$10 Worth of Headaches
Marco:
I have some bad news.
Marco:
I've just been notified with an email from Apple, subject aligned, your Apple news channel.
Marco:
Oh, it hasn't been updated?
Marco:
Is this Marco.org?
Marco:
We noticed that you have not published to your Marco.org channel in three months or more.
Marco:
Your channel will be removed in one week, period.
Marco:
Oh, wow.
Marco:
Good grief.
Marco:
Regards, the Apple News team.
Marco:
Oh, well.
Marco:
It doesn't say that if I publish now, it'll get me out of this.
Marco:
Like, it just says your channel is going to be removed in a week, period.
Marco:
Like, there's no if you don't publish.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Didn't we have a friend who got the same notice, but their notice said if you publish something, it'll reactivate it?
John:
Maybe I'm listening to a rumor.
Marco:
I think that was Daniel Jalkut, but I don't know.
Marco:
Anyway, yeah, it's the Market.org channel.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
I don't know how many... First of all, I publish my channel just as an RSS feed that I submitted to them in my regular RSS feed.
Marco:
I don't have any special Apple News tags.
Marco:
So I think they were deprecating RSS-based channels anyway, right?
Marco:
Aren't they deprecating them or something?
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
I haven't kept up with that.
Casey:
I tried to do the same thing and something must be wrong about my RSS feed because they always refused it for reasons I never quite understood.
Casey:
And I didn't care enough to fix it.
Casey:
And nobody has ever, ever, ever asked me about it.
Casey:
Now, to be fair, I probably have one tenth of your readership.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I can't remember a time that anyone was like, hey, man, can you put that in Apple News?
Marco:
I honestly would be surprised if my readership could be divided evenly into tenths.
Marco:
I might have eight people reading it in Apple News.
Marco:
I think it's going to be a very small number.
John:
Yeah, I never liked that Apple News app.
John:
I never tried to get my annually updated blog into it for multiple reasons.
Marco:
Well, darn.
Marco:
I guess I'm going to lose all those eight page views.
Marco:
I don't even measure page views anymore.
Marco:
how do they even show up like how would you tell if someone's coming from apple news once they have their own user agent i assume there's probably at least like a crawler user agent and i i would assume that every time they view the page maybe if i'm just going to report i have to sign up for like i because i don't think it's actually making a web request to you each time right yeah you have to go to the special apple web page with no api and you have to look at it you have to look at a graph where they round things
Marco:
I have to go to Apple Web Connect or something and look at only opt-in stats for people who viewed my content.
Marco:
I don't have server logs enabled.
Marco:
I don't even have Google Analytics enabled anymore.
Marco:
I haven't for years.
Marco:
When I publish something on my site, I have absolutely no idea how many pages it gets.
Marco:
And it's incredibly liberating.
Marco:
I highly recommend anybody out there who has stuff online, remove the counters.
Marco:
You will be shocked how great it feels.
John:
Or just have nobody visit your site like me, because then you don't have to worry about it either way.
John:
Speaking of Apple's websites where you supposedly can go to see some kind of number, you would think that the one web system they would have that would be, I don't know, accurate, thorough, fairly well vetted, would be stuff related to the App Store, because that's real money if you don't have a free app.
John:
It's real money traveling back and forth, and real money, usually people are accounting for the real money, but...
John:
Boy, they do not make it easy to figure out what's going on.
John:
Maybe this is just me not understanding money.
John:
Granted, I'm not an accountant.
John:
I don't understand the world of finance.
John:
It's very confusing.
John:
But I have two apps.
John:
The second most simple thing I can imagine doing is wondering in a given pay period.
John:
I'm not going to say month because I know that finance is too complicated for pedestrian concepts like months.
John:
In a given pay period...
John:
How much money did I make off of one of my two apps?
John:
But there's no way to tell that.
John:
I mean, they have a report that supposedly gives you an answer, but the answer is wrong.
John:
And I know that because for one pay period, I only had one month, one app.
John:
And so I could say, now run the report and tell me how much did that one app make during that pay period.
John:
And it's different than the amount they paid me.
John:
this is their system i'm like well i'm never gonna know how this works it's close it's like within two percent like maybe refunds or something you're accounting for that i don't so i run the reports and i download them and i keep them but it's just like i don't understand why these numbers don't match up in the end the money they give me is the money they give me and i trust that that's the money they're supposed to be giving me but you know try running those reports it doesn't make any sense
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So two things.
Marco:
Number one, I recommend using AppFigures.
Marco:
This is a paid service.
Marco:
This is not an ad.
Marco:
But yeah, AppFigures, I have found, is the best way to kind of make sense of Apple's weirdo reporting.
Marco:
And I provide useful graphs and everything.
Marco:
I've been using them for a long time.
John:
But the AppFigures also does not match the amount I actually receive from Apple.
John:
Again, it's very close.
Marco:
They also have the payments area.
Marco:
The payments usually are able to derive what it actually means.
John:
Right, but I get one.
John:
I don't do what you do, which I should have, which is like one Apple ID per app, right?
John:
So I have my two apps under one Apple ID.
John:
So they pay me some amount, and some of that is attributable to Switch Class, and some of it's attributable to front and center.
John:
How much for each app?
John:
Hell if I know.
John:
I mean, again, you can run the report like, you know, filter by parent apps that, you know, like it's in their software and then they give you a graph that's rounded and then you can download an Excel thing that has exact numbers to 500 decimal places, but it's off.
John:
It's so hard to just try to back solve and figure it out.
John:
I mean, sometimes it's off by a few cents or whatever.
John:
It just annoys me.
Marco:
Yeah, that's why back forever ago when I had that stupid idea to have some kind of pay Overcast $10 a month and then I'll split it up between the podcast you listen to and distribute it to them.
Marco:
I was thinking about doing that kind of scheme before podcasters told me they don't want that surprise.
Marco:
Nobody wants people getting in the way of them and their money.
Marco:
I should have known that before because I'm the same way, but for some reason I didn't think about that.
Marco:
Anyway, so one of the problems with that plan is...
Marco:
assuming I'd have to take in-app purchase, because otherwise Apple would never allow it, not only would I then lose 30%, but also I would have no good way to account for, like, how much money did I actually receive from user ID 1234 this month?
Marco:
Because you just get that lump sum payment, and you can't actually know, like...
Marco:
you can't there's no way to correlate a user id to an amount of money you definitely received because there's so many different exceptions and there's things like refunds cancellations there's foreign currency exchange which messes everything up yeah the exchange the exchange stuff is like all the things that are off it could entirely be attributable to foreign exchange rates because the reporting that what you got paid is what the exchange rate was at the moment of the blah blah blah if you read the big finance agreement but then the reporting could be different it's very confusing
Marco:
Yeah, and the whole basis of a system like that would be, I need to know for your $7, how to split it up between the podcasts you listen to.
Marco:
This actually plays into the whole world of...
Marco:
big services like YouTube Premium or Red, whatever it's called this month, or Spotify or Apple Music, anything where the customers pay a flat rate and that gets distributed based on whatever they listen to, like to artists or whatever, the way those work is incredibly scam-prone because they can't do it either.
Marco:
They also don't track...
Marco:
Your $5 does not get split between the five artists you listen to this month.
Marco:
Everyone's $5 a month goes into a giant pool, and they just track number of listens.
Marco:
So it doesn't matter if you listen to five artists this month and a bot somewhere in Russia listen to 100,000 artists this month.
Marco:
Your money's all pooled together first, and then it's divided up by views.
Marco:
So you might think that you are helping the three bands you listen to a lot because you only listen to three bands on Spotify this month or whatever, but no, you're not helping them at all.
Marco:
You'd be helping them a lot more if you left everything streaming all day, 24-7.
Marco:
And there's this whole ecosystem of
Marco:
scams and click farms and all this other crap to like increase view counts and time spent listening and stuff like that to skim off more of the pool than what they you know actually have earned it's a whole thing and of course i didn't want to deal with any of that and my stupid plan wouldn't have wouldn't have really worked that way anyway but the reason why no one does that is because it's too hard to track how much money you actually got from each individual person each month
John:
yeah and in the end you're trusting the same company to do like accounting on itself right it's all sort of like a like an honor system right so i mean and they have no particular reason until they start getting you know payola from the record companies to use some lingo from the 70s or whatever um but you know that like apple doesn't have any particular reason to lie to you about how much money your app is making right but
John:
It's like anything else.
John:
My instinctual first feeling when the App Store was announced is that people are going to stop receiving checks from customers and start receiving checks that are signed by Apple.
John:
It seems like it's the same thing, but it's not.
Marco:
It's way better than it used to be, though.
Marco:
It used to be, you know, for the first, I think, two or three years at the App Store, you would get paid in wire transfers from, I think, seven or so different places around the world from various Apple subsidiaries for different regions.
Marco:
Oh, goodness.
Marco:
So depending on your bank account, you might be paying like hundreds of dollars a month in wire fees.
Marco:
And then you have to resolve like, all right, you have like seven different deposits.
Marco:
And it was a crazy setup.
Marco:
And then fortunately, a couple of years in, they fixed it to just have one direct deposit.
John:
I got two.
John:
I got two this last pay period.
John:
I got two Apple...
John:
deposits oh really i don't understand why is one of them a different the other app actually yeah it's one per apple id oh no because you you don't have you don't have right i just have the one i'm just selling both through a single app because i i have have received payments for months when both were for sale and i got one payment all right this time i got two payments which is fine like if they want to send me three payments four payments just keep sending me money
John:
It's just mysterious.
John:
I just noticed them as separate line items in my bank account.
John:
I'm like, huh, that's funny.
John:
Why would they send me?
John:
It's the right amount.
John:
Like, if you add them together, you know, it's like, yep, there it is.
John:
That's all.
John:
This is weird.
John:
I'm still angry about the fact that I couldn't change my company name.
John:
Did I complain about that on the show at some point?
Casey:
No.
John:
I was so angry about it when it happened, but by the time we recorded, I chilled out and realized it doesn't actually matter.
John:
But, boy, in the moment, I was angry.
John:
I actually sent the closest I've ever gotten to sending an angry email to
John:
was a reply to some poor helpful person was trying to tell me that what i wanted to do was not possible and i was like this is dumb that's how angry i get an email i literally wrote this is dumb wow it was spitting fire there john thumbs down i just like i was angry but i but i didn't want to say something that was angry but like what can i say that's not based on emotion but it's true i'm like you know what this is actually dumb like that is that is a truthful statement what i'm talking about is uh
John:
Since I had just freshly signed up for my developer account and all that stuff, I remembered at some point during the process there was something.
John:
You guys might not remember this because it was so long ago that you signed up.
John:
Maybe when Marco did it, this didn't even exist.
John:
It was like, oh, and by the way, as you're clicking through these things and typing stuff in boxes, if you'd like your product to show up on the store with a different name that's visible to customers, type that name here.
John:
And at the time I signed up, I was doing it as just me, like my name, right?
John:
And so I'm like, no, I don't want that, right?
John:
Just John Syracuse is fine.
John:
That'll show up as the developer on the store.
John:
And I did that for a while.
John:
And eventually I made myself a company and switched it over to that.
John:
And that took like a month and a half to get through all that red tape.
John:
And I'm like...
John:
And then I went to the app store and I realized that my name was no longer visible.
John:
And if you just search for my name, you didn't find me anymore.
John:
I'm like, oh, that's bad.
John:
If someone searches for a name, I want them to find my apps, right?
John:
And of course, you can't add it to keywords without releasing a new version, but that's a separate issue.
John:
So like, oh, I'll just change the company name back and I'll just have it say my name again because there's that field where you can change what it says underneath your app to be something different than your actual, like, you know, legal entity thing.
John:
uh and i searched and searched and couldn't find it and asked a bunch of people in developer slacks that i'm in and went through all the help and someone's like oh i did that my company changed their name to this and that and the other thing and it just you know eventually it was i kept running to dead ends and you know i i went through their official help system and got people and i i called them on the phone all right and i had people telling me like an animal we've yeah i would
John:
people were telling me we've done this twice in fact we've changed our name twice right and it's complicated by all the people who did it actually did something slightly different i like uh like i think uh both of you have like you know a single person llc uh that's a disregarded entity for tax purposes it's really just me like it's like legally and in all other ways it's exactly me so changing my company name to my name on the app store is not like misleading or anything like that and
John:
I forget the exact details, but the basically, you know, I said, I remember seeing that field or whatever.
John:
And the person was like, when you're doing the initial setup, you can enter a registered trade name.
John:
I don't know what that is, but whatever.
John:
It sounds like a legal thing, a DBA, which is I'm pretty sure doing business as or a fictitious business name.
John:
This cannot be edited or updated later.
John:
So during the process, you can enter.
John:
It sounds like anything.
John:
Fictitious business name.
John:
You can just make it up like whoopity do.
John:
Like this is on the app store.
John:
It's going to say whoopity do apps, which is not even a thing.
John:
It's not a legal entity in any way.
John:
But once you've done that during setup, you can never change it again.
John:
And what it will be is it will always be the legal entity that Apple considers.
John:
So when I changed from me to an individual to my company, it became my company.
John:
Can I change it back to my name?
John:
No.
John:
This cannot be edited or updated later.
John:
And that's what I said was dumb.
John:
I said, this is dumb.
John:
And unless I don't understand, because for all I know, fictitious business name is a legal term that I don't understand because I'm not a smart business person.
John:
But anyway, I was so angry that I couldn't just change it back to my name.
John:
But by the time we recorded, I had calmed down.
John:
But now all of a sudden I'm angry about it again for some reason.
Marco:
No, I mean, ever since the beginning of the App Store, the process of changing your company name or changing the name on your developer account has always been, effectively, you can't do that, no matter what.
Marco:
Now, in reality, it's like, okay, if you know someone or you email somebody at Apple and you can get the right person, they can actually do it, but the process apparently is very difficult.
Marco:
I have never succeeded in doing it, but I know people who have.
Marco:
If you can call and get the right person on the phone somehow, or if you just get lucky with who you talk to, that kind of thing, which is annoying.
Marco:
And it's the kind of thing that you would think this would be easier.
Marco:
So initially, you couldn't do it at all, no matter what, period.
Marco:
Down the road, they added a special case where if your company was sold to somebody else...
Marco:
then you could change the account to be the new owner, like a one-time change, and you had to send in all this paperwork to prove that it was bought by someone else.
Marco:
So that might be an avenue for it.
Marco:
Maybe you could say that John Syracuse has bought Mac Pro LLC or whatever and tried to get it changed that way, but I don't think that would work.
John:
According to entrepreneur.com, fictitious business name is a similar thing to doing business as and as with all these things in these lovely United States that we live in.
John:
Anytime you read anything having to do with business stuff, they always have to hedge because it's always like in some states, X, Y, and Z is true.
John:
So that's exactly what this thing says.
John:
In some states, you have to register your fictitious business name.
John:
With the state, some states you have to pay a fee, but that also implies that in other states you don't have to.
John:
So basically, if I really, really, really wanted to make this happen, in theory, I could get a doing business as, but I could probably also get a fictitious business name if that's a thing that my state supports.
John:
And like get a legal filing to say, yeah, my company name, the fictitious business name is my name.
John:
But again, I will cite and this is not the stupidity of Apple is probably just the stupidity of law.
John:
That's dumb because my LLC is a sole provider, not a sole proprietorship.
John:
My LLC is a single member LLC.
John:
It's just me.
John:
We are the same legal entity.
John:
So I shouldn't have to get a DBA or a fictitious business to say I can use my own name.
Marco:
Objection, Your Honor.
Marco:
There's a problem with that logic.
Marco:
The whole point of an LLC is to separate.
John:
I know.
John:
It's not the same legal entity.
John:
I'm considered the same for tax purposes.
John:
The tax is passed through.
John:
Yes, you're right.
John:
It's a different legal entity.
Marco:
However, I think this is why LLCs, in most states at least, if not all of them, are required to have LLC at the end of their name.
Marco:
Corporations have Inc.
Marco:
or Corp.
Marco:
or whatever.
Marco:
And the reason why, I think, if I remember correctly from how this was explained to me 15 years ago,
Marco:
is so that like people know like if you if you say you know i'm doing business with john siracusa period right then then your customers might think that the fullness of john siracusa is there to back it up liability wise if they come to sue you and you say well actually what you're not really suing me you're suing this llc that you didn't even know was there uh and that llc has one dollar to its name and so sorry that's all you can get like
Marco:
So then how can you have it doing business as at all, though?
Marco:
That probably varies per state with the requirements of that.
Marco:
But I don't think you can say doing business as your own personal name with no suffix or anything.
John:
I think the whole point... I can only pick another name that ends in LLC.
Marco:
Or a name that is clearly not yours, probably.
Marco:
Again, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that's why these rules are there.
Marco:
So you probably can't just say, okay, I'm operating an LLC, but I'm going to not say that anywhere.
Marco:
I'm just going to say I'm John Syracuse, because that would probably expose you personally to liability.
Marco:
Anybody could then probably see you and say, well, you kind of broke the LLC seal there, and so you're not really protected by it.
John:
Yeah, there's a whole bunch of legal stuff about, I forget what it's called, there's a term for it.
John:
If you do stuff with your company that mixes your personal stuff with it too much.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
They can basically say, you're not really operating this correctly, and so therefore you don't get the protection.
Marco:
That's why I always recommend, if you're going to have an app, make money, have an LLC, do everything under that LLC, have a separate bank account that the only transactions are for the business.
Marco:
It has no other transactions, it just keeps everything so much cleaner, and
Marco:
it protects you a lot better than any kind of weird, like, jumbled arrangement.
John:
Yeah, and that's why I think all the people who say they did this probably just changed from one legal name to another, like, from one corporation name to another corporation name, like, or something like that.
John:
Because that's hard enough.
John:
Like, just changing it from my name to LLC was a pain and took a long time, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
And I suppose you could do doing business as, like, I was just looking at Microsoft.
John:
Microsoft says Microsoft Corporation on it.
John:
So maybe that's, maybe they're all like that.
John:
So anyway, it still strikes me as dumb.
John:
uh but i feel like the person who was helping me had they just explained what marco just explained i would have been less angry because i'd be like oh okay you know because i cited fictitious business name i'd be like look you don't understand fictitious business name is not what you think it is and uh the whole thing about the llc suffix or whatever like i could have been walked off this ledge but i wasn't so i got mad and said it was dumb
John:
But then I gave up on it.
John:
So, you know, I did the right thing in the end, which is don't worry about it.
John:
And then I just waited and waited for me to do my next app update so I could put my name in the keywords.
Casey:
I should do that, too.
Casey:
I never thought about that.
John:
Let me see if it works.
John:
I didn't even test it.
John:
No one's buying my app anymore.
John:
But hey, everyone in the chat room, go buy another copy of my app.
John:
It's great.
John:
me too me too me too his has some sort of memory problem you don't want that oh hey i got oh wow someone put my name in the keywords of their app hmm i don't know how i feel about that oh it's a cool app i like this app so i guess it's good i don't know you're not supposed to like the spammers app
John:
no it's not it's not like a it's it's another app someone was talking to me about the beta test and uh beta testing it it's an app that they thought i would like and they're right it is an app that i would like i don't know where my name appears it could be in the keywords anyway downloading their app now yeah one of my i have to wait i haven't updated front and center in a while but the next time i do i will add my name to the keywords
Casey:
All right, so let's start the show with some follow up.
Casey:
I presume that neither John nor Marco have looked at Instagram in the last 45 minutes to an hour.
Casey:
Incorrect.
Casey:
I saw your little thingy.
Casey:
If you look at my Insta stories, you will see that I got some treats today and I have been messing about with all the raspberry pies.
Casey:
So in my Insta story, if you're not on Instagram or don't care to look, what you'll see is me taking a reed switch, which is a little magnetic switch, and moving it close to the other half of it and out and close and then away and close and then away and a little LED in the background lighting and going off and lighting and then going off.
Yeah.
Casey:
That is my physical proof of concept that everything, including my hilariously bad soldering, has worked.
Casey:
So I now have two Raspberry Pi Zero Ws.
Casey:
So those are not at all the same as what I had.
Casey:
What I had is like the big boy Raspberry Pi, the Raspberry Pi 4.
Casey:
Now I have two Raspberry Pi Zero Ws, which are literally $10 computers that have wireless and Bluetooth on them.
Casey:
So what I have is, as described last time in my ridiculously overcomplicated Rube Goldberg setup,
Casey:
What I have is a setup wherein one of the Raspberry Pis is just detecting this magnetic read switch and then sending a multicast message to the other one, which is saying it's open, it's closed, it's open, it's closed.
Casey:
And then that other one will light or extinguish an LED.
Casey:
Now, since we last spoke...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But anyway, the other thing I've learned in the last week is that there are four connectors on the back of my garage door opener.
Casey:
Two of them seem to be just like a constant power.
Casey:
One of them is connected to the sensors at the bottom of the garage door.
Casey:
So they know if one of the kids runs through as the garage door is closing, then it would stop the garage door from closing.
Casey:
And the other one is connected to the switch in the wall.
Casey:
And it appears that all you need to do to tell the garage door to open or close is just connect the common line or, you know, the always powered line to the line coming from the switch on the wall.
Casey:
So to test this theory, I did what I shouldn't have done, but it worked.
Casey:
is I took a pair of pliers and just connected it, physically touched it to the two screws, one of which is the common line and one of which is the line from the wall unit.
Casey:
And sure enough, the garage door started closing.
Casey:
And then I did it again and started opening.
Casey:
What this means is with a relay, I should be able to open and close the garage door from the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
And so I have a relay, which I have not even opened yet.
Casey:
But my next mission is to hack together my own completely bespoke HomeKit-enabled garage door setup.
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
Because I can.
Casey:
And because it's fun.
Casey:
And I'm having a lot of fun.
Casey:
And it's stunning to me that I actually made this work.
John:
I have some design notes for your based on your Instagram thing.
Casey:
Oh, it looks like utter garbage and it's it's terrible.
Casey:
And you should not see.
John:
It's not that it's something bigger.
John:
So I I'm I may be wrong, but my guess is that you are overestimating the precision of your garage door with those sensors.
John:
Like when you're holding the sensors up to each other and saying, look, open, closed, open, closed, you're assuming that the door will come to a closed position with such precision that those two things will be anywhere close enough to each other and align with each other to actually activate.
John:
When you're doing it with your hand, it works great.
John:
When you're doing it with the garage door, I can imagine there being up to a centimeter gap in any direction.
Casey:
Yeah, that's theoretically true.
Casey:
But let me remind you that as we discussed last week, when I was at DubDub a year or two ago, the garage door completely buckled and we got a whole new garage door and a whole new garage door opener.
Casey:
So this is not one of the like 20-year-old, god-awful, extremely loud, extremely rickety garage door openers, or at least not yet.
Casey:
But I do take your point.
Casey:
You very well may be right.
Casey:
I haven't even attempted to mount these little sensors, so to speak, on the garage door or anywhere near it.
Casey:
But
Casey:
My hope is that it'll at least be able to get close enough.
John:
Maybe.
John:
I mean, like, what kind of tolerances do we have?
John:
Do you have, like, Apple-style iPhone tolerances on your garage door where it's sub-millimeter precision where this door comes to rest in exactly the same spot every time?
John:
I guess we'll find out.
Casey:
Yeah, we will find out.
Casey:
That's part of tomorrow's mission as well.
Casey:
If I'm procrastinating on doing image-related work and memory-related work, then I'll be trying to mount all this and see if I can get that going.
Casey:
We have some other follow-up from Colin McKellar, who wrote in with regard to arm predictions.
Casey:
So we had said last episode that we couldn't remember when each of us had wagered the arm transition, if it happens, would happen.
Casey:
And Colin wrote that in episode 285, starting at about three minutes and 48 seconds into the episode, and this was from the 30th of July, 2018, we had made predictions.
Casey:
And according to Colin, and I didn't
Casey:
verify if this was exactly right, but I take them at their word.
Casey:
I had said sometime in five to 10 years from 2018, which puts that at 2023 through 2028 with the first Mac definitely by 2023.
Casey:
I think the context was when would the transition start and when would it be done?
Casey:
John said you had said it would be done in 10 years, which is 2028, with a fast transition once it starts.
Casey:
However, in episode 306, at about an hour and 36 minutes, apparently you had said you would be surprised if there were no ARM Macs by 2021.
Casey:
Marco was the most aggressive and bold.
Casey:
You had said the first one within two years, which would put that at about mid-2020, mid this year, and the last Intel Macs sold within five years, which would be about 2023, and
Casey:
And then finally, Colin also noted that on the talk show, Gruber, specifically episode 227, Gruber had noted that he think it'll be announced last year with a transition this year.
Casey:
So we'll see what happens.
Marco:
I feel pretty good about that.
Marco:
I think this summer is probably too soon, as I set the beginning of my range at.
Marco:
But I bet it's not by that much.
Marco:
I'm guessing it's probably going to be at the earliest, possibly this fall.
Marco:
At the latest, probably next fall.
John:
Yeah, the problem with all these predictions is they were like in 2018-ish, and that's a little bit too close because by then we had like rumors and we were all informed by the same stories coming out of it, you know, leak type stuff coming out of Apple.
John:
That's the difficulty of predictions that are close to the event.
John:
We start getting some real information and it's not just hunches.
John:
That's why we're all clustered around this kind of thing.
John:
It's just a question of how long do we expand out.
John:
I don't remember this conversation, but I imagine my 10-year thing was like, well, one Mac could hold on for a really long time, presumably the Mac Pro, but who knows.
John:
But I'm saying by 10 years, it's got to be done.
John:
What I was basically probably railing against there was the idea that they're going to permanently keep the Mac Pro x86 or something, and I just don't see that happening.
Casey:
So the other thing we had talked about at some point in the past, and we didn't talk about this last week, did we?
Casey:
What is going to be the first Mac to go ARM?
John:
We've talked about it before.
Casey:
No, we've absolutely talked about it before.
Casey:
I'm saying, what do you think now?
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, and before, I think we said the 12-inch, which no longer exists, technically.
Marco:
I mean, it could come back.
Marco:
It could exist again.
Marco:
Right, like it could come back as that.
Marco:
I think if I had to guess, I'm going to guess the MacBook Air.
John:
Yeah, I don't know if it's going to be a single...
John:
Like, you're saying, like, is it going to be one Mac?
John:
I mean, I suppose it could.
John:
There's no reason.
John:
But, like, obviously we're thinking laptop because that makes the most sense.
John:
And then it's just a question of which laptop.
John:
Could it be all the laptops?
John:
Like, I'm still kind of rooting for that thing.
John:
Apple hasn't done it in a while.
John:
They've been much more sort of conservative where you pick a guinea pig machine, you do it, and it eventually rolls out to the other products, right?
John:
But I kind of miss the days when they would say, guess what?
John:
Here's our new line of ARM-powered laptops.
John:
And it's all of them, right?
John:
It's the Air, the 13-inch MacBook Pro that we'll talk about later, and the 16-inch.
John:
It's just three computers.
John:
Apple could do it.
John:
So that's not my prediction, but that's what I'm rooting for.
John:
My prediction... Yeah, I'm going to go with the Air in the current lineup.
John:
That's what I'm going to say.
Casey:
You know, I would say the same, but Marco's really messed with my mind by saying it's something new.
Casey:
I wonder if it would be something new.
Casey:
It could be the... I said the Air.
Casey:
The 12-inch.
John:
He said the Air.
John:
He just mentioned the 12-inch could come back in the form of a new fanless...
Casey:
right that's what i'm talking about like i don't know if it would necessarily be the 12 inch but it wouldn't surprise me if there's some sort of new thing a la the air when it was brand new or perhaps the adorable when it was brand new you know something ios laptop yeah like an ios laptop you never know things could get crazy
Marco:
I mean, you could also argue, though, that the 11-inch iPad with various keyboard options that are now available satisfies a lot of that need for a super tiny laptop that was previously solved by the 12-inch.
Marco:
But ultimately, the reason I guess the MacBook Air is that it's just such a massive hit.
Marco:
It hits such a sweet spot of needs for most people being pretty well satisfied.
Marco:
Really, the one area that the MacBook Air really is not so great at is CPU performance.
Marco:
And so that's the area where ARM could really help there.
Marco:
It's not so great in CPU performance because they need a super low wattage part from Intel to fit that chassis and thermal design.
Marco:
And this is the best Intel can do with that wattage.
Marco:
I bet Apple could do better.
John:
And no one's going to argue against getting more battery life as well, right?
John:
So it's a crowd pleaser, that computer.
John:
Put an ARM in that thing and no one's going to question why this computer exists and what the benefits might be.
Marco:
Yeah, I would buy one immediately, like day one.
Marco:
An ARM MacBook Air, I would buy it immediately.
Marco:
Because the current MacBook Air, again, it's wonderful in many ways.
Marco:
It really is an amazing size.
Marco:
Even the previous one with the butterfly keyboard, I never bought one, but I handled one a few times, like in a store.
Marco:
People would have one.
Marco:
I'd pick it up and play with it.
Marco:
And it felt great.
Marco:
It's a great feeling form factor.
Marco:
Just the size and the wedge shape really feels good.
Marco:
And they've done a good job with the other physical stuff like the hinge and everything too.
Marco:
But I love my 16-inch, and I'm glad I have it most of the time I'm using it.
Marco:
But I can't deny there is a very strong appeal of a super small laptop that can still somehow make a good balance of screen size and power and everything else.
Marco:
And the current Air...
Marco:
is just a little bit too slow.
Marco:
We'll get to this later when we talk about the 13-inch.
Marco:
The current Air is a little bit too slow for me.
Marco:
I would feel that pretty frequently.
Marco:
But an ARM version could plausibly be faster enough to really close that gap between it and the current pros, or even surpass them.
John:
The other angle in this is the other...
John:
like the second most likely, or maybe it's tied.
John:
If you think about it, you know, we keep thinking like which computer would benefit most from ARM, where does it make sense to have ARM, yada, yada, yada.
John:
All those are factors.
John:
But the other factor is like, okay, but this will be the first one.
John:
So it's going to have the most growing pains, and do you really want to put those growing pains and those compromises and have to explain it to buyers who are our most popular product?
John:
Or I think this is what they did with Intel.
John:
Or do you want to instead put it in the 16 inch just because so few people buy that and the people who buy it know what they're getting into in terms of whatever emulation there might be or compatibility concerns?
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
To let the the more expensive, lower volume computer be the first one just to shake out all the kinks and get it settled, because by putting it in the MacBook Air, there's probably best selling Mac.
John:
then now you have this thing that you have to explain to people, especially if you don't sell the x86 one anymore.
John:
It's like, oh, I was going to get a Mac, but I hear they don't run their software right anymore or something or other, right?
John:
That's the risk with doing it on your most popular computer to begin with.
John:
It doesn't mean they're not going to do it.
John:
That's just the opposite argument than the way that you could end up having it in the top end laptop first, right?
John:
Or put it in the Mac Pro first if the first one they make is 64 cores, but I'm not holding my breath for that.
Casey:
You know, if you'll permit me to go back a step, I forgot to mention a small tale of woe I had with my new treats that I got today.
Casey:
So I had ordered the Pi Zero W, as I had mentioned.
Casey:
And again, this is a single board $10 computer.
Casey:
And I didn't get one of the like overpriced starter packs that has like a case and a power supply and all this other junk because I didn't need that.
Casey:
I knew what I was doing.
Casey:
Or so I thought.
Casey:
One of the things that...
Casey:
Basically, in order to get these things started, what happens is you can choose to buy, and I did, an SD card that has something called Noobs pre-installed on it, N-O-O-B-S.
Casey:
What that basically does is it lets you decide what OS you want to put on that card, and it'll do like an internet restore in order to install that OS.
Casey:
And so generally speaking, you would just install the Raspberry Pi, a Raspbian Linux distribution, and that'll be that.
Casey:
And so I had ordered, you know, a couple of 16 gig SD cards for these little computers and that had noobs on it.
Casey:
And so the first order of business in order to get everything working is to go ahead and plug in a keyboard to the Raspberry Pi Zero W and plug in my TV that's operating as an HDMI monitor.
Casey:
And so I didn't order any sort of dongles or anything with this because I did get with my Pi 4 dongles for HDMI and it has USB ports and so on and so forth.
Casey:
I go to set the first one of my two Pi 0s up.
Casey:
And gentlemen, if you will look at the link in the chat slash in the show notes...
Casey:
you can see all the different connectors on the Pi Zero W. And the connectors are mini HDMI and USB on the go ports, and then micro USB for power.
Casey:
So USB on the go is apparently also micro USB.
Casey:
But all I have keyboard-wise...
Casey:
is an Apple, like, not wireless, an Apple wired extended keyboard.
Casey:
You know, one of the ones that has a USB port, which works great on the Raspberry Pi 4 that has a full-size USB port.
Casey:
But on this, I, oh, I can't connect a keyboard.
Casey:
Well, that's a problem.
Casey:
And then I went digging through my drawers full of adapters and finally I got a series of adapters that would let me plug in a keyboard so I can actually do something with this computer.
Marco:
So what USB on the go is basically is a micro USB port that's acting as a USB host port instead of USB device side port.
Marco:
So it's like a micro USB port on a device but on the computer side instead.
Marco:
Normally the cables are not made to do that.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So I was able to get a series of cables connected to plug a full-size USB keyboard into this thing.
Casey:
And then I went to connect my display.
Casey:
Now, I don't know how close you were paying attention earlier, but I said that the Raspberry Pi Zero W, and let me just make sure I get this right, it has a mini HDMI port on it.
Casey:
However, my Raspberry Pi 4 has a micro, well, two micro HDMI ports.
Casey:
So I have micro HDMI cables.
Yeah.
Casey:
I do not have many HDMI cables.
Casey:
And what really chaps my hindquarters is I went through all of my cables like six months ago.
Casey:
And I remember seeing one of these cables and thinking, oh, that's for a camcorder that we had 10 years ago.
Casey:
I will never need this cable again.
Casey:
Off it goes.
John:
Let this be a lesson to you kids.
John:
Never throw out anything.
Casey:
Never throw out anything.
John:
I might need that cable someday.
Marco:
That's totally the wrong lesson.
Marco:
No, let this be a lesson to you kids.
Marco:
When you buy your first Raspberry Pi of a certain size, get the adapter kit that everyone sells for like an extra 15 bucks.
Marco:
That's another lesson you could take from this.
John:
Or you could just hoard all your cables forever.
Marco:
I know you're going to pay more for the cables and adapters than you did for the Pi Zero W, which is $10, but still, there's a reason why those kits exist, because the first one of these you buy, you're not going to have all the weird, crazy little tiny cables it needs.
Marco:
So just get the kit the first time.
Marco:
It's like $25, and then you can go from there.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Now, I assumed, unfortunately, that they were the same connector.
Casey:
Why wouldn't they be?
Casey:
But they are not.
Casey:
And so now I have a very unique scenario where I do have a keyboard connected, hypothetically, as it turns out, I never tested it.
Casey:
I do have a keyboard connected, but I can't see anything.
Casey:
And that's going to make things challenging.
Casey:
So what does one do?
Casey:
Now, Marco, you might know the answer to this, but I'm curious, John, and this is an unfair question.
Casey:
I'll be the first to tell you it's an unfair question.
Casey:
But what would you try, John, in order to fix this problem?
John:
Could you SSH into it and use a big, expensive $1,000 computer as a dumb terminal?
Casey:
And certainly, except that there is no OS on it as yet.
Casey:
Remember that noobs, the first thing you do is you choose what OS to put on it using a keyboard and a display.
Casey:
And then at that point, you could probably SSH into it.
Casey:
But what do you do?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Can you just do it by feel?
John:
Maybe.
John:
Maybe.
John:
You could use the force.
Yeah.
John:
I can tell when you have to hit F2 during the BIOS process to get something.
Casey:
I guess in theory, I could have booted one of the, because I got two cards, you know, one for each Pi.
Casey:
I guess I could have put the other card in the Raspberry Pi 4 and kind of like followed along.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
And just guess.
John:
I just watched a YouTube video.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true.
Casey:
I didn't think about that.
Casey:
That's actually a pretty good answer.
Casey:
I'm annoyed because that's a pretty good answer.
Casey:
Marco, do you know what I feel like is the correct answer?
Casey:
Like, how would you have handled this?
Casey:
Because I think you might know.
Marco:
I think there's probably some config file you can edit or some file you create.
Marco:
If you touch a file at a certain path on the card, you can tell it just automatically configure with this or enable SSH or something like that.
Marco:
That's the solution I would look for.
Marco:
Is there something I can modify on this SD card to make it automatically configure enough to the point where I can get an SSH login?
Casey:
I will award you full credit.
Casey:
You're missing a step, but I still award you full credit.
John:
Hold down a key on the keyboard that you just connected?
Casey:
No, no, no, no.
Casey:
So what I ended up doing was I used an app called Etcher on my Mac to basically reset and reformat the SD card to actually have the OS already on it.
Casey:
So not have noobs on it, but instead have the full OS installation on it.
Casey:
At that point, this is where, Marco, you're exactly right.
Casey:
You can put a file or touch a file called SSH into the root of that file system, and it will automatically enable SSH when it boots.
Casey:
However, this thing does not have an Ethernet port on it.
Casey:
How do I connect to my Wi-Fi, which is not exactly open?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Marco:
You can open it up for two seconds.
Marco:
No one's going to hack you.
Casey:
I could.
Marco:
Is there some, like, again, config files?
Marco:
Is there some config file you can put on there that says, like, connect to this SSID with this password?
Casey:
As it turns out, WPA underscore supplicant dot config, you set your country, you set a couple other parameters, and then you set a network, you know, and you say it's such and such SSID with such and such pre-shared key.
Casey:
And sure enough, when I plugged this thing in, suddenly my Eero app said, hi, there's a new Raspberry Pi connected to your network.
Casey:
And so I was able to, at that point, SSH, or if I really wanted to, I guess I could have VNC'd if I'd started Xwindows, but I was able to SSH in and do everything I needed to do.
Casey:
But imagine my utter misery...
Casey:
When I finally gotten my treats that I've been waiting like, I don't know, less than a week ultimately, but it felt like forever for, I finally got all the stuff I need.
Casey:
And I was doing, there was an Amazon order and a pie shop.us order.
Casey:
So two different orders that happened to come at the exact same time.
Casey:
And I'm all excited with myself.
Casey:
I'm not gonna have to wait for anything.
Casey:
Ooh.
Casey:
And I'll be able to talk about it on the show.
Casey:
This is like a double bonus and, ah, crap.
Casey:
I don't have any way to plug it into a monitor.
Yeah.
Marco:
No, this is perfect.
Marco:
The entire reason you got this is because you wanted an incredibly complicated, convoluted, pain in the ass solution to a very simple problem.
Marco:
It's so true.
Marco:
You're getting your money's worth.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I'm getting my money's worth.
Marco:
What you got was that problem being even more convoluted and pain in the ass than you thought it would be.
John:
Never has $10 bought so much hardware and software headaches.
John:
It's how to really stretch your dollar.
Marco:
Yeah, right?
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
You are keeping busy.
Marco:
I tell you what, you are finding ways to keep yourself busy during this difficult time.
Marco:
Give yourself credit.
John:
Just wait until he starts trying to line up those sensors on the garage door.
John:
Open, close.
John:
Open, close.
John:
Let me just bend a little bit more.
John:
Open, close.
Yeah.
Casey:
It's going to be a three weekend ever.
Casey:
I'm telling you right now.
Casey:
Uh, but no, it was, it was such a, like, again, like this is so stupid.
Casey:
Like I recognize it's stupid, but in the heat of the moment, it was such like a roller coaster because I've got my treats.
Casey:
I go and open it up.
Casey:
I go to set it all up and Oh wait, I can't connect my keyboard.
Casey:
Oh, Oh, Oh, I finally put together all the adapters necessary for the keyboard.
Casey:
Oh, I can't get on the Wi-Fi.
Casey:
Oh, wait.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
You know what I can do?
Casey:
I can use the same connectors.
Casey:
I actually have USB to Ethernet.
Casey:
I can put it on Ethernet just long enough to set up Wi-Fi.
Casey:
Oh, crap.
Casey:
I can't connect a display.
Casey:
So it was like issue after issue.
Casey:
I am definitely getting my $10 worth out of computer headaches, as you said.
Casey:
But even though this is so frustrating and silly, I think because it's silly,
Casey:
i enjoy it so much because it's so like the stakes are so low like what's the worst that happened i think all in on this garage project i'm at like a hundred bucks which is not a little amount of money like that's money but in the grand scheme of things it's not insurmountable money and i have gotten even though it has been stressful i have gotten incredible amounts of joy from being able to do all this and tinker and i
Casey:
Now, I briefly FaceTimed with my dad to show him my achievement tonight.
Casey:
And something that occurred to me as I was talking with him was even though I've been writing software for like professionally for almost 20 years and, you know, in an amateur sense for probably 30 at this point, I've...
Casey:
I've only in a couple of occasions have I really seen my software come to life in the sense that it is interfacing with the physical world.
Casey:
And my first job out of college was actually, and I've mentioned this several times in the past, was writing C++ for DOS.
Casey:
to power slot machines that, well, they weren't actually slot machines.
Casey:
They were bingo machines that looked like slot machines because of weird laws.
Casey:
And so I got to see the real spin and the display work when my code worked and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And so that was really exciting.
Casey:
And then I vividly remember the first time I ran Fast Text on my iPhone and saw my software on this device.
Casey:
And it was just mind-blowing.
Casey:
I don't know, Marco, if you remember the first time you had Instapaper on your device.
Casey:
But for me, it was incredible.
Casey:
And so this now I'm interfacing with like real world things like sensors and lights.
Casey:
And yeah, it's dumb, but it's so cool.
Casey:
It's so cool being able to see this like actually happening in the real world.
Casey:
And it's so much fun and such a silly waste of time that I have enjoyed every second of.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
That's otherwise pretty hard to do yourself.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
I don't need to spend money on WWDC.
Casey:
So I actually have like...
Casey:
$3,000 or $4,000 to spend, right?
Casey:
That's how it works.
Marco:
So which of the new laptops are you going to buy or have you already bought?
Casey:
No, I'm not buying anything right now.
Casey:
Not because I don't want to, but because I shouldn't.
Marco:
Because you're not going anywhere?
Casey:
Yeah, because I'm not going anywhere.
Casey:
I actually said to Erin earlier, today or yesterday, I said to her, you know, I really want to buy like a $2,000 or $3,000 laptop to go to the grocery stores I'm not going to and do work that I'm not doing there.
Right.
Casey:
But before we talk about that, let's talk about WWDC.
Casey:
There has been a date announced.
Casey:
It is selfishly inconvenient because I'm supposed to hypothetically be on vacation that week.
Casey:
As it turns out, I'm sure I won't be on vacation that week because of coronavirus.
Casey:
But nevertheless, Apple is hosting their Worldwide Developer Conference beginning June 22nd.
Casey:
So it stands to reason that on the 22nd will be the keynote.
Casey:
And then the rest of it will be all virtual, including apparently labs, which I'm really, really curious how that's going to work.
Casey:
But we have a date and it's June 22nd.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Most of the information in the announcement is not especially new, with the exception of there's a whole bunch of stuff about how the student things will work.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of new student things they're doing, and apparently the only way you can get a WBDC 2020 jacket is by winning one of the student things that you can do.
Marco:
But for non-students, for kind of the rest of us,
Marco:
The only real news here that we didn't already know is the dates.
Marco:
And they did mention labs existing, and they said that it was free.
Marco:
We still don't know.
Marco:
I think the big question is, like, how are the labs going to work exactly?
Marco:
That's a pretty big question.
Marco:
But ultimately, this is good.
Marco:
I'm glad to see them, you know...
Marco:
laying out a little bit more trickling out information as they are ready to you know this is good and for now this is kind of all we need to know anyway i mean no one needs to make travel plans all we know now is like all right you know set aside some time during the week of june 22nd because you're going to probably want to you know do some of the sessions or if however the labs work it's probably going to be time-based so like somehow get to some of those labs who knows
Marco:
um but you know again glad to see we're making progress we're getting towards this thing and uh you know it seems like their heads on right like i think it would have been weird if they were like all right online wbdc 500 and like that that would have been strange so you know the pricing seems right of being free uh the focus on a lot of student stuff is you know fairly typical like they seem to be amping it up a little bit every year and that's that's very good uh and yeah otherwise it looks good um we'll see we'll see how it goes
John:
Is it just me or did they not give an end date?
John:
We're all just assuming it's a week as normal, but they didn't say that anywhere, did they?
Marco:
I don't think so.
Marco:
Keep in mind, this is so new.
Marco:
There are so many assumptions that we have and that they might have based on how it's always been done that we can break.
Marco:
And one of those assumptions is like, why does it have to be a week?
Marco:
It can be three days or it can be all summer.
Marco:
Who cares?
Marco:
It doesn't really need to have a certain ending date.
Marco:
The only thing that really needs to end is at some point the people doing it at Apple have to get back to the rest of their jobs.
Marco:
But that doesn't mean it can't be nine days or four days.
Marco:
It could be
Marco:
anything within a certain reasonable range and it would be fine and of course you know the sessions air at certain times or are on at certain times or get released at certain times but the sessions are then available forever like you can go on go online now and look back like up to like probably at least three or four years ago and they started putting them online you know you can you can go back and get previous year session videos you can search the transcripts you can look at sample code from previous years so like these things have long lifetimes so the only question is like when are these sessions released
Marco:
And because they no longer have this like travel oriented in-person event, if they can't release everything they want to release in five days, they don't have to.
Marco:
They can take a little bit longer.
Marco:
They can release it over a few weeks if they want to.
Marco:
If some API is not ready yet, they can wait till it is ready.
John:
Yeah, they've been doing that lately anyway, where they would make these little mini presentations when they'd have technology announcements that were like miniature WWDC sessions for the past several years.
John:
Those tend to be shorter, but still, that's a format they seem to like.
John:
The marketing for this one is a bunch of Memojis behind laptops, I guess, inside of a dark background with being lit by the screen, I suppose.
John:
And it's interesting because it lets them advertise their Memoji thing.
John:
But I feel like where they have the people peeking out from behind their screen and you can only see their eyes, there's something strange about that.
John:
It's not menacing exactly, but maybe it's a coronavirus thing where the mask is covering their nose and mouth and you can just see the eyes peeking out.
John:
I like it much better when you can see their whole face, like their smiling person or whatever.
John:
the guy with the the gap in his tooth or the missing tooth or whatever that looks fun and happy but i'm not quite sure why they're in the dark i mean i guess it's saying like developers toil away in the dark do you remember a couple years ago that apple had that video that was kind of like playing all the stereotypes that all developers are uh terrible terrible antisocial troglodytes that was not that was not a good one that is an unfortunate stereotype to be you know emphasizing even further here on the other hand it is largely true yeah
John:
I mean, I don't think they're emphasizing that.
John:
It just reminded me of it.
John:
But I do think that someone made a choice to not show the whole faces of a bunch of people and have them peeking out from behind the monitor, which is kind of cool.
John:
But also, I don't know, a little bit seems a little bit strange to me.
John:
I do like the fact that a lot of the media they have randomizes the Memoji you get.
John:
Apple's been a fan of doing that.
John:
It's like three people.
John:
And which three people do you get?
John:
They have a set of, I don't know, 20 or something.
John:
And they're all different.
John:
They're all really cool.
John:
Whoever did the character design on them, they have a variety of...
John:
hair colors and glasses and you know skin colors and hats and you know hairstyles and all sorts of cool stuff so they're it's it's fun in that way and then people have stickers on the back of their laptops so then some people don't have stickers on the back of their laptops so you can choose who you you know kind of person you'll get along with should i become a hat person you didn't pull that off you were a hat person and then you know they got ruined for you and did you get a blue one
Marco:
or something i i forget i think i lost it i gotta make a new one for the summer you're a hat person by default to keep from getting sunburn on your head right i don't mean like a baseball hat i mean like a fashion hat like it seems like a fashion one of the options now uh for personal fashion is you could just be like a hat person you could be like a cool hat person wear a cool hat a lot of danger in that because a lot of the hats have pre you have a existing associations like for example you probably wouldn't want to get a fedora
Marco:
well why not oh god just just trust me see i don't i don't know anything about hat fashion so i don't even know like why is that bad i have no clue yeah same you could tip your hat and say m'lady just don't i wouldn't do that oh god just be glad you don't know just trust me when i tell you that certain hats are for existing associations the cowboy hat can i pull off cowboy hat
Marco:
You absolutely could pull off a cowboy hat.
Marco:
Especially in the suburbs of New York.
John:
No, you absolutely can.
Marco:
A cowboy hat would fit you perfectly.
Marco:
I could totally see that.
Marco:
You seem to know a lot about hat fashion.
Marco:
What kind of hat do you think you could pull off?
John:
I think I could do the big droopy straw hat.
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
I would kill to see that.
John:
huckleberry finn or like i don't know what character i'm thinking of but just kind of like a big stalk of wheat coming out of my mouth and the big floppy straw hat i think i could pull that off and then what would casey be wearing not what he would choose what would look good on him
John:
I think, I don't know.
John:
I just keep saying Casey in a dorky baseball hat.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Sorry, Casey.
Marco:
That actually is like the perfect answer.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
What's the Kraft macaroni and cheese of hats?
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
First of all, it's Velveeta, you jerk.
Casey:
Secondly, I am not kidding.
Casey:
I long to get to the point.
Casey:
that I can pull off a flat cap.
Casey:
You know what that is?
Casey:
I think that's what it's called, right?
Casey:
Todd Vaziri can pull this off so well and it makes me so angry.
Marco:
I'm doing an image search.
Marco:
Oh, this?
Marco:
I think you're too tall for these.
Casey:
maybe i don't know but it's like it comes up just a little bit in the back and then kind of like falls down to like being like a wedge in the front it's like a macbook air shaped hat yeah yeah i want to be able to do this so badly and i know i can't right now but i'm hopeful i'm hopeful when i get old i'll be able to pull it off no no please dad you have to get like a foot shorter and way fatter to pull this off case why do you have to be short i'm saying one doesn't have to be short but you to pull this hat off would have to be way shorter and fatter
Marco:
i just want to be able to wear it come on no sorry i didn't make your head shape this is what it is makes me so sad uh it makes me so all right now if i were to get a fedora as john suggests no i did not suggest oh i was gonna say do i get a red one for the linux reference or is that too like michael jackson no no i was telling you to get a cowboy hat oh that's right okay cowboy hat all right
Casey:
Can we please discuss why Fedora's bad?
Casey:
I'm really curious now.
Marco:
I'm looking up image searches for all these things.
Marco:
Now, do I curl up the edges on the cowboy hat like some people do, or do I leave it flat?
John:
There's so much variety in cowboy hats.
John:
I don't know all the different variety, but I do know that some of them have one curl, some of them have two curls, some of them have no curls of different degrees.
John:
I think you would just pick whichever one works for you.
Marco:
It does seem like the world of cowboy hats is quite vast.
Casey:
I still think when I'm like 60 or 70, I can do a flat cap.
Casey:
I'm telling you, I'm holding out hope.
Casey:
I'm holding out hope.
John:
Start gaining that weight.
John:
And shrinking.
John:
And shrinking.
John:
That'll happen naturally, though.
John:
That much, though?
John:
No.
John:
Osteoporosis.
John:
I believe in him.
John:
He's pretty tall.
John:
He's got all sorts of genetic ailments, though.
Casey:
Wait, what are my genetic ailments?
John:
Your eyes, right?
Casey:
oh well yeah okay that doesn't make you shorter yeah and it doesn't make me shorter i'm just saying like you know there could be other ones we don't know uh yeah yeah all right let's talk about something happier except not uh there's a new 13 inch macbook pro which is happy this is amazing the butterfly keyboard is dead we won that's it it's as dead as you want it to be
Marco:
well yeah i mean obviously there's still a whole bunch of them still in the channel and still in people's homes and still owned by people that'll be in use for years and and still on the and still on the ipad keyboard you like that's true yeah and still in the one keyboard cover that i like so it's exactly as dead as you wanted it to be exactly the butterfly keyboard is gone from the entire mac lineup i am so so happy finally one of our long national nightmares is over
Marco:
We will probably never know why it took so long for them to fix this problem.
Marco:
But it's now fixed.
Marco:
And I could not be happier.
Marco:
The new keyboards that we have, the Magic keyboards and the laptops...
Marco:
They are totally fine.
Marco:
They're not amazing.
Marco:
They're just fine.
Marco:
The way laptop keyboards should be.
Marco:
They are unmemorable.
Marco:
You will start typing on it and you will forget about your keyboard.
Marco:
You won't have to think about it.
Marco:
You won't have to baby it.
Marco:
You won't have to be afraid of getting a tiny speck of dust in it once.
Marco:
Your keys will work reliably all the time and it's amazing.
Marco:
It's the way it used to be.
Marco:
It's like if your house caught fire once a week that would become pretty annoying and you would think
Marco:
I can't think about anything else because it keeps catching fire and I have to deal with that.
Marco:
This is like your house was catching fire once a week for the last four years if you had an Apple laptop and now finally you can buy one that doesn't.
Marco:
It doesn't need to be an amazing house.
Marco:
When you're used to one that catches on fire once a week, if you have one that doesn't, that's great.
Marco:
It's a huge upgrade in quality of life.
Marco:
And that's what these keyboards are.
Marco:
They're not amazing, ridiculous, awesome keyboards.
Marco:
They're totally fine keyboards.
Marco:
And we're coming from a place that was so far from totally fine for so many people that that's a massive improvement.
Marco:
So I'm happy that now the laptops are finally...
Marco:
With a couple of minor nitpicks here and there, as I will always have, for the most part, laptops are in a very good spot.
Marco:
And I would say the entire Mac lineup, for the first time in a long time, possibly 2012, I'd say the entire Mac lineup is in a pretty good spot right now.
Marco:
The best spot it's been in a long time.
John:
Yeah, that's true, especially since those models that never get updates have been updated recently-ish, within the last year or two.
John:
And that's pretty much the best you can hope for.
John:
The ones that are frequently updated were just updated, and the ones that haven't been updated in ages were kind of updated.
John:
I mean, maybe the iMac Pro is the one spot that you could quibble about, but otherwise, there are really no more Macs that if someone wanted to buy them,
John:
you would have to swoop in and explain some sort of caveats that they may not be aware of.
John:
All of them are, you know, it's a balance of price and performance and it depends on what you want and yada yada, but they're all basically good computers, even the really old iMac Pro.
Marco:
Even the iMac Pro, like, it's a Xeon.
Marco:
It's a Xeon workstation lineup product and those always have, like,
Marco:
18 to 24 month update cycles so we're we're near the end of that but we're not like it's not egregious like it's not like super outdated to the point where it's embarrassing if you had to go out and buy an iMac pro today it's fine like you're not going to feel like a total idiot doing that and you're not you're not getting a terrible deal doing that necessarily
Marco:
Even the Mac Mini, you know, the Mac Mini is usually neglected horribly and has been for much of much of its life or its entire life.
Marco:
But even the Mac Mini is only a couple years old.
Marco:
I just bought one.
Marco:
I feel fine with that.
Marco:
I don't feel like I got ripped off like I needed one.
Marco:
I bought one.
John:
I feel like you got ripped off more than usual with the Mac Mini.
John:
Right.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
More.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
I don't feel like I got ripped off because of the product age.
Marco:
Obviously, it's always rip off in other ways.
Marco:
But, you know, even even the value argument, you know, they've had some pretty bad times for value in the Tim Cook era.
Marco:
It has seemed like you're you're just paying more and getting less in so many ways so much of the time.
Marco:
But they've made a couple of corrections in the past year or so.
Marco:
Even though the high end is still very expensive, John, there's now significantly improved value at the low end for most product lines.
Marco:
And that's true of the Macs, too.
Marco:
The MacBook Air got significantly better value with its revision.
Marco:
The Mac Mini, obviously, not incredibly good.
Marco:
You do get more storage now for your money, which the storage prices are still nowhere near what you can go on Amazon and buy an SSD for.
Marco:
But
Marco:
But it's better than it was.
Marco:
A lot of the complaints about the new 13-inch update that came out this week focused on the formerly Escape models of it, which are still around and kind of didn't get updated.
Marco:
They only got the new keyboard and I don't think much else.
Marco:
It's the two-port versions of the 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Marco:
And a lot of people are like, well, to get one that's good, you have to get this four-port expensive one.
Marco:
And that's true.
Marco:
That's always been true for the 13-inch.
Marco:
To get a good 13-inch, you're always paying around $2,000 for a decent 13-inch configuration.
Marco:
I specced up, I went on earlier to see how good of a value these things are.
Marco:
If I was buying a MacBook Air, I would get the fastest processor, because it's a pretty slow computer, so I'd get the fastest processor, 16 gigs of RAM, 1 terabyte storage.
Marco:
That is $1850.
Marco:
The 13-inch MacBook Pro, i5 2.0 CPU, 16 gig, 1 terabyte, 4 port model.
Marco:
$2,000.
Marco:
$150 more.
Marco:
And it's significantly faster.
Marco:
It has twice the ports.
Marco:
It has the much brighter Pro screen.
Marco:
The Air screen is kind of dim.
Marco:
That's a significantly better computer for $150 with otherwise pretty comparable specs.
Marco:
So we're not talking about super cheap computers in any case, but they haven't been.
Marco:
That is not new here.
Marco:
uh so the value argument if you're looking at a 13 inch macbook pro it's probably not going to be a good value no matter what you do uh if you want a good value in the mac lineup it's the air or the base model 16 inch uh otherwise you know i think they've done a really good job here you could argue like whether the two port 13 inch models should even still exist uh and i think they only pretty much just hit price points otherwise um go for the four port one if you can
John:
Yeah, as you know, the reason people are complaining about the lower end 13 inch, which, by the way, Jason Snell pointed out in Slack while we were recording, he was musing about the continued absurdity that Apple sells to computers, both called the 13 inch MacBook Pro, that...
John:
aren't really the same computer other than more or less being in the same case, right?
John:
They've always used like different chips and had different performance trade-offs and different prices.
John:
And one of them used to not have a touch bar and it's always been kind of weird.
John:
And so here we are again in the same spot where we've got these, this bifurcation in the 13 inch line that is definitely not obvious from a consumer perspective, unless you actually like look at the specs and understand more about it.
John:
And in this particular case, they upgraded the high end one to be what everybody wanted.
John:
Uh,
John:
And they upgraded the low-end one.
John:
Yes, they fixed the keyboard.
John:
But they didn't really change much else about that.
John:
It's weird that they didn't upgrade the CPU, the internals, essentially, of the lower-end 13-inch.
John:
And that's making people...
John:
scratch their head a little bit about it you don't want to feel like you're getting you know apple apple always does it with intel's terminology of eighth gen 10th gen processor right it's not a 10 nanometer process a processor but the the 10th gen one is and it's the same one that it had before and yes you get double the storage and yes you get the good keyboard and so on and so forth but it's it's the one you look at kind of as an ugly duckling and arguably the escape was also always kind of an ugly duckling unless you really love that escape key always in which case right and so like the the comparison that i've been thinking about and a
John:
And you just did it yourself, comparing, all right, so how do I choose between an Air and the low-end 13?
John:
Because they're sort of in each other's space, right?
John:
You know, there's the obvious physical differences.
John:
You can look at them and see what the physical differences are.
John:
And Rene Ritchie, in his new YouTube channel, which you should check out, enumerated, I think, basically all the changes, the significant differences between the MacBook Air and the low-end 13.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The low-end 13 is 0.3 pounds heavier.
John:
Display is 20% brighter, and it's P3.
John:
It's got a better speaker and microphone setup than the Air.
John:
The MacBook Air has the 10th-gen processor, but the 13-inch does not.
John:
It has 8th-gen.
John:
The 13-inch has a worse GPU, and it can't drive the Pro Display XDR, but the MacBook Air can, which is, again, something you wouldn't expect.
John:
Like, wait a second, the cheaper non-Pro model can drive the Pro Display XDR, but the supposed 13-inch MacBook Pro can't?
John:
It's because it's the older, you know, GPU and older chipset and everything.
John:
Wait, is anybody driving a Pro Display XDR with a MacBook Air?
John:
i don't know it just i'm just saying like this is a spec difference if it's a spec difference the worst gpu people do care about because it's not like worse by a little bit like if you do anything involving the gpu which maybe you do you're doing you know like but then the xdr is just a side effect of of having an older gpu it doesn't have display stream compression um one hour less battery life on the 13 inch and of course 13 inch has a touch bar which again like the escape key is like well is that a plus or a minus right so there are differences but the differences like
John:
but aside from the display stuff and the speaker and mic everything really is in favor of the air because the air is newer like the air has got the new stuff the air has got the new gpu and cpu the air you know uses less power presumably with the with the new gpu and cpu the air has display stream compression right all those things makes that low in 13s look like kind of ugly talking but that said you know they're
John:
You can look at these differences and make the decision that you want about it.
John:
The point is, if you look at these tradeoffs and say, actually, I do want the Pro because it has these advantages.
John:
You know, it has better cooling or the 8th gen processor runs the app that I want better than the 10th gen one because of thermal throttle, whatever.
John:
You decide you want it.
John:
it's a perfectly good computer because now the keyboard is fine again, right?
John:
And it's just, you can actually pick products based on the specs and not have to have any of these weird conversations about, with the exception of maybe having a conversation about the touch bar.
John:
There's no more sort of like caveats that you're just desperate for everybody to know.
John:
But I think the fact that this one hasn't been updated still makes that 13-inch product the sort of most treacherous for the casual consumer because there are differences, legitimate differences, like, you know, sensible differences, but that are not obvious by looking at them in the store because they all just look the same, right?
John:
So hopefully this weird...
John:
The low-end 13-inch either goes away entirely, which I would love because I don't want there to be a two-port computer called Pro, but that's just me, or eventually gets the internals updated when new chips are available that are not the exact same chips that are in the high-end one.
Casey:
So if I were to buy something tomorrow, which I'm not, what would I buy?
John:
You'd get the high-end one with all the goodies, and you'd be happy, right?
John:
Because that's what you always wanted.
John:
You wanted a 13-inch size computer that has all the things and has all the ports and is fast and has a good keyboard, and this is it.
John:
10-nanometer Intel processor, like good GPU, double the storage.
John:
That's another thing they did across this whole line is the whole you get twice the storage for the same price, which, again, storage prices are so stupid, but, hey, it's good, right?
John:
It improves the value.
Casey:
uh it's it's everything you said you wanted for the past many years when you were you know waffling over what to buy me waffling no surely not yeah i mean i i really want one really badly um i don't want to spend the money on one at this particular moment but i want one uh my adorable is just it's it's it's old i i love it i still love it but it's old and it's slow and i want something faster and newer
Marco:
I still love it, except that I've hated it every moment of using it, but I love it.
Marco:
I love it.
Marco:
It has all these problems.
Marco:
It's slow.
Marco:
The keyboard breaks all the time.
Marco:
It's horrible.
Marco:
And the one port is a huge pain in the butt, but I love it.
Marco:
Absolutely.
Marco:
Have I told you how much I love it?
John:
When I'm sitting on the couch reading Slack with it, I'm sure it's great.
John:
It's an element.
John:
Reading, not writing.
John:
I can type on it.
John:
Typing, I'm sure, works fine, too.
John:
Maybe it's not so much so great for Xcode.
Casey:
Well, typing is also difficult because I feel like I'm getting double vowels all over the place.
John:
I was thinking when Marco was celebrating the banishment of the butterfly keyboard from Apple's laptop line, I was looking at my laptop off to the side and I was thinking, you know what?
John:
I think I'm in a...
John:
i'm in the butterfly second honeymoon period or the the second wind of the butterfly because remember like this is my work laptop and it was 2017 and i had the butterfly keyboard and eventually my space bar stopped working right uh and then i got it replaced on the repair extension program of course because a small percentage of people though
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
I'm one of the small percentage.
John:
And when they replaced it, of course, because this laptop is designed in a dumb way, they also gave me a brand new battery.
John:
And so after using this laptop for two years at work and, you know, really...
John:
hurting the battery doing webex meetings with video and you know having the fans spin up and just like i got a brand new battery two years into the life of this laptop for free and i only had to be without it for like a week so and my keyboard works again so i have a working keyboard and the battery it's like new because it is new it had like three cycles on it when i got it so i'm actually not that i'm glad that i have a butterfly keyboard but if the butterfly keyboard didn't break my battery would be terrible by now
Casey:
So if I were to buy one, which one would I get?
Casey:
I would think either the 2 gigahertz 512 or the 2 gigahertz terabyte, because I have 512 in my Adorable and I don't need it, but I don't want to be in a position where I'm like, uh-oh.
Marco:
I made the decision a couple years back to just get one terabyte for my laptops because I have a similar situation as you.
Marco:
It's not my primary computer, so I don't need the biggest storage in the world because I'm not keeping everything on it.
Marco:
But it is nice to have a bunch of storage for not only development stuff because Xcode stuff is massive.
Marco:
You always need tons of space for the Xcode itself and the betas and the SDKs and everything else.
Marco:
And then also when you're going on a trip or something, when we can eventually do that again,
Marco:
You know, I know I like to bring a lot of downloaded video files.
Marco:
Casey, I can only imagine what you bring with you.
Marco:
I like having a terabyte and most times I have approximately 300 gigs free.
Marco:
So like less than 500.
Marco:
So I know that was generally the right move to go to the terabyte.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I think 32 gigs RAM, so that's $400.
Casey:
Is it worth the $200 for the 300 megahertz and the additional turbo boost?
John:
No, but I always pay it.
John:
It's really not most of the time.
John:
But because when the increment is that small, even though I know it will probably hurt my battery life, I just pay it.
John:
Because what I'm always looking for in laptops is to get a little bit more longevity because they're the kind of computer that feels slow before everybody else.
John:
So I would do it.
John:
There's not probably a good reason.
Marco:
You probably shouldn't, but that's just me.
Marco:
I usually don't get the high RAM option on laptops.
Marco:
Like, 16 is my RAM number for laptops.
Marco:
Even though I get high RAM on desktops, because on the desktop, I leave this thing, you know, the uptime is very, very long, and I'm leaving all sorts of huge things open all the time.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
Right now, I have numbers, pages, in addition to Slack, Dash, the documentation viewer.
Marco:
I sometimes podcast with Xcode and a simulator running and open, which I probably shouldn't, but that happens sometimes.
Marco:
Forecast, iTunes.
Marco:
I have so many things open right now because it's my desktop and I do everything here.
Marco:
on a laptop that I'm using as like a secondary slash travel workstation, I'm usually more focused on what I'm doing.
Marco:
I'm not usually running everything all at once.
Marco:
Instead, I'm like, I'm just running Xcode, Xcode and like, you know, mail and Safari or whatever, you know, as opposed to like all sorts of different, you know, logic and Photoshop all being open at the same time, like I often do here.
Marco:
Um, so on laptops, I've been going 16 gig for years and it's been totally fine.
Marco:
So $400 for 32 gigs to me is not worth it at all.
Marco:
Now, for those of you out there who are getting this as your primary computer and you're like, Oh, I got to run VMs or whatever.
Marco:
Like, okay, that's a different story.
Marco:
But as a secondary slash travel computer, 32 gigs might not be necessary for most people.
John:
Yeah, I think there's like two modes that you can use this computer in.
John:
Like if one mode is going for maximum battery life, which I suppose to be the travel case, I would get the slower processor in 16 gigs.
John:
But for all other cases, I would get the faster in 32.
Marco:
And for the processor, there's also the like, I know this is super nerdy, but my whole turbo boost religion, like for me, like because I usually run my laptop with turbo boost disabled,
Marco:
that changes the calculus of, well, do you want a high base clock?
Marco:
Do you want high turbo boost?
Marco:
It kind of changes that.
Marco:
So usually I go for actually a lower base clock because then I save even more battery power when I'm not on turbo.
Marco:
But that, of course, comes with a significant performance hit as well.
Marco:
So on this, between the 2.0 and 2.3 high-end CPUs, I'd probably go 2.0.
Marco:
just because you know it would run very cool i'd maximize battery life and if i really needed to step it up for performance i would just turn turbo boost on and the difference between 3.8 and 4.1 is not very big we're gonna get you a hardware turbo button maybe i'm just thinking the same thing he can make something with a raspberry pi that you can tape to the back of your computer right i would love that use an authentic turbo button from a pc at
Marco:
The touch bar is so freaking useless.
Marco:
That should be on the touch bar.
Marco:
Or replace the touch bar with keys that make sense for volume and brightness and then a turbo button.
Marco:
That would be amazing.
John:
Why don't you just get the model that has four high-speed cores and eight power-efficient cores?
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
See, this is why, like, when we go ARM, there's going to be a lot of problems that I think will just kind of disappear.
John:
Speaking of turbos and other, maybe this should have been a follow-up, but I got some more suggestions for fan control apps, and I got one of them that lets you manually control the fan speed, even on my Mac Pro.
John:
And I'm not sure if this is a limitation of the software or if it's a limitation of the computer, but the reason I was all excited to get the manual control one is because I was like, now I can manually turn the fans way, way, way down and just look at the temperatures and see if I'm about to fry my computer or whatever, right?
John:
But this software did not let me turn any of the big three fans below 500 RPM.
John:
I'm like, but that's what they run at all the time.
John:
And it's like, yeah, they're running at the slow speed.
John:
Someone from Apple should tell me, can these fans spin at anything less than 500?
John:
It seems like they can't.
John:
uh so which is kind of disappointing because i was i was hoping they could spin at like 100 rpm and it would be like almost silent but anyway this software couldn't i forgot the name of it it's there's like smc fan control and stuff like that tg pro
Marco:
I don't know the physics of it, but motors have a certain minimum speed they can spin at.
Marco:
I've never seen computer fans, from Apple at least, that idled below about 900 RPM.
Marco:
So the fact that yours idle already at 500, I don't think you're getting a lot better than that.
John:
Yeah, they're huge fans.
John:
They're the size of a cantaloupe.
John:
It's understandable that they would be going slow.
John:
I just couldn't make them go any slower than that.
John:
Anyway, I did pin them all to the slowest speed and just watched my temperatures.
John:
They don't really go up.
John:
Maybe that'll change in the summer with my lack of air conditioning in my house.
John:
But anyway, that was a fun experiment to play with that manual fan control.
John:
I don't recommend it.
John:
This software lets you put in your own fan curves, essentially, and say, when it hits this temperature, go to this RPM, and I'm not going to play that game.
John:
I'll let the system handle it.
John:
But it was worth it just to be able to play around with it.
Marco:
Are you actually setting, like, are you forcing it to stay too slow?
Marco:
Because usually those programs are used to force the fans to spin faster than they otherwise would have to keep the laptop running cooler.
Marco:
You can do that too.
Marco:
It has sliders.
John:
You just slide them and you can listen to the fans.
John:
You can just, you turn on manual control and you basically have a slider that lets you individually control the fans with one slider for each fan.
Marco:
Yeah, but will it actually, like, I bet, like, it probably wouldn't let the CPU get above about, like, 90 Celsius, I bet.
John:
I was never close to that.
John:
Like, I'm not doing anything on my computer.
John:
It's like it hovers.
John:
And I changed everything to Fahrenheit because I can't handle doing even for CPU stuff.
John:
I know people get used to it for CPUs.
John:
But anyway, yeah, I don't I didn't try to stress it.
John:
Like, I'm sure if I played a game or something, it would get hot and maybe something would happen.
John:
I mean, eventually, like the, you know, the thing will just turn itself off for for safety.
John:
But yeah.
John:
Like I was saying, since the slowest you can make them go with the software is 500, they don't really go much above that in normal use anyway.
John:
The only time I hear the fans is when I'm playing Destiny and Windows.
John:
And then it's only like... There's this thing about games that I wish... I've heard people refer to many times, but I've never heard someone explain it to me.
John:
I'm sure we've all experienced it in games that...
John:
the fans spin up the loudest when there's stuff on screen that looks the least impressive, basically.
John:
Like, you're in a menu, or, like, you're at a vendor, which is, like, basically a static screen with just a bunch of choices, and you're like, and all of a sudden, all your fans crank up, and you're like, why are the fans spinning up?
John:
And I heard game developers say offhandedly that this is the case, that, like...
John:
you know drawing things that are not impressive on the screen for some reason make the fans but maybe it's because you can get amazing frame rights and things i don't know the explanation but practically speaking it's what happens like so in destiny i'm playing and everything's fine and then i go to some screen that is totally not impressive like a menu screen or something and the fans go look crazy occasionally i can see where it makes sense where there's lots of lighting effects where you know big explosions are going off and i hear the fans spin up but yeah i can you can definitely hear them when you're playing destiny at uh at 4k and hdr
John:
the struggle is real and as for the the theory that the frame rate goes wild i in i have in software in destiny i have the frame rate capped at 60 because i have a 60 hertz monitor so there's no point in frame rate being much above that so i don't know it's it's confusing but yeah when these fans get going you can definitely hear them
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting my servers and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Ask ATP?
Marco:
Let's do it.
Casey:
So let's start tonight with a question from Tom Anthony.
Casey:
Tom writes, I'm a full-time video producer slash editor for three years, starting to develop some signs of RSI.
Casey:
I've adjusted my desk so that the keyboard mouse monitor are all at the recommended height and angle.
Casey:
I take breaks, but it's still getting worse.
Casey:
Are there any suggestions for the next thing to try?
Casey:
I'm considering switching to a trackpad or a different mouse, but I have no idea where to start.
Casey:
I've been using a magic mouse forever.
Casey:
I don't seem to have problems with my iPad, but I can't edit video on that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So I think the reading, reading this message and other things like this, I was just thinking this is probably not medically accurate analogy, but you think about like, uh, if you are like a metal wire and you bend it back and forth, you ever like bend a metal wire back and forth to, until it gets like hot and breaks.
John:
Right.
John:
as a way to you know break a metal thing right and this thing is kind of like I've been bending the metal wire back and forth and it feels like it's getting weaker and I've been bending it less and taking breaks between bending but I'm afraid it's going to break what can I do
John:
And it's like, stop bending the metal back and forth in that spot.
John:
There's no magic bullet.
John:
Your insides aren't made of metal.
John:
But if you're doing the same thing with some mechanical part of your body, a joint or whatever, and you're just repeatedly doing this, that's why it's called repetitive strain injury.
John:
You're repeatedly straining something.
John:
Yes, taking breaks is good and having good ergonomics is good, all those things.
John:
But what it all boils down to is not bending that thing back and forth.
John:
So, for example, to use the wire analogy, you could bend a different spot.
John:
Like, oh, it looks like it was almost going to break at this spot.
John:
Let me go to another spot on the wire and bend it back and forth.
John:
And it gives the other spot a break, right?
John:
And if it's a very long wire, you can bend it all to sorts of different spots and spread it around.
John:
That's why lots of people say, which should I use?
John:
What's the good pointing device?
John:
Should I use an ergonomic mouse?
John:
Should I use a trackpad?
John:
Should I use a trackball?
John:
What's the good one for ergonomics?
John:
There is no good one.
John:
There are ones that are worse than others depending on how your positioning is or whatever, but it depends on how and where are you injured.
John:
If you've always been using a mouse in the same way, using literally anything else will probably help alleviate some of the things that are bothering you about the mouse.
John:
It doesn't mean that other one is better.
John:
It just means you're bending a different part of the wire back and forth.
John:
who do we know like uh mike hurley uh is is on a and cgp gray does this too on an input device rotation regime to enforce this like an actual like i do this with this device i use the pen with this i use the trackball with this i use the mouse with this just like not just like on a month by month basis but like on a task by task basis right you're spreading the strain around now
John:
It really depends on how injured you are.
John:
And, you know, you have to take breaks and do all this stuff.
John:
And some people could get to the point where they're so injured that any activity exacerbates it.
John:
And if you have any kind of nerve injury that doesn't heal as well or at all, they're all, you know, anyway, see a doctor, deal with all that.
John:
It's such a pain.
John:
I know you can't really see a doctor now.
John:
It's such a pain in the butt.
John:
But the final line is there's no way to avoid the wire breaking if you keep bending it at the same spot no matter how many breaks you take, right?
John:
It's just you really have to...
John:
stop hurting yourself, right?
John:
Hurt yourself differently in different places and spread it around and make yourself stronger and read books about it.
John:
And like this, no, there's no easy answer.
John:
So I guess in my, my depressing non-answer to this, I think the takeaway are there's like the idea that a track pad is better or worse than a mouse or better or worse than a vertical mouse or better or worse than a pen or better or worse than a split keyboard or better worse than a regular keyboard.
Um,
John:
stopping doing what you're doing that's hurting you is what you're looking for.
John:
And if what's hurting you is using a super duper ergonomic keyboard and you switch to a different kind of keyboard, it might make you feel better.
John:
It doesn't mean that different kind of keyboard is better than your ergonomic ones.
John:
It just means you're injuring a different part of your body.
John:
So don't look for the magic bullet.
John:
Get in touch with your body.
John:
Read some good books on this and hope that someday you can see a doctor again and that doctor will have any kind of clue about how they can help you.
Marco:
I'm going to say the exact same thing I said last time we had an RSI question, which is, first of all, I have found this is not an area where doctors are typically extremely helpful.
Marco:
For the most part, while there are exceptions, there are some doctors who are very good and have...
Marco:
are empowered to do good work and recommend good things and with patients who are willing to take the right advice and everything.
Marco:
But largely, most modern doctors in most American systems at least and similar systems are largely like medication vendors and people who will refer you to more specialized doctors who will generally recommend surgery.
Marco:
The way that doctors usually will address this kind of stuff is like, well, you can put on these wrist braces from the drugstore for a while, which don't do anything.
Marco:
You should take this ibuprofen or something, which also, I mean, it helps a little bit, but it's not really a great solution and neither a complete nor a totally safe solution.
Marco:
At the most extreme case, they'll tend to refer you to surgery.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
any kind of surgery that involves RSI causes or see also back pain, which has a lot of the same issues, efficacy rates of such surgery are shockingly poor.
Marco:
While some people have good results, it's far from a guarantee that it actually will help you.
Marco:
So the solutions provided by
Marco:
the you know doctor industrial complex for things like rsi or back pain not great for most people like your outcomes are not incredibly promising that they'll actually be able to locate and fix the actual root problem for you so you know what what john said is is largely true like
Marco:
The thing that is hurting you, you need to be doing less of it.
Marco:
Now, things are better and worse.
Marco:
I have a little bit more faith in input devices than John does as a potential for making things better or at least varying things, as you said.
Marco:
I'm a huge fan of split keyboards.
Marco:
For me, the natural ergonomic split keyboard type has done wonders for me in this area.
Marco:
I always find that when I go long periods using non-split keyboards on laptops frequently, I get a little more sore and I start having potential issues.
Marco:
But ultimately, it's been years since I've had anything besides mild soreness.
Marco:
Because I've spent those years really like regularly exercising, like doing like core strength exercises, lots, you know, just kind of whole body exercises with a trainer and everything.
Marco:
It's been wonderful.
Marco:
I'm not like a bodybuilder or anything and you don't need to be.
Marco:
And if you get your body in better shape, especially in like the core and, you know, lower arm areas for this –
Marco:
you will generally have a better time around stuff like this.
Marco:
I know this is not a very useful answer when you want something like, I want to buy a new mouse to fix this problem.
Marco:
Or I need this problem to be fixed yesterday.
Marco:
This is not a great solution for that.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It is one that works and it works really well and not much else does.
Marco:
So definitely consider a significant change to your fitness regime that can strengthen core and whole body stuff and you will probably see good results from that as well.
Marco:
But certainly on the computer side, I strongly suggest a natural split ergonomic keyboard.
Marco:
I have found, and I think many other people have found, that changing the keyboard to the split type can have a surprisingly large impact.
Marco:
Certainly on the pointing device side, I like having a trackpad on the left and a mouse on the right.
Marco:
It seems weird for about a day, and then your left hand gets used to it, and over time you will develop precision pointing device abilities with your left hand as well as your right.
Marco:
So now I can do precise...
Marco:
movement with either one so you can kind of share the load between your hands you can kind of alternate so if you're having like worse problems in your right hand than your left chances are that is mouse related and while you can switch up you know the kind of device your right hand is using you can also share the load with your left hand and that will also help again none of these things are silver bullets but it will help and if you can get enough solutions that kind of help and pile them all together you have a pretty big overall improvement
John:
I'm just going to defend medical science for a moment here and say that although it is totally true that in the U.S.
John:
especially, doctors have no idea what to do with RSI and it's very difficult to find a doctor that does, it's still important to see one because they can suggest whatever they want.
John:
But ultimately, you decide what treatment you want to pursue as long as you understand that, yes, they're probably going to suggest dumb things like take ibuprofen or put on a brace or whatever.
John:
see a hand surgeon or whatever doesn't mean you have to do them but they do have ways to test for things that you would like to rule out they can do nerve conduction studies for example which are not fun but nerve damage is one you really want to know about because it's the kind of thing you can't like
John:
you know get yourself back to health with exercise if you if you damage your nerves it's very difficult to come back from that and it's a serious issue and they can test they are you in the process of damaging your nerves have you lost nerve connectivity we can test for that do you have one of the incredibly rare things that everyone knows the name of that everyone thinks they have like carpal tunnel which everyone thinks they have then almost nobody who has rsi does have
John:
Carpeton has a real good PR agency, I guess.
John:
They can test to see if you have that one specific ailment.
John:
And they can rule it out if you don't.
John:
They can tell you what part of yourself are you injuring and how.
John:
Now, when it comes to them trying to suggest ways for you to not do that, they'll just say, I'll just stop typing and that'll solve it.
John:
And they're right.
John:
That's not great advice.
John:
And then you get into the whole, like, who can actually help me with this?
John:
And I think we talked about this in past shows, occupational therapy and trying to find a good doctor and so on and so forth.
John:
But
John:
science does have ways to test for things and it is good to know um and you know for things like the uh the split keyboard or whatever if the thing you are injuring is alleviated by using a split keyboard you will see relief from it if instead the thing you were injuring is like somewhere else in your body like in your lower back or your shoulders or your neck it's it's possible that a
John:
won't provide any help beyond just a slight change of pace, then you'll be back in the same position as you continue to tense up in your neck muscles or whatever the hell you're doing to yourself, right?
John:
And that could be, you know, core strengthening or something else you need to do, right?
John:
So it's good to actually know to the best of your ability, where are the actual problems and what are they?
John:
And also to get them sort of classified as like, is this the type of problem that I can solve with exercise?
John:
Or is it a, you know, like...
John:
how am i injuring myself and like even on the rotating thing like the you know do different things rotate so and so forth you're all you're just starting about some people have a bad knee right and then they you know get a brace in that knee or they start favoring their other leg and then they get a second bad knee because now you're putting all your weight on your supposedly good knee and now you've injured that one right you can chase these things around all you want right but in the end there's you know it's only a certain amount of bends that wire can take and you really just have to learn to manage that and we're not all given the same wire this wire analogy i'm really just riding this thing all the way home
John:
we're not all given the same gauge of wire and the same length and the same strength one person can bend that wire back and forth 24 hours a day seven days a week for their whole life and be fine you might not be able to do that it's a genetic lottery and you know who knows like you can't one size does not fit all so like so many things having to do with health especially sort of like
John:
minor non-fatal chronic conditions it's very difficult to like to to find a way to deal with that without essentially taking on a lot of the burden yourself to like
John:
Read books, do research, audition lots of other, lots of professionals in the field.
John:
Don't accept the advice of the first person you talk to.
John:
Be cautious of medical advice that you know is sort of interventionary of like, well, surgery, surgeons want to do surgery and doctors want to prescribe drugs and people don't understand RSI.
John:
Like all that is the case, but God, I hate talking about this topic because you really just want to tell people how to, how to deal with it.
John:
And the answer is it's hard.
John:
Good luck.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Jack Johnson writes, what are the tips for improving audio quality on video conferencing for people working from home?
Casey:
Is there an external mic you recommend for this purpose that would be better than, say, AirPods?
Casey:
Is there a way to separate audio input and output on iOS?
Casey:
I, gosh, I don't know what to do about iOS unless you want to do one of those completely convoluted setups that like Federico would do.
Casey:
For the Mac, you could get a decent mic or just talk really close to the one that you have.
Casey:
Marco, this is probably best asked to you.
Casey:
What's the right answer here?
Marco:
I'll start with the tricky stuff.
Marco:
Basically, iOS does not expose to the user a concept of choose your input and output device.
Marco:
Apps can do it.
Marco:
Apps have access, like audio apps in the APIs, you can enumerate and list the devices available and give people a choice of where the audio is sent.
Marco:
Most apps don't do that, though.
Marco:
By default, the audio APIs basically just go to whatever the...
Marco:
like the most recently plugged in, or there's a certain priority order of what device should take control, basically, based on what's available.
Marco:
But most iOS audio apps will just use whatever the system default currently is for input and output, so they don't usually offer that kind of control.
Marco:
So that being said, generally, when it comes to improving audio quality,
Marco:
And intelligibility of how you sound, people being able to understand what you're saying, how professional, how clean your audio is as you're talking.
Marco:
Most of us don't have a ton of control over the room we are in.
Marco:
And most of us are not in a recording studio.
Marco:
I'm not even in a recording studio right now.
Marco:
And I try to make it sound like I'm kind of close to one, but I'm not.
Marco:
I'm in an office that's a shared-use room that's full of all sorts of other stuff that has some sound treatment on the wall, but more than most people would have, but not nearly as much as a studio.
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of other crap in the room.
Marco:
It's way too big to be a studio.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Even I'm now in a room that's not ideal for it.
Marco:
So what we need to do is figure out what are ways that you can make decent sounding audio or make noticeable improvements when you can't control the factors.
Marco:
And usually you can't control the room.
Marco:
And the critical thing that, Casey, you were right, what you said a minute ago, what most people don't realize is that you can buy the best microphone in the world, but if it's like three feet away from you in an echoey room, it's going to sound like crap.
Marco:
no matter what mic it is.
Marco:
It can be a shotgun mic, it can be a hypercardioid mic, whatever it is.
Marco:
It's going to sound like crap if you're in an untreated room and you're too far away from it.
Marco:
And so the best thing you can do generally, obviously there's exceptions, but generally speaking, what you want to do is have a microphone that is as close to your mouth as possible given the conditions.
Marco:
And you also, ideally...
Marco:
want to be able to send the audio that you are listening to, like the other people talking back to you, ideally send that to headphones, not out to speakers.
Marco:
And the reason why is that you have Zoom and Skype and all these different things, FaceTime, they are smart enough that they will try to not record what they're outputting.
Marco:
So you don't get echo back into...
Marco:
the other person talking that's coming out of your computer, which will be picked up by your mic, the software tries to correct for that and cancel it back out again so that it doesn't get into an echo loop.
Marco:
By doing that, though, the software has to do more work to filter your incoming audio.
Marco:
It introduces artifacts if you happen to talk over each other, which happens all the time when video calls because of latency.
Marco:
And
Marco:
it just generally can sound worse.
Marco:
So ideally, you want to give the software the best fighting chance of sounding decent.
Marco:
So number one, if you can, send the audio to your headphones that you're hearing.
Marco:
So that way the software doesn't have to work as hard to cancel it out.
Marco:
You will still get some headphone bleed, but that's another story.
Marco:
Anyway, you know, in the context of video calls, it deals with that.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So if you want to be wearing headphones, and the best thing for a microphone is to get it close to your mouth,
Marco:
then ideally use a headset and all of us have headsets generally speaking because airpods and earbuds that apple sells that have microphone blobs in the cords those are headsets they aren't necessarily the best headsets for this purpose but you probably already have one
Marco:
So already, you can generally get a significant improvement by just using earbuds or AirPods.
Marco:
Now, if you want to go beyond that, again, look at anything that can get the sound to go into your headphones and the microphone to be close to your mouth.
Marco:
So that could be like a gaming headset.
Marco:
There's like USB headsets for gamers that integrate the microphone.
Marco:
There's also like analog ones that have the two plugs on the outside, like the, you
Marco:
headphone and one mic and there are ways to adapt that to a phone with the three conductor phone cables that have the microphone built in so there are various ways to do that I haven't looked into the cabled ones in a long time so I can't tell you what's available there are probably many that just go directly without any adapters into a headphone jack but
Marco:
There's probably also Bluetooth ones.
Marco:
There's some latency issues there, but for video conferencing, it would be fine.
Marco:
So generally speaking, get the microphone close to your mouth.
Marco:
Now, what you do after that, that's up to you, whether you want to get super fancy and get a podcasting microphone.
Marco:
But in the context of video chats, it's not really that important because, first of all, if you get a microphone close to your mouth, no matter what it is, you're going to be the best-minded person on the entire call every single time.
Marco:
I guarantee it.
Marco:
It doesn't have to be a great microphone to beat everyone else.
Marco:
And it can be as simple as, like, there's this wonderful Audio-Technica mic series, the ATR2100 series.
Marco:
There's most recently the ATR2100X.
Marco:
I added it to my giant microphone mega review on my site, which I guess we can link to so you can kind of see how it sounds compared to everything else.
Marco:
And if you talk close to it, it sounds pretty good, and I think it's like $100, and it's a USB-C XLR or USB-C mic, so you can add it later to a bigger setup if you really wanted to, or you can just use it over USB, stuff like that.
Marco:
But ultimately, all that stuff is kind of overkill.
Marco:
What you really just need is a decent headset.
Casey:
You know, I had actually forgotten and would like to reiterate what you were just saying about using headphones at all.
Casey:
When I was still working at a traditional jobby job, we did a lot of Google Hangouts or whatever it was called for that minute.
Casey:
and one of the things that annoyed me the most, because the mobile team tended to kind of go in and out of the office.
Casey:
Sometimes some of us were always working from home, even though we were, strictly speaking, all based in Richmond.
Casey:
So anyway, I noticed that anytime we did a stand-up or any sort of meeting,
Casey:
Anyone who didn't use headphones, it was very difficult to hear because there was so much feedback and cancellation of the feedback and so on and so forth, just like you were describing, Marco, that it infuriated me that these people wouldn't just put headphones on.
Casey:
Even if you're alone, just put headphones on.
Casey:
It makes a world of difference.
Casey:
So I think that's probably step number one is to put headphones on and politely and gingerly and gently encourage those who you're meeting with to also put headphones on if possible.
Casey:
There's no chance of that.
Casey:
Oh, I know, I know.
Casey:
But if any one of you is doing this open air, it's probably going to ruin it for everyone.
Marco:
I mean, look, I have – there's a lot of upsides to everybody working at home these days being forced to.
Marco:
There are a lot of upsides to it.
Marco:
However, one of the major downsides is –
Marco:
Video conferences are just fancy conference calls, and conference calls are one of the worst forms of communication that humans have ever devised.
Marco:
Because there's so much latency and delay and crosstalk and confusion and false starts, and it's just a miserable experience for everyone involved, even if everyone's really good at it.
Marco:
it's it tries to mimic and with video it comes even closer it tries to mimic being in person and hanging out but in practice it's nothing like that at all and people the closer people try to make it act like that the more it falls down that oh no wait you you go ahead no you go ahead oh wait i was gonna say oh no wait you go who's who's breathing it's ah just it's it's a bad scene so make the most of it get a headset you know what
Marco:
The way to beat this, get a headset to improve your quality and your listening and everything else, and then get a beer.
Marco:
And your hands are now free because you have a headset, so you can use your newly freed hands to have a beer.
Marco:
That makes it a little bit more bearable.
Casey:
John, any other thoughts?
John:
I can't believe you, at least Marco, so worked up about a conference call considering I can't even remember the last time he would have had to do one for quote-unquote work.
John:
I have multiple ones per day, so I'm in the thick of it right now.
Marco:
No, what it is is that now the only way I can hang out with my friends is via conference calls.
Marco:
I went from not having to ever do them to the only way I can socialize.
Marco:
And that sucks.
Marco:
It's way worse than in-person socialization.
John:
You can just tell your friends to put on headphones, though.
John:
It's harder to tell your coworkers that.
John:
Anyway, my advice would be much more pragmatic and lower level.
John:
I know the question was how do I improve the audio quality, but practically speaking in all of my various video conferences every single day of the week –
John:
I'm just begging for people to not be in the middle of a tunnel filled with diesel trucks when they're... Mute yourself when you're not talking.
John:
Everybody knows that, but apparently not everybody knows that.
John:
I don't care about the audio quality.
John:
I don't care how far away you sound.
John:
I just want to understand your words.
John:
And sometimes there's just so much noise, like a constant static, like there's a giant fan blowing on the microphone.
John:
I'm like, what is that?
John:
Where are you?
John:
What is that noise?
John:
It doesn't make any sense.
John:
And it's not like it annoys you because you're bothered by noise.
John:
It annoys you because they speak and you can't understand their words because there's too much noise.
John:
I just want to be able to understand you.
John:
I don't care how good you sound.
John:
I don't care how distant you sound.
John:
I don't care if you sound like you're in the far corner of a giant public restroom.
John:
I just need to understand your words, which means everyone else mute and you somehow have enough signal to noise ratio for me to hear the words coming out of your mouth.
John:
That's all I want.
Marco:
Yeah, because keep in mind, there's going to be, I kind of alluded to this earlier, there's going to be so much processing done by the software to your voice that the differences between higher-end mics are mostly going to be crushed.
Marco:
Most people are not going to really be able to hear those through the terrible protocol that the programs are using.
Marco:
So as long as signal-to-noise ratio is what's important here, as long as people can understand you and you're speaking clearly and it's not too echoey in the room.
Marco:
And you're not riding a motorcycle at the time you're on the conference call, stuff like that.
Right.
Marco:
You also want to avoid the problem of like, I get this because whenever I do a video chat, which again is not frequent normally, but it has occasionally happened for various, you know, somebody wants to talk and let's talk about podcast standards or whatever it happens.
Marco:
Whenever I do a call, I always just use my podcasting microphone because it's configured as like the input to my computer.
Marco:
It's right here.
Marco:
Why wouldn't I use it?
Marco:
I have headphones.
Marco:
It's always ready to go.
Marco:
So I swing it over.
Marco:
It's on this big boom arm.
Marco:
I put on my big headphones.
Marco:
It has a little pop filter in front of the microphone.
Marco:
and every single time everyone's like whoa look at you all fancy and it becomes like a thing like i like it's like a thing that everyone has to mention like the other night i did a hangout with my friends and same thing it's like oh whoa look at that yeah and you sound better than all of us well and it's like that's a that's a kind of attention that you might not want or it might not be appropriate in certain contexts for you to like be like the fancy person with the big fancy setup so like maybe you don't want the cowboy hat yeah
Marco:
So that's another reason why I suggest a headset is a really good balance because a headset gives you, in the purposes of a video chat program, 90% of the quality or more as the best podcast setup you could possibly have.
Marco:
but with a smaller, low-profile thing that no one's going to notice and call out and draw attention to yourself with.
Marco:
So stick with the headset range of things if you don't want people to be commenting on it constantly.
Marco:
And then finally, I will also say that this is, you know, typically these days, we're not just doing audio calls, we're doing video calls.
Marco:
And the best thing you can possibly do for video calls is get some light on your face.
Marco:
For the love of God, get some light on your face.
Marco:
Most people doing video calls...
Marco:
Do it like, you know, in an unmodified office, unmodified room that usually has a big light above and or behind them.
Marco:
They get backlit and you can see their face very, you know, darkly shadowed and this bright light shining behind them.
Marco:
that's never good do whatever you can to get light hitting your face so get light you know behind your computer above your computer whatever it is get light on your face it doesn't have to be fancy you know right now if you go out right now and try to buy like studio lights they're all sold out everywhere of course because everyone's doing this like you don't need that it can just be a lamp just move it to you know next to or behind your computer like somehow get more light on your face and
Marco:
And get more light in front of your face than there is behind your face.
Marco:
So whether that's like, you know, turning on a light behind the computer and then turning off the light behind you, you know, whatever you can do, do that.
Marco:
Because that will also like, in addition to sounding reasonable on these video calls, you will look better than everyone else in the video.
Marco:
You will be clearer to see and clearer to understand.
Marco:
You will look more professional if you have just some kind of light on your face during these video calls.
Marco:
All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace and Linode, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech Podcast.
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
Did you see Porsche has come up with new radios for old Porsches?
Casey:
So the idea here is, let's say you have, and I don't know squat about Porsches, so forgive me, but...
Casey:
If you have like a 60s era Porsche, I keep trying to say Porsche because I'm American.
Casey:
If you have a 60s era P car, you might want to have a modern stereo, maybe, I don't know, with CarPlay.
Casey:
You know, Marco, that thing that your Tesla can't do, that thing?
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Anyway, you might want to have CarPlay in your 1960s era Porsche, and they have created head units that are specifically designed for that purpose.
Casey:
So they're single and doubled in, and they're styled in such a way that they would sort of fit in in these like old, old, old Porsches.
Casey:
And I think this is the coolest, most amazing idea in the world.
Casey:
I'm sure they're very affordable too, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I'm sure they are.
Marco:
Like everything else about having a Porsche, right?
Marco:
Yeah, that's also true.
John:
This is the world's most expensive, like, 60s size head unit for your car.
John:
Like, it's this tiny thing with this tiny screen.
John:
Do they have the pricing anywhere?
John:
I just, I really want to know how much this is.
Casey:
I thought it was like a thousand bucks, but I may have made that up.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm sure, like, owning and maintaining an antique Porsche has got to be a really, you know, value-conscious hobby.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's probably less expensive than owning and maintaining a modern one, just because the old ones were just so much simpler.
John:
Maybe.
Casey:
And they were air-cooled, for goodness sakes.
Casey:
Anyway, I just wanted to call out how cool I think this is, because if I were to, I mean, I'm not looking to replace my car, but let's suppose I wanted to replace my car.
Marco:
Casey, you're always looking to replace your car.
Casey:
Not right now.
Casey:
I'm really not.
Casey:
And that's not even a financial thing.
Casey:
I just really am not.
Casey:
Plus, I haven't driven it in like two weeks.
Casey:
But anyway, let's suppose I wanted to go back to my roots and get a 300ZX.
Casey:
And we can argue about how crappy a car that is.
Casey:
It's irrelevant.
Casey:
But if I wanted to get a 300ZX, I would have to give up a lot of modern affordances.
Casey:
And
Casey:
If I could do something like this in the 300ZX, have this Bluetooth CarPlay-equipped head unit, really the only modern affordance that I can think of that I would really, really miss in this hypothetical 300ZX with this CarPlay head unit is a keyless entry and a keyless ignition.
Casey:
But other than that, I would have Bluetooth.
Casey:
I would have CarPlay.
Casey:
And yeah, I know there are other third-party head units that you can do this with, but they wouldn't...
Casey:
fit in and like every time everyone i've seen always looked gross i know marco you had or have one and it always started looking at one right now it's right it's an extra way from my hand there you go and it's just i just think this is the coolest most awesome idea for keeping older cars relevant and in in a small way and i just really commend porsche for doing this and i and it
Casey:
Honestly, I would never in a million years buy a Porsche because I'm too cheap, but it makes the idea of owning a Porsche, particularly a used one because that's all I could afford, so much more appealing because for somewhere between $1,000 and $35,000 or whatever it costs for these head units, you could retrofit them and you would have all these modern conveniences in a Porsche from long ago.
John:
See, if I ran a luxury car brand, I would be doing stuff like this all the time.
John:
Yeah, agreed.
John:
Because the whole point of a luxury car brand is your margins are bigger than everybody else.
John:
Your cars, they're super expensive.
John:
And the people who buy them, you want to cultivate fans, right?
John:
And so doing stuff like this, it doesn't really make any financial sense and it's not going to really make you a lot of money and you may actually end up losing money on.
John:
You just have to look at it in the grand scheme of things, the goodwill this generates.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It makes people proud to own your kind of car.
John:
It makes people happy with the car they have.
John:
And if someone owns and maintains a Porsche from the 60s, chances are good that they are a potential future customer, right?
John:
Because like, you know, maybe if that's your only car, it's the only thing you could afford not.
John:
But like if you have a 60s or a 70s Porsche, you're probably the kind of person who might buy future Porsches.
John:
Because people don't have old cars like that for the hell of it because they are weird and finicky and expensive to deal with.
John:
So that probably means they have a lot of money and it seems like they like Porsches.
John:
So this is exactly and it's why I always encourage Apple to do frivolous things with its mountain of cash.
John:
to cultivate a happy and loyal customer base that's what you're going for right you're not you know so even though this this particular project doesn't excite me that much and like i would much prefer like the authentic experience of having the crappy push button radio because that's the whole deal if you're going to be in this noisy death trap of a car from the 60s why don't you get some leaded gasoline while you're at it yeah right yeah i'm glad they're doing it and i'm sure they're charging ridiculous prices
John:
can you put an airbag in it no no your your life is you can listen to tunes but your life is forfeit they're not gonna they're not gonna retrofit it with uh crumple zones and roll cages and airbags uh if only uh it's 1300 euros on this random site i found on the internet so that's roughly 1500 do they charge a yearly fee to use carplay no they're not bmw
Marco:
I mean, a good aftermarket doubled-in CarPlay unit is $600, $500.
Marco:
It's kind of in that ballpark.
Marco:
So when you add the Porsche multiplier, that's not that bad of a price.
Casey:
No, it really isn't.
Casey:
That's another thing we should bring up that I forgot to mention.
Casey:
I heard news via Twitter today that, Marco, you and I are not going back to buy your next BMW because European delivery has apparently ceased, which really, really bums me out.
Marco:
Yeah, I thought it was interesting.
Marco:
So BMW is ending the European delivery program for North American customers.
Marco:
And I think it was interesting.
Marco:
Basically, one of the reasons that the forum people dug up was basically that most BMWs sold to North American customers are SUVs now.
Marco:
And almost all BMW SUVs are made not in Europe.
Marco:
At least the ones sold in North America are made in North America.
Marco:
They're made in various factories somewhere in the US and Canada, I think.
Marco:
So it doesn't really make sense.
Marco:
Those were never getting European delivery because they couldn't because they weren't made in Europe.
Marco:
And so the percentage of sales that BMW has from North American customers keeps going more and more towards models that weren't made in Europe anyway.
Marco:
So they're basically saying like they had very few people still doing European delivery.
Marco:
And so they're, yeah, they're ending it, which is unfortunate.
Marco:
It's kind of the end of an era.
Casey:
Although BMW North America has historically represented an average of 2,000 European deliveries annually, such deliveries have declined in recent years to under 500.
Casey:
Based on these trends and long-term evaluation, BMW Group will end the European delivery program in 2020 and cease accepting reservations as of this week.
Casey:
Or maybe next week.
Casey:
But soon.
Marco:
It's a shame.
Marco:
It's one of those things that... I'm so glad we did it.
Marco:
It was so fun.
Marco:
If you want to hear us, back when we recorded Neutral, we kind of ended with us having gone to European delivery for my M5 and us and the Liss family.
Marco:
It was great.
Marco:
It was a fantastic trip.
Marco:
It was so cool.
Marco:
The fact that you could order a car from BMW in America...
Marco:
And then go to Europe.
Marco:
They would give you this, like, whole, like, factory tour walkthrough thing.
Marco:
They would give you your car.
Marco:
You could drive it around Europe for, like, a week and then just drop it off at any of these, like, five or six places in Europe.
Marco:
And then they would ship it to America.
Marco:
And, you know, a couple months later, you could pick it up at your dealer.
Marco:
That was incredible.
Marco:
And because of some weird, like...
Marco:
tariff loophole, it was cheaper.
Marco:
You would save a few thousand dollars on the cost of the car so you would pay for the trip.
Marco:
It worked out that the trip was low to no cost in the grand scheme of things because you were saving all this money on the car.
Marco:
It was this kind of amazing thing.
Marco:
And it always kind of seemed like this shouldn't be possible.
Marco:
How is this legal and profitable for anybody?
Marco:
How do they work out with the tariffs that you're picking up a new car meant for a different country in this country that it's not certified to run in and you're allowed to drive it around for a little while and put on a boat somehow?
Marco:
This should never have worked.
Marco:
but it did.
Marco:
And it was amazing.
Marco:
And I'm so glad we got to do it.
Marco:
It is a shame that it's ending, but it is kind of amazing that it ever existed.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It was an incredibly, incredibly fun time.
Casey:
And I'm so glad that, that Aaron and I were, were able to do it with you guys.
Casey:
It, it was really preposterous and kind of stupid in a lot of ways.
Casey:
Like let's fly across the planet to pick up a car and use it for a week.
Casey:
And in our particular case, we like drove arguably more than we actually stayed still and
Casey:
But, oh, my gosh, it was such a fun trip.
Casey:
And yet the next to last episode of Neutral, kind of the end of the regular season of Neutral, if you will, which is episode 12, we dragged John through all of it.
Casey:
And it was such an incredibly great experience.
Casey:
And it made me feel like a million bucks being part of this experience.
Casey:
And really, I was just a hanger on.
Casey:
Like, I had no reason to be there.
Casey:
But the BMW people were still super nice.
Casey:
And it was so, so cool and so fun.
Casey:
And a once-in-a-lifetime experience for sure even before they shut down.
Casey:
And now with it being shut down, it's even more so.
Casey:
So I just wanted to call attention to it.
Casey:
It just kind of bums me out because it was so cool.
Casey:
But you can still do it with Porsche.
Casey:
I think you can still do it with Volvo.
Casey:
Saab I don't even think exists anymore.
Marco:
Yeah, everyone loves getting in their fun new Volvo and driving it around the Nürburgring.
Marco:
Well, Volvos are fun.
John:
Well, you don't have to worry because Tesla will let you do a California pickup where you can pick up your Tesla in the tent where it was painted.
Yeah.
Marco:
By the way, before we leave the Porsche car play topic, can we just laugh at how amazing this single DIN unit looks?
Marco:
So like, you know, car stereos have like the two different heights they can be.
Marco:
And the double DIN is the regular looking one that has like a reasonable size screen.
Marco:
Then they also offer a single DIN one, which is like back when cars were only radios or maybe a radio and cassette could fit in that size.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
that size they have a car play screen and it looks like the tiniest like it looks almost like it's small smaller than the original iphone yeah it looks like two apple watches next to each other and that's your car play screen it's three and a half inches apparently it's like you get you gotta be squinting at the navigation screen you see anything on it it's too small
Marco:
Yeah, because the CarPlay UI is not particularly scalable.
Marco:
It's fairly fixed.
Marco:
So it's not like they're just rendering one icon on screen.
Marco:
I think they have to render the same number of icons, just really tiny.
Marco:
It's like 600 DPI screen.
Marco:
Yeah, it's probably a really nice screen.
John:
You need a magnifying glass to read the street names.
Casey:
Can we just pause and look at the link that put in the chat?
John:
Don't give me.
John:
That's a lady's son hat.
John:
That's not what I was talking about for me.
John:
Marco's cowboy hat is not really a cowboy hat either.
John:
It's on crooked.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
It's so good.
Casey:
It's so good.
John:
Casey's the only one who's got the hat he asked for.
John:
And now we can see why he shouldn't wear it.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
I actually was just thinking to myself, that doesn't look bad.
John:
No, see, this is why you need to be kept away from this hat, because you're not thinking straight on this topic.
Casey:
Oh, man.