File a Casey Radar
Casey:
last week in the pre-show i said i had stopped following the news very closely the next morning russia started a war so you know maybe poor timing on that i shouldn't laugh i laugh with respect i laugh at you marco because yeah maybe not the best timing i am not at all laughing about what's going on in ukraine um it is truly terrible i i'm pretty darn sure i speak for all three of us and saying we stand with ukraine we we find this to be an absolutely disgusting act of war
Casey:
uh and and you know we are certainly our hearts are with the with ukraine or i don't even know what to say right now it's just so stupefying that in 2022 this is still a thing that's happening and i just don't even know what to make of it yeah and and i'll be the first to admit i know basically nothing about the politics of the region about you know like i know there were a lot of things leading up to this and i had the you know privilege slash ignorance of
Marco:
not really paying much attention because there's a lot of stuff that happens in the world and i don't have time to pay attention to most of it um and i've never been much of like you know a news junkie or anything like that and so i i have no idea all this stuff led up to this and i you know i've been trying to educate myself in the meantime um but you know war is awful and this is not going to be resolved probably quickly or cleanly
Marco:
And, you know, lots of people around the world, including Putin, have looked at the U.S.
Marco:
and said, well, look, you guys invade stuff all the time.
Marco:
And yeah, we have done that.
Marco:
And we shouldn't have done it either.
Marco:
In almost every case, I think that has proven to have been the wrong move and also has always proven to be way more messy and lengthy and costly to human life and everything else than we had initially expected it to be.
Marco:
And I expect this to play out no differently.
Marco:
I think this is going to be a mess for a long time.
Marco:
And there's certainly large risks, I think, of escalations.
Marco:
And we'll talk about that a little bit.
Marco:
But this is not going to be some quick thing that's out of the news in a few weeks or even a few months.
Marco:
I think this is going to take years.
Marco:
And it's...
Marco:
yeah it's awful any kind of war is awful and it's not productive to try to like compete and say like oh why didn't we care about xyz that happened in the past that was worse or happened to other people you know let's let's let's just get that right out uh you know i think this is we can look at this in objective terms and say this is this is awful and and uh we all hope it gets resolved sooner rather than later even though i know that's you
Marco:
you know best wishes to the people of ukraine and and uh and i was wondering like i mean maybe this is more of a topic once we get to that in a second but um i was kind of wondering like what like are we supposed to do much from here in terms of like you know not only you know things like if there's good places we can send donations that might actually have an impact but also stuff like you know obviously you know don't support russia business-wise um
Marco:
uh but like i was thinking like you know i run a podcast app that is server-side based like am i supposed to block russia from accessing that like i don't even know like would that wouldn't that just hurt a lot of nerdy russians who probably don't have any say over what their government's doing like i don't know yeah it's really messy to think about this stuff like you know what what kind of actions that are even within our control that you know we even could take first of all that's a question and then
Marco:
among those that we could do like what should we do that would actually have an impact or have a chance of having an impact without also hurting a bunch of people who who don't deserve to be hurt necessarily like like you know the us has done a whole bunch of crazy stuff and it's a whole bunch of terrible leaders over time um and you know the not every american supported what they did you know and like so i i don't know it's it's a hard thing to uh to navigate
Casey:
It is.
Casey:
It's so funny you bring this up because I am releasing a new app tomorrow.
Casey:
We're going to talk about this later.
Casey:
And not to make this awful situation about me, but apparently here we go.
Casey:
I was wondering, should I not make this available in Russia?
Casey:
And
Casey:
And for a couple of reasons, that is not the choice I made.
Casey:
First of all, I lived through the four years that just ended a year ago.
Casey:
So 2016 through 20, I lived through it.
Casey:
And suddenly, my government was doing a bunch of things that...
Casey:
I really didn't like, and I'm sure that's been true most of my life, if not all of it.
Casey:
I was going to say suddenly.
Casey:
But it was abundantly obvious that my government was going in a wildly different direction than I wanted.
Casey:
And I was just along for the ride.
Casey:
I did what I could to stop it and to prevent it, but I was just along for the ride.
Casey:
And I think if it wasn't for the 2016 through 2020 era...
Casey:
I think I would have had a vastly different and less sympathetic opinion about this.
Casey:
But what I came down to is, first of all, there are a lot of honest Russians that are also deeply upset about this and are like, you know, doing going in the street and protesting and doing things that.
Casey:
I don't do in America, generally speaking, and it's mostly safe to do that here.
Casey:
They're putting themselves at tremendous personal risk to protest this grotesque war.
Casey:
And because my app could, if you look at it in a certain angle, my app could be used to kind of try to prevent them from getting retaliated upon.
Casey:
And so because of that, I thought, you know what, I'm going to make it available in Russia.
Casey:
But I had these same thoughts.
Casey:
And many people that are doing independent app development were
Casey:
like you and me, I've had these conversations with many of them, and none of us have reached the same conclusion or for the same reasons, but it is weird and wild that you or I, Marco, could even have this discussion.
Casey:
Like, it's kind of cool in a roundabout way that you and I
Casey:
have at least enough reach that this is a plausible conversation we had i'm not saying that there's more than six users of my app ever and certainly not in russia but you know this is a conversation that is on the surface a reasonable conversation to have which is really weird and kind of a cool thing about 2022 now granted the reason we're having this conversation is again grotesque and awful but i don't know it's wild it's super weird john you've been quiet what are your thoughts
John:
I mean, I think a good rule of thumb for trying to figure out, like, what we as individuals should do is, I mean, we obviously, we know we're not, no individual is doing anything to, you know, affect this on a sort of geopolitical scale, right?
John:
It's the, you know, the government and the world governments, you know, are doing the big moves.
John:
But you're right that, you know, if it's weird that individual people have, like, international businesses, like, you know, in...
John:
In decades past, you'd be like, okay, well, I run the corner store in my town, but this doesn't affect me.
John:
But now, you know, if you just make a dinky little app, you put it on the App Store, you realize I have customers in Russia?
John:
What?
John:
It's kind of weird.
John:
And so we do have some kind of decision to make.
John:
And a good rule of thumb, I feel like, is –
John:
For individuals, this is helping me see people discuss this.
John:
As an individual, you should try to do something that you think will help.
John:
So that would fall under the category of figuring out how to send money or, you know, do like, what do you have that can help?
John:
You have time and you have money and you can do that on an individual basis.
John:
And if a bunch of individuals do it, it can help.
John:
So am I doing something to help?
John:
If, on the other hand, you're looking at trying to do something punitive, you know, I don't like Russia, therefore I want to do something punitive that will punish them for their bad invasion.
John:
That's not going to do anything in an individual level like punitive actions by individuals are probably going to be misguided.
John:
But just in general, like, I feel like that's not going to, you know, you know, 300 million people doing an individualist punitive thing by saying, well, I'm never buying anything from Russia again, or I'm going to.
John:
remove all of my movies that feature Russia from my collection.
John:
Anything you can think of, it's be like, I disagree with Russia, therefore it's natural to feel like you want to do something to fight back against it, but I think it's the wrong way to go.
John:
So I would say, look at the thing you're thinking of doing and saying, am I trying to help somebody or am I trying to do a thing that is punitive because I think the punitive thing for individuals is extremely misguided.
John:
And for nation states, seeing how the world has reacted to this is kind of interesting because
John:
For most of our lives, we haven't had World War III, obviously.
John:
And during my whole childhood, World War III was a big thing because the Cold War was a big thing.
John:
And then the dissolution of the Soviet Union kind of put that on the back burner for a while, and we had all these smaller wars.
John:
quote-unquote smaller wars was like oh well they don't have nuclear weapons so it's just a regular war just people die the regular way so it's okay you know but anyway uh and now to see it like uh you know total destruction of the planet is back on the table in a big way that's exciting for all us gen x people um but now the way the world has reacted to it is
John:
We have such an interconnected world these days that the whole world basically said, well, we're not going to deal with you anymore.
John:
I agree that I think it's silly for anyone to withhold their apps or whatever, an individual developer.
John:
But if the whole world says, well, you can't use our banking system, you can't fly your airplanes over our airspace, we'll stop selling you parts for all your airplanes because all your airplanes are like Boeing and Airbus.
John:
You know, Apple stopped selling its products in the country, probably mostly because the ruble was massively devalued.
John:
But either way, like basically saying like, you know, Russia, you might not realize how much the world is interconnected.
John:
And we'll show you that by like the whole world turning their back on Russia, the whole world, except for like the six other dictatorships that are buddy buddy with them.
John:
And China, which is another complicated situation.
John:
But I think that, like, I don't think that we've ever had a situation like that, and I'm not a historian, so I don't know, but, like, where so many other countries have so much power over this country, like, non-military power.
John:
Like,
John:
What, you know, what can you do that will like and it's part of is you don't want to isolate them or whatever and, you know, have them sort of turn inward and become even more dangerous.
John:
I don't know what the right thing to do is, but how quickly, you know, the international banking system and all these these large companies like, you know, Exxon, Exxon pulled out of Russia and left behind, you know, billions of dollars in assets like.
John:
Everybody just saying, no, this is not OK.
John:
Essentially, I can tell, you know, this is you're not allowed to invade your neighboring countries.
John:
That's it.
John:
We're not.
John:
Never mind that Russia has done it multiple times before.
John:
But like apparently everyone has decided this is the line.
John:
You wonder where the line was.
John:
This is the line.
John:
And so I don't know how Russia can continue.
John:
to sort of be a going concern in the long term with the whole world turning its back on them.
John:
And it's terrible because, as you pointed out, the people who live in Russia, they don't determine their government.
John:
Putin is a dictator.
John:
They don't get to vote for him every year.
John:
Oh, you won again with 99% of the vote.
John:
Imagine that.
John:
So the people there, they don't want this, but what choice do they have?
John:
And so it's terrible that the people are going to be hurt by this.
John:
And that's why I think it is...
John:
the correct choice for people like apple to say well we won't well we won't sell our products to you anymore but we will keep the app store open because you might need to ask apps on your phone that lets you securely communicate with other people and so on and so forth like you're trying to draw the line where we don't want to hurt the russian people but we do want russia to clearly get the message that this is not okay um and also we don't want to all die in a nuclear uh you know
John:
mushroom cloud so i don't know how to walk that line uh that's why i don't run this country or any other country i hope we do walk it correctly but the reaction the sort of international reaction of you know i i know this is such a stupid analogy but i'm thinking of like if you're ever in kind of some kind of online community and someone does something that's not okay for that community and the whole community lets them know that it's not okay like that we don't do that in this community whatever it is whatever they did and whatever their community is uh that's happening in international level right now um
John:
whether or not putin is open to the idea that what he's doing is not okay or if he's just completely off in his own world is you know thing that will keep you up at night but still it's in some ways it is an interesting moment of unity among the slightly more civilized world that you know the countries that ostensibly do not have dictators running them versus the ones that definitely do
John:
So I hope everything works out.
John:
I hope we're all still here to keep doing this podcast.
John:
And speaking of this podcast, there is an Apple angle on this.
John:
Aside from Apple just like stopping selling stuff or whatever.
John:
Jason Snell had a good article in Macworld today speculating about what would happen if China did something like this.
John:
Because, you know, what did Apple do?
John:
Apple said, well, we're not going to sell Apple products in your region anymore.
John:
We'll keep the app store open.
John:
But, you know, we're basically, you know, this is not OK.
John:
And this is how we're expressing that.
John:
What if China invaded a neighboring country, which is not too far fetched because there's a neighboring country that China really, really wants to invade and take and bring back into China?
John:
And that's Taiwan.
John:
And you know what else happens in Taiwan?
John:
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
John:
And you know what happens in China?
John:
All of Apple's products are assembled except for like a handful of other ones, right?
John:
So if China did something terrible, you know, and the whole world said we're going to tell China that it's not okay by kicking them out of the banking system and doing X and doing Y and doing Z, never mind that the entirety of the U.S.
John:
economy would be crippled because of so much stuff that we have as a manufacturer in China.
John:
But Apple specifically, if they said, okay, well, we're not doing business with China anymore, it's like, well, I guess there's no more iPhones this year because where are you going to build all those, right?
John:
Where are you going to build all your products, right?
Marco:
Not just iPhones, like Macs and everything.
John:
And setting aside, as Jason starts the article, China is a market where Apple sells like $72 billion worth of stuff.
John:
But setting aside selling, that's the country that makes all this stuff.
John:
And that's why I said so many shows ago that Apple has a China problem and the world has a China problem.
John:
I'm not sure which one of those is the bigger problem, but, like, you know, Apple's China problem, it could be, like, existential.
John:
Like, if Apple can no longer do business with China or does not want to do business with China because China did something terrible...
John:
does apple like sort of burn cash for three years to rebuild manufacturing somewhere like i don't know how they would even recover and then obviously um the world doesn't want china to be invading other countries either so uh yeah this is a fun topic um unfortunately there is an apple angle for it but like this is this really highlights that this stuff isn't all necessarily just theoretical like things like this still happen uh countries run by
John:
Countries without even remotely democratically elected leadership can do all sorts of things that don't make sense to us in the outside world.
John:
But nevertheless, they still happen and we have to figure out how to deal with it.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So our thoughts, energy, everything is with Ukraine and we hope that everything reaches a peaceful end sooner rather than later.
Marco:
And this is why, you know, which I was saying about, you know, Apple and China and everything, this is why this stuff matters.
Marco:
You know, like it...
Marco:
To have such a strong dependence on a country whose relationship with the U.S.
Marco:
is tense is not great.
Marco:
This is why all the Trump stuff mattered a lot with how cozy he was with Putin.
Marco:
People out there were voting for Trump for a variety of reasons, many of which were stupid.
Marco:
and they didn't see stuff like this or they they were and sometimes still are excusing the you know trump russia relationship like this stuff matters like this matt this is why like you know electing like throwing away your vote in a way that that is flippant or as a joke or something is is you know that's that's a
Marco:
who we elect as world leaders and the countries that we empower or that we let have power over us over time.
Marco:
This kind of stuff is all big stakes.
Marco:
And I think we've gotten very comfortable because most of us haven't been in a major war and, or we haven't been alive during times of major world wars.
Marco:
Uh, but you know, that's, this is strategically very risky.
Marco:
And this is again, why going back to our tech show, Oh yeah, it's, it's a tech podcast.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
This is why I really am uncomfortable with the level of dependence that, you know, not only Apple, but as John said, like as many of us, the world that we have on China, because, again, China is, you know, the Russia of this century, basically, in a lot of ways.
Marco:
I'm sorry if this is a terribly flawed analogy.
Marco:
And also, by the way, the major risk to the world here is the pile-on effect.
Marco:
China will probably consider invading Taiwan, this kind of stuff.
Marco:
This is serious business.
Marco:
This is really dark, horrible stuff that could happen here, including if the Russia-Ukraine invasion doesn't resolve itself in some way soon.
Marco:
Well, who else is going to join that fight?
Marco:
And then what will happen?
Marco:
And if anyone starts joining that fight...
Marco:
China, if they get involved, is much more likely to be on the Russian side than the everyone else side.
Marco:
And that's a big problem for lots of people, including us.
Marco:
And this is a big, potentially horrible mess.
Marco:
And this could get very, very bad.
Marco:
And this is why, again, this is serious business.
Marco:
We all hope for a faster, cleaner resolution than that.
Marco:
But this is real risky stuff here.
John:
That's when we talked about China in the past.
John:
The dichotomy was like, do you engage with them, which has been the Apple, what the Apple's been doing, and Tim Cook has said it explicitly, we want to engage with China.
John:
Or do you isolate them, right?
John:
Russia right now is being isolated because they've crossed the line, right?
John:
But up until that point, we were engaged with China.
John:
Exxon was there drilling for gas.
John:
We were trading with them freely.
John:
They were part of the international banking system, despite the fact that they were, you know, run by a dictator who, like, poisoned his enemies and does all sorts of terrible assassinations and invades other countries.
John:
And it's like, you know, but eventually there was a line.
John:
And China, the thing, the main thing that's protecting all of us is that
John:
Yeah, we get all our stuff from China and China gets all our money.
John:
And so there's this relationship between the U.S.
John:
and China and lots of other countries that goes both ways.
John:
You know, Apple would be destroyed without China.
John:
China gets a lot of money from Apple.
John:
The U.S.
John:
would lose tons of products that are all manufactured in China, and China would lose all the money that we pay for those products.
John:
Like, having an interdependent world where we all trade with each other, even when we're trading in an uneasy way, we're like, we don't really like your system of government and the way you do things.
John:
And honestly, they could say the same thing about us, and now it's not the same.
John:
They always throw the back in our face.
John:
Well, you do bad things, too.
John:
We do, but there's a matter of degree here.
John:
And also, that's not a valid counterargument.
Yeah.
Marco:
The thing you do can be bad even if I do bad things.
Marco:
That's not related.
John:
But they're like, you know, it's an uneasy relationship in both directions, but it is mutually beneficial for us to continue to have this relationship.
John:
And that is, I feel like, the main thing protecting us all from annihilation is that
John:
You know, the people, the leaders in China don't want to screw up their country, I hope, don't want to screw up their country by becoming isolated from the rest of the world and vice versa.
John:
So the policy of engaging with China and both of us trying to use our leverage to make the other do more what we want them to do.
John:
Ben Thompson's talked about this a lot, where we always felt like by engaging with China, we would...
John:
spread democratic ideals to China.
John:
But rather, instead of that, by engaging with China, it looks like China is, you know, exporting fascist ideas to us by making, you know, Apple, if you want to work here, the government has to have access to your data centers and stuff.
John:
And Apple's like, oh, I guess so.
John:
You know, I'm not sure how that balance is being met, but I do know that I actually feel a little bit safer with the world...
John:
entangled with China than if they were isolated.
John:
Because you don't want a country to be isolated, run by dictators, and have nuclear weapons.
John:
That's bad.
John:
It's better to be engaged, run by dictators, and have nuclear weapons.
John:
You wouldn't want either one of them, really, but the engagement, I feel like, is a thing.
John:
And that's why the world turning its back on Russia is effective.
John:
Because if Russia was not part of the international community,
John:
Then everyone turning their back, like, so what?
John:
You haven't been helping us already anyway.
John:
But it's not true.
John:
They're, you know, they're billionaires have apartments in New York City.
John:
Their yachts are parked on the shores of the, you know, the French Riviera.
John:
Like the people who are on that, the oligarchs that run that country.
John:
you, you know, engage with the rest of the world and are in the rest of the world.
John:
And they don't want that world to become, you know, a cinder.
John:
They don't want it to be irradiated either.
John:
So I hope there's enough mutual interest in not, you know, just destroying the planet because, you know, it's hard with Putin and people who seem disconnected from reality.
John:
It's hard to know how things actually, what's actually going on in their head.
John:
But I hope there's enough people who realize that, um,
John:
None of this is worth destroying the planet over and maybe we could just all go back into our corners and stop invading other countries.
John:
If only.
John:
I hope so.
John:
Now that America is done invading everybody, let's all stop.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Invading other countries and taking their territory.
John:
That's how America was formed.
John:
And to Marco's point, it was wrong then.
John:
It's also wrong now.
John:
It was wrong both times.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Right.
John:
But we can't do anything else about the past.
John:
We're trying to make progress and say now we find it much less acceptable to invade the neighboring country, kill the people and take it over.
Casey:
All right, so speaking of invading things, what's going on with your intestines, Marco?
Marco:
Oh, well, nothing new to report.
Marco:
I've started the avocado testing, but it's too early to say.
Marco:
Bananas continue to be a food in my lineup, and I'm very happy with them because it turns out they're delicious.
Marco:
and pretty useful and the funny thing is apparently they used to be much much much more delicious and then like that species died off and now we're stuck with a yeah then we get the cavendish and yeah because they're all clones of each other and the cavendish might go extinct at some point too yeah it's a whole thing anyway um so yeah i did want to quickly give some follow-up i did it on twitter and the show notes as well so um
Marco:
I had mentioned with my like, you know, hey, it turns out I took some colostrum and it fixed my banana stomach intolerance thing.
Marco:
And I had mentioned that I'd heard of that from some, quote, celiacs in my life who had taken it and it had fixed them.
Marco:
Well, we got a lot of feedback from people who know a lot more about celiac disease.
Marco:
And it turns out that celiac disease, like the actual celiac disease with that name tested and verified that it is that thing.
Marco:
And apparently you need like a blood test and biopsy to even verify that it definitely is that thing.
Marco:
Apparently, that cannot be cured.
Marco:
And so basically, the people in my life who describe themselves as celiacs were probably just wheat intolerant in other ways.
Marco:
Like, there's other situations that could be going on in your gut that could make you gluten intolerant that aren't necessarily celiac disease.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
And also, if you have celiac disease, you actually really should not try this, because not only can it not be cured, apparently even testing it by having a small amount of wheat is potentially harmful.
Marco:
So please don't do that.
Marco:
And yeah, sorry for the error.
Marco:
And apparently these people who describe themselves as celiacs, they were really just describing gluten intolerances that maybe they were not confirmed as exactly this particular thing.
Marco:
So once again, doctors, go talk to them, not us.
John:
Talk to them before you buy pills on Amazon.
Casey:
Moving right along, we had an Ask ATP question last week about shared contacts and a handful of people wrote in to say, well, the obvious fix for this, which.
Casey:
maybe wasn't so obvious to us anyway, is to make another iCloud account that everyone in your family shares.
Casey:
And the only thing you use that for is contacts.
Casey:
So there's a six-year-old article by Lena Shore that describes this approach in pretty significant detail that we will link in the show notes.
Casey:
But basically the idea is, let's say it's Aaron and me.
Casey:
So Aaron has her iCloud account.
Casey:
I have my iCloud account.
Casey:
Then we both log into a shared iCloud account whose purpose is simply to get contacts between the two of us.
Casey:
And that's it.
John:
I mean, we discussed this very solution maybe it was six years ago.
John:
I think Todd Vaziri was one of the people who wrote in to tell us the solution they did.
John:
And it's not great, like, for multiple reasons.
John:
Obviously, it's weird to do that.
John:
But also, if you ever have to deal with, like, Apple support or dealing, you know, just like Apple doesn't – Apple expects Apple IDs to be one person, one Apple ID.
John:
Like, obviously, you can have more than one Apple ID.
John:
All of us do, right?
John:
But –
John:
Apple software and Apple support and everything about Apple is kind of like, oh, well, you know, you are the owner of this Apple ID.
John:
And the idea that you have an Apple ID that is shared amongst people because you're using it as a backdoor to share contacts is not going to be something that is...
John:
potentially well supported by by other software or certainly not by apple itself if you ever have a problem with it and it's just a hassle like what do you call the third apple id and you know eventually if apple adds this feature you gotta like get rid of that apple id or just it just it's weird i would never suggest this is good for someone who listens to a tech podcast if you want to do this go for it but like i would never suggest this to a regular person because it's just so weird like
John:
This is something that people shouldn't have to deal with.
John:
They shouldn't be like, oh, of course, if you if you spend all this money on Apple devices, you'll be so happy.
John:
Everything will work great together.
John:
But if you want to have a shared library, let's now we're going to make a fake Apple ID and we have to give it an email address.
John:
And it has to be the contacts sharing for the family thing.
John:
But no, don't send email to it.
John:
But it's just for comment.
John:
I don't want to have to explain that to anybody.
John:
It's just awkward and strange.
John:
But if you want to do it, this is one way.
John:
The other way is you can just use a different system for your contacts.
John:
People are all on board with Google or whatever.
John:
I think there's some sharing thing for that.
John:
But, you know, the real way to fix this is Apple needs to implement this feature in their contacts database and application and API.
John:
And maybe we only have a decade or two left and they'll get it done.
Ooh.
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Oh.
Casey:
All right, we got a fair bit of feedback that we will probably be reading for the most part because it was all very interesting.
Casey:
Last week, I made a somewhat offhanded comment about how I didn't really hear much complaining or anything about people who were kind of burned by the Intel to Apple Silicon transition.
Casey:
And Andrus Kiss wrote in,
Casey:
to say, I was listening to this week's episode and heard Casey say he hasn't heard of anyone having issues with x86-64 to ARM transition and the lack of ability to natively run Windows.
Casey:
I will say that one group I know, because I'm one of them, is mechanical slash electrical slash aerospace engineers or engineering students have to run CAD.
Casey:
I'm always keeping my eyes out for reports of how well our CAD software of choice, which happens to be SolidWorks, works using virtualization of ARM Windows in Parallels Desktop, which
Casey:
Unfortunately, thus far, all the stories have essentially been, quote, it doesn't work, quote.
Casey:
If that continues to be the story in a few years when I may need to replace my work computer, I might be facing no other choice but a switch to PC for work.
Casey:
If I were an engineering student starting today, it would be a very tough choice because while the Mac today can do 90% of what I needed during my studies, that last 10% is now impossible where it was once possible.
Casey:
That really stinks.
Casey:
I'm not sure this is a market that Apple cares about, to be honest.
Casey:
And I would hope that the people writing this software, like SolidWorks, for example, if they wanted to be cross-platform, then they would be.
Casey:
Or if their users want them to become cross-platform, then you should tell them that.
Casey:
But it still stinks.
Casey:
And it is an example of somebody really getting burned by this transition.
Casey:
Moving right along, we got a couple of pieces of feedback with regard to accessibility.
Casey:
Todd Shiresky wrote in with regard to the consequences of iPadOS limitations.
Casey:
Todd writes, I agree iPadOS is lagging the hardware it's running on.
Casey:
It's not only affecting advanced users, it's also affecting the physically disabled community as well.
Casey:
For example, because iPadOS doesn't allow concurrent use of the microphone, physically disabled users like myself who have no movement in their limbs and operate their iPads solely by voice using accessibility's voice control
Casey:
can't attend Zoom meetings because after joining the meeting, voice control no longer functions.
Casey:
This prevents the user from unmuting the microphone or even leaving the meeting early if they need to.
Casey:
This is ridiculous.
Casey:
A key accessibility component like voice control should always work, even if another application is using the microphone.
Casey:
We don't have this issue on macOS.
Casey:
We should not have this issue on iPadOS.
Casey:
I am not 100% this casey now.
Casey:
I'm not 100% sure this is a iPadOS issue and rather a Zoom issue.
Casey:
But no matter where the fault lies, that's really crummy.
John:
I mean, I'm assuming that Todd is saying that using Zoom on the Mac doesn't have this problem.
John:
So it could just be that Zoom, their iPad version isn't as good as their Mac version with regards to this.
John:
But maybe they'll say, well, it's harder to do that on the iPad, so we did it on the Mac first or whatever.
John:
But yeah, that's definitely a shame.
John:
And, you know, it's adding to the impression that, like, there are things I can do on my Mac.
John:
Why can't I do them on my iPad that have literally the same processor, right?
John:
There's no reason why I shouldn't be able to do them.
John:
And the reason, you know, people can attribute it to the OS or they could attribute it to, you know, the app APIs or just the app developers paying less attention to the iPad.
John:
But, you know, it's just one more pebble in the pile for the iPad feeling a bit like handcuffs sometimes.
John:
Yeah.
John:
A bit.
Casey:
Fair.
Casey:
Then we had some feedback with regard to AirTags and accessibility.
Casey:
So before I read this feedback, which is really fascinating, and I really think does a good job of riding the line between, you know, I want this for me, but I understand it's not for everyone.
Casey:
This is one of those scenarios where any one of you, the listener, can what about this whole conversation respond.
Casey:
Please just understand.
Casey:
We're trying to have a conversation here.
Casey:
And Kai Russell, who wrote this feedback, isn't saying that any of these ideas are the best idea.
Casey:
They're just presenting an alternative point of view.
Casey:
So please consider that.
Casey:
This is all in the spirit of presenting an alternative point of view.
Casey:
So Kai writes, Kai Russell writes, I'd like to highlight my experience as someone that heavily uses AirTags as an assistive technology.
Casey:
I am legally blind.
Casey:
I am not completely without sight.
Casey:
Rather, my vision is severely limited.
Casey:
I tend to lose things a lot.
Casey:
And when I do, it's very hard for me to find them.
Casey:
I bought heavily into the tile, et cetera, category of products as soon as they came out.
Casey:
They were a big help.
Casey:
Eventually, these products started getting unreliable for reasons that I understand to be at least partially Apple's quote unquote fault.
Casey:
As you can imagine, I was very excited when AirTags were announced.
Casey:
AirTags are a game changer for me.
Casey:
just as Tile was when it first came out.
Casey:
The features that are unique to AirTags, like being shown the relative direction and distance of any of your AirTags, and yes, the Find My Network, make AirTags an even more valuable piece of assistive technology.
Casey:
I say this all to make the point that AirTags are not a luxury or convenience item for all of their users.
Casey:
Not to sound too much like an Apple marketing video, but AirTags significantly improved my life.
Casey:
Unless you have experienced it firsthand, you cannot truly understand the severity of the feelings of frustration, helplessness, and defeat.
Casey:
Once one experiences when they cannot function independently, especially within their own home with no end in sight.
Casey:
For me, AirTags mitigate that.
Casey:
I'm not attempting to state that my use case negates or otherwise delegitimizes concerns around personal safety.
Casey:
Those concerns are certainly valid.
Casey:
I'm certainly not saying that my use case justifies the continued existence of AirTags in the current form.
Casey:
That is not for me to decide.
Casey:
However, in the age of fast-paced internet PR storms, where people fixate on a single issue at the expense of all others, I feel that it would be remiss of me not to provide my experience for the other side of the scale."
Casey:
I am really impressed with how well written this was.
Casey:
And I'm really glad that, Kai, you wrote in to tell us about this because this was something I did not consider and is utterly fascinating.
John:
That's just like the general accessibility angle of new tech.
John:
Like if you have any accessibility needs, anytime a new technology comes out, you're going to look at it and say, how can this help me?
John:
What can this do?
John:
You know, what is now possible that wasn't before?
John:
Even if it wasn't the intent of the person selling the product.
John:
Like I'm not sure air tags are like when their meetings are said, this will be great for low vision people.
John:
But I don't think that was –
John:
on their list because maybe they just don't even have that, you know, understand where the person is coming from.
John:
Like losing things inside your house, they feel like, ah, I can't find my keys or whatever, but like losing them because you literally can't see them well enough to find them.
John:
And you just had it five minutes ago and how frustrating that is.
John:
It's, you know, and so it's like, like any of us with tech, we see a new tech product and we say, oh,
John:
Let me think of the ways that this can, you know, how can this change my life or what could this do in my life that would be different?
John:
And everybody has that different point of view of depending on what their life is and what their needs are.
John:
And anytime there's a product that has some kind of problem, like the safety issues with AirTags or has like a...
John:
uh you know a nefarious use and that the the product designer has to deal with that nefarious use you're always going to end up hurting the legitimate users who are you know who are helped by that technology and it's it's a difficult balance to strike and you know there you have to be open to the idea that maybe this product has more downsides than upsides but you also have to be open to the opposite that all products have some way they can be misused and but maybe the upsides outweigh the down right
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
we have something to discuss, two somethings to discuss.
Casey:
We have an Apple event that's coming up, but we have a different event that's happening beforehand.
Casey:
As you are listening to this, I have a new app in the App Store, which is exciting.
Casey:
That doesn't happen all that terribly often, but starting at 10 o'clock tomorrow morning, as we record this, so 10 o'clock Thursday morning, Masquerade, my new iOS app, will be available.
Casey:
And so, what's going on here?
Casey:
So,
Casey:
As my kids got older, I felt less and less comfortable.
Casey:
And this is just for me.
Casey:
I'm not saying anyone else feels the same way.
Casey:
This is just for me.
Casey:
But I felt less and less comfortable with splashing my kids' faces across the internet.
Casey:
And I do from time to time.
Casey:
It does happen from time to time.
Casey:
But generally speaking, I try to avoid it.
Casey:
And what I've decided to do, and I decided to do a few years ago, is generally speaking, I will put an emoji on top of like Declan or Michaela's head in a picture.
Casey:
So you can see their body, but you can't see their face.
Casey:
And this is just my point of view.
Casey:
I'm not trying to say it's right or wrong, but that's what I like to do.
Casey:
And I was doing this not often, but often enough that I was like, man, this is kind of a pain in the ass.
Casey:
And there's got to be a better way for this.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
It occurred to me, I just had an epiphany all of a sudden, that, wait, there's a way to do this.
Casey:
Apple has an API for this.
Casey:
And I don't remember exactly when it was, but a few years ago, Apple came out with Vision Kit and one of the APIs, which I don't have the actual name in front of me, but one of the APIs is basically, give me a rectangle or a series of rectangles in an image for all the faces in that image.
Yeah.
Casey:
And so I realized, well, holy crap, I can use that API to figure out where faces are in an image.
Casey:
Because goodness knows, I know almost nothing about machine learning.
Casey:
And me trying to work this out would not end well.
Casey:
So I could use the Apple API to do that.
Casey:
And then I can just slap an emoji on top of, put an emoji where the rectangles are.
Casey:
Easy peasy.
Casey:
And that was in September.
Casey:
And it's now March, and the app is out.
Casey:
So six months later, here we are.
Casey:
But the idea behind Masquerade is to make all of this easier.
Casey:
So the idea is when you load an image into Masquerade, which by the way is a pun, if you will, it's M-A-S-K-E-R-A-I-D, Masquerade.
Casey:
And that's because you're being aided in masking your kids or what have you.
Casey:
What was the original name?
Casey:
Uh, the original name, which was a Casey special and truly and utterly terrible, which I'm going to regret saying out loud because now it'll be the feet from fast text.
Casey:
I'm never going to hear the end of it.
Casey:
Uh, but the original name was face splash, which the thought was, and just hear me out for a second.
Casey:
The thought was I had like the, the image of splatoon in my head, right?
Casey:
Where, you know, there's those little like splats of, of paint and you're sort of, even though I was using emoji, it's sort of kind of in that spirit, right?
Casey:
And, and you can just like splat or splash, you know, an emoji on somebody's face.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
It was later that it was brought to my attention, I think by one of you, actually, potentially.
Casey:
It was brought to my attention that there are other connotations that one could use for that.
Casey:
And especially when this is an app designed to hide children's faces.
Casey:
Wait, that's where people went with that?
Casey:
Well, eventually.
Casey:
I didn't go there at first.
Casey:
I mean, people just thought it was a dumb name.
John:
It wasn't me either.
John:
I'm trying to blame either one of us for this.
Casey:
Oh, my apologies.
Casey:
I don't know who it was, but I didn't go there.
John:
I would not have thought of that.
John:
I mean, I will say that FaceSplash didn't make sense to me with the purpose of the app, but...
Casey:
Well, and that's totally.
Casey:
I mean, again, the name was terrible.
Casey:
And I think you can see it peek out in like the somewhere.
Casey:
It might be the the apps reverse domain thingamabobber.
Casey:
I'm drawing a blank on the name of that bundle ID.
Casey:
There you.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
But anyways, yes.
Casey:
So the Facebook was a terrible name.
Casey:
And my friend Steve, who came up with the icon, he did the icons for all my apps so far.
Casey:
He came up with Masquerade and I freaking love that name.
Casey:
Um, so anyway, so the idea of masquerade on the surface anyway, is to load an image.
Casey:
It'll put emoji on all of the faces it can detect, or that really Apple's code can detect in that image.
Casey:
And then you can share it to like Instagram or what have you.
Casey:
But
Casey:
After a while, it occurred to me, and I think it was Mike who said this first, that, wait a second, this isn't really limited just to hiding faces.
Casey:
I mean, that's what I wrote it for, but it's more than that.
Casey:
And what you can really use it for is just annotating an image with an emoji.
Casey:
And suddenly that...
Casey:
makes it a much more useful tool for really anyone whereas previously i was writing it basically for the perspective of parents and and you could do all sorts of silly and ridiculous things and and i think that that could be a very fun use of of this very app and in fact
Casey:
I've recorded an episode of Analog that won't be out until Sunday where we discussed Masquerade.
Casey:
And watching the RelayFM members Discord going nuts, trying to put in ridiculous emoji annotations on things or stickers, so to speak, on things, it was quite funny.
John:
But did the Relay Discord come up with Facey Liss as an alternate name for this app?
John:
like the atp chat room just did or faceless yeah yeah so faceless yeah faceless by corrupt pixel in the chat room that's my winner for most uh best list pun name for this app and obviously you know i'm i'm going with waft who uh said faceless that's that's oh actually no thomas b19 said it first
Casey:
no facey list come on anyway these these uh these names you would never use for the chat room i know they're just coming up with names or whatever you'd never use these because the people who buy this app don't know who casey list is exactly yeah and and that's actually one of the interesting things so i don't know where where you guys want to go with this we can talk about the development we can talk about some interesting pieces behind it uh but one of the one of the very weird things for me it's been marketing this because i feel like
Casey:
I'm going to get some pretty good coverage tomorrow within our little world.
Casey:
And I don't know if that's because I'm me.
Casey:
And that sounds so gross to say that.
Casey:
But obviously, you know, in our little world, people tend to know who I am.
Casey:
But I don't know if it's because I'm me.
Casey:
I don't know if it's because the app is genuinely good or maybe it's a train wreck and I just don't realize it.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
But what's really difficult about the app is I feel like this is a more broadly appealing app, not unlike Widgetsmith, for example.
Casey:
I'm not saying to that level, but in a similar spirit of Widgetsmith where it's more than just my little audience.
Casey:
Again, I feel kind of gross saying that, but you know what I mean.
Casey:
and and what i've been trying to struggle with or what i've been struggling with in trying to do is figure out how can i get this in front of like parent bloggers for example um so like the scary mommies of the world which if you're not familiar is a really really clever like twitter account and blog where they kind of make fun of but also give you know funny tongue-in-cheek parenting advice and and i've emailed their press you know catch all link which our email address which i'm sure will come nothing will come of that but i'm not i'm not a marketer i don't know what else buy an ad on their podcast
Casey:
Yeah, well, that's a fair point.
Casey:
And actually, the next question is, you know, how much money do I want to throw with, like, you know, paid marketing for this?
Casey:
And I've put it in front of a local mom who's really awesome at, like, sharing things that you can do locally here in Richmond.
Casey:
I haven't heard anything from her one way or the other.
Casey:
I've sent it to a couple of, I guess they're internet acquaintances at best, but there's a couple...
Casey:
uh... who did a lot of home renovations here in richmond uh... they go by young house love and actually aaron knew the husband uh... in the couple back in college and i put in front of them and you know said hey you know i know you do something deeply similar when you post pictures of your children so i thought this might be useful to you but i don't know if
Casey:
I don't know what to make of this app in a happy sense, because I feel like if the stars align just right, like they absolutely did with Widgetsmith, I think I could get some decent traction.
Casey:
Not Widgetsmith's traction, but decent traction out of this.
Casey:
But if they don't align just perfectly, then it's going to be like any other app.
Casey:
Like Peak of View, you know, it made okay money, all told, but it...
Casey:
It makes gas money at best now, which is, you know, that's the way of the world, this way of the App Store.
John:
Have you checked gas prices lately?
John:
Because that might not be true anymore.
Casey:
That's true, actually.
Casey:
It's under $4 here, and we're an all-premium family, but it's under $4 still, but not by a whole heck of a lot.
Casey:
I know in California it's like $5+, which is just bananas.
Casey:
But anyways, I don't know...
Casey:
I don't know where this is going to go, and I don't know both the episode and the app, but I'm pretty proud of it.
Casey:
I feel like the app is pretty good, and again, it's a Casey app in that it does one thing and does it at least reasonably all right, hopefully pretty well.
Marco:
And there's a lot of apologetic text.
Casey:
Yeah, and a lot of apologetic text, right?
Casey:
But no, it's a very casey app, but I'm pretty proud of it.
Casey:
I think it looks better than any other app I've written so far, which is a low bar, if I'm honest.
Casey:
But it looks really good, all told.
Casey:
And I'm pretty proud of it.
Casey:
I think it works pretty well.
Casey:
So we can take this wherever you want, gentlemen, and we can just move on, or we can talk about how it was developed, or we can tear it apart and tell me everything I've done wrong.
Casey:
Pick your poison.
Marco:
First of all, on the tearing apart front,
Marco:
I would like to apologize as your friend for giving almost no feedback and doing almost no testing during this process.
John:
It's fine.
John:
Because that's a tradition is we wait until on the podcast and then we give our suggestions because it's much easier just to give it in person than to try to file a Casey Radar or something.
Casey:
Title.
Casey:
There you go.
Marco:
No, but I mean, there are, obviously, I mean, I would have tons of suggestions on this if you actually want them, but, you know, it's kind of late now.
Marco:
I mean, I could go through every screen and be like, all right, I would change this, this, and this.
Marco:
I would make this work this way.
Marco:
I would, you know, change this wording to this wording.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
You didn't do your patented cut two out of every three words of the entire app because you did a really good job of that with, I think it was Peak of View, or maybe it was Vignette, but I thought it was Peak of View, where you found ways that, you know, Captain Verbose over here, just I could not fathom how to cut...
Casey:
text out of the app and you have a genuine talent for figuring out how to use two words when it comes to app development anyway, how to use two words when I would normally turn to 10.
Casey:
So yeah, maybe you and I can do a pass on that another time.
Marco:
But anyway, I mostly just want to apologize for not having done that because...
Marco:
I have been so underwater with my own stuff that I would get the test flight email every time you did a new build.
Marco:
I'd be like, oh, yeah, I got to check that out.
Marco:
I got to check that out.
Marco:
And then I would instantly move on to other stuff.
Marco:
And so I'm sorry.
Marco:
I've been a bad developer friend for this app.
Marco:
But yeah, so overall, I think you've done a pretty good job.
Marco:
I think marketing-wise...
Marco:
The challenge you're going to have is that this is an app that even though you did broaden it to be more about just put emoji over any photo, this is an app that has a narrow appeal in the sense that it's very specialized.
Marco:
For the people who want to perform these tasks, you did a good job.
Marco:
But how you find those people, as you mentioned, that's tricky because it's not going to be that broad of an audience.
Marco:
It's not going to be something that when you see it on your phone, you show all your friends, hey, look at what I can do.
Marco:
It's not going to be that broad.
Marco:
It's going to have to be...
Marco:
Much more specialized.
Marco:
And I think to some degree, you're going to have social benefits here in the sense that many people might not want to show their kids faces and photos, but might not have thought to put emoji on top of them.
Marco:
And so maybe this is the kind of thing where you see someone else's photo that has an emoji on their kid's face and you're like, hey, how'd you make that?
Marco:
You got a quick app to do that?
Marco:
And the other, I guess, competition you have is using no apps to do this and either just not caring about posting photos of your kid, which can be a lot of people...
Marco:
Or people who use, like, the built-in image editor on Instagram to automatically, or, you know, just type an emoji as text and, you know, stick that over whatever they want to block out.
Marco:
So that's your main competition, and that's going to be your main marketing challenge.
Marco:
It's like...
Marco:
You did a good job with the task that you solved, but you have to find people who want that task solved and or find people who might have a need but might not have thought to look for this particular solution to that need.
Marco:
That is a challenge.
Marco:
Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of advice on how exactly you find these people other than just hope for some social recognition and word of mouth there.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
You mentioned buying ads.
Marco:
I wonder if search ads would actually be useful for this.
Marco:
I think one of the challenges you'd have is what are people searching for that might be relevant search terms to this?
John:
yeah see i don't know there's so much i don't know i don't mean do people use these words like probably not like you know hide faces in photos you know that kind of stuff when you hear people talking about software of like you know i want to make an app what should i do and we we do it ourselves to talk about like oh make an app to scratch your own itch this is the other side of making an app to scratch your own itch that people don't talk about as much which is if you make an app to scratch your own itch
John:
What if no one else really has?
John:
The reason we say to do it is you'll be enthusiastic about it.
John:
You're a subject matter expert because Casey's doing this manually all the time, so he has the need for it or whatever.
John:
It's a great idea.
John:
It has lots of upsides.
John:
The downsides are...
John:
You know, not that you're going to be the only one because, you know, you're going to introduce people to the concept of it.
John:
And if you start seeing these around, maybe you'll catch on.
John:
But if it really is just your itch and there's just, you know, dozens of you, that's that's the downside.
John:
Right.
John:
And sometimes the downside doesn't matter.
John:
It's like, oh, you know, maybe I'm just doing this because I wanted to learn how to program.
John:
So I made an app to scratch my own itch or whatever.
John:
But if you're trying to do it as a commercial venture.
John:
Like, you might have to make whatever underscore thing, 63 apps that, you know, his apps don't all scratch his own itches.
John:
He's scratching everybody.
John:
He's looking for any itch that he can possibly scratch, but... I think at this point, he's scratching far more people than we can ever hope to.
John:
Yeah, yeah, but like the one...
John:
the one that did it though like what about the 62 other ones like well they weren't those garbage no it's just you never know what's going to actually have mass appeal versus what's not going to and so this is this is kind of like a single serving app does one job does it well the question is does anyone else want to do this job or is it just casey
Casey:
Yeah, and I don't have a good read on that.
John:
Oh my God, there's so much text in this app.
John:
I like the text.
John:
Marco, you want to make it an app like how you would make it, but I look at this app and I see Casey, for better or for worse, right?
Marco:
I do, yeah, and there's so many Casey-isms in this app, and I mean this in the warmest way possible.
Marco:
It's almost apologetic.
Yeah.
Marco:
about its own existence it's very helpful it's very helpful it tells you how to do stuff big casey energy there it's very it's very apologetic that like you know hey you know sometime you might have to pay me money for something the request a refund thing in settings is that casey is part of this yeah you gotta be all of it you gotta you gotta be kidding me with this but then he does advertise his other app so it balances out
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
I've never seen an app use its own name so much in its text.
John:
With different capitalizations each time.
Marco:
Almost every label includes the word masquerade somewhere.
John:
Why does the watermark not have a capital M?
John:
I don't understand that.
Casey:
i don't know i just like the look of it all lowercase why is it in monospace it's like mac os tv os ios i don't know i just like i for the for the watermark i just like the look of it all lowercase i felt like it was less you know it's it's here again it's huge casey energy right it was less shouty about what it was you know huge casey energy being completely inexplicable and indefensible but nevertheless it's your app so you get to do what you want oh
Casey:
Sorry, Dad.
Marco:
No, I mean, like, there are definitely things about this that I would say, like, hey, tweet this, tweet this, tweet this.
Marco:
But ultimately, I am a little bit concerned that this took you, like, six months.
Casey:
Well, that's fair.
Casey:
That's absolutely fair.
Casey:
Now, consider the holidays.
Casey:
We're in the midst of that.
Casey:
But...
John:
I mean, the functionality worked in the first beta when it was called Face Splash.
John:
It's like, done, ship it.
John:
But you can't ship it because he wasn't happy with the UI.
John:
And he did a lot of iteration on the two or three screens that are here, which I can relate to.
John:
But it's not like it took him six months to implement the app.
John:
It took him six months to make 75 passes over the UI.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And admittedly, that does take a ton of time.
Marco:
I know from experience.
Marco:
But this is going to be a pretty specialized app.
Marco:
If you're looking at it as a business venture, as John was saying, the difference between writing it for lots of other reasons versus writing it to make money, I think you're going to have a hard time making six months worth of app income from this app because it's too narrow of an appeal.
Marco:
That's certainly worth, if you want to have that discussion of prioritizing different developing needs and
Marco:
Having something that doesn't justify a super long amount of time, then how do you rein yourself in and set limits and everything?
Marco:
Because that's a very hard problem that most people, myself included, are not very good at.
Marco:
But again, it does actually serve the job very well.
John:
and it's a lot better than it was like it's a vast improvement over the original beta every pass did actually improve this and it you know it depends on what you want to use the app for right so if this was an app to like i'm going to hone my app development skills by learning how to really polish a ui to get it to the point that's way better than where it started success you did that right but you know if you're going to try if it was going to try to be a business venture for you your your hourly rate for making this app is not going to look good
Casey:
Yes, but I don't know.
Casey:
I take a little bit of issue with what you guys are saying for a couple of very unique to Casey reasons.
Casey:
First of all, to be completely frank, if this doesn't make money, that would be unfortunate, but it's okay because this is not the way in which I make money for the family.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
John:
That's what I was saying.
John:
Maybe the purpose of the app was...
John:
I feel like you've improved your app development skills during the course of making this and you learn new APIs and stuff that you hadn't used before, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I think in that sense, in keeping that set of my skills sharp and not having them completely atrophy, I think is also very, very important.
Casey:
Because, you know, if suddenly Spotify gets its way and podcasting is ruined forever, like I need to have a backup plan.
Casey:
And the best backup plan that I can think of right now anyway is... Please say Bitcoin.
Marco:
Please say Bitcoin.
Casey:
No, God, no.
Casey:
Goodness, no.
Casey:
The best backup plan that I can think of right now is to be like a Marco or an underscore where I have one or more independently written apps that can sustain the family.
Casey:
And that's the best possible backup.
Casey:
But the second best possible backup is being able to say to a potential employer, you know, yes, I would like this job as an iOS developer, please.
Casey:
Here's my work.
Casey:
And you can see in the App Store right now.
Casey:
And I was writing this not two, three, four, five, seven years ago.
Casey:
I was writing this, you know, two, three, four, five, seven months ago.
Casey:
Like, this is all still current.
Casey:
My muscles have not atrophied.
Casey:
But also, I think...
Casey:
Although I certainly was pretty focused on one particular use case for the app, I really do think if there was ever a time that any person would desire to put an emoji in an image and then share that image with someone...
Casey:
This app does that very well.
Casey:
Now, granted, it starts from the perspective of hiding faces, and I think I might actually in a future version have a setting to flip that off.
Casey:
So it won't automatically detect faces, and it'll just let you add emoji as you see fit.
Casey:
But I feel like this could be broadly appealing.
Casey:
I mean, how funny would it be to take a picture of somebody's profile and put the little, I forget the actual term for the emoji, but basically the little fart emoji behind them, you know?
Casey:
Like you can use it for silly things like that.
Casey:
If you're at a protest, this is what I was alluding to earlier.
Marco:
Oh my God.
Marco:
Do they have butt detection?
Casey:
No, but that would be very cool.
Casey:
Um, but they do have body detection.
John:
I think you can train a model to get butt detection.
John:
It's a good WWDC session.
John:
You just need a corpus of butt images, which I'm sure you can find on the internet.
John:
And then you just train that model and you embed it in your app.
John:
And then you could, you could make like, you know, fart array that would just automatically put the little fart thing on people's butts.
John:
They did hot dog detection, but you know, butts it's all in the same area.
Casey:
Oh my gosh.
Casey:
Anyway, focus, gentlemen.
Casey:
But another use case, and this is what I was alluding to in the beginning of the show, is what if you take a picture of a protest and you want to obscure all these faces?
Casey:
That does involve face detection, but this would be a really great and easy way to do that.
Casey:
And maybe that's a dumb idea, but I don't know.
Casey:
I'm just trying to think of ways in which this could be useful beyond just hiding pictures of your kids.
Casey:
And I feel like it's possible that it could be.
Casey:
But the problem is, how do I convince people that this is a problem that they need solving?
Casey:
And I think you said that earlier, Marco.
Casey:
And how do I convince them that my app is the way to do it?
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
And part of the reason that it took six months other than me just iterating is that even for an admittedly fairly simple app like this, there is a lot of...
Casey:
a lot that goes around it in modern app development.
Casey:
There's the whole in-app purchase flow, which Apple just released a new API for that.
Casey:
There's everything in settings.
Casey:
There's how do you manage things in settings.
Casey:
If you're doing any sort of analytics, just usage tracking, you have to think about a way to do that.
Casey:
One of the very interesting things that I tried to solve for, and I like to think I've successfully solved for, we'll see in a week or two,
Casey:
is what happens when there's a new batch of emoji that comes out?
Casey:
How do I handle that?
Casey:
Do I need to release a new binary?
Casey:
And sitting here today, I think, and I've tested as best I can, I think I do not have to release new binary.
Casey:
And what I'm actually doing is using a tip from Guy Rambeau where you can make a shared iCloud database that everyone in the app, everyone that has the app is using a shared database that only has literally like one or two rows in it.
Casey:
And that's where it will check for new emoji and see, okay, do I have a new batch that I should suck in?
Casey:
And then obviously whenever I update the binary, then it will update the list of emoji that's caked into it.
Casey:
But that was a whole rigmarole.
Casey:
And so there's all these little things that, yes, like John's right.
Casey:
It took me from late September to late February, really, to get this shipped.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But and it was in the first like 24 to 48 hours that I had a working version that showed rectangles on faces.
Casey:
But there's so much more than just that, like even something as silly as the drawer.
Casey:
So when you when you tap on an emoji, there's like a little single row of face emoji that you can use to switch to swap, you know, what emoji you would like in the image.
Casey:
But then you can drag that up, you know, kind of like in maps, you can drag that up and then you get like this multi row, you know, something vaguely more vaguely similar to the to the stock picker.
Casey:
And that drawer took me a couple of days to write.
Casey:
Now, part of that is because I'm not great at Swift UI.
Casey:
This was new to me.
Casey:
But part of that is because there's no out of the box drawer for Swift UI, you know, and so it's surprising.
Casey:
It's it continues to surprise me, even if someone who thinks he does this for a living.
Casey:
how much just administrivia and other stuff is necessary even for a fairly simple ios app much less something that's as involved as overcast for example so yeah i agree with you it probably shouldn't have taken me six months and part of that is because i'm slow and part of that is because i'm you know not working eight hours a day every single day um but nevertheless exactly but nevertheless the
Casey:
There is more to even the most simple app you can imagine than meets the eye.
Casey:
And I don't need to tell you that, Marco, but for people listening, even a simple app, you'd be surprised how much work has to go into that.
Marco:
No, believe me, that I definitely understand.
Marco:
By the way, I'm going to send you a quick little Swift function here that dumps all emoji from the Apple Core color emoji font in the system.
Marco:
I had to write this for...
Marco:
I'll paste it in our Slack.
Marco:
I don't know if it's shareable to everyone else, but here, that's how to dump every emoji symbol and name.
Marco:
Anyway, this is part of my crazy exploration for things that take way too long that it shouldn't.
Casey:
And actually, you bring up a great example, like, how do I get access to all the emoji?
Casey:
Because I can't just throw out, it's not easy to just throw up the stock system emoji picker, because basically you need a place where you're entering text to do that.
Casey:
And that's not really what I wanted for this app.
Casey:
So then I've got to figure out, okay, how do I get all of the emoji?
Casey:
And I have a mechanism for doing that.
Casey:
And I'll check out, absolutely check out what you just sent.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I have a mechanism for doing that.
Casey:
And then, okay, well, what do you, you know, so I got to figure out what are all the emoji and then I got to figure out, well, some of them are represented in odd ways on Apple.
Casey:
Like if you look at the actual Unicode list of emoji, which is what I was working from, a lot of them are represented in kind of odd ways on Apple platforms, at least right now.
Casey:
So then you've got to like cull that list.
Casey:
And how do you present that list?
Casey:
And if there was a simple API where Apple said, okay, we'll throw up an emoji, like basically a keyboard, we'll throw up an emoji picker for you, like that would have saved quite a lot of time, but that doesn't exist.
Casey:
So now I've got to reinvent the wheel.
Casey:
And it's silly stuff like that.
Casey:
As you're working on an entire app, it adds up.
Casey:
It adds up surprisingly quickly.
Marco:
Oh, believe me, I know.
Marco:
So I'll tell you, I don't think I've shared much of this publicly yet, but it's in beta, so anyone in the beta can see.
Marco:
So one of the features of the Overcast update that's currently in beta is that I allow you to choose icons for playlists to show on the list screen.
Marco:
what you know this is why i wrote this emoji dumper because first of all michael what if i want people to be able to choose emoji to be the icon how do i get a list of all emojis so that they could like search for them by keywords i'm like how do i get all those unicode descriptions of like you know person with hair like you know how do i how is there a list of those how can i get an api with that and i had the same concern you did what if if they add to emoji if there's some way i can dump this from the system dynamically rather than like hard coding a list somewhere or having a list on my server that to keep updated like that's obviously better and
Marco:
um so i went through all that and then i realized actually what would look better is sf symbols um and you know this for those of you don't know this is like apple's standard icon set they launched it a few years ago and they've been adding to it every year and there's a there's a huge library of i think about 3 800 of them right now uh of like basically stock icons that it
Marco:
There's a lot of good reasons to use them.
Marco:
And there's actually a whole Under the Radar episode that we talked about.
Marco:
We'll link to that in the show notes.
Marco:
Anyway, I decided, let me see if I can make an SF Symbol picker in the app.
Marco:
Now, there is an app called SF Symbols that Apple makes.
Marco:
But there's no API to do what SF Symbols does.
Marco:
Because it's not made for users to choose their own icons.
Marco:
It's made for developers to choose icons and then hard-code the values that we're using.
Marco:
So there is no index on iOS that is a list of all SF Symbols.
Marco:
So I had to build that.
Marco:
And that took...
Marco:
a stupidly long time like i i that i probably spent two weeks on that like just just the index of sf symbols because not only do i want to be able to know that i can list them all and actually and actually know that i have them all um but also i want to have like well how do you search for them you have to type in keywords well where do those keywords come from how do you know what keywords associate with which symbols
Marco:
then do you do things like synonyms or dictionary lookups to like you know if if there's a symbol called computer do you also want to match pc and mac and like how do you how do you get these lists and how do you like and i even i looked up dictionary like there's an ap there's dictionary api on mac os but not on ios and so i was like okay what if i build the index statically and build it into the binary and
Marco:
So I used the Mac API, dumped the dictionary, and then I did that.
Marco:
I actually built that, realized the dictionary was cluttering it up with way too many words that were not relevant as part of the definitions and everything.
Marco:
I tried thesaurus.
Marco:
That didn't work very well either.
Marco:
I built all of that.
Marco:
I tried using different linguistic stemmers to build the search index.
Marco:
Then I'm like, well, I'm a stickler for file size in my app.
Marco:
So I'm like, I'm not going to embed this 400 kilobyte index.
Marco:
smaller and i started playing with schemes like that i think i this is why you need someone helping you develop because when you say i'm not gonna embed 400 kilobytes what decade is this just staying it's fine no and i i think i ended up getting it down to like 30 write your own compression algorithm yeah
Marco:
that would be speaking of huge casey energy that's huge marco energy i could just use zip but i don't want so true it didn't quite get that bad but uh but certainly it's it's pretty like i spent again i spent two weeks on this like just just making a searchable index of sf symbols and then i spent another two weeks trying to get swift ui to do it to render them in a useful way on the screen that wasn't loading all 3 000 at once
Casey:
There's that, too.
Casey:
But this is such a great example of some little thing that doesn't seem that complicated.
Casey:
Like, there's a list of something that exists somewhere on your iPhone.
Casey:
44K.
Marco:
That's the final size.
Marco:
44K.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
Oh, my gosh.
Marco:
Go on.
Casey:
So there's a list of all these SF symbols that exist somewhere, but you didn't have access to it.
Casey:
And what's also interesting with SF symbols is certain symbols are... There's like a...
Casey:
I don't know what's the less gross way of saying gentleman's agreement but there's like a a person's agreement that that you can't use like the iMessage looking symbol for anything except you know iMessage related stuff so even though it's like just a speech bubble you're not allowed to use that for anything except iMessage specific related things and so then you've got a lot as an app review will reject you if you try to
Casey:
Correct.
Casey:
Yeah, seriously.
Casey:
I'm really serious.
John:
I remember seeing stories about this and it just didn't make any sense to me.
John:
Remember when Apple used to reject you if you put like a rounded rectangle that had the same dimensions as an iPhone in your app?
Casey:
I sure do.
John:
It was supposed to look like a phone.
John:
Like it looks too much like an iPhone.
John:
Well, what do you mean?
John:
Well, the proportions are exactly that of one particular iPhone we made or like, well, there's a dot.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure I actually got that on Instapaper because I tried my tilt scrolling icon.
Marco:
I tried using like a phone.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure I got rejected for that.
Casey:
But the point I'm driving at is this data seems to exist somewhere, and you should in a perfect world be able to just say, I would like that list, please.
Casey:
But because it isn't accessible to you, you spent two weeks going through it.
Casey:
Now, maybe some of that was getting a little crazy about the compression stuff, but nevertheless, you spent a long time just getting the actual information.
Casey:
stuff the effort squared away such that it was functional and that it seems so dumb and it seems like why would that take so long marco what's wrong with you but this is just the way app development works i don't say that to necessarily complain even though i think that's how it's coming across but just to say there's so much here like fast text which admittedly was a garbage app
Casey:
But it was an entire app, and it was, I don't know, like a couple hundred lines of code or something like that.
Casey:
I haven't done a clock on Masquerade.
Casey:
Maybe I can do that while we're talking.
Casey:
But it is not just a couple hundred lines of code.
Casey:
It is more than that.
Casey:
And granted, it perhaps shouldn't have taken me as long as it did, but this is app development these days.
Casey:
This is just how it works, is that it takes a while to make something that's decent.
Marco:
I can't even tell you how many of these dumb little things I've run into.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
This isn't just any one particular app or project or task in an app.
Marco:
This is just the job.
Marco:
I run into this dumb stuff almost every day.
Marco:
I'll have some days where I just have amazing productivity in getting stuff done.
Marco:
I'll be able to check off a bunch of stuff off my list and I'll be able to ship out a new build and everyone's like, well, I can't believe you filled this in here.
Marco:
And then I'll have other days where I spend the entire day, like, I start out doing some checklist item that I wanted to get done, and then I realize, oh, no, this is not working the way I expected it to work.
Marco:
Or to do this, I need to do something else, which needs to do something else, which needs to do something else.
Marco:
Like, oh, wait a minute.
Marco:
Now this whole thing is expanding in scope because to actually achieve this.
Marco:
And some of it was stupid stuff.
Marco:
Like, for instance...
Marco:
that list of restricted symbols and sf symbols that is gettable information the way the first way i found to do it i have since found a simpler way but the first way i found to do it was i noticed that like if you open up font book if you load the sf pro fonts and font book
Marco:
they have, as part of their license text, a list in the license of the symbol name, and then it says, this symbol may not be modified, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
And so I figured out, what the heck is the CT, the core text API call, to try to get that license?
Marco:
from the font file and then parse that text for this.
Marco:
And I, I did eventually figure that out.
Marco:
And that probably took me two hours.
Marco:
Like it's, there was so much like little stuff like that that I run into all the time.
Marco:
you know just yesterday i'm like i i wanted to get um i'm moving my notification type from background update pushes to actual live alerts for many reasons basically background pushes are much less reliable than i would like them to be and people keep complaining that they're missing their notifications and so i'm just moving to live alerts and
Marco:
when the upside will be will be that they are much much much more reliable the downside will be that the app will no longer necessarily wake up every single time in the background to start the download so that's starting the download is going to be more dependent on background refresh intervals or actions that you take as the user rather than me being able to tell the system hey there's content available hey it's content available hey it's content available so anyway
Marco:
But to do that, I had to change the way notifications are generated because before my servers, when a new episode would come out, my servers would send a content available push notification to the phone.
Marco:
The phone would download the data for the new episode from the server in response in a background task and then would post a local notification.
Marco:
with the episode info once it got that info from the server so you know this multi-step thing but key thing was it was it was the server was triggering the app to background launch but again the problem with that is the is that ios will often just say nope don't want to do that for whatever reason you know maybe i'm low on power or
Marco:
Or my internet connection isn't very good.
Marco:
Or the user has put me in low power mode.
Marco:
Or you've been forced quit, quote, out of the app launcher.
Marco:
And that used to prevent those.
Marco:
So, you know, there's all sorts of things that prevent those.
Marco:
And so anyway, now I had to switch to the live push that, you know, you get like when somebody messages you or something.
Marco:
Like you get the alert push that they are pretty much always sent through.
Marco:
You know, up to user settings, of course.
Marco:
But they're pretty much always sent and delivered.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
You can't include things like the artwork image in them and the limit for how much text can go in there is 4K.
Marco:
So you can't even like really cram it in.
Marco:
And so I had to change my server side support for things like first I had to build a system where all these APNS tokens that I store.
Marco:
Well, now I have to store an app build version with those.
Marco:
Because I'm going to communicate with the app in two different ways depending on which version of the app it is.
Marco:
If it's a version before this build, I have to use the old way.
Marco:
And if it's a version after this build, then I get to use the new way.
Marco:
So first I have to alter the server stuff to support all this distinction on the APNS sending side.
Marco:
Add new support for the new types of pushes I'm trying to send.
Marco:
Then go back to the app side of things.
Marco:
Add a notification service extension so that it can intercept the alert notification on the way in.
Marco:
Download the image it needs to download, then modify the notification payload for then, you know, further display in the other notification extension, the notification content extension.
Marco:
And that was all to, you know, to quote, make notifications more reliable.
Marco:
like that that's that was the checkmark item it was basically like you know fix notifications and that like it involved this whole day of jumping between server stuff and app stuff and making a whole new extension and all this other and you know and any one of those steps if i temporarily screwed it up that add another hour wait why is this not working oh i didn't change this key over here like you know it's and that's yeah that's just the job and and so i i totally get why this took six months
Marco:
That makes total sense to me.
Marco:
And especially all of the UI iteration that you did.
Marco:
That's the worst.
Marco:
Because UI stuff, not only does it take a surprisingly long amount of time to build a UI because you run into weird things with SwiftUI or UIKit or your own ineptitude and stuff like that.
Marco:
So not only does that take a long time.
Marco:
But then, usually you have to build something to see if it really works.
Marco:
And oftentimes get it out there to people.
Marco:
And then fix the bugs that they report.
Marco:
And then, oh, by the way, this whole UI, this doesn't work.
Marco:
Oh, throw it all away.
Marco:
Start again.
Marco:
Or change this whole screen around.
Marco:
Rebuild.
Marco:
Tear out half of this.
Marco:
Move it around.
Marco:
And that is incredibly time-consuming.
Marco:
I mean, this is why I've been working on...
Marco:
basically what an overcast is basically one screen like like this this first this first version of my redesign there's a but there's some stuff you know like font and spacing changes that that are kind of you know impact every screen and that that's a large amount of work but mostly i'm redesigning like one to one and a half screens in this build and that's taking that's taking me six months so i i totally get it i totally understand
Casey:
I don't say it to complain.
Casey:
It's just that goodness.
Casey:
I mean, if you had told me after day one or two where I had a very, very basic proof of concept that it would still take me many, many months until it was released, I would have been like, really?
Casey:
There's not that much here.
Casey:
Come on.
Casey:
But no, there's a lot here.
Casey:
And I used Clock on Masquerade, and it's a little bit less than 5,000 lines of code.
Casey:
A couple of quick fun facts just because a lot of developers listen.
Casey:
There are 29 closed pull requests, all from me to me, which I think is kind of funny.
Marco:
You make pull requests to yourself?
Casey:
Sometimes.
Casey:
Oh, that's so cute.
Casey:
So if I'm doing like a major feature, like the drawer, for example, then I'll branch.
Casey:
I'll do all of that stuff in that branch so I can kind of do whatever and not have to worry about mucking things up.
Casey:
And then as a final step before that gets merged back into main...
Casey:
I'll actually issue a pull request, because I really do love GitHub in so many ways, but I love that GitHub's pull request UI does a really good job of showing diffs, and I know there are other ways to do this.
Casey:
I know I could do this with Kaleidoscope or any number of other tools, but I really like doing it on GitHub, and it lets me walk through all the files and see these diffs, and almost every time, almost every single time, I catch something
Casey:
And now, mind you, before I check in, I always look at it in tower and look at the diffs in tower and make sure everything looks good.
Casey:
But almost every time, when I issue a pull request from me to me, I have almost every time I find something that I'm like, oh, crap, left in a print statement I didn't want to, or oh, crap, I hard-coded something I didn't want to.
Casey:
And so I go back and have to change something before I accept the pull request.
Casey:
So yeah, 29 pull requests, 64 closed GitHub issues, and 12 open ones, some of which are kind of administrivia stuff.
Casey:
um it is using async await in a handful of places uh it does use combine here and there but more async await when possible it is almost exclusively swift ui it is exclusively swift uh first commit was 21 december 2021 and the build that went to the app store that is that is as you hear this released uh that was built this past friday so at the very very end of february
Casey:
But yeah, go check it out.
Casey:
I'd love it if you take a look.
Casey:
Oh, I don't think I actually talked about the revenue model.
Casey:
So you can use the very, very basic smiley face for free.
Casey:
If you would like to use any other emoji under the sun, then you need to pay a one-time as we record this $3 in-app purchase, which will give you access to...
Casey:
basically all the other emoji.
Casey:
I haven't conquered skin tone.
Casey:
I don't know if I'm going to offer that or not because it's a very difficult UI problem to solve.
Casey:
But you get basically all the other emoji for one time $3.
Casey:
So yeah, even if you're listening to this and you think I'm all right,
Casey:
just go download it and buy the in-app purchase just to be nice.
Casey:
Consider it a tip.
Casey:
But tell your friends, tell your family, tell parents, tell people who want to put fart clouds on butts.
Casey:
Whatever you want to do, tell people and check it out.
Casey:
I'd really appreciate it.
Marco:
My favorite thing about this app is that the title bar of the in-app purchase screen is titled in-app purchase.
Casey:
Well, yeah, that's fair.
Casey:
They could use the wordsmith here or there.
Casey:
I didn't get the Marco treatment like I did with Peek of View, I think it was.
John:
Did you do a lines of code?
John:
Yeah, it's a little under 5,000.
John:
5,000?
Casey:
Mm-hmm, a little under.
Casey:
Smaller than Switch Class.
Casey:
Ah, see?
John:
Because I was just running the same thing.
John:
That's why I must have missed the number.
Casey:
Yep, there you go.
John:
It has no windows.
John:
That's a surprising amount of code.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so let's move along.
Casey:
We have an Apple ad breaking news.
Casey:
Apple event on Tuesday the 8th.
Casey:
It is Tuesday, right?
Casey:
I'm not making that up.
Casey:
It is March 8th, one way or the other.
Casey:
Or 8th of March, as I should probably say.
Casey:
Peak performance.
Casey:
And it's spelled like peak of you.
Casey:
Thank you very much.
Casey:
P-E-E-K.
Casey:
Peak performance.
Casey:
Are you getting Sherlocked?
Casey:
apparently.
Casey:
So I got to get a new app out there quick because the old one's getting Sherlocked apparently.
Casey:
So yeah, so peak performance.
Casey:
What are we getting a peak at?
Casey:
Are we getting your beloved Mac Pro or are we getting something else?
John:
It's weird that they put peak in there.
John:
I mean, I guess they give you a peak at some things you can't order immediately.
John:
So technically it's not, you know, but like a lot of people are seeing the word peak and saying, oh, maybe they're going to show us the Mac Pro, but even though the Mac Pro won't be ready, they'll show us just how amazing it is.
John:
And they're like, and this will be ready later this year.
John:
I suppose they could do that.
John:
I mean, maybe it's like actually is ready, but supply chain stuff, make it so they can't ship it for a long time and they just want to brag.
John:
But that's not an Apple thing to do.
John:
It's like they'll show it to us.
John:
It's not that they wait until you can buy the day out, but they wait until it's closer for sure.
John:
So if this is something that's supposed to ship in December, I don't think we're going to be seeing it now.
John:
What would be the point of that?
Marco:
Also, that's more of a WWDC kind of announcement.
Marco:
Think about the audience of the event.
Marco:
Typically, the spring event does not contain a lot of pro hardware.
Marco:
Now, things might be different this time, on the Mac side at least.
Marco:
yeah well first of all yeah everything's pro but like on the mac side um it does seem like we are likely to see any remaining products that use the m1 pro and max chips and the biggest holes in the lineup that will most likely use those are a larger imac and a higher end mac mini and so you know it wouldn't surprise us if we see those at this event um that that would be nice uh those are those are two especially the large imac that's a
John:
if it was any other normal time i would say that yeah this will be the you know the remaining m1 m1 pro max machines but because everything is weird with supply chain stuff it could be that if they had access to all the parts that they expect to have access to that this would be the time but it could be they have to make some hard choices about which one of these products is more important because we only have enough like
John:
power inverters to make either the iMac or the Mac mini and so we can only announce one of them that would be a shame but that's just par for the course now lots of times you just you know the limiting factors we can't get enough of some part that's essential for all the computers that we essentially have finished we're like we're done they're designed they're everything is ready about them the packaging is ready to go we're tested we just can't put this product up for sale because if more than 10 people buy it we run out of this one part I hope that's not the case
John:
But we never know.
John:
So, yeah, Mac Mini and Big iMac, for sure, are on the table, you know, and would make sense for them to be released.
John:
But this is like a new factor in our whole, like, what is Apple going to announce?
John:
There's so many factors that go into already.
John:
Now, all of a sudden, it is what Apple would like to announce this but can't.
John:
And that hasn't been a thing for, you know, basically since the Tim Cook era, not when he was CEO, but when he was a COO and he was doing inventory management.
John:
It used to be that Apple was not particularly good at manufacturing and had a long lead time between when something was made and when someone actually bought it.
John:
And Tim Cook added more modern discipline to that and not having tons of channel inventory and not stuffing the channel to boost sales numbers.
John:
You guys missed this era in Apple's history, but one of the things they used to do was it was called stuffing the channel where...
John:
if the quarter is ending and apple wants to say we sold x number of macs uh they would say how many they sold quote unquote into the channel like into the place where distributors get them from and so they would just sell them into the distributors that would distribute them to the physical stores and count those as sales even though no person bought those macs and then those things would just sit in the in the distribution channel for months slowly draining out into like
John:
i don't know what was like you know egghead or best buy or independent mac sellers and during that time apple can't sell anything more into the channel because it was full and it was just it was a nightmare right uh so but that those days are long gone and now we think okay well this apple is they're great at manufacturing things and they can get the best they get the best parts they get the best chips they get the best manufacturing stuff they paid all this money for these amazing factories uh that shouldn't be a problem anymore but then
John:
covid and now nobody can get anything so i really hope that doesn't squash any of these computers but uh if all the parts are available uh this would be the time for the mac mini and the quote-unquote big iMac to uh make the debut well and i gotta say like you know throughout all of covid and the you know the subsequent supply chain problems that we've had
Marco:
Apple has done a very good job of hiding us from any problems that they might be having, getting supply or getting things made or getting things shipped.
Marco:
Almost everyone else around the world who makes or sells things has made those problems very noticeable to their customers because they had to.
Marco:
Apple, through logistical magic and expertise and good deals and priority and good planning or whatever it is, maybe just not talking about it too much, Apple has really kept a lot of this out of public view.
Marco:
To be an Apple customer right now and to be able to just, for the most part, go to Apple and just order what you need or buy what you need and be able to get it in a pretty reasonable amount of time for almost this entire pandemic, that's really saying something.
John:
So Apple's style of communication where they don't tell you about things ahead of time really helps here.
John:
Because, like, for example, the big iMac, that was actually rumored for 2021.
John:
And then the rumors were it got delayed because of supply chain stuff.
John:
But we don't like that.
John:
Apple never said anything about that.
John:
There's no reason we should have expected it in 2021 except that we saw a rumor about it.
John:
But Apple says, like, why, you know, it's not late because we never told you when it was coming.
John:
Right.
John:
And so any delays are completely hidden from us, you know, in that respect.
John:
which is an advantage of their communication strategy.
John:
But I would hope that the way they build things also factors into this.
John:
Like you said, having preferential treatment that we paid for your factory, we get first choice on all of these things.
John:
We're putting the same chip in a lot of our computers, which helps so we don't have to have 17 different chips being made and deal with the inventory.
John:
Just make as many M1s as you can because we're going to chip a whole line of computers that have M1s in them.
John:
And now with the M1 Pro Max,
John:
You know, make as many of those as you can because we got like three or four different computers that are going to use them.
John:
And the fact that the M chips work in all these different contexts, that it's not shoehorning that chip into a computer that shouldn't have it.
John:
It's great in all those contexts.
John:
That certainly helps as well.
Marco:
But yeah, so as for what we're likely to see, I mean, honestly, as part of the same reason why I haven't looked much at Masquerade, sorry again, I also haven't been paying much attention to the tech rumors and everything this time around.
Marco:
But I think just looking at the lineup and looking at what
Marco:
you know what still has to come out and what's likely to happen um i would say this still feels a bit early to have any of the like multi-chip or multi-die m1 max products so probably not the mac pro and probably not like there were there were always some ideas floating around that maybe a high-end iMac or you know slash iMac pro might have like a dual m1 max design and
Marco:
If that's to come, which honestly would surprise me, but if that's to come, I don't think it's going to come at this event.
Marco:
It feels too early to do those.
Marco:
I'm guessing this event is the computers that historically have had the guts of the MacBook Pro in some version or another, and that would be the large iMac and the high-end Mac Mini.
John:
yeah just to do a quick recap of the we've talked about all these machines on past shows and the various rumors around them but the mac mini this is the rumor is that it's thinner that it has a glass top it's got the magnetic power connector for reasons that we could not really make sense of in fact when we discussed this rumor and that it would come with m1 pro or m1 max and the big iMac keep calling it that just because it's got the bigger screen than the current 24 inch one
John:
For a while, we thought it might be 30-inch, but now the rumors have really solidified that it's just going to be 27-inch.
John:
M1 Pro, M1 Max as the rumored CPUs, with the possibility of an M1 Max Duo, the double thing.
John:
And the reason we're calling this Big iMac is because...
John:
Is it just going to be called iMac?
John:
Is it going to be called iMac Pro?
John:
Is the iMac Pro just the one that has the double M1 Macs in it?
John:
These are all kind of marketing decisions that it's not clear what Apple will do here because it's kind of a big reset on this whole product line.
John:
So we'll see.
John:
And the big iMac, the rumor is that it's thicker, won't come in colors.
John:
We'll have 120 hertz screen and mini LED and all that.
John:
um and then the other products that there's lots of other products that are rumored just because apple files for whatever you know uh the the equivalent of the uh underwriters whatever like i don't know what like the fcc you know in various countries you have to file to say i'm going to be shipping a product that's going to do radio stuff in your country and
John:
Here's the code number for it and people figure out what that anyway There's a lot of products that are in the pipeline that in theory might also be announced New iPad Air just sort of spec bumping that so it's not so embarrassingly worse than the new iPad mini
John:
A new low-end iPad that finally ditches the old thing and gets the flat sides like the Air.
John:
And the iPhone SE, the new iPhone SE, which again would just look like the current iPhone SE, but it had an A15 and it didn't have 5G.
John:
Lots of those are products that are probably in the pipeline, but I don't think it makes for a coherent...
John:
presentation especially when performance is highlighted in the invitation it just seems like the whole event could be macs that are faster than previous ones which shouldn't be hard because all the macs they introduce are either low-end macs or laptop macs and now it's time for macs that are not low-end and or are not laptops and they should be fast and that'll be exciting and this is the event that i have
John:
most looking forward to so far this year obviously the most i'd be looking forward to is the mac pro one if the mac pro comes out today this is what i'm gonna say about like expectations we don't know how they're doing on manufacturing these chips right like we don't have any intel would talk about their things and intel we'd see like pcs would always ship with the thing first or whatever even if apple got the chip first we knew it was coming
John:
we have no idea what apple is even building we just have these vague rumors or what the timelines are when the m1 pro max came out was that earlier than people thought later than people thought we have no yardstick for judging like how long does it take to make this stuff happen so it could be they come out on stage and here's the new mac pro with 40 cores or something the only reason we doubt that is just because it usually takes them a long time and that's usually the last one to come but
John:
I don't know, like maybe things are different now that they're making their own chips.
John:
Maybe the M1 Pro and Max machines were not shipping because of some part that has nothing to do with this amount of chip and that shortage is, you know, it's just, it's so hard to predict.
John:
But I do like the fact that this has performance.
John:
And so we're getting into the good stuff now.
John:
It's like the mass market computers, the ones that people actually buy, shipped first.
John:
Good job, Apple, shipped the computers that people actually buy.
John:
And now we're getting into the ones that I'm the most interested in, which are the ones that nobody buys.
Casey:
Including you for most years, or most decades, I should say.
John:
Well, I'm getting this big iMac because I was saying, my wife's got a 2015 5K iMac that I have just today.
John:
I guess we'll talk about this in the next show, but just today I was fighting with the...
John:
her iMac and some issue or whatever and i was like i can solve this problem with hardware and i was about to do it and i said nope i'm not buying anything else for this computer it's a 2015 computer it's it's just the new she's got a big iMac she likes it she thinks there's nothing wrong with her computer i think there are things wrong with it so uh i'm no more i'm not spending any more money on that computer and as soon as they announce that big iMac that's what i'm getting and it'll just i said you won't even if you don't care if you think your current computer is fine the only thing you'll notice is that there'll be a skinnier border around the screen
John:
And there won't be an Apple logo facing you.
John:
And other than that, it will be a thousand times faster and will anger me less.
John:
So I'm getting that.
John:
And I really hope that's announced.
Casey:
Yeah, I hear you.
Casey:
Do you think there'll be displays?
Casey:
Because now I feel like my display situation, I'm actually pretty happy with it.
Casey:
So now is the time that Apple's going to finally come out and make me spend more money on stupid monitors.
John:
I haven't even seen any rumors about that.
John:
I feel like I'm getting greedy.
John:
Okay.
Casey:
I mean, hey, man, you never know what will happen.
Casey:
It would be kind of cool.
Casey:
You take a peek at that display.
Marco:
Yeah, I've only heard, like, wish lists.
Marco:
Like, people want there to be displays.
Marco:
I've seen nothing to suggest that there will be.
John:
Well, there's rumors that they're working on, but, like, not that they're imminent.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Like, they still, like, based on the state of the rumors, let's say, like, the current positioning of the rumors, it still feels like they're, you know, a half a year to a year out.
Casey:
Okay, so let's look at it this way.
Casey:
So, John, selfishly, it sounds like you're most interested in a 27-inch iMac.
Casey:
What do you think is the single most important product for Apple to announce on Tuesday?
Yeah.
John:
It probably is the big iMac, because who buys a Mac Mini?
John:
That's a very narrow interest product.
John:
And the iMacs were well received, I feel like.
John:
And just to have a slightly bigger model to bring people up market and to make a little bit more money and to give people a bigger screen, I think that is by far the most important Mac product.
John:
Depending on how the iPads go, if they do actually come out with a new low-end iPad, like the cheapest possible iPad and it's got the flat side, that's probably the most important product in terms of how many people are going to buy it because I think they sell a lot of those super low-end iPads.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
That's like a late-breaking rumor.
John:
Who knows if there's any...
John:
any basis in fact at all to i mean why would they show that at a peak performance thing you know it's like that's that's the opposite of peak performance the lowest performing ipad you can buy it would be weird to announce it on stage it could still be announced by press release or something or whatever but uh but yeah on stage it's the big iMac i feel like that's going to be the star of the show
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, Marco, what do you think is the most important?
Casey:
What are you personally most interested in?
Marco:
What I am hoping for is the new iPad Air because my son is due for an upgrade and his birthday is coming up soon.
Marco:
And that could be a good answer to that question.
Marco:
What would be the most important, you know, to my overall other interests?
Yeah.
Marco:
Probably a big iMac.
Marco:
Not that I would want to get one because, frankly, I'm incredibly happy with my current setup of ridiculous XDR and desktop laptop.
Marco:
Like, I love this setup.
Marco:
This is fantastic.
Marco:
This is so fantastic that it's actually going to be a question whether I get the next Mac Pro or not.
Casey:
Yeah, I actually I don't think we necessarily have time for today, but I would like to explore that with you because I also am in a really good computing place right now.
Casey:
And even though I had, you know, what, five, six, six, seven years of 27 inch iMacs and I loved that time of my life.
Casey:
I really did.
Casey:
But being able to take.
Casey:
my best computer and move it wherever I want is so freaking magical.
Casey:
It's so cool.
Casey:
And we don't need to belabor it right now, but it is so great.
Casey:
So yeah, I have very big interest in the 27-inch iMac in terms of, and I think it is probably, in my opinion, I think it's the most important product for Apple at this event.
Casey:
But I don't know if I would want it because I feel like I'm back on the laptop train.
Casey:
But anyway, I digress.
Casey:
I apologize.
Marco:
That's roughly where I feel.
Marco:
Because right now, I am very rarely wanting more performance out of my computer now.
Marco:
Ever since... The M1 was already almost there.
Marco:
The only reason I really wanted to expand past the M1 was...
Marco:
A little more high CPU core for parallel stuff, but mainly stuff like disk space and RAM.
Marco:
The RAM was really holding me back a lot on the M1.
Marco:
Now, with the M1 Max and the ability to have high RAM and bigger disks and higher core counts...
Marco:
i am fine like i am even even doing big compilations of my app like i'm not waiting very long for that kind of stuff like everything is very very fast now and so when the mac pro comes out i might not get it or at least you know right now i'm still in my like mobile lifestyle for the next probably two years or so maybe after that things might change
Marco:
But for now, I'm very happy where I am.
Marco:
So anyway, this is an event where I am mostly excited about products that other people want.
Marco:
I'm excited for them.
Marco:
And in that way, I'm very excited to see the new big iMac because...
Marco:
For the most part, for a long time now, we really haven't had a good recommendation for developers or power users who wanted a good desktop setup, except get the big iMac, because Apple has been so weird slash negligent on the monitor front.
Marco:
But the iMacs have always been great monitors, and for most of their iterations, pretty great computers as well.
Marco:
So, you know, now that we had the small iMac with the M1 get updated, and that was seemingly a pretty big success, and people seemed to like that machine a lot.
Marco:
And now the question was just, you know, what's the big one going to be?
Marco:
And if this event answers that question, I think that's a really big step for the lineup.
Marco:
You know, nerd-wise, the Mac Mini is certainly interesting, but I personally don't have a use for a high-end Mac Mini right now.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, it's funny you say that because I don't think I do either.
Casey:
Like I'm rocking a circa 2012 Mac mini as my Plex server and it does a handful of other minor things, including former sponsor channels.
Casey:
But it never seems to really complain about any of it because I'm really not asking that much of it.
Casey:
But that's the one I am selfishly most – well, display if it actually shows up, but I agree with you guys.
Casey:
It would be pretty surprising if it did.
Casey:
But if not a display, I'm curious about a Mac Mini because even though I don't particularly need one, I think that might be the next thing that I buy computer-wise.
Casey:
Obviously, I'll buy phone or whatever.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
In terms of a computer, I would like a less than a decade old Mac Mini.
Casey:
And since you sold yours to Apple, you big jerk, then I'm curious to see what's announced.
Casey:
And I don't think I need the Super Baller Mega Mac Mini.
Casey:
I think a base Mac Mini would probably be sufficient for my needs.
Casey:
But I'm still curious to see what it is they announce if they do so.
John:
a wild card here is m2 stuff again getting back to how little visibility we have in apple silicon process other than the fact that you know m2 will eventually come what's the schedule on that we talked about this or how does it overlap with the m1 type stuff because remember the m1 is based on the a14 course it might not a15 course right no a14 a14 a14 yep yeah a14 course it's sort of sort of like it's not exact right
John:
uh and then you know the the m1 pro and m1 max have lots of variations uh but it's still essentially the same core designs for the cpu cores in there close to the same anyway they're tweaked a little bit we all assume based on our past conversations that the big giant mac pro one will also be m1-ish cores just because that's the way we discussed on a past show the way it usually goes you make the smaller simpler chips and you make them bigger and bigger and bigger you don't come right out the gate with the big one but that means that the m2 which we all think is going to be in the new very skinny
John:
laptop that may or may not be called macbook air the m2 based color flat you know the rumors for that are pretty strong that has been projected out to be well that's not going to be in this event because it's not a performance computer it's just sort of like you know it's a low end low power probably fanless computer but that probably is going to have an m2 in it right but if the m2 is ready now would they come out with some kind of macbook non-pro with an m2 and
John:
I mean, it seems like the timing is all wrong because they just came – didn't just.
John:
They quote-unquote just came out with the new M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pros, and those are their high-performance laptops.
John:
The initial M2 machine is not going to be high-performance.
John:
It's going to be the M2 non-Max, the M2 non-Pro, just the plain old M2.
John:
But is the, would the plain old M2 be faster than the M1 Pro and M1 Max in certain operations?
John:
And, you know, it's just, I feel, it will feel much better once we get through all, like we get through all of the Max going to ARM and then we get through the first iteration of like M2 to understand how this is supposed to go.
John:
Although when we do that, actually, we probably won't even be able to extrapolate because we'll say, well, that was all weird because it was COVID times.
John:
And here we are, hopefully someday.
Yeah.
John:
Not as crippled by supply chain things in COVID.
John:
And maybe we'll have a normal iteration.
John:
But it's all just a complete mystery because Apple doesn't have to tell anyone about what they're doing and what the timelines are.
John:
And so we know that there are machines like this in the works, supposedly, but we don't actually know when they might be scheduled.
John:
And so the M2 is supposedly based on A15 course.
John:
The A15 has been out for a while now.
John:
It's not like we're expecting, oh, M2, that's not going to come out.
John:
It's too soon for that.
John:
It's too cutting edge.
John:
the time is not you know 2022 is a reasonable time for an m2 based computer to ship maybe not in march 2022 but the rumor is floating around out there um and potentially you know let's say it was just it was ready they had the the m2 based really thin low power macbook air replacement d kind of machine coming out
John:
they could fit that into a peak performance thing because they would say, look at the existing M1 MacBook Air.
John:
Everybody loves it.
John:
It's a great computer.
John:
It's super awesome.
John:
But now we can do that, but with even higher performance and even better battery life, and it comes in colors.
John:
That would fit in the event.
John:
I just don't think it's probably ready yet.
Marco:
yeah and that's that would actually be be a shame because i i'd actually forgotten about the m2 macbook air because that that has been rumored to be a this spring release for like the last six months like it's been a while yeah like but did it does it get does it get pushed like everything else yeah and it certainly does seem like the rumors to that effect have dried up recently and have kind of been like oh maybe later in the year so and it might not even be a macbook air i feel like there's been waffling on that of like well
Marco:
they don't have to call it the air they could just call it the macbook like branding and naming is always weird yeah but i mean ultimately like there has been this this m2 redesigned macbook air that's been rumored for a while that sounds awesome like you know people talking about like the the colors of the new small iMac and like you know a more a design more reminiscent of
Marco:
of that and of like you know current uh laptops that have like you know no more taper and more more like flat sided edges and stuff like that like that the rumors of that and oh and i believe it's rumored to have a white keyboard uh and and to have like you know the light colors on top like that sounds really cool
Marco:
And the existing M1 MacBook Air is so incredibly good that to take that same thing forward with a new industrial design that could be really awesome and really breathe some new aesthetic life into it, that's fantastic.
Marco:
That's going to be a great thing if that comes out.
John:
It's the iMacification of the laptop, which I think this was slightly before both of your times as well, but the iMacification of the laptop, the first time that happened?
John:
Do you remember the original iBook, the toilet seat iBook?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, the big, you know, translucent blue, everything.
John:
The big poster I got from Macworld Expo in New York, it said iMac to go.
John:
It was literally like, take the iMac,
John:
and slam it into our laptop line, you get the iBook, right?
John:
The toilet seat iBook with a handle and it came in fun colors.
John:
These rumors of this M2 laptop is basically take the 24-inch iMac and slam that into the laptop line.
John:
Again, it's like history repeating itself.
John:
And granted, the colors are more muted now and the design is very different, but it's going to be what if that iMac but laptop?
John:
That's what all the rumor things look like.
John:
It's almost like you could take it to 24-inch iMac and fold it in half and shrink it down.
John:
And there you go.
Marco:
yeah yeah so i that i would actually i hope that that comes out at this event but because the rumors have been so hesitant on it coming out soon like recently i'm i'm a little hesitant to whether that's ready yet but that would be exciting now you know as for m2 versus m1 stuff
Marco:
I think we've already seen how this plays out on the phone side with these same cores, and so we can extrapolate roughly what that's going to be like on the Mac side.
Marco:
On the phone side, A14 to A15 was a...
Marco:
fairly minor update it was still good um it was more in the area of power efficiency than in performance so what this means on the max side that's not a small thing that that's still an important thing but i wouldn't expect this to be like embarrassing the m1 products in any benchmarks like that it's probably just going to be like
Marco:
Hey, everything got like, you know, 5 or 10% faster and you get like 10 or 15% better battery life.
Marco:
That's a great improvement, but I don't think anything's going to make the M1 look bad so soon.
John:
I'm not sure because I feel like the thing I don't have a good handle on is how much is tweaked, right?
John:
Just for the M1 versus what would have been the A14X, how different are those two things from each other?
John:
Probably not that different.
John:
I mean, they use the M1 on the iPad, we're crying out loud.
John:
right but the m1 pro and max the more i hear about them the more i hear about the things that are different in those chips than just oh it's an m1 but with just more cores like the pro and the max have other stuff possibly one of those things being multi-chip interconnect for the duo and quad thing or whatever but also just the internal guts and however it's laid out of the execution units that the cache hierarchy all that stuff uh the gpu the way it's designed um so i do wonder
John:
how different the m2 might be like that maybe the m1 is very much like an a14x but the m2 is less like an a15x you know what i mean like we again we don't have a precedent for how much variation apple is willing to do how much customization they're willing to do and how much they're willing to lean into uh you know the
John:
the power potential of the m line of chips you know a little bit with the pro and the max because those are pretty gargantuan chips with a huge number of transistors and they do lots of amazing stuff um but for the m2 like i feel like the first one the m1 as amazing as it was apple's target they even said this stuff like they said their funny line in the introduction said we we might have overshot
John:
Like they weren't aiming for something as phenomenal as it turned out, right?
John:
I think they just would have been happy if it's an A14X that can run Mac stuff, but it was just fantastic.
John:
And maybe the M2, they actually are aiming higher and maybe they'll achieve that, but we'll see.
Casey:
I'm excited.
Casey:
I feel like there have been rumors, but I don't think that this is a known quantity.
Casey:
And I don't know, I should go back and listen to past pre-event shows and see if I've been saying this for the last six events running.
Casey:
But I don't know, I feel like Apple's done a pretty good job of keeping most of this close to the vest.
Casey:
And I'm excited that, you know...
Casey:
i find it much more fun to go in kind of not really knowing what to expect than than knowing exactly what's coming and probably next week we'll talk about like the rumors of the hole punch front sensors on the iphone 14 and and we've seen like renderings of it and that's fine and all but i don't know i kind of like being just shocked and and just being completely surprised
John:
I don't think you're going to be shocked because I think we've had individual episodes looking at the renders of all of these rumored products.
John:
So I don't think they're going to, I mean, the big iMac, does anyone think it's going to be anything other than a scaled up version of the 24 inch iMac that might be a little thicker and comes in gray?
John:
Like in terms of physical appearance, that's, I would be very surprised if it's anything but that.
Marco:
Well, I mean, that's an interesting question, though.
Marco:
Probably it's going to be positioned as a pro product.
Marco:
And so I would assume not only is it going to be available in gray, I would assume it's only available in shades of gray.
Marco:
That is, I think, a very likely direction.
Marco:
Honestly, I think that's a sad and boring direction to go in, but that's, I think, very likely.
Marco:
But also...
Marco:
do you think they would do things like have the external power supply?
Marco:
Is there going to be an Ethernet port internal to the Mac, or is it going to be on the brick, like the 13-inch?
Marco:
The 13-inch makes a bunch of compromises because it's a lower-end machine where aesthetics are more important.
Marco:
The bigger one...
Marco:
I think customers would say aesthetics are significantly less important.
Marco:
Apple, I think, would say they are more important than their customers would think.
Marco:
They're still a factor, yeah.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But to include the number of ports on the big iMac has always been pretty high, and that's a pretty big part of its utility.
Marco:
And to have all those ports and especially to have all those port types on the big iMac will require it to have significantly greater thickness than the smaller one.
Marco:
There's also a question of like, what if they don't use the chin design?
Marco:
If they're going for something thicker, this maybe looks a little more like an XDR, but like a little bit smaller and a little bit thinner than that.
Marco:
But if they're going for a more XDR-like design or an XDR-influenced design at least, what if they just make it, you know, thin bezels all around and just make the back of it a little bit thicker to have all the components?
John:
I think the chin is still going to be there because I think that's where they're going to put the computer.
John:
It's going to be thicker probably, but it's not going to be so much thicker that they can get rid of the chin.
John:
And for the external power supply, I honestly don't know.
John:
Like when I say it's going to be thicker, it's like, well, it could be thick enough to fit an Ethernet plug, but maybe.
John:
Maybe not.
John:
And it's not like they're going to ship this thing without Ethernet.
John:
So I feel like I'm leaning towards the stupid external.
John:
But it's not stupid.
John:
The external power supply.
John:
I don't think it's that ridiculous because we talked about this when the 24-inch iMac came out.
John:
It actually is kind of convenient to plug an Ethernet cable down with the stupid brick.
John:
The brick itself is not convenient.
John:
The brick is annoying.
John:
But if you've got the brick...
John:
I'd rather plug Ethernet into the brick than fish it up to my desk and through the little thing into the back of the computer.
John:
Because the more things you plug into the back, like the iMac, you know, the 5K iMac, it's got a lot of ports back there.
John:
And I have things plugged into almost all of them.
John:
And it's a lot of cables sneaking out the back of your computer.
John:
So if one of those could be on the floor, that does kind of clean things up.
John:
And we know Apple likes to keep things cleaned up.
John:
But yeah, a little bit thicker, but not a lot thicker.
John:
Like I don't expect an XDR type thing.
John:
And a lot of this also depends on, again, we keep calling this the big iMac.
John:
Will there be an iMac Pro or will there not?
John:
Is this the iMac Pro or is it just called iMac, right?
Casey:
Oh, that's an interesting question.
Casey:
I meant to talk to you about this.
Casey:
I personally do not think we're going to see another iMac Pro.
Casey:
And I would love to be wrong.
Casey:
I really would because gosh, did I love my iMac Pro that I just got rid of a couple of months back.
Casey:
But
Casey:
i don't i don't or how about maybe a different a way to different way to approach this what makes it let's assume that there is an imac pro what makes it better than the best 27 inch imac i mean like i guess the obvious answer is like an m1 max duo but then you're potentially trampling on mac pro aren't you or do you think that that would be quad only
John:
But no, it's an all-in-one.
John:
It's just like the iMac Pro.
John:
You're right that it's weird because the iMac Pro, as we've discussed many times, was supposed to be the Pro solution before they had decided they're going to make the Mac Pro again.
John:
And once they've made the Mac Pro again, do you still need to have an iMac Pro?
John:
I would say yes, because maybe some pros want an all-in-one computer.
John:
Why don't you make that for them?
John:
But you can make different choices for that computer.
John:
The existence of the iMac Pro would allow the big iMac that's not a Pro...
John:
to be just what we describe a scale of 24 inch and so on and so forth the big imac you know the imac pro could be thicker still uh could be thick enough to have ethernet ports on it could have 10 gig ethernet on the power brick through a different connector you know like the imac pro would i would expect it to be just as pro as the previous imac pro otherwise why even have that product
John:
But if branding says, we're just going to call the big iMac the iMac Pro, that's just what we're going to do.
John:
That doesn't convince me that they're going to be approaching that computer with the same mindset as they approach the original iMac Pro.
Marco:
I'm guessing that there is no two different models of the 27-inch anymore.
Marco:
There's going to be one 27-inch.
Marco:
They might call it iMac Pro.
Marco:
But there's only going to be one model, and if we get one on the 8th, it's going to be that model.
Marco:
I am not expecting them to have a mini Mac Pro version of the iMac.
Marco:
I think there's going to be the 24-inch that we see now, and that uses the M1 class of chips and whatever that line is going forward.
Marco:
And there's going to be the 27-inch version of it that they might call iMac Pro, although they might not.
Marco:
I'll get to it in a second.
Marco:
But that's going to use the MacBook Pro X version of these chips.
Marco:
And that's going to be it for the iMac line.
Marco:
And no duo in the iMac in that case.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm saying no duo in the iMac.
Marco:
But if you look at the website now,
Marco:
In the header and in the titles of these pigs, these computers are officially called iMac 24-inch and the current, hopefully soon to be outbound Intel version is called iMac 27-inch.
Marco:
So it's just iMac 24 and iMac 27.
Marco:
And I think those are actually a pretty good... That's a pretty good naming scheme.
Marco:
It makes it much more like laptops.
Marco:
And if they keep it like that...
Marco:
That wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.
Marco:
But that being said, I think the more likely outcome is that they call the big one a Mac Pro.
Marco:
Because I think it will have many of the distinctions that the MacBook Pro has.
Marco:
I think it's going to have the mini LED screen and, of course, the Pro and Max options on the chips.
Marco:
It'll have the higher resources of those chips and everything.
Marco:
So I think it's very likely that it's called iMac Pro because it matches MacBook Pro in so many feature distinctions from the model that's below it.
Marco:
But if they just keep it called iMac 27, that wouldn't surprise me that much either.
John:
it's kind of if they you know if the duo is a real thing and it would be kind of a shame if they never put it in an all-on-one computer you know because like even i understand like if they come up with the design it's like well the design doesn't really allow for that type of cooling and the duo is kind of a pro product anyway um
John:
I mean, we've been spoiled by the iMac Pro, but even some of the 5K iMacs.
John:
At various times, the 5K iMacs had the highest single-threaded CPU performance of any Mac, right?
John:
Usually.
John:
At most times, they did.
John:
Because they had fewer cores, right?
John:
But they also had the cooling capacity to run them at higher clock speeds.
Marco:
Well, and they would get the consumer-grade chips, so they'd be updated faster from Intel, and they would be updated more often by Apple.
Marco:
So it was all those factors going on.
John:
So I feel like a performance iMac is not unprecedented, and it would kind of be a shame to have this Duo thing.
John:
It's like, well, that would be – I think an M1 Pro slash Max Duo is an appropriate chip for a high-end iMac.
John:
And it would be a shame if they chose a big iMac design that didn't allow –
John:
for that not that bad because you still got the mac pro like it's not the end of the world but i kind of got used to the idea that a high performance imac is not uh you know a contradiction in terms even before the imac pro i got used to that but certainly the imac pro it showed that that style of computer it's all in one you get everything you need but also it's really really fast and you know has big cooling capacity to have powerful stuff that's a cool product and i hope someday they make that again not instead of the mac pro but in addition to it
Marco:
All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Collide, and Linode.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at adp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we'll talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
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-D-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-
Casey:
We're talking about Marco Christmas now, Casey.
Casey:
Yeah, I was just going to say, this is another example of the random thing in the show notes that I do not understand.
John:
It's not random.
John:
It's Marco Christmas.
John:
Did your Marco Christmas come?
John:
Oh, you're talking about the boxes I sent you for my clean outs?
Casey:
Oh, yes.
Casey:
Oh, I misunderstood.
Casey:
Yes, I did get Marco Christmas.
Casey:
And Marco and I had a conversation over text message about this.
Casey:
My Marco Christmas was a legitimate Christmas.
Casey:
It wasn't the school supply holiday.
Casey:
It was a legitimately good Christmas.
Casey:
So I found a large box on my front stoop, and I was very confused by it.
Casey:
And I looked at it, and I realized, oh, this is...
Casey:
marco christmas and it was very large and very heavy and so i lift it up and i bring it into the house and i open it up and there's you know just oodles and oodles of random packing material and then the first thing i saw i'm going to try to do a little foley work here the first thing i saw was this
Casey:
which is which is a baggie of one two three four five six seven ssds some of all of which appear to be intended for internal use and i do not have a enclosure just hanging around seven random ssds of sizes that i didn't even bother looking at because i have no freaking idea what i'm going to do with them but i can tell you the sizes one of them is 160 gigs that's the very first ssd i ever had from intel
Marco:
Four of them are, or maybe five, are one terabyte.
Marco:
And I think one of them is two terabytes.
John:
Oh, that's actually not that bad.
John:
Oh, you should send me the two terabyte one.
John:
I can use that.
John:
That's the hardware that I almost bought for iOS iMac because she's got the photo library on an external drive and it's one terabyte and it's full now.
John:
I'm like, oh, two terabyte would get room for that.
John:
And so I started doing some research.
John:
I'm like, no, stop.
John:
Don't buy anything.
John:
You're just going to buy a four terabyte big iMac.
John:
Stop.
John:
So I didn't buy anything.
Casey:
So Marco Christmas was already off to a good start, but that was not the majority of the volume of the box.
Casey:
And so I was like, what the hell is the rest of this stuff?
John:
It's all Kindles for packing material.
Casey:
No, you would think.
Casey:
I genuinely was expecting a bunch of Kindles.
Casey:
And I know that's usually your Christmas present, but I wasn't sure.
Marco:
Yeah, I sent that to John.
Casey:
Yeah, I wasn't sure if I would get some.
Casey:
And I went rifling through the packing material, and I see large, like, not boxes, but like rectangles that are, you know, rectangular solids or whatever that are in the box.
Casey:
I'm very confused, and I realize, oh...
Casey:
Oh, these are speakers.
Casey:
And then I look closer and they're the, what are these called again?
Marco:
The Paradigm Atom.
Marco:
There you go.
Casey:
The Paradigm Speakers, which appear to be very, very nice.
Casey:
And what the listeners don't know is that a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago,
Casey:
I had said in one of the private slacks that Marco and you and me all are a part of that I want a pair of computer speakers that in a perfect world would be self-powered.
Casey:
But I know that's not normally much of a thing unless they're like truly garbage.
Marco:
Yeah, it's a big thing.
Marco:
They just I have never found a good one.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So I wanted a set of speakers, preferably self-powered, but I understand that's probably not going to work, that I can use for my computer.
Casey:
And supreme audio fidelity is not particularly important.
Casey:
I just want something that's better than the mostly trash speakers that are in this LG 5K.
Casey:
And I do have the decent speakers on the MacBook Pro, but not only is that physically to the left side of me, but it's more often than not clamshelled.
Casey:
And so, yeah, I mean, I could still hear it.
Marco:
Please don't use those for music at your desk.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
I did briefly when I didn't have the LG 5K, which had at least, well, I was going to say passable.
Casey:
I'm not even sure they're passable speakers, but it had some sort of speaker.
Casey:
It has some sort of speakers in them.
Casey:
So yeah, so Marco sent me these two speakers.
Casey:
And again, I don't have an amp just laying around, but I'll absolutely take a pair of really good speakers and where I have to supply my own amp.
Casey:
Oh, what was me?
Casey:
I'm going to have to spend like $50 to $100 on an amp for these like God knows how much, how expensive they were speakers.
Casey:
So yeah.
Casey:
My Marco Christmas was fantastic.
Casey:
A++++++++ would receive unsolicited mail again.
Casey:
John, it sounds like you did not win the lottery like I did.
John:
Oh, I totally did.
John:
I had an awesome Marco Christmas.
John:
And by the way, the reason I call this Marco Christmas is it reminds me of Alston Christmas.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes so people know what Alston Christmas is.
John:
But it's basically when all the –
John:
students have to move and they take all their junk furniture that they don't want to move with and they just put it on the street and you can just go through Alston which is a area of Boston and wander around and you know if you want a used unfinished wooden desk you can get one in Alston Christmas if you want a really crappy computer chair you can get one in Alston Christmas anyway Mark Christmas is way better than that you get much better stuff
Marco:
Because when I clean out my closet, I don't want to bother with selling things.
Marco:
Selling things is a pain in the butt.
Marco:
And so if there's somebody in my life who can use it, then great.
Marco:
I would much rather just give it to the person who can use it.
John:
So last Mark of Christmas, I did get a big pile of Kindles, which are used as packing material for the other items.
John:
This time, I just...
John:
Because they're good.
John:
You can wedge them between things.
John:
This time I just got one Kindle, but it's a really cool, fancy Kindle.
John:
It's a Kindle Oasis in a cool, I guess it's the Amazon case, cool magnetic case thing.
Marco:
Yeah, this is actually the first Kindle Oasis.
Marco:
They updated it shortly afterwards and they made it like bigger and bulkier and worse.
Marco:
This is the very first Oasis before they made it big.
Marco:
um so it's actually i if i were still ever reading anything on a kindle i would have kept it because it's a great device for that but i haven't used it in like four years and i like i even i tried i tried turning it on to like you know reset it and clear it off and everything and i think it was having trouble even connecting to amazon servers so maybe it was like you know an expired certificate somewhere in the chain that's a problem i don't know but this is your problem now and the disappointing part is that i thought it would be funny if i could you know surround whatever i was sending you with kindles again and
Marco:
And I can only find this one.
Marco:
And then literally, like, I dropped it off at the post office the next day.
Marco:
And an hour after I dropped it off at the post office, I found two more Kindles.
John:
They're just like cockroaches.
John:
The Kindles you see are just nothing compared to the Kindles you don't see.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
So I don't read that much on Kindles.
John:
I don't read that much, period.
John:
But we are a Kindle household.
John:
Everyone else uses them.
John:
But I did claim this one for myself.
John:
My wife's got a fancier Oasis.
John:
Hers is actually nicer, newer than this one anyway.
John:
But I like this one.
John:
It's got physical buttons.
John:
I couldn't figure out the interface at first.
John:
I had to ask my wife because I opened up.
John:
It does work.
John:
I logged into my thing.
John:
I downloaded a bunch of books.
John:
I opened up the current book that I'm reading.
John:
And I couldn't figure out how to get off of the book reading screen.
John:
I like I tap the middle, you know, left and right would go page left, page right.
John:
I tap the bottom.
John:
The one place I didn't tap was where you do it.
John:
You got to tap on the top.
John:
Anyway, that's cool.
John:
So I got that.
John:
And then I found these other two boxes that like these long, skinny, heavy things.
John:
There's so much packing material in there.
John:
They're long, skinny, heavy things.
John:
And I open them up and they were identical.
John:
There was two of them.
John:
They were like, I don't know.
John:
10 inches long by two inches thick by three inches wide and they were heavy and they were like little velcro things and i open them up and it's like a velcro top and i open it up and there's like a flash looking at me like a an external flash like a big like not the really giant ones but like an external flash you put on a hot shoe on the top of like a big dslr and like
John:
you know rotate and bend you know it has like a hinge in the middle so you can aim at different spots and there was two of them i'm like why the hell you need two flashes then i saw they come with little stands uh where you can like mount them like oh i guess you could if you wanted to have two flashes like you know when you go to professional photographer they have multiple lights flashing at you at the same time you don't just want one flash and you don't want it to be on the camera you could put one on the left and one on the right that's the key off-camera flashes are way way better than on-camera flashes if you are in a situation where you can use them
John:
Yeah, and it's not like the big umbrella-sized things.
John:
It's still a hot shoe type thing, but it came with its own little foot that you could put the thing on.
John:
I'm like, well, what the hell am I going to do with this?
John:
I don't even have anything to communicate with them.
John:
And as far as I can tell, there is nothing that communicates with them.
John:
It's just two random flashes.
John:
I'm like, well, Marco's getting run into this junk.
John:
But then I saw the final thing, the final thing in the box, and it was very exciting.
John:
It was my best Marco Christmas ever, although kind of like Casey, who was given speakers but no amplifier.
Yeah.
John:
the gift that i got is an invitation a very dangerous invitation for me to spend way more money way more money so he sent me a camera that i didn't even know he had the sony a7iii which i don't when did you get this and why did you get this for video i got that for my youtube career
John:
oh that's that must have been i'm like why did you ever have because i know you had a bunch a series of a7r whatever's and stuff but i didn't even know you had an a7iii now i have an a7iii and it came with the kit lens right and that's why this is dangerous to me this is my very first full frame camera i was super excited to get it it's a terrible lens you don't want that lens
John:
yeah well that's exactly it it's like okay but now my now my eyes are filling with stars i'm like i know so much about sony lenses like i have i have notes documents filled with potential lenses right just going down i'm like now i have a full frame camera and i was like okay keep it under control because the a the a3 doesn't have as fancy of like
John:
uh subject detection and tracking stuff is my uh my newer uh a6600 it doesn't do pet eye detection it doesn't it can't keep up with fast action and it can't take as many pictures per second so i'm like the i'm telling my a6600 don't feel bad you're still you still have important purposes here and i have a lot of cool great lenses for you and so what i'm trying to do with this one is say do not buy a full complemented lenses to this camera because you will bankrupt yourself because the
John:
The full frame lenses are so much more expensive and so much bigger and so much heavier.
John:
And so I'm trying to confine myself to say, what I'm going to do with this camera is I'm going to do what this camera is good at.
John:
It's got a big sensor.
John:
It's got big fat pixels that can gather a lot of light.
John:
So I'm going to get a fast prime lens and use this for my indoor...
John:
I can't use any other camera because I need a big sensor lens because it's too dim in here.
John:
And that's it.
John:
I'm not going to buy a long zoom for it.
John:
I'm not going to buy like an everyday walking around zoom because this camera is big and heavy.
John:
I'm just going to buy one prime lens for this.
John:
And I go to my document where I had kept track of these.
John:
And I'm like, new things have come out since then.
John:
I did some more research.
John:
And I'm like...
John:
Found the lens that I probably think I wanted, and it's $2,000, and now I need to think about some stuff.
Marco:
Oh, my good grief.
Marco:
Which one?
Marco:
For your intended purpose here, what I would look at, having not paid attention to anything they've launched in the last couple of years, is the one that I actually have that I'm keeping, because I like it so much, the 55 1.8 Prime.
Marco:
It was one of the very first FE lenses.
John:
Oh, I know about it.
Marco:
It's really good, and it's very fast.
Marco:
It's extremely sharp.
Marco:
55 is a fantastic length on a full frame.
John:
Do you have the Zeiss one?
Marco:
No, just the Sony A55.
John:
No, it is Sony co-branded.
John:
They make two of them.
John:
Maybe the other one I'm thinking was 50.
John:
Look, is your lens cylindrical shaped or does it taper?
Marco:
Here, it's a perfect cylinder.
Marco:
I just pasted it in the link.
John:
It's about $1,000.
John:
That's the Zeiss one, yep.
Marco:
Yeah, the Sony A55 1.8.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
John:
People love that lens, but since that lens came out many years ago, Sony's newer lenses have better focusing motors in them, and they also sell a 1.2.
Marco:
This lens is very compact and light.
Marco:
I would expect a 1.2 would be neither of those things.
John:
I know.
John:
But again, for the purpose of my one lens that I'm going to buy for this camera, I'm like, well, I don't care about size.
John:
This is not going to be my portable walking around camera.
John:
I have a much smaller camera for that.
John:
And that has a good do everything lens.
John:
Anyway, I haven't bought anything yet.
John:
I'm not buying anything now.
Marco:
I would also say for whatever it's worth, the lens that I have used most often on Sony cameras is the 35 millimeter 2.8 because it's very small.
John:
Yeah, that's another thing I started looking into.
John:
the problem with the full frame is i don't all my sense of like what i like to use is calibrated for aps-c cameras yeah so i like 35 millimeter because i went in that direction like but there's a bunch of good 35 millimeter primes too but i don't i don't like my my intuition about what sizes mean and how they work in a camera are totally screwed up because it's like and there's all these converters that say like oh if you want to see what is this thing this lens on an aps-c equals this lens on you know
John:
but the conversions never go the other way because why would anyone go the other way but for me like i don't know if i like i have a 50 millimeter 1.8 it's my favorite lens for my aps-c cameras right then you want to get this 35 no because the 50 millimeter on aps-c is zoomed it's more like a 70 oh it's like 85 sorry i went backwards yeah it's like 85
John:
And so so but I thought, well, if I get a 55, I can always just crop in.
John:
But then like 35, I've never been a fan of 35.
John:
I feel like it's too far out for a prime for the type of pictures I take of people.
Marco:
The 35 will look a lot like an iPhone one X camera.
Marco:
It's not it's not quite the same, but that's more like a 28.
Marco:
But it's like it's in the ballpark.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the other lens I'm looking at going the other direction there, there's actually really good Sony 85 millimeter prime, which is not the same as the 76, which is sort of the equivalent of my fifties, but it's a little bit more than that.
John:
But I'm like, but indoors, then it gets too much and I have to get too far away from people.
John:
So I'm still leaning towards the 1555s.
John:
But the point is, this is incredibly dangerous because I love lenses and I love reading about reviews and I have a bunch of them already.
John:
I did actually put a bunch of my APS-C lenses on here just to see how it would go with the crop sensor.
John:
But, you know, you don't want to go that far.
John:
that route but it does work like and if i needed to i could just bring this into my existing lenses like they are physically compatible you just don't expose the whole sensor which is a shame because it's only a 24 megapixel sensor and you know doing an aps-c size chunk of that is is not great um but yeah so i'm just putting this aside this thing that you have landed in my house will eventually cost me a lot of money but for now for now i am in research mode i have other things that i'm researching that cost me a lot of money sooner than the camera so
Marco:
I would honestly say this would be a good opportunity to use lens rentals or something to just rent three of these primes for a weekend and just get a feel for what you actually want.
Marco:
You could probably get three of them for a weekend for a few hundred bucks and that could possibly affect what you spend $500 to $2,000 on.
John:
I can, there is a cheap 1.8 for like 500 bucks that I could just, there's a 50 to just to see if I like a 50, but I don't know.
John:
I've just, I spent a lot of the time with a lot of tabs open and I just went around and around and around and just like keep coming back to don't just let it stew for a while.
John:
Don't buy anything now.
John:
well if you're going to be in in that range i'm telling you that 55 1.8 is so good like it's i know but there's newer ones the newer one they have i don't care about the bulk of the newer one i don't even care about the 1.2 that's not what i care about i care about the fact that it's it's optically even better and has faster focusing you will care about the bulk when when it's on the camera yeah we'll see
Marco:
Because these cameras, compared to SLRs, even a full-frame mirrorless is a pretty small and light camera.
Marco:
And when you put a giant 1.2 lens in the front of it, it becomes kind of weird to handle.
Marco:
It's a very lopsided handling thing.
Marco:
Whereas the lightweight 1.8 primes are significantly better balanced.
John:
I mean, and that's the other thing I have to remember is that 1.8 in full frame is not the same as that the converters will do this conversion to you.
John:
It's not the same as 1.8 in APS-C.
John:
You have to do sort of that conversion of like, under what conditions can I take a decent picture with this camera and how fast can the subject be moving?
John:
I have to redo all of that math in my head because it's different on these things.
John:
So we'll see.
John:
I'll do something.
John:
I'm going to save it probably...
John:
probably won't do anything until the summer, right?
John:
So I go on vacation.
John:
I'm going to take both these cameras with me now.
John:
And it'll be nice because when I would take my first camera, my first summer, this past summer with a 6600 on the beach, I had to change lenses a lot because I have the big giant zoom for when people are out in the waves.
John:
But then when you're back on the beach towel, that's not the right lens for the job.
John:
So now I got to switch.
John:
I don't want to switch too much because you can imagine how fraught the experience of switching lenses is for me on a sandy beach.
John:
I'm able to do it, but it is a stressful experience.
John:
So I try to minimize the number of times I do that.
John:
But if I just had two cameras, one with the prime for the beach things and one with the zoom for the waves and the action and the bazillion frames per second.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And plus, you wouldn't want a full frame giant zoom because that would be so expensive and so big and so heavy.
John:
Forget it.
John:
I need a tripod.
John:
The white lenses that they take pictures of the servers with.
John:
But I'm not not doing that.
Marco:
no and i really i i would strongly suggest try the 55 1.8 because you know so there's 1.2 the 51.2 i i can tell you like i've had i've shot with 51.2 before because tiff has one for the canon system that she got forever ago and actually gruber got it first and we tried his at south by southwest a million years ago and then as soon as we came home tiff's like i have to have that lens
Marco:
So I've shot with it a few times.
Marco:
First of all, the 1.2s, by being so much bigger and heavier, usually, I haven't done the research on these, usually they focus more slowly because they have much more glass to move and it's a much bigger thing.
Marco:
But also, again, the handling is pretty rough.
Marco:
But you never actually shoot a 1.2.
Marco:
unless you're trying to do some special you know blur thing for like you know maybe a wedding portrait maybe you might do it for then but if that's what you're doing you wouldn't use 50 millimeter like you you would use a further zoomed in one to do that um so yeah i whenever i have a really fast lens like this i i almost never shoot it wide open or even anywhere close to wide open usually i'll like that that 55 does great at like 2.2 to 2.8
Marco:
I would almost never run it below that just because then you get into the situation where the person's eyes are in focus but their nose isn't or something like that.
Marco:
You're not even getting the whole subject in focus, let alone nailing it or whatever.
Marco:
So I would say –
Marco:
this is a really good candidate for a rental.
Marco:
Like, you should rent the giant 50 millimeter lens and then you should also rent the smaller I'm telling you to get and see which one you actually end up liking the handling and stuff more.
Marco:
Because I bet it won't be what you expect.
Marco:
And if it is, then at least you can come back and say that you told me so.
John:
Uh, it's, it's a focusing speed that I'm worried about.
John:
And also I do kind of like the aperture ring on the, on the big G one as well.
John:
Like that's the fact that I don't have to use the, I always find it weird to use the aperture controls with the dials on the camera and having it actually on the lens and having the lens override what the camera does and having it be clicky and everything is kind of appealing to me, but maybe, maybe rental, maybe I'll just talk myself out of ever buying a lens this expensive for my purposes, just pointless anyway.
John:
But, uh, then again, I do have this Mac pro here, so we'll see how that goes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
One,
Marco:
but and even then like what you said like that's worth considering like if you're if your alternative is just having the kit lens for a whole summer and missing out on a summer of good pictures with this i'm never i'm never gonna use this kit lens right you should i mean i've taken a bunch of pictures around the house to try out the camera but it has convinced me that yeah
John:
no the kit lens is garbage they always are it's not it's not bad for a kit lens it's actually a pretty good kit lens but all all my other lenses are designed to not be this even my zoom lens is specifically like a zoom lens that actually isn't completely horrible um so yeah no trust me get get a nice light prime for it you will you will be very happy with it