid $5 just to have a single playthrough, an album, whatever it's called, the album mode or the mode where it just plays straight through that pauses between levels.
John:
That's worth $5 to me right there.
John:
I pay a similar amount to rent movies from iTunes and play them for the same amount and watch it for the same amount of time I just played this.
John:
I just got to remember to cancel because I'm probably not going to play any of those games because I'll be too busy playing Destiny.
Marco:
I will say, we finally started watching The Morning Show on Apple TV+.
Marco:
This is the first Apple TV+, show that I've actually watched.
Marco:
And it's pretty good.
Marco:
I'm actually enjoying it.
John:
You should try For All Mankind after that.
Marco:
Yep, agreed.
Marco:
Yeah, that's probably next on the list.
Marco:
Here I am coming very late to everything.
Marco:
Yeah, I finally watched Apple TV+.
Marco:
And yeah, it's not bad.
John:
I just started watching Defending Jacob, which is notable because it is shot...
John:
ostensibly shot in and around where i live and it's fun to watch as a resident to say that's not you know i don't know where they're actually shooting it but like that's not where i live you know lots of lots of fake signs lots of made-up names it's kind of a depressing show about uh murder and school-aged children or anyway so maybe not your cup of tea but i started watching that just for the the hometown aspect of it and because i remember when a
John:
I had heard that the stars of the show, the star of the show was Chris Evans and Kerry Russell, maybe?
John:
Anyway, Captain America.
John:
Yeah, I had heard that he wasn't going to be here.
John:
So don't bother coming to the set because Chris Evans isn't going to be here.
John:
They're just shooting some other scenes or whatever, which is either it's a lie or they composited him in because I saw some scenes shot.
John:
I'm like, I know where that is.
John:
And there's Chris Evans standing there.
John:
I could have gone by and waved him, but I didn't.
John:
That was...
John:
But again, it could have been green screen.
John:
It's really hard for me to tell.
John:
I could have Todd look at it and tell me, is Chris Evans actually there?
John:
They just put him in.
Casey:
Yeah, I thought Morning Show was good.
Casey:
I thought For All Mankind was even better.
Casey:
And those are the only two I've tried.
Casey:
But I enjoyed them both.
John:
I watched Sea, which is a little bit silly, but if you like that kind of thing, it's fine.
Casey:
Let's keep ourselves in macro corner.
Casey:
Do you want to tell me about your wheels and feet and heights and angles and things?
John:
Yeah, this strategy of putting wheels on the front and feet on the back or vice versa so that you have something that you can wheel but that doesn't go anywhere until you pick up the feety part.
John:
Jeremy Cox did some measurements based on stuff on the product pages.
John:
And apparently the wheels are about an inch taller than the feet.
John:
So if you were to do that, you'd have roughly a four degree slope.
John:
But more importantly, it would look and feel awful because the feet on the Mac Pro are totally flat.
John:
So they'd be like on an angle just touching at the edge.
John:
So yeah, you'd have to make an adjustment.
John:
You need basically one inch heels on your feet to get a little Mac Pro.
Marco:
Yeah, I love the illustration that they provided too.
Marco:
I'll have to make that the chapter art or something because it's really cool to see like, oh yeah, that would be way too much, like way too big of a slope.
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we have some feedback about the iPad Magic Keyboard.
Casey:
Matt Berkler writes that they just tried it out again, was actually impressed how hard they could bang on the space bar and provided a video.
Casey:
And apparently this thing is like...
Casey:
very precariously perched with only the ipad portion on a table and and the entire keyboard is dangling in thin air but because of physics and counter levers and whatnot it's somehow and i guess all the weight is in the back so it's somehow staying afloat but this oh this is stressing me out just watching this
John:
I think the video would be impressed, like, wow, how stable.
John:
But all this is doing is emphasizing exactly how lopsided the weight distribution on this thing is.
John:
Like, it is so heavily back-weighted, again, which is why they can't tilt the thing back any farther.
John:
All of the weight starts basically where the keyboard ends.
John:
And that's why you can get away with what's shown in this video.
John:
You should definitely watch it to realize exactly how...
John:
you know, back weighted is it's not tippy.
John:
It's not going to tip over backwards, but all of the weight is on that end, which is, you know, don't try this with your laptop because you will have very different results and be very sad very quickly.
John:
And, you know, so this is, it was not clear.
John:
This is not the weight distribution that you want for a laptop.
John:
You would rather have the weight low and flat to the ground, like in a car or like, like in Marco's car, a big, all the big heavy battery is at the bottom of,
Casey:
low and wide right you don't if the if marco's battery was on the roof of his car it would be like this keyboard stand all right john not suracusa writes in that alternators guess what they do generate alternating current uh they're used in cars because they're smaller more efficient thank you to tesla as in nikola tesla and a simple rectifier circuit converts ac to dc for the battery etc a dc generator would be larger heavier and less efficient to lower pms
Casey:
And then Craig Weber also adds a generator produces DC directly through what's effectively a mechanical bridge rectifier, but less efficiently.
John:
So cars, all the stuff inside your car is running on DC, but your alternator is making AC briefly before it's converted.
Yeah.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then King T-Bird writes, always ground to the alternator bracket or a similar point on the engine as that will bypass the battery.
Casey:
This is in the context of jumping a car to the same ground the starter uses.
Casey:
Trust me, it makes a huge difference in the current delivered without passing through a dead battery, especially a shot battery.
John:
Yeah, I hadn't thought about like if your battery is totally fried.
John:
Obviously, mine wasn't totally fried.
John:
I was able to start by going through the battery.
John:
But again, today I actually replaced the battery.
John:
I looked for – I still didn't go to the point where I looked in the user – the owner's manual.
John:
It doesn't go that far.
John:
But while I had the engine bay open, I was like, is there some post where it wants me to ground in here?
John:
Is there something?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I could see a couple of nuts that in theory could be used for it, but nothing labeled as like a grounding spot.
John:
And practically speaking, my two little clampy thingies, if the positive one is on the positive, the negative one doesn't reach very far.
John:
It's not like I can go across the other corner of the engine and find something to clamp onto.
John:
So if there's some post for me to put it, I still couldn't find it.
John:
Oh, and by the way, when I did the replacing my battery today, this is the first time I've ever successfully done this thing that I always think about doing.
John:
I don't even know if this is true of modern cars, but I used to be annoyed with my older cars that when I replaced the battery, the car would like forget all its settings, right?
John:
Because there's no VRAM essentially.
John:
And all your radio presets would be gone and all your preferences and settings and everything would just be gone.
John:
And that annoyed me because I'm like, I don't remember when I set this thing up, you know, six years ago, right?
John:
So this time I said, I'm not going to let that happen.
John:
I don't know for a fact whether my car has NVRAM.
John:
I'm hoping it does because it's more modern, but I don't want to take the risk.
John:
So yeah.
John:
I very carefully used my battery charger and clamped it onto the little thingies and then disconnected them from the battery.
John:
Oh, my goodness.
John:
Keeping current flowing through the car while I swapped out the battery.
John:
Then I put in the new battery and very carefully put the little things over and screwed them on and then disconnected it.
John:
And as far as I can tell, everything worked and I didn't lose any info and I have a shiny new battery.
John:
And speaking of my battery, it came with a little round sticker on it that says 3 slash 20 on the top.
John:
And I don't know what that is supposed to be.
John:
It's probably March 2020, right?
John:
Maybe it's a sticker that says, like, that's when this battery was manufactured or something.
John:
I don't know what the purpose of the sticker is supposed to be.
John:
But the reason I noticed the sticker at all is because it was like a reddish sticker.
John:
But there was a little crescent moon of a green sticker poking out from underneath it.
John:
So I peeled off the red sticker.
John:
And underneath the red sticker was a green sticker that said 1 slash 20.
John:
so i just i just put the 320 sticker next to it so now my battery has two stickers on it uh at least the thing underneath didn't say like 4 slash 17 so pretty sure my battery's fine uh car starts right up battery's fully charged everything's great go team
Casey:
All right, we didn't get a chance to talk about this last week, but Apple has released contact tracing.
Casey:
I mean, exposure notification in, what is this, iOS 13.5, something like that, whatever came out today.
Casey:
Yeah, 13.5 beta.
Casey:
And so there's some stuff in settings that will allow you to turn on or off COVID-19 exposure notifications.
Casey:
And that is the thing where the iPhone will, in the background, it will communicate via Bluetooth low energy and kind of, if I understand things right, kind of say, I'm here and I am code 1234 and I'm oversimplifying here.
Casey:
And then it will listen to other phones saying, I'm here and I'm code 5678.
Casey:
And it will keep a kind of database or tally of who it's seen for a certain duration of time so that if a central health authority finds out that, oh, 5678,
Casey:
has coronavirus, you can look up all the people who have been tested positive and compare who you've seen with who is tested positive and say, oh, I was around them at some point.
Casey:
I should probably self-isolate, quarantine, and then maybe even get tested.
Casey:
uh this at a glance seems pretty solid i'm i'm pleased with what i've seen to be fair i haven't looked into this deeply it seems like in order to write an app that leverages this api you need a certain um uh certain not certification what's the word i'm looking for entitlement thank you yep uh you need a certain entitlement uh which presumably apple will not be giving out willy-nilly but i don't know at a glance this looks pretty good marco thoughts about this
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, contact tracing or exposure notification is a pretty important part of controlling a pandemic and dealing with it.
Marco:
And so the need for this is very high.
Marco:
The fact that Apple and Google worked together to develop a standard that both Google-powered Android phones and all of the iPhones could both use and talk to each other
Marco:
is really remarkable.
Marco:
And so just that alone, the fact that they worked together pretty quickly and developed this thing that they could both swallow and were willing to do for all the people out there who have either platform, that's really impressive.
Marco:
And if you look at the actual design of the system, obviously you would think, all right, well, if the phones are going to be passively trading identifiers with each other all the time, and then they'll keep some kind of history of what other identifiers they've seen...
Marco:
And then they'll be able to notify, oh, I've seen identifiers 10, 15, and 20, so notify them because I now have the virus.
Marco:
They need to know that they were exposed to me.
Marco:
You would think this would be a privacy nightmare.
Marco:
But the way they've designed the system is both simple and pretty clever to basically use a bunch of short-lived random tokens.
Marco:
And they're all stored locally on device.
Marco:
There's no real persistence, no persistent identifiers, no...
Marco:
real tracking possible beyond a 15-minute window of any one particular identifier.
Marco:
So it's actually... If you look at the system, I can't see any problems with the system as designed.
Marco:
At least any big problems.
Marco:
Any kind of massive privacy violation or creepy tracking potential.
Marco:
They've done a really good job.
Marco:
I suspect... Oftentimes what happens with standard bodies or tech standards is...
Marco:
Apple basically designs the whole thing and then hands it to the other party and is like, this is now our standard.
Marco:
That happens a lot from what I hear.
Marco:
And, you know, like things like USB-C.
Marco:
So apparently, you know, Apple frequently does stuff like that.
Marco:
And it wouldn't surprise me if that's what happened here because this is a very Apple-y kind of system.
Marco:
And I can't imagine Google coming up with the system, you know, if they had, if they were, you know, at the drawing board.
Marco:
So ultimately, it looks very good.
Marco:
It isn't out to the public yet.
Marco:
There are a bunch of complicated questions of things like, should it be enabled by default?
Marco:
Like, should your phone be broadcasting these identifiers by default?
Marco:
And there's certainly a slight privacy angle to that.
Marco:
But I think the system is so well designed that I would argue that, yes, it should be on by default because the privacy implication is so tiny, like the scope of potential privacy risk is so small and so minor.
Marco:
And if it's not on by default for everyone, it's far less effective.
Marco:
You might as well not even do it if it isn't on by default.
Marco:
So I'm hoping they end up with that.
Marco:
I think that is the plan right now.
Marco:
Maybe there will be one of those setup wizard screens when you first boot up 13.5 that it might ask you and just be defaulted to yes.
Marco:
But hopefully it is totally up and up and on by default and everything else.
Marco:
And hopefully the same applies to the Android platform as well.
Marco:
There is certainly the question of how the heck Android phones are getting a large-scale software update in any kind of reasonable amount of time.
Marco:
I assume, I don't know anything about this, but I assume that this is part of the Google Play services thing where Google kind of has this library of stuff they can update on a much more frequent basis compared to the actual OS of all these phones that never get updated.
Marco:
So it's most likely there.
Marco:
So yeah, hopefully this is...
Marco:
Hopefully the system can get deployed soon and enabled by default on a lot of different phones because that would really be quite effective at achieving this.
Marco:
There's all sorts of problems that they have clearly considered or been made aware of and addressed in some way.
Marco:
Like, for instance, you wouldn't want to be able to just spam everybody by saying, like, I got the virus, I got the virus, even if you didn't, and be able to spam all the people who were...
Marco:
who were near you for the last week or whatever and have, you know, scare them all or have them all go to get tested unnecessarily or whatever.
Marco:
So like they've thought about stuff like, okay, only public health authorities will be able to notify or to be able to submit the thing that says this person has it for sure.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
So like there's all sorts of concerns that they've been
Marco:
um seemingly addressing pretty well uh some countries there was this whole drama with like certain countries i think france was one of them and uh where like they they didn't want this kind of approach but that was totally passive they wanted like only an app that the user would be launching and keeping in the foreground and keeping their phone on with the screen on all the time for it to work and it's like that's no that's not going to do anything that's that's a that's a no-go
Marco:
I think most of those countries seem to be coming around that this is actually the better way to do it.
Marco:
So anyway, from what I can see so far, it looks really good.
Marco:
If you want to hear more detail about how it works or read more detail about how it works, there's a good article on NS Hipster about basically the whole API, what it does, how it works, why it's important, why it's pretty safe privacy-wise.
Marco:
So we'll link to that from the show notes.
Marco:
And otherwise, I think it's a great thing that they're doing.
Marco:
I hope it gets deployed widely and quickly.
John:
When we talk about security in other non-virus-related contexts, we're always talking about the classic tradeoff between convenience and security.
John:
Lots of stuff that has to do with security is inconvenient.
John:
You just want to get to the thing.
John:
You don't want to have to say okay to a bunch of permission dialog boxes.
John:
You don't have to enter a bunch of passwords.
John:
You don't want your password to have to be long and complicated.
John:
Basically, security and convenience are opposing forces, and you have to trade one for the other.
John:
And that's a difficult tradeoff because we all just want convenience.
John:
We also want the security, but day-to-day, we just want the convenience.
John:
For the virus stuff, I mean, that kind of same tradeoff still exists.
John:
You know, Marco was just talking about, you know, having to leave an app turned on and everything like that, which would be, quote-unquote, more secure because you'd be aware that you're doing it, but it's ridiculously inconvenient, right?
John:
But the real tradeoff here is efficacy versus...
John:
security right the more the more this the system respects your privacy the less effective it is right so you can imagine a system that totally violated your privacy it would be way more effective to give just one example nowhere in this scheme that apple has come up with is location information used anywhere period like the random identifiers that are sprayed out they're just random identifiers
John:
Nobody knows where anybody is.
John:
There is no location and information recorded or exchanged whatsoever.
John:
All it knows is that you saw this other device that sprayed this number out.
John:
It doesn't know where you are when you saw it.
John:
I don't even know if it knows the time of day when you saw it.
John:
It's just merely like exposure.
John:
Have you been exposed?
John:
Did you get this number sprayed at you from this number, you know, so on and so forth?
John:
I don't.
John:
Um, the fact that only, you know, that it's voluntary and that you have to go through this whole big procedure to submit the fact that to, to assert the site, you know, I actually, I've got it.
John:
I've been diagnosed.
John:
They tested me.
John:
I'm positive.
John:
The, the process of doing that, a, it's voluntary.
John:
You don't have to do it if you don't want to, because again, that's better for privacy.
John:
Right.
John:
Um,
John:
Um, if it was, if it was involuntary and if you, if you tested positive, you had no choice and they would, they would submit your thing worse for privacy, better for effectiveness.
John:
Because at this point, someone would be like, oh, I don't want to, I don't want to submit that.
John:
Right.
John:
And then you have to go through some process, which you have to know about and the doctor has to know about and you have to come together and do all that stuff.
John:
Um,
John:
if instead this is one of the things the other country was talking about let's say that it sprayed out your location and a bunch of identifiers in times of days and it was all collected into one global server somewhere so that some central authority or government had tracking information in real time of every single person and where they are 24 hours a day seven days a week and what other things are in the vicinity and it connected up involuntarily to all their private health information so as soon as someone tested positive
John:
No participation needed.
John:
We would just connect all the dots and find all the people.
John:
That would be way more effective and a privacy nightmare.
John:
So we're used to – we're talking about, oh, convenience privacy tradeoff and you can't have debates about it or whatever.
John:
This is a whole different ballgame because it's a similar set of tradeoffs but on the other side is like public health, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
You're inconvenienced.
John:
No matter how inconvenienced you are, you probably don't die.
John:
You know, someone you know probably doesn't die, which is part of the reason these countries with, I think, better governments, with citizenry that has more faith in its government—
John:
We're pushing the system.
John:
I said, well, why won't you just let us report all this information centrally to the government automatically?
John:
Because that's the purpose of government, to do a thing that individuals can't do.
John:
The collective, as elected by the people...
John:
Responsibility is to serve the public good, and it is entrusted to serve the public good through the system of government that we have, right?
John:
So why wouldn't we want to collect it?
John:
And Apple and Google are like, no, we're not going to do that.
John:
Our system is completely anonymous.
John:
You can't track people.
John:
There's no location, and there's no central –
John:
you know, authority or whatever.
John:
It's on-device information.
John:
You know, like, all those privacy-preserving things make it less effective but protects against what we know would happen in the United States, which is that some giant corporation would eventually get this information or they would leak out of the government or, you know, would end up on a bunch of servers on the dark web or whatever.
John:
Like,
John:
inevitably, it would get out.
John:
Like, you know, we can't even keep our credit information secure.
John:
Like, there is no way to have that valuable pile of information in the United States and not have it get out to bad actors, let alone before you consider whether the government itself is a bad actor and stuff like that.
John:
So...
John:
It's, you know, Apple and Google are doing what they can within the parameters that present themselves.
John:
But, you know, and the final bit is that this isn't even out yet.
John:
We're talking about iOS 13.5 beta.
John:
13.5 presumably will be out in the next week or two.
John:
But there is a question of by the time this actually gets out and by the time actually people upload their phones, you know, how much value can it deliver?
John:
And how much is that value necessarily constrained by, you know, the dire environment in the United States and in general across the world?
John:
Like to have to sort of code for the worst case scenario and say, we have to be very aggressive or protecting your privacy, even though we know it will make this effort less effective than it could be.
Yeah.
John:
And I think they've probably made the right trade-off because it is not an ideological trade-off.
John:
The trade-offs they've made recognize the realities of the world.
John:
But I feel bad for the countries that are essentially doing better than us and have more faith in their government because we can't afford to have a system like this that works well in the best of cases but is a disaster in the worst of cases because so many places in the world, including the U.S., are the worst of cases.
Casey:
Yay.
John:
I mean, assuming if it's on, if it's not on by default, are you two going to turn it on?
John:
Oh, totally.
Casey:
I mean, well, I don't, I don't see any downside to it personally.
Casey:
Like more data is good.
Casey:
I don't particularly want to, like, I don't want to know if I've been potentially infected, but I really want to know if I've been potentially infected.
Casey:
So yeah, I would absolutely turn it on.
Casey:
I am not, I'm not,
Casey:
I'm currently in a position where I think it's worth running the beta, especially since it doesn't appear that there's any like health organizations that have released an app for it as far as I know.
Casey:
But no, I definitely will turn it on once the opportunity arises when 13.5 is out for real.
John:
The other thing about this is whenever there's any technology involved in health, there's the danger of the magic thinking of technology, especially people who aren't into technology.
John:
I think it's whatever that's saying.
John:
If you're actually a programmer, you know that all software is horrible.
John:
But if you're not, you might think it's magic.
John:
So part of what this system has to do is decide what counts as exposure.
John:
It's not just, oh, I received a communication via Bluetooth of this identifier.
John:
Because that can happen when you drive by somebody in a car.
John:
You probably didn't get it from them.
John:
They have to decide...
John:
How long do you have to be within proximity of this thing to count as an exposure?
John:
Because practically speaking, again, if you walk past each other on opposite sides of the street, on opposite sidewalks, you're probably not going to get affected.
John:
Mostly from what we know of the transmissibility, you're probably okay on opposite sides of the street.
John:
But if you hang out in an elevator for half an hour, you're probably going to get it, right?
John:
So somewhere between there, this system has to decide what counts as exposure.
John:
But because it's technology, they're going to be like, oh, well, I got an exposure notification.
John:
That means I was exposed.
John:
Well, maybe.
John:
Maybe.
John:
Or maybe they, you know, were a little bit conservative with the exposure and really they made it like a two-second gap and really you walked past someone at a 12-foot distance and were within range for them for two seconds and it counted as an exposure.
John:
Or if you don't get a notification like, yay, I wasn't exposed, maybe, or maybe they said it so you had to be in close proximity for somebody for five minutes and you were in proximity for four minutes and 30 seconds and you got it, but you didn't get the notification.
John:
So keep in mind that, you know,
John:
Even when working as designed, this isn't necessarily an imperfect system.
John:
All we're trying to do is help.
John:
This is better than not having the system, but it is not, like anything else we're going to hear, a complete solution to the problem.
John:
If you get notified, this doesn't mean you're sure you have it.
John:
If you don't get notified, it doesn't mean you're sure you're not.
John:
It just adds more information than you had before.
Marco:
I would also say for all of you listeners out there, this is a thing where the question of whether you enable it shouldn't even be a question.
Marco:
Yes, enable it.
Marco:
If you actually look at what it does and how it works, it's a no-brainer.
Marco:
There should be no controversy about it.
Marco:
There should be no...
Marco:
real concern about what it's doing like and it will only work if everybody enables it so just enable it like research if you're concerned research what it actually does and you'll see you know you'll see it as as i have by looking into like the actual protocol what it's actually doing that it's fine like this is one of those cases like vaccines where like
Marco:
the only people who are going to be afraid of it and not do it are people who have less information willfully or not.
Marco:
Like they're, if you actually look at what it's doing, it's a, it's a no brainer.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And of course it's software.
John:
There can be bugs and so on and so forth.
John:
But like in the grand scheme of things, your phone company already has so much more information about you than you can ever possibly imagine.
John:
Uh, just yeah.
John:
Enable this.
John:
It's a no brainer.
John:
Take, if you're listening to this thing, they'll listen to, uh, get advice from people who know stuff about technology.
Uh,
John:
or we're telling you, because of what I just mentioned, how incredibly limited this is and how preserving it is of your privacy, that's the reason why you should just do it by default.
John:
It's a no-brainer.
Casey:
Also in 13.5, there are group FaceTime and FaceID improvements.
Casey:
I haven't had the time to look into this myself, but my limited understanding is
Casey:
You can or I guess when it detects that you're wearing a mask, it will not wait near as long trying to figure out whether or not this is your face.
Casey:
And it will just immediately show you a password prompt.
Casey:
Did I get that right?
John:
It'll scan your face like it's still doing the face scanning.
John:
But rather than just saying, I'm trying to recognize his face, I'm trying to recognize his face.
John:
It will take a break if it doesn't immediately recognize your face and say, okay, I didn't recognize the face, but does this look like a face that's wearing a mask?
John:
And I'm not sure how it does that.
John:
It could do it with a depth sensor looking for basically a person without a nose and a mouth.
John:
Or it could do it with the camera looking for a big region that doesn't look like a face.
John:
Or who knows?
John:
Could it be some machine learning?
John:
Anyway, there's some magic that basically says...
John:
If I don't recognize a face, the next thing I'm going to do is try to recognize a mask.
John:
And if I recognize a mask, then I'm going to fall back to passcode rather than keep trying to recognize the face, which is a smart thing to do and some fast work from Apple.
Marco:
Yeah, in the Face ID training thing, when you're registering your face with it, it has a thing.
Marco:
If you tried to do the second appearance as one with a mask, which I've tried and many people have, it doesn't work for most people, it seems.
Marco:
It certainly didn't work for me.
Marco:
But what it does is if you're wearing a mask or...
Marco:
a half folded over mask or whatever trick people tell you might work.
Marco:
Um, the face ID registration thing says your face is obstructed.
Marco:
Like it actually has that as a status that can, it can detect and show you.
Marco:
It's probably using that exact same logic to see like, all right, is your face, does it, does it look like a face, but one that is obstructed?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Then immediately fail and go to the passcode screen, which, you know, face ID is the way all modern iPhones authenticate.
Marco:
with the exception of the very, very old slash new SE and previous models, but I wouldn't call those modern iPhones.
Marco:
All the modern iPhones use Face ID as their only biometric authentication method.
Marco:
This is not going to be a great long-term solution.
Marco:
And we're going to be wearing masks for a while.
Marco:
Some countries are going to keep wearing them as they have been for lots of conditions, if not all the time.
Marco:
Some professions require their workers to wear masks all day, every day or much of the day.
Marco:
And I don't think the mask thing is going to go away in the next few months.
Marco:
So I think this is a good stopgap to make the current situation a little less crappy.
Marco:
But this is only a temporary solution, I think.
Marco:
So it's great Apple's buying some time.
Marco:
I hope the real solution ends up being either a new line of phones that has Touch ID and Face ID somehow and will let you have some kind of setting that says, like, all right, whichever way you recognize me first, just trust that and go.
Marco:
and or have a setting on Face ID that makes it less secure that basically doesn't check for your mouth and just, all right, recognize me by like my eyes and my forehead and yeah, that's less data points and it's going to be less secure, but I'll take that trade off because right now the alternative is like...
Marco:
I've been using an alphanumeric passcode forever, and I just had to switch to a number passcode this past couple of weeks because every time I have to go shopping with a mask on and everything, I can't use my phone very easily, and typing in an alphanumeric passcode sucks when you're wearing gloves, potentially, and it's certainly inconvenient to have to do that every time you're checking your shopping list in the grocery store.
Marco:
Ideally, Apple has to find some way to make their biometric authentication on the iPhone work when people are wearing face masks.
Marco:
That is the only good long-term solution here.
Marco:
So whether it's re-adding Touch ID and having it be simultaneous recognition or whether it's giving an option to have Face ID have probably less security but have it operate with a mask on, that's the real long-term solution here.
Marco:
We don't have that yet, but I hope they're working on it.
John:
The lead times on getting a touch ID back into the phone are too long for them to do it as a reaction to the virus because they've either been in their roadmap for years or it hasn't been.
John:
We're all hoping that, you know, for years that they were going to bring it back as under screen.
John:
And I've always been saying under screen, either whole or half screen touch ID where you don't even have to have your finger in a specific spot.
John:
But there was no rush for it when we were talking about that.
John:
It was like, oh, that would be a cool thing to have in the meantime.
John:
Face ID is fine.
John:
But now there's a little bit more urgency.
John:
But, you know, if that's the reason they haven't been doing that is, you know, one cost and two, my understanding is that the underscreen ones are still not as good as the dedicated one that Apple has on the SE in terms of.
John:
How secure it is, how many points can it pick up, how easy it is to read your finger, yada, yada, right?
John:
So maybe three or four years from now, Touch ID will, you know, if they start now, three or four years from now, Touch ID could make its triumphant return underneath our screens of our iPhone 27s or whatever the hell.
John:
I guess 11 plus 3 or 4 is not 27, but do your own math.
John:
You know, with Apple's naming, you know what?
John:
I take it back.
John:
There's no reason it couldn't be 27 with Apple's naming screen.
John:
But yeah, in the meantime, other solutions like Margo suggested are much easier to do quickly.
John:
Weakening face ID by only doing your eyeballs or your forehead, maybe a little bit too weak.
John:
The one that sprung to mind immediately to me and it would help Apple sell more stuff is
John:
have better link to unlock with your apple watch kind of like they do with mac os right because the watch doesn't suffer this because it's always touching your screen so it can be used as a proxy key to say as long as you don't take your watch off and as long as your watch is unlocked if you pick up your phone and try to open it and it's close by your watch then your phone will unlock automatically too given how well that works or doesn't on the mac maybe they need to work on that feature a little bit but i would think that that would be more secure than eyeball face id
John:
I suppose they can do retina scans, but again, that's another five to ten year timeline for them to come up with that amazing technology.
Casey:
Additionally, the group FaceTime in 13.5 beta, you can optionally turn off the enlarging of whoever's speaking.
Casey:
Now, I'm familiar with this in principle, but I have not experienced this myself.
Casey:
And to be honest, almost any group call I've been on has been Zoom, not FaceTime.
Casey:
But my understanding is, especially once you get like three or four people involved with single FaceTime calls, that this gets real annoying real fast.
Casey:
So now there's a switch.
Casey:
This is where you can disable the enlarge the face of the speaker feature.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, this is true on Zoom calls as well.
Marco:
Zoom has this wonderful option called GridView.
Marco:
And I'm not a video chat expert.
Marco:
I don't know how many other platforms have this.
Marco:
But the idea of if you have a conference call, a video call with more than a handful of people...
Marco:
you know normally what these platforms would try to do is may have like one big rectangle for like the primary person and then a bunch of smaller rectangles for like everyone else and then basically detect and switch whoever was talking the loudest at any given time they would be shown as the big primary square and then when somebody else was talking it would switch to them and
Marco:
Turns out this is kind of annoying a lot of the times.
Marco:
And having just a basic grid view where everyone is the same size and just no matter what, when people are talking, like the arrangement stays stable, that is a lot better in a lot of conditions.
Marco:
And so this is basically saying that that will now become a possibility for the FaceTime video chat, I think.
Marco:
Am I interpreting this correctly, that that's what this means?
John:
I don't know if that's... I think we're all correct on the thing they're reacting against, which is the current implementation, which I have used.
John:
The current implementation is trying to be an app-ish version of what Margo just described as the default for Zoom or lots of other things where...
John:
There's one, the whole screen gets taken by whoever's talking and then there's a smaller version of other people.
John:
That's what Face ID does now, except for instead of having it be like big and everything else, it gradually moves between those phases.
John:
So it's just a bunch of floating boxes.
John:
And as you start to be the dominant talker, your box gets bigger and bigger, but never quite as big as full screen.
John:
But then if someone else goes, you get smaller and that other box gets bigger.
John:
So it's trying to be a smooth, dynamic version of the very binary.
John:
You either get the whole screen or you're one of them.
John:
The background bit players, right?
John:
What I don't know is there.
John:
All right.
John:
So is the fix?
John:
What is the fix that is the fix for that just a grid?
John:
Maybe I haven't seen any screenshots to know whether it is the fix for that could also be just a bunch of little floating boxes, but they don't get any bigger.
John:
But I think a much more Apple-ish solution to this and one that actually would be used by people who find themselves in a situation.
John:
I know because I've done lots of family group FaceTimes.
John:
Direct manipulation, right?
John:
People know what they want to see at any given moment.
John:
It's annoying to have to manipulate it manually.
John:
But, for example, very often someone is showing something.
John:
Look, some kid is holding up a picture they drew.
John:
Right.
John:
That's what you want to see.
John:
But at the same time, someone else is talking saying, oh, that's so nice.
John:
When did you draw that?
John:
What is that supposed to be?
John:
You know, like the one talking is not the one you want to see.
John:
So you need the person who's using the interface to be able to say, I know what I want to see.
John:
I want to see the picture and have them do what everybody knows how to do with their phone, which is pinch to zoom.
John:
Just grab the picture, grab the thing you want to see, make it come to the front, pinch to zoom, chuck it into the corner, like direct manipulation and
John:
And to go along with the direct manipulation, you need to turn off the sort of, you know, non non direct manipulation, the sort of I didn't touch anything, but things are moving around and changing anyway.
John:
Right.
John:
So if you just start with a grid view and let people sort of zoom and shrink as needed.
John:
I think that'll cover basically every use case without having any sort of machine learning, artificial intelligence, noise canceling, whatever, whatever.
John:
And it's better than grid view because in grid view, the more people you get, the smaller everybody becomes.
John:
So if you get 12 people on a call and you want to see little Susie's picture that she drew, it's too damn small.
John:
And then if your only option is zoom Susie to full screen or make Susie a thumbnail, then you're back to the zoom thing, which is, you know, it's passable.
John:
You can either be full screen, you can choose what you want to be full screen or
John:
Or you can be one of the little tiny ones, but sometimes you want something that's kind of in between.
John:
So I really hope Apple just lets us directly manipulate those little floating people.
John:
And then, you know, if there's any auto manipulation, I'll have it to be, have it to be very gentle and have some way to sort of reset back to a reasonable grid type mode.
John:
But yeah, I don't, I don't like the floating and the zooming and the changing.
John:
I find it very annoying.
John:
I find it hard to keep track of things and people keep moving around and,
John:
Yeah, I'm not a fan.
John:
And the other thing that I'm not a fan of is trying to set up a group FaceTime call.
John:
Even if everybody in your family has Apple devices is way more of a pain than it needs to be due to like the way of Apple's various messaging applications.
John:
in general are not good about letting you sort of select how you want to contact somebody like we have you know contact entries in our in our address book or whatever and everybody has five email addresses and one of them is an apple id but this person's apple id is also their hotmail address
John:
but this person's Apple ID is their Gmail address, but this person has a Gmail address, but that's not their Apple ID.
John:
And like, you know, when you want to contact somebody in the FaceTime app, very often you have to like be very careful to say, okay, when you bring this person in, don't use their Gmail address, but this person use their Hotmail address, but don't use their phone number for this person because they're not on their phone device.
John:
They're in their iPad and the phone number isn't.
John:
It's just like, oh my God, figure it out.
John:
Like I'm in FaceTime and I want to do a FaceTime.
John:
like whatever it's going to take to do a facetime do that and i just want to pick the contact i don't want to have to know which person i should pick a phone number for and which person i should pick an email for and which person i should pick their apple id for and very often what will happen is you'll do it and like oh that my phone is ringing but it's not on my ipad but i don't want it to be my phone can you send it to my ipad
John:
Just setting up the call is half the challenge.
John:
It's easier to set up a Microsoft Teams meeting, for crying out loud, because at work, everybody just says one work email, and it's the works domain, and there's no question about who you're connecting to.
John:
But with home people, with all the different things,
John:
It's annoying.
John:
It's the same thing I used to complain about in messages where messages would be split up and I wanted them to be grouped by person.
John:
But then you're like, well, we're, you know, they all have that preference.
John:
Like, where do you want your message to first come from?
John:
Do you want it to come from your phone number?
John:
Do you want it to come from your Apple ID?
John:
Do you want your Mac to listen on your phone number?
John:
But you can only do that when your phone is in proximity.
John:
It's too confusing.
John:
Like too many of the implementation details are exposed.
John:
Implementation details that we don't care about.
John:
So in a context where Apple has a fighting chance of knowing what we want, you've launched the FaceTime app and you're trying to do a FaceTime, just figure out which way in the giant contact entry for this person will result in a successful FaceTime and do that.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I know it's a difficult problem.
John:
I just, it's frustrating.
John:
And then once you get on there, their heads are all changing sizes and floating already.
Casey:
Oh, the struggle is real.
Casey:
And speaking of struggles, Google is perhaps struggling with chips right now because there's a rumor in Axios that Google is readying its own chips for future pixels and Chromebooks.
Casey:
So this is following the Apple playbook as Google's off to do and
Casey:
and they're supposedly working with Samsung to make their own CPUs.
John:
I can't believe it's taken this long.
John:
I mean, we've been saying for years and years and years that Apple has the best chips in their phones.
John:
They're the most powerful.
John:
They use the least power.
John:
Everything about them is amazing, and it's not by a little bit.
John:
It's not like, oh, they're 1% or 2% better.
John:
They're hugely better than the competitors' phone chips.
John:
You would think the competitors would feel some kind of pressure to say,
John:
We need to match this.
John:
But instead, just for years and years, they've been willing to outsource it to having Qualcomm make their system-oriented chips for them.
John:
And the Qualcomm system-oriented chips have, you know, taken more power and not been as fast.
John:
Like, the one thing Qualcomm has been doing for them is letting the non-Apple phones have, like, little spec wars.
John:
Like, look how many cores we have and all sorts of other things that sound good on paper.
John:
But in practice, their CPUs use more battery and are slower than Apple.
John:
So, like, what the hell is the point of having umpteen cores if the end result is a slower phone that, you know, takes more power to run?
John:
Right.
John:
So finally, it seems like this is the I think is the first rumor I've seen the first sort of substantial rumor I've seen of Google saying, you know, we should just make our own chips because Qualcomm sucks and they're not doing the job.
John:
And we can make we can do what Apple does and make a chip that's just purpose built for our phones.
John:
Because Google has all sorts of, you know, interesting machine learning ideas and they're building their own hardware.
John:
As we know, we talked to Chris Latner about this, all their TPUs and the other kind of hardware they built for the data centers for machine learning.
John:
they that's exactly what apple does in their phones they put that neural engine in their design to help speed up the things that they know they want to do when apple rolls out facetime they have hardware that's going to help them do facetime better when apple does portrait mode they have hardware in their image processor that helps them do that right uh it's a big win to do that and google is the other big player in the phone industry so they should totally make their own chips so we'll see how they do i
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm not actually that hopeful about it because Google's experience so far with hardware has been mostly middling.
Marco:
The Pixel phones recently have been pretty good in camera stuff, kind of a mixed bag and other stuff.
Marco:
Their heart is not in it, clearly.
Marco:
They don't really prioritize hardware.
Marco:
they're never going to be very good at it.
Marco:
Maybe they can do a passable job, but they clearly are not that into it.
Marco:
In the same way that Apple isn't into so much other stuff that they, you know, do a passable job.
Marco:
It's like, you know, like we were talking about earlier, iCloud Drive.
Marco:
Apple is not a great...
Marco:
company for that kind of service, for that kind of product.
Marco:
They're going to consistently do kind of a half-assed job.
Marco:
Things like iWork document sharing, collaborative document editing, any kind of competition for Google Apps.
Marco:
Apple's heart is not in that.
Marco:
They do a pretty poor job of that most of the time.
Marco:
They have some kind of passable solution, but it's nothing compared to the company that cares more about it, which in this case is Google.
Marco:
So going back to this topic,
Marco:
Apple cares a whole lot about making really, really good hardware, especially really good mobile phone and mobile computer hardware and chips and everything.
Marco:
They do a really good job of that.
Marco:
Google doesn't want to do that.
Marco:
They're doing it because they're being competitively forced.
Marco:
The same way Apple's being competitively forced to have iWork collaboration features.
Marco:
Apple doesn't want to do any of that.
Marco:
They're doing it kind of reluctantly.
Marco:
And that's how this feels.
Marco:
It feels like Google is doing whatever this chip move is.
Casey:
reluctantly because they don't really have any other choice competitively for this really important market but i don't think they're going to do great things i think you might be underselling the google pixel phones from everything i've understood their cameras are at least as good as iphone cameras if not better in certain cases for stills for video from everything i've gathered the the iphone is still leaps and bounds ahead and
Marco:
That's because of software, though, not hardware.
Marco:
Google is really good at taking a pedestrian camera sensor and getting really good output out of it just using software enhancements.
Marco:
That's not really a hardware thing.
Casey:
My very limited understanding is that the Pixel phones are legitimately good phones, and
Casey:
They're arguably, up until very recently, the only good Android phones.
Casey:
And I think recently that's not the case.
Casey:
But for a while there, certainly when I was still traditionally employed, all of our Android team would swear by the Pixel phones and say they're the ones that are great and everything else is kind of garbage.
Casey:
And now I think that that's changed a bit.
Casey:
But yeah, I think that the Pixel phones, certainly a couple of years ago, were very, very good and arguably as good as iPhones, if not in certain cases better.
Casey:
I mean, I think a lot of people prefer still cameras than the Pixel phones.
Casey:
And whether that's software or hardware, I mean, it's still ultimately the experience of these cameras some people thought were better.
Casey:
And I haven't tried an Android phone in a long, long time.
Casey:
But, you know, I wouldn't say that their hardware is mediocre or, you know, just bargain.
Casey:
Well, not even bargain basement, but it's not just run of the mill stuff you can grab on a store shelf, so to speak.
Casey:
Some of it is very good from what I've gathered.
John:
Well, what Google's heart is not in is building phones.
John:
Forget about system-owned chips.
John:
Like, their heart is not in building phones for a variety of reasons.
John:
Potentially, it's like, well, if they want to be a platform vendor, kind of like the Microsoft thing, why didn't Microsoft make PCs for a long time?
John:
It's like, well, PC makers would be mad at us if we made a PC.
John:
Microsoft got over that eventually.
John:
But still, Microsoft volumes are low.
John:
So, yeah, Google gives you Android for all your billions of Android phones.
John:
And, hey, we also make phones, but don't worry.
John:
We don't sell too many of them, Samsung.
John:
So it's not a big deal, right?
John:
why is that the case maybe because they don't want to anger their vendors especially in the beginning they wanted to get traction and not say they were competing with them but maybe also google just you know doesn't have the expertise in manufacturing they for a while they outsource the construction of their pixel phones i don't know if they still outsource all of it and not just like to foxcon like apple does but apple is intimately involved with the manufacturing process of all its products including its phones with lots of apple employees and technology and everything going into the manufacturing process and
John:
Google, my impression, is way less involved than Apple in the manufacturing of its phone.
John:
So if it ever wants to be high volume, high quality, it would have to dedicate itself to the manufacturing of the phone.
John:
So I'm not sure if they want to do that or if they're going to do that.
John:
But the system on ship is different.
John:
Google is totally into building, you know, silicon chip hardware that has synergy with what it wants to do with software.
John:
Again, those TPU things with the machine learning, you know, like Apple's not designing.
John:
Well, maybe they are.
John:
We don't know about it.
John:
But as far as we know, Apple is not custom designing its own hardware for the data center down to down to the CPU.
John:
Google is doing that purpose built hardware just for its machine learning stuff.
John:
Because that has synergy with the software stuff that it's doing, and it's not a consumer product, so you can, you know, fill it all in.
John:
So there is a potential that Google could say, hey, if we build our own system on our chips or our phones, we can make something that fits our needs exactly.
John:
And we could continue to be...
John:
You know, not super into manufacturing phones and continue to sell only a small number of these Pixel phones to discerning people who want a phone that has the tradeoffs that the Pixel phones have.
John:
But it'll be good for us because we can build into these system-on-chips these certain features that help other Google features.
John:
Potentially, they could sell the system-on-chip to other Android vendors.
John:
Or the other route they could go, and this is what I was thinking with Google making its own system-on-chip is...
John:
rather than making a powerhouse competitor to the top-line A-series chip that Apple makes, instead make a pretty okay chip that is able to run Android and Google stuff very efficiently,
John:
with very little power consumption and with very low cost to allow the creation of a google phone that is way cheaper than any iphone could be slower than an iphone like kind of like imagine something that is you know i can't say it's like the iphone se because the iphone se has the best chip in the
John:
the market in it which is a weird thing but you know like a a phone that is acceptably good but way undercut to anything that apple could ever put out and it's difficult to do that because in the android market if you get like a cheaper qualcomm chip it's so dog slow if you don't get the top of the line one it's so dog slow and it's probably not great with power and that's you know it's
John:
I can imagine Google making a different set of trade-offs than Apple makes, like having dedicated processors with a few important things that make the Google phone impressive, but otherwise giving a middle-of-the-road chip that uses very little power and has good enough performance to allow it to sell Pixel phones at a way lower price.
John:
And that could make it so that Apple... I keep saying Apple.
John:
So that Google could...
John:
distribute across the world way more phones than they do now that we would look at and say it's an okay phone but suddenly google becomes a volume distributor because they're able to sell this phone and undercut everybody else and they still outsource all the manufacturing and if you look at it you're not super impressed by the industrial design and the camera is fine and you know the software on it's good like
John:
These are things that Google can't do because they're stuck using system-on-it-chips made by other companies that are A, not as good as Apple at it, and B, make trade-offs that are not the same trade-offs that Google would make if it was designing its own phone.
John:
So when I envision a Google system-on-it-chip for a phone, I keep thinking of...
John:
A good enough cheap phone for way less money rather than a flagship Apple destroying phone.
John:
But who knows?
John:
In this phone market, I've always kind of been baffled by the way Google does things from their decisions about the tradeoff between being the platform owner and also selling your own phones right down to exactly how long they've gone.
John:
dealing with third-party chips that are obviously massively inferior to what Apple's putting out and just sort of like not doing anything about it.
John:
So now it sounds like they're doing something about it.
John:
So we just got to sit back and see how they do.
Casey:
And speaking of building your own chips, this flew by in a big way a week or two ago, but the Arm Mac is coming, or so we're told.
Casey:
Mark Gurman says, what do you say, 2021?
Casey:
Apple's going to start shipping.
Casey:
uh three of its own mac processors bait based on the a14 and the next iphone uh the first of these will be much faster than the credit processors in the iphone apple's preparing to release at least one mac with its own chip next year in 2021 the initiative to develop multiple chips codenamed kalamata suggests the company will transition more of its mac lineup away from the current supplier intel
Casey:
TSMC is going to be building new Mac chips at 5 nanometers.
Casey:
The first Mac processors will have eight high-performance cores, codename Firestorm, and at least four energy-efficient cores, known internally as Icestorm.
Casey:
Very good.
Casey:
Very good codenames.
Casey:
I very much approve of them.
Casey:
Apple is exploring Mac processors with more than 12 cores for further in the future.
Casey:
In some Macs, Apple's designs will double or quadruple the number of cores that Intel provides.
Casey:
The current entry-level MacBook Air has two cores, for example.
Casey:
And the Kalimata project has been going on for several years.
Casey:
Surprise, surprise.
Casey:
In 2018, Apple developed a Mac chip based on the iPad Pro's A12X processor for internal testing.
Casey:
That gave the company's engineers confidence they could begin replacing Intel Macs as early as 2020.
Casey:
Like with the iPhone, Apple's Mac processors will include several components, including the CPU and GPU.
Casey:
On the one side, this is very exciting, very interesting and very cool.
Casey:
On the other side, I'll believe it when it happens.
John:
We've been talking about this for ages, but there are a few more details in here.
John:
We've got a codename, Kalamata.
John:
That's good.
John:
So now we can talk about this effort if that codename is real in some way rather than just saying Apple's ARM transition.
John:
We've got core counts, and I think the core counts are surprising.
John:
You would expect that there would be more cores than Intel just because if we look at how many cores are in our phones today.
John:
uh it's you know it's it's it would be a surprising number for a fanless mac that fits in your hand right again with the macbook air having only two cores and our phones have what do they have they have like the two high performance one and the four slow ones i forget what the the current phone has i know what you're saying i think it's four and four now i don't know it depends on the model but yeah i think we have a lot of cores now
John:
For a Mac application, I'm saying eight high performance and at least four energy efficient cores.
John:
The core counts are going to be very high.
John:
The whole thing that they did at one base on A12X gave them confidence that they could replace Intel.
John:
That didn't give them confidence.
John:
They knew they could, like, the benchmark numbers for the A12 that they got three years ago when the A12 developed.
John:
Like, we all have confidence.
John:
We all know they'll do fine, right?
John:
Because we keep comparing our iPad and our phone processors against MacBook Pros and these fanless handheld things with, you know, seven-hour battery life.
John:
are destroying the max and single core and being competitive and multi-core.
John:
And the only reason losing multi-core is that maybe they don't have so many cores.
John:
If you doubled or triple the number of cores, these will be amazing processors.
John:
Um, so I'm, you know, I'm very excited about these chips.
John:
Uh, also I think that the other interesting part is the fact that they're going to have integrated GPU.
John:
Now for a laptop application, you say that's a given, right?
John:
Cause you want a system on a chip type of thing.
John:
You want all the energy savings of having it all in one.
John:
You don't want discrete GPU.
John:
Um,
John:
There is a question of how beefy a GPU can you fit in a system on the chip?
John:
At what point do you have to go to a discrete GPU?
John:
And would Apple consider making a discrete GPU or they just continue to ship AMD discrete GPUs in that scenario?
John:
to get an idea of how beefy a gpu can you fit in a system on a chip look at the next generation consoles look at the xbox one and the playstation 5 they both have essentially system on a chips that have amd cpus and amd gpus on one big thing and those gpus that are in there are pretty darn good right it's just one big honking chip but the
John:
Those GPUs are not embarrassing.
John:
Arguably, they may be better than my stupid $1,000 video card that I just installed.
John:
I haven't looked at the actual benchmarks, but it's pretty impressive.
John:
Now, granted, those are big or whatever, but when we're talking about, hey, what kind of ARM system on a chip can you put in an iMac?
John:
Could you make an iMac Pro without a discrete GPU?
John:
I think it's plausible, especially, you know, if it's a GPU custom tailored to whatever Apple thinks people are going to be doing with an iMac Pro, like Final Cut Pro stuff or whatever, and not necessarily tailored to gaming performance or something like that.
John:
You know, for the laptops, it makes much more sense.
John:
But for the desktops, I'm still curious.
John:
Like, so this just has hints of like, well, they could make, you know, even higher core counts.
John:
How many cores could they fit in the power budget of my giant 2019 Mac Pro with these huge fans?
John:
Right.
John:
With no fans, you can do an iPad Pro.
John:
If you have, you know, three gigantic fans plus a blower in this huge case, how many cores could you fit in there?
John:
You've got the 28 core Intel thing now that costs a whole jillion dollars.
John:
I'm pretty sure that you could do, like, a 64-core ARM CPU for a similar price and power budget.
John:
And, you know, not that Apple's probably going to make something that big, but, boy, that would be a hell of a machine.
John:
So I continue to be very excited about Apple's efforts in this area, and I'm, you know, I'm...
John:
glad to see that the rumors are for 12 core things with eight high performance core and four energy efficient cores and i'm also excited that you know this again makes sense if you think about it but it's nice to get some kind of information they're going to use low power cores like you think oh on the phone they have to do that because you know it's a handheld device and yada yada but it makes perfect sense to do it in
John:
laptops as well you know apple's main mac they sell is laptop because this will make them so marco doesn't have to run his little turbo disabling thing it will just run the energy efficient course almost all the time and reduce power consumption and heat and fan noise in the whole nine yards and only only even turn on the high performance cords when it's called upon to do something big so boy these this first line of uh arm laptops is going to be a hell of a thing i predict
Marco:
I really am looking forward to this.
Marco:
Same.
Marco:
I was so happy to see this report because we've been expecting our Macs are probably somewhere near the near term for a while now.
Marco:
I believe we did some kind of bet on the show about when we would see the first ARM Mac.
Marco:
And I believe I said possibly this year.
Marco:
So if this report is true, I'm a little early, but not by much.
Marco:
I'm just so excited about this because...
Marco:
Everything John said, I think we're going to have a significant improvement in performance per watt.
Marco:
And that's always one of the most exciting metrics and advances that we can make in computing.
Marco:
Making large advances in performance per watt enables new form factors or makes existing form factors way better.
Marco:
It enables things like the Apple Watch, which normally to get that kind of performance would require something larger than what could fit in your wrist until fairly recently in computing history.
Marco:
And now we can do that, right?
Marco:
Phones are amazing.
Marco:
iPads are amazing.
Marco:
All with these extremely low power chips that can run on these very tiny batteries for many hours at a time while also powering these giant bright screens and cell radios and GPS antennas and stuff like that.
Marco:
So we've made some incredible progress in that area.
Marco:
And whenever there's new progress to be made, it's a big deal.
Marco:
the laptop area has been lagging behind the iPad area pretty badly in this department.
Marco:
There is a lot that the big beefy Intel architecture is going to be better at for the foreseeable future.
Marco:
Stuff like, you know, I don't think we're going to see a Mac pro that has a bunch of expansion slots that can run various like PC and Mac hybrid hardware cards and
Marco:
that's going to run an ARM CPU.
Marco:
I think anything that's going to involve Thunderbolt, high performance bandwidth, external stuff, or any kind of pro hardware integration, things like cards and Thunderbolt devices, that's probably going to stay Intel only for the foreseeable future, if not forever.
Marco:
Or at least until those technologies aren't used anymore.
Marco:
But most Apple computers are laptops.
Marco:
Most laptops don't need Thunderbolt 3 for anything, and most people never have a single Thunderbolt peripheral.
Marco:
So most of the time, most people using most Apple Macs would be totally fine to be served by this.
Marco:
So even if they kept the iMac Intel and the Mac Pro Intel, they could still have really awesome laptops using ARM.
Marco:
And that would still be a wonderful thing.
Marco:
The GPU issue I'm actually very excited about because, again, look at most Apple computers sold.
Marco:
We know about two-thirds of them are laptops.
Marco:
And I don't think we know the model breakdown among the laptops, but I think it's pretty safe to assume that most laptops sold are not the 15 or 16-inch class.
Marco:
And if you can assume that, then literally all other models don't have discrete GPUs.
Marco:
Everything else besides the 15 to 16-inch is using integrated GPUs.
Marco:
So to have something really good with...
Marco:
awesome you know awesome integrated gpu performance and power and size paired with an amazing cpu that is this new architecture that you know very power efficient and everything that's awesome that covers the vast majority of apple's computer needs that's going to be great and i will be the first person to buy that arm laptop
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I could use a new one.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So the discrete GPU use case, like even though it's a tiny corner of the market, it is a corner of the market that Apple just recently entered with a big splash and presumably wants to continue to be a contender in.
John:
They're selling Mac pros where you can get four discrete GPUs.
John:
Is it four?
John:
Maybe can you do eight?
John:
I forget how many you can put inside this thing.
John:
You can put a lot of discrete GPUs and they've made it a point of saying, and look, we have, if you're using some specific Apple software, we will use all those GPUs.
John:
So, uh,
John:
if apple wants to stay in that market and if apple actually wants to transition that market to arm anytime soon they need to have a solution that the solution could just be just keep using amd like that's fine it's perfectly good solution like their gpus are great maybe apple doesn't want to deal with that but for like mark was saying for every other use case like there is no problem building a system on a chip with a good enough gpu uh for even the highest end macbook pro like that'll be fine right
John:
And plus, all those machines all have eGPU support if you really, really need some beefy box outside.
John:
And as for bets, I did a search, and I don't know what bet Marco was talking about.
John:
The only one I could find.
John:
This is a reminder.
John:
Well, it'll come up in my calendar again, so we won't forget.
John:
But on Wednesday, July 1st.
John:
Marco contended sometime in our past that the vast majority of models Apple sells will have scissor keyboards.
John:
I think he's going to win that bet.
John:
I think he already has one.
John:
Yeah, I think I did win that bet, didn't I?
John:
I don't think anyone was betting against them.
John:
I think it was just a prediction, not really a bet.
John:
But anyway, July 1st, we will revisit and confirm.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Maybe they'll go back to Butterfly across the board.
Marco:
Unless the 13-inch MacBook Pro sells way better than we think it does, I think I've already won.
Marco:
But even that, I think rumor-wise, I'm pretty sure even that is said to switch over any minute now.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm excited.
Casey:
I really, really hope that this is a thing.
Casey:
And maybe it'll be terrible for all I know.
Casey:
Maybe I won't be able to run anything on it.
Casey:
Maybe it'll be an absolutely dreadful experience.
Casey:
But sitting here now, where the future is infinite, it does sound amazing.
Casey:
And I don't have any particular angst against Intel, but it certainly seems like Apple is just killing it in the A-Series CPUs for mobile stuff.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
stands to reason, they may be able to do an okay processor for a computer.
Casey:
And I would love to see the output of that team.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsor this week, ExpressVPN, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
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, they didn't mean it.
John:
So I was talking about the fans in my Mac Pro and using iStat menus.
John:
And during the show, I realized I had a question about the fan thing.
John:
I was looking at my screenshots.
John:
In the iStat menu thing, they show the fans.
John:
They say one of the fans is the blower fan, which is that one that's on the side, kind of.
Marco:
Yeah, like who's like the RAM slots or whatever.
John:
yep uh and it's a differently designed fans like a i don't know it looks like more like a water wheel for air impeller i don't know what that was called anyway it's called a blower actually yeah exactly um and then there are the three fans in the front and i stat menu labels them fan one fan two and fan three and i was trying to determine if me having two gpus now taking up six slots the height of six slots in my thing is that making uh
John:
Like, the bottom fan run more, because that's where the two GPUs are.
John:
There used to be one little skinny GPU there, and now there's one gigantic GPU plus the skinny one.
John:
But it occurred to me, I don't know which one is fan 1, fan 2, and fan 3.
John:
So I did a bunch of Googling, and as you can imagine, this is not an easy Google query to formulate, because...
John:
Anyway, I couldn't find anything telling me whether Fan 1, Fan 2.
John:
I didn't even know if those were official Apple names.
John:
And I thought maybe Fan 1 is the top, Fan 2 is the middle.
John:
The only thing I was sure about is Fan 2 is probably the middle one.
John:
Other than that, I couldn't figure it out.
John:
yeah so i wrote to the developer and i said i uh you know what's fan one fan two and fan three and i also said is there some place in the app where i could have figured this out because i figured maybe they have a diagram somewhere that i couldn't find and so if you take a look in the slack channel it's a picture i just posted this is the picture that was attached to the email that i got back from oh no this is making me uncomfortable so and so the email says is uh
John:
In our testing, please see attached, we've concluded that fan 3 is the top fan.
John:
The photograph is of a Mac Pro with a wooden stick poking into it.
John:
The wooden stick presumably stopping the top fan and then seeing which one of the RPMs drops to zero.
John:
that's i was going to suggest like why don't you just hold your finger on the axle of each one but i i would never have done that to my own because like yeah that's probably going to burn up burn out a motor at some point like you don't want to do that if you don't have to i did that to my synology recently because uh i'm i was down there i was down in the basement long enough to be annoyed by the synology fan noise i'm like is one of my fans going bad let me just stop one of the fans just to see if like that's the one that's making the noise because there's multiple fans
John:
And, boy, the fans in my Synology are very powerful.
John:
They snap the toothpick right in half.
John:
I stuck a toothpick in there to stop the fan.
John:
They were like, toothpick?
Marco:
Forget about that.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
You're supposed to, like, stick a finger on the axle of the fan.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
I was doing it without disassembling.
John:
It was kind of hard to get through the grating.
John:
You know, I couldn't really.
John:
So I'd use a toothpick.
John:
Anyway.
John:
But, yeah, I would not have the guts to try this experiment.
John:
So thank you, IceDatmen, your developers, for destroying your own Mac Pro to let me know.
John:
But, honestly, it's your software.
John:
You should be able to figure out.
John:
Yeah.
John:
fan one is the top one without doing this so yeah like i said the answer is that fan three is the top fan but then he says they're probably going to they'll think about renaming them to make it clearer in the actual shipping application this is still a beta that has mac pro support by the way i can't speak for the beta but in istap menus that i'm running if you open the preferences there's global on the left at the top and there's a pause button next to it if you pause that istap menu stops
Marco:
Yeah, that's what I was referring to.
Marco:
Sure it does.
John:
Go run Kexload and see if the current adventure is stolen.
Oh, my God.
John:
The other thing I realized when I was playing Destiny is a cool thing happened when I was playing.
John:
I'm like, how do I save that?
John:
Oh, I'm not recording all the time like I am on the PlayStation.
John:
Win for dedicated hardware.
John:
The PlayStation is always recording.
John:
Always be recording.
John:
It is literally always recording.
John:
So I don't have to remember before to record my gameplay.
John:
After I do something cool, I can just say, save that.
John:
And when I did something cool on my quote-unquote PC...
John:
it's gone because i wasn't recording as far as i know as far as i know it's not recording i know steam has some game capture recording thing that i managed to bring up but it's like but it's too late it's after the fact so many overlays in pc gaming so many overlays
Marco:
Yeah, whenever I launch Minecraft on Tips Gaming PC, it tells me this thing about the Xbox Game Bar.
John:
I'm like, what are you doing?
Marco:
What the hell is this?
Marco:
What are you doing?
John:
It's got a social thing.
John:
It's got a bunch of stuff in there for capture and stuff, so it's nice that there's a system level... It's Steam, the way I'm using it, but it's nice that there are sort of metagaming products that no matter what game you're playing can do a cool thing for it, but just so much crap on your screen.
John:
You've already got the game UI, and then you've got the Steam UI, and then you've got the game bar, and...
Marco:
when we were talking about my Minecraft starting and I had to get a screenshot you told me to take a screenshot of what I had built and make it the chapter art so I'm running around right before publishing the show trying to get a screenshot and I used the Xbox game bar or whatever on the PC to just capture the screenshot first of all figuring that out was non-trivial and then to try to figure out okay where did it save the file and
Marco:
As someone who doesn't remember a lot about Windows, and I mean, the last version of Windows I used extensively was Windows XP, and that was a very long time ago.
Marco:
I had no clue where to even begin to look.
Marco:
It took me forever to find where the heck it put this file.
Marco:
It was totally not obvious.
Marco:
It's funny.
Marco:
When I use the PC, I get a slight glimpse into what it must be like to be a normal person using a PC who's not a computer nerd.
Marco:
because i i'm so unfamiliar with this platform that lots of other people are totally familiar with i feel like i'm such a noob and i don't know what i'm doing and everything is confusing nothing makes sense i do everything very carefully and gingerly because i don't want to break it like right now like we we're kind of alternating between the minecraft uh bedrock edition because we play some games that use that
Marco:
And the Java edition, because we play on a server that uses that.
Marco:
And I have both installed, and I have both icons in whatever the start bar is called these days.
Marco:
Both of them next to each other, they have very similar icons.
Marco:
All I want to do is rename one of them to say Minecraft Bedrock Edition, and rename the other one to say Minecraft Java Edition.
Marco:
I cannot for the life of me figure out how to rename things in this bar.
Marco:
And I just gave up.
Marco:
I'm like, all right, fine.
Marco:
I'll just know the one on the left is this and the one on the right is this.
Marco:
And it's exactly the kind of failure of computer usage that we as nerds, we see other people doing that and we're like, oh, what a shame.
Marco:
They could be making this so much better if they just held down control and right-click this and hit F4 or whatever.
Marco:
And we know all those things, but no one else does.
Marco:
Now I'm kind of getting a taste of that.
John:
yeah i've been you know my brief forays into windows 10 mostly just trying to make sure that the sound is going to the right place and to make sure the drivers are hooked up and stuff like that the windows 10 like the the shell that's covering the deep internal guts of windows xp still lurking or windows 7 still lurking under there whatever it's mostly faked me out like i don't like the interface but in general their search is good and i can find what i'm looking for pretty easily um
John:
When I installed the new drivers from a video card, of course, like every PC thing, there's some weird ass application that comes with the drivers like AMD settings.
John:
And it's like this weird like it looks weird.
John:
It's got a custom UI.
John:
It's like brushed metal, like all custom everything.
John:
And it's like, do you really need an entire I guess AMD probably does for, you know.
John:
formerly ati for their video cards but like it's this whole other world of places you can screw with your video card including a tab that has some acronym that i didn't recognize that as soon as you click on it says warning you can damage your monitor by changing these settings like all right nope nope not that monitor what
John:
I don't know what that is, but I'm not going to that tab.
John:
Like you can change everything in these weird custom apps.
John:
And then, of course, I had that open at the same time as I had the Microsoft Displays setting open.
John:
It's like, what if I change like something over here?
John:
Like if I change the bit depth or if I change the resolution, will it reflect on the other UI?
John:
Probably not.
John:
So I just, you know.
John:
again you're being very careful just back away just close one of the applications if you're about to change resolution just do it in one place in fact don't even have that application running the other thing the only thing that's driving me nuts about windows in the brief time that i'm using it is like let's say i download these amd drivers it's the typical windows browser thing where it gives you that dialogue that has evolved over the years but it's still basically the same which is the option is uh open run like what do you want me to do with this download right
John:
um you know one of the options is just like let it download it's okay for this download the other one is like show me the folder after it's finished downloading the final one is actually launch the thing after it finishes downloading and i you know it's if it's on downloading drivers they just launch it because if i don't launch it like marco i won't know where the hell it is so just just run it
John:
that's what most people do because they don't know where the hell it is either right um but like the running thing i think what ran it ran like the unzip process or something it basically threw me into an explorer window that showed me like a folder like oh well i guess it extracted it so i go into the folder and there's setup.exe right i double click setup.exe and i'm always like oh i didn't i didn't adjust the double click settings maybe i didn't double click fast enough because i double click and it seems like nothing happens yeah
John:
like nothing happens right and so i right click and select open uh and i i must have done this over the the time that i've had this mac pro messing boot camp like five times this this happens all the time what happens is eventually like the thing that's set up you know the setup thing comes on the screen that has the next next next button i'm going to the wizard halfway through the wizard i get a dollar box that comes up that says sorry another copy of this application is already running
John:
That's the second right-click open happening, right?
John:
The open takes so long to run, and there's no visual feedback that, yeah, my first double-click did work, and so did my right-click open.
John:
And one of them ran, and I'm interacting, but then the second one finally launches and says, oh, I can't run because there's another copy of me running.
John:
If you're lucky, that happens.
John:
If you're unlucky, a second copy runs, and then you're like, I don't know what the hell's going on.
John:
But like,
John:
I came to appreciate the dock and the stupid bouncy icons because if there is some visual indication in the default Windows 10 UI that I have successfully double-clicked a thing, I can't find it.
John:
And if your thing doesn't immediately throw a wind up on the screen, you have no idea whether you successfully double-clicked it.
John:
That seems like a basic thing.
Marco:
I have found, like, in my, you know, admittedly very minimal usage of Windows here, I have been able to find most settings that I had to change or wanted to change.
Marco:
But the process of finding settings is kind of soul-crushing because... It's like web search.
Marco:
Yeah, well, because...
Marco:
There's so much complexity still in Windows because just a combination of just lots of inherent complexity in what Windows is, but also lots of legacy complexity in what Windows was and always has been.
Marco:
And so they have all sorts of different levels and screens and modes and different settings, Windows and panes and everything.
Marco:
Nobody can find anything.
Marco:
And they know this.
Marco:
And so the process of trying to change the setting in Windows feels almost like a touchstone menu on a phone.
Marco:
It's like, all right, what kind of thing do you want to do?
Marco:
Here's a bunch of very long text descriptions that you have to read about all the different areas and modes you might want to try.
Marco:
And then it's just like a wall of text everywhere you go that is not what you want,
Marco:
But it's more like a pointer to what you want.
Marco:
It's like explaining like, okay, well, here's the kind of category that we have over in this department.
Marco:
Click here to be quick linked over to that department and we'll transfer you there and they can keep helping you.
Marco:
You click on that link and then you go to the next department.
Marco:
Okay, here's another giant wall of text.
Marco:
What kind of thing within this department do you want?
Marco:
And eventually you go through two or three of those and eventually it opens up some kind of actual settings pane.
Marco:
It's so weird and that is one approach.
Marco:
If you have massive complexity...
Marco:
And huge amounts of layers and layers upon layers of legacy and cruft.
Marco:
One approach is to just throw walls of text at people to try to get them to successfully navigate it.
Marco:
And that will work to some degree.
Marco:
It's incredibly inelegant, but it does kind of sort of work.
Marco:
I guess a better approach would be just try to get rid of a lot of that complexity, but they don't seem... The entire OS feels so designed by committee at this point that that's never going to happen.
Marco:
So I'm just enjoying the ride of whenever I have to change anything in Windows, like, all right, how do I do it?
Marco:
Well, let me just go talk to the committee, and they will transfer me to the other committee, and eventually somebody will send me in the right direction.
John:
I appreciate the options when I'm in the game stuff, like that game bar thing that I mentioned I brought up.
John:
One of the things that it brings up is an audio panel that I would have killed for on my PlayStation even.
John:
It's an audio panel that said, here's your master volume.
John:
Here's the volume of the Steam application.
John:
Here's the game volume.
John:
Here's the voice chat volume.
John:
Here's the mix between them.
John:
It was just like...
John:
Like, yes, that's every setting I'll ever want to change.
John:
Because, you know, when you're playing a game, I mean, if you're trying to play a game and you're streaming, you have voice chat and like just one volume control is not enough.
John:
You always want to adjust all the volumes and all the different things.
John:
And here it was one little panel that had sliders for literally every single volume, including mixes between stuff.
John:
And on PlayStation even, which has settings for that, you got to go back to the system menu, then go into the thing and scroll down and adjust this thing here.
John:
But then make sure this chat is going through that.
John:
But then in the game, it has its own set of settings.
John:
This had one little floating window, granted in this giant set of overlay things, that had all the adjustments on it.
John:
And forget about on the Mac.
John:
The Mac would have no, you have like system volume and that's it.
John:
Maybe you have separate volume settings in the game itself.
John:
This was like, no matter what game you're playing, these are all the volume settings that you can deal with.
John:
I was very impressed.
John:
Everything's better when it comes to gaming over on PC.
John:
Other than actually having to boot Windows, that is.
John:
Which continues to be a challenge.
John:
Black screens.
John:
Like, I hate every time I have to disconnect my LG monitor from my PlayStation.
John:
It's such a pain with the stupid power brick and the power cord and getting an HDMI cable and dragging it over here.
John:
And it's just...
John:
just wish it would just work oh the other weird thing is when i wanted to reboot i set my startup disk to be windows just because i was rebooting so many times and i didn't want to like have to hold on option to pick the drive i just wanted to default boot off windows but eventually i'm like okay well i'm done with that i disconnected my windows drive put it away and then i boot i'm like i'm gonna boot back into mac os and it booted and it was like grinding my hard drive like crazy like my spinning hard drive like what are you doing hard drive like
John:
So much so that it was like beach balling and I couldn't even get a right click to eject the thing.
John:
I was like, why?
John:
Why are you?
John:
Is Spotlight trying to index my drive?
John:
Why is it even mounting?
John:
Shouldn't it be auto?
John:
I had a bunch of stuff set to not mount and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And eventually, I think I figured out that what it had done was booted onto my spinning disk super duper clone.
John:
let me tell you don't do that i should not like i mean it worked like the fact that it took me a while to notice but mostly what i noticed was that incredible noise and it's like that's my boot disc it's and it's it's grinding my boot disc like because i think it was probably spotlight indexing or preparing a time machine backup of my boot disc boy what a racket so yeah rebooted into the ssd way quieter
Marco:
See, hopefully when this ARM transition finally happens, it will finally force you to just get a freaking gaming PC and separate these roles so you can stop doing all these crazy hacks.
John:
Seems like I already have one, as evidenced from my Destiny gameplay experience today.
John:
and as we know that's the only game that i care about playing so i think i'm all set on the gaming pc front the only thing i could wish for is i would like it if my playstation controllers were wireless but that's not a mac specific thing i think it's just a steam thing i haven't quite figured out how to get that work to work yet but yeah it was pretty good the only problem is that a cheating is more rampant on pc for obvious reasons and that's kind of annoying uh and b people are a little bit better on pc and that makes me feel worse
Marco:
We know some people who are very extreme or specialized or really good at certain things, like our friend underscore David Smith.
Marco:
I think he might be the person in the world who has made the most apps for the Apple Watch, including people who work for Apple on the Apple Watch team.
Marco:
I think he has almost certainly spent the most time total writing watchOS apps compared to probably anyone else in the world.
Marco:
Do you think you might be the only person in the world who is using a 2020 Mac Pro as a gaming PC?
John:
I'm not using it as a gaming PC.
John:
I played some games on it.
John:
And no, I'm not the only one playing some games.
John:
I guarantee that everybody who has one of these things who doesn't need it for legitimate purposes is playing games on it in Windows at some point.
John:
really do you do you think are are there many people who buy this computer just for for the heck of it besides like you and max i don't think there's a lot of them but we how many people do you know you know me stephen hackett uh quinn nelson like that's three people right there then you know it's a small group but it's not like they don't exist
Marco:
i you might be the only person using that computer as a gaming pc i just played a game on it using it as a gaming pc i'm not the only person like installing boot what i mean by that you know installing boot camp and running windows games on a regular basis it's not regular basis like i before it wasn't because my gpu was crappy now i have a decision probably mostly what's going to happen is i'm going to continue to play in the play season just because i don't want to reboot my beautiful mac because it is painful to reboot in windows but it was definitely cool um
John:
and you know i'm like mac games i'm now much more interested in too because now i have the ability to play them but honestly that i don't think there's many mac games that are would challenge my gaming pcs even the old gpu yeah i'm not i'm not the only one but yes there are there are dozens of us right maybe not more than dozens probably not i can't imagine
John:
All right, Casey's going to turn into a pumpkin.
John:
We have to let him go to sleep.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I'm still here.
Casey:
I'm still here.
Casey:
I'm fine.
John:
And you don't even know if your garage door is closed.
John:
He's got a lot on his mind right now.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
It's terrible.
Casey:
Actually, the funny thing is I can look on the app to see if it's open or closed.
Casey:
So let me look.
Casey:
Wait.
Casey:
And this app is so f***ing bad.
Casey:
You can just open the app and check?
Casey:
Yeah, but I want a little LED that shines.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
John:
This whole time, that could have been the solution?
John:
Now you have to cut this whole segment.
John:
Oh my God.
Casey:
No, he's going to drop this in at the end.
John:
He left out the most salient idiotic piece of information.
John:
He's going to set up a phone with an old iPod touch with the app always running and point a camera at it and use machine learning to figure out.
John:
And the boot will knock over the fish bowl.
John:
The cat will chase the fish.
Casey:
Clearly the easier way of accomplishing this.
Casey:
Why would I do anything else?
John:
Light the candle that'll burst the balloon and send the trolley on its way.
Casey:
I said from the get-go this was overkill.
Casey:
I said it from the get-go.