Market Your Bug
Casey:
I feel like I should acknowledge that if something weird happens, it could be my fault because I have a brand new computer that I'm recording on.
Casey:
Marco, it could be your fault because you have a brand new computer that you're recording on.
Casey:
And it could actually even be John's fault because his computer is so old, busted, ancient, and slow that it could be his fault after all.
Casey:
We don't know.
Casey:
Nobody knows.
John:
I think you mean reliable.
Casey:
Slow and steady wins the race.
I see.
John:
But why are you worried about your computers?
John:
There's nothing weird about your computers.
John:
I mean, yes, they are new, but like, do you expect there to be problems?
John:
They're not too different from the computers you're replacing them.
Casey:
We're also jumping ahead, and I need to put the kibosh on this until we get there.
Marco:
We don't want to spoil the fact that we buy new computers frequently.
Right.
Casey:
Well, especially one of us.
Marco:
Who has bought the newest computer here?
Marco:
Oh, you.
Marco:
That's right.
Casey:
It's you.
Casey:
Oh, by a week.
Casey:
It's like I'm the older twin because I'm five minutes older.
Casey:
Anyway, but no, when I got on the call this evening, first thing Marco said to me was, oh, you're on the wrong mic, which was true for the record.
John:
I mean, that never happened with the old computer, so you're right.
John:
This is a big change.
Casey:
This is your second notice.
John:
Second of three.
Casey:
Second of three notices.
John:
Also known as the second to last.
Marco:
Also true.
Marco:
I'm warning you with peace and love.
Casey:
The ATP Holiday Gifts whatever store is here at ATP.fm slash store.
Casey:
Now is the time.
Casey:
And let me remind you, if you are an ATP member, and I assure you, almost all of the cool kids are.
Casey:
There's only a few cool kids left that aren't.
Casey:
So if you're an ATP member that you can join at ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
By the way, to be clear,
Marco:
You can join even if you're not cool.
Casey:
I think actually by joining, you become cool.
Casey:
And we're not going to do any further research on that.
Marco:
Yeah, we're going to leave that as a theoretical.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So if you wanted to partake in this, a time-limited, as we call it, sale, this is one of those times that you get 15% off anything you buy from the ATP store in this time-limited sale.
Casey:
You can go into your member dashboard or whatever we're calling it.
Casey:
to get your bespoke discount code that you use at Cotton Bureau.
Casey:
But yes, now is the time to buy gifts for you.
Casey:
Hey, you know what?
Casey:
You know what you should do, Marco?
Casey:
You should treat yourself.
Casey:
You should get yourself a gift.
Casey:
You could have somebody else treat you.
Casey:
You can treat somebody else.
Casey:
Treats all around, I tells you.
Casey:
So John, can you walk us through what are the wares we have on offer today?
John:
We went through them all last week.
John:
The headlining stuff that you need to know is that there's a new shirt where we tried to do the logo out of pixels, which is at the bleeding edge of what is possible on printing.
John:
And so that's exciting.
John:
Give it a try.
John:
Live on the edge with us.
John:
And then we have a space black joke shirt where the logo is not quite black, just like the new
John:
then we have a bunch of m3 shirts which are like the m2 and m1s were uh we have a the atp6 color shirt where the shirts come in lots of different colors but the logo is just white on all of them that's the main colorful one then we have the plain atp1 the hoodie the polo a new mug and pint glasses and the only thing i want to add that we didn't mention last week is that
John:
The mugs and the pint glasses, unlike the other things, like we have to guess how many we're going to sell these and we order them up front in a certain amount, which means that they may run out.
John:
So if you want a mug or if you want a pint glass, don't wait because they may run out.
John:
And if they run out, that's it.
John:
Like we can't get any more in time for anything close to the holidays.
John:
So.
John:
uh you know don't wait on the on the mugs and the pint glasses every time we sell mugs people send us pictures of all their mugs that they broke you know and it's like you know be careful someone someone dropped their mug on their ipad no no they dropped their ipad on their mug oh either way so we already know the power of the ipad it shatters windshields it destroys mugs the ipad is indestructible unless you drop it by itself and then it shatters
Marco:
In all fairness, the mug damage on the drop incident was actually, it was only like a little chip off the side.
Marco:
The mug was mostly intact.
Marco:
It was a pretty big chip.
Marco:
I think that suggests that the mug might be more sturdy than windshields.
John:
That's true.
John:
Oh, yeah, for sure.
John:
Well, not wielded by Casey, though.
John:
We don't know.
John:
We don't know the velocities involved here.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
But yeah, it's just got a patina now, the mug.
Casey:
But yes, we are saying this in part for our own selfish purposes, because we want you to buy and buy now.
Casey:
But also really and truly, that isn't a lie.
Casey:
Like we did.
Casey:
I don't remember the quantities.
Casey:
And honestly, I don't know if we tell you anyway, but we have limited quantities of the mug and the glass.
Casey:
We should have enough if you order anytime soon.
Casey:
But if you're concerned, order now.
John:
Yeah, don't wait on those.
John:
And the other things you don't have to worry about, but you do have to worry about the sale ending.
John:
Again, I worry about people who like who want this, but it's a perfect gift for someone to get you.
John:
If you're hard to shop for and people don't know what to get you and you're afraid they're going to get you socks or something, send them this link.
John:
Do not be shy.
John:
You can't beat around the bush.
John:
You can't lay hints.
John:
You have to say, look, the sale ends November 26th.
John:
And I really want one of these things.
John:
I know you think it's dumb, but I like this.
John:
Like, that's what you have to communicate.
John:
Say, I know this stuff looks dumb and expensive, but I like this podcast and this would be a good gift for me.
John:
Tell somebody who actually wants to get you a gift, tell them that and send them the link before the sale ends.
John:
some breaking news we've actually added not new designs but some new other things john can you elaborate a little bit for me yeah a couple people asked hey do you have long sleeve versions of these and i was like i meant to do that because we did we did add sweatshirts to a lot of them like instead of just t-shirts a lot of them come in sweatshirt variants it's the same product like the product will be called like atp space black and that comes in short sleeve t-shirt sweatshirt but now also long sleeve t-shirt some of them even come in tank tops like not every variety is on everything but
John:
think oh i don't want a t-shirt so i don't want to click on that click through on the design that you like and see if it's offered in sweatshirt long sleeve t-shirt tank top whatever you want and we also added youth and kid sizes we can't do baby sizes for these because they like the whatever the printing process is the logo is the same color and this logo is too big to fit on a baby the on-demand ones i think they can do on babies because that's a different printing process where it's just like well i i don't know anything about how it works but i imagine in my head that's more like an inkjet printer that can print anything whereas these are like
John:
i don't know some kind of like pattern that they run ink through or something anyway point is no infants for these but we do have youths and kids sizes which are like smaller than adult sizes and we do have long sleeve tees on several of them and switcher it's on several of them so they're good for winter weather so check them out
Casey:
And as a final note on that, the youth sizes were a request from my beloved wife, Erin, who has said, and I think I'm pretty damn sure she said it jokingly, but she said, you know, when you, the three of you are just swimming Scrooge McDuck style in all of your merch proceeds, because everyone has gotten youth sized teas for their children or friends, children, or what have you, you know, I should thank Erin.
Casey:
So if you would like her to be able to rub something in my face, probably until the end of time,
Casey:
Go ahead and buy your friends, kids, your kids, your random kids.
Casey:
Throw them in the schools like a t-shirt cannon at a stadium.
Casey:
I'm sure that won't be awkward or get you in trouble at all.
Casey:
Buy some youth sizes too.
Casey:
I believe this is the first time we've offered anything in youth sizes.
Casey:
So check it out, atp.fm.
Casey:
We also have something else to talk about.
Casey:
We have a new member special.
Casey:
And I don't know, Marco, would you like to take a stab at describing this and then John can correct you?
Yeah.
Marco:
So, you know, as we've discussed in the show a little bit here and there, in recent months, John has been working on the CMS.
Marco:
And the CMS is something that I wrote in PHP originally.
Marco:
And so John has been learning, well, reluctantly plowing through PHP.
Marco:
And we thought, what is better content than having John talk about his learning process of learning not only PHP, but learning my totally undocumented framework that is a custom framework that no one else uses, basically.
Marco:
And also, you know, the whole code base to the CMS, which, you know, let's be honest, it was not like, it was never my top priority.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
So, John had to wade through that, and we made him talk about it and recorded it, and I think it's pretty good.
John:
Yeah, the title of it is The More Aspirational, My More Aspirational Goal, which is the title, this format of title for our specials I'm rapidly regretting, but now it's kind of becoming a joke, which is...
John:
Something colon and then something else, right?
John:
So we do ATP top four for the ones that are like top four format that makes sense.
John:
ATP eats for the ones where we eat gross foods, ATP movie club or whatever where we watch movies.
John:
This one is ATP dev colon other people's code.
John:
And I hope to make it more broadly applicable to like, hey, so you're a software developer.
John:
Guess what you're going to be doing?
John:
You're going to be looking at other people's code a lot.
John:
And what is that like?
John:
And obviously the concrete example is I'm looking at other people's code.
John:
It's Marco CMS stuff or whatever.
John:
But we hope it's more broad than that.
John:
If not, you can just hear me.
John:
I tried to lay off complaining about PHP too much because like, yeah, whatever.
John:
We get it.
John:
It's gross.
John:
We've had many shows where we've talked about that.
John:
But the more applicable thing is like, what is it like, not just for a program, but anything, what is it like when you don't get to define everything from the ground up?
John:
And what is it like when you do?
John:
Like with Marco's perspective, he did get to write this thing from the ground up, but that means it's a weird thing that only he knows and that he didn't document that he's not interested anymore, but it still exists and it still runs.
John:
And anyway, that's what the episode is about.
John:
We hope you find it entertaining.
John:
As we said on this member special, the next one, the one for December, will probably not be tech related.
John:
We'll see what that ends up being.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And remember, atp.fm slash join.
Casey:
You can join for as little as a month.
Casey:
You can join for a year.
Casey:
You can grab all the member specials, get your discount, and then cancel.
Casey:
And because we respect you, that's easy to do.
Casey:
But because you love us, you won't do that.
Casey:
You're going to join and say, holy smokes, this is the best decision I've ever made.
Casey:
Happy Christmas, Hanukkah, birthday, whatever to me.
Casey:
I'm just going to stick with it.
Casey:
And that's what we recommend.
Casey:
So atp.fm slash join, atp.fm slash store.
Casey:
Treat yourself.
Casey:
Now's the time.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Todd Shiresky writes, amen to Face ID on Macs.
Casey:
As someone that uses his Mac completely hands-free, Face ID on the studio display and MacBooks would be a game changer.
Casey:
I am paralyzed from the shoulders down.
Casey:
Having Face ID in place when Apple's accessibility feature, Voice Control, came about was truly a life-changing moment.
Casey:
It gave me complete independence, being able to operate my phone and iPad by voice completely by myself.
Casey:
It would be nice to have the same independence with my MacBook and Macs connected to the studio display.
Casey:
I've been telling myself I need to try to work on being more aware of the non-vanilla case for everything.
Casey:
That's oftentimes thinking about accessibility, but not exclusively.
Casey:
And this was just a complete oversight on my part.
Casey:
And I thought Todd made the point very succinctly, yeah, we should think about that.
Casey:
And that would be real.
Casey:
I mean, it would be nice for all of us, as with most accessibility things, but it would be doubly nice for those of us who have that kind of need.
Casey:
So I thought that was a great point.
John:
and especially the studio display because you don't have problems of like oh it's not thick enough you know what i mean like you know or or like that's that's a place where i feel like you can solve these problems uh and apparently they're not afraid to add hundreds of dollars for accessories like the stand so i just throw a face idea in there yeah something tells me that they have the margin in that product to add the one additional sensor because like they already have a camera and you're right they have room you know at the wazoo in that product so
Marco:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure they could add the IR blaster thing, and that would be fine.
Marco:
Especially when you look at how inexpensive the phones are now that have it in it.
Marco:
It's like, okay, now almost every iPhone model, including almost every one of the less expensive ones, has Face ID now.
Marco:
And it's probably a very short matter of time before they all have them.
Marco:
Once they do the next iPhone SE, it might be all Face ID at that point.
Marco:
So it's no longer a cost thing.
Marco:
You look at the studio display, and there's a few misses in that product.
Marco:
So maybe it just didn't make it in in time or whatever.
Marco:
But hopefully when they update their monitors, which they do very frequently, I'm sure it's just a small matter of time.
John:
Once a generation, they update the monitors.
Yeah.
John:
We mean human generations, not hardware generations.
Casey:
I don't want to think about it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Jamie West writes, oily noses are not just useful for testing for fingerprints.
Casey:
I can't find the original source now, but at some point in the past, BBC TV technicians used vision mixers, which had faders that would sometimes get a bit sticky.
Casey:
causing the crossfades to visibly not be smooth.
Casey:
As everything was basically still done live back then, you couldn't exactly stop to perform some quick maintenance.
Casey:
But often a quick rub on the side of the operator's nose and an application of nose grease to the fader would be enough to get it unstuck and moving smoothly again.
Casey:
So first of all, yuck.
Casey:
Second of all, that's actually kind of interesting.
John:
This sounds a lot like something that a British person would make up to tell Americans to make them.
John:
See how gullible they are.
John:
Yeah, surely.
John:
How do you get the grease down into the part where the friction surfaces meet?
John:
Like, you could put grease on the top of it, but that doesn't help you.
John:
Anyway, I hope this isn't true.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then we have microwave follow-up because how could we not?
Casey:
This is the Accidental Appliance Podcast.
Casey:
Nate writes, the modern knob.
Casey:
That was the whole tweet or toot, I guess.
Casey:
And it's a photograph of a LG microwave.
Casey:
It has a display in the upper right-hand corner.
Casey:
It has what appears to be a horizontal slider labeled time with a minus on one side, a plus on the other, and then stop start buttons.
Casey:
That's the whole microwave.
Casey:
That's the toot.
John:
I saw this, and I thought of, like, car controls, and I was thinking, like, that's, like, a touch slider.
John:
You know how they do those things?
John:
Like, instead of having a volume knob in a car, they'll have, like, this little tiny region with some gloss black plastic where you swipe your finger to change the volume.
John:
It's like... It's like it was a contest.
John:
You've seen these things.
John:
There's, like, a contest for, like, how...
John:
make the worst kind of progress bar, I think, with a dialog box.
Casey:
Have you seen those, right?
John:
This is like that, but in real life.
John:
Someone's like, how can we make the worst, most annoying interface to a microwave?
John:
And it's like, how about just a knob?
John:
No, too simple.
John:
How about a plus and a minus button?
John:
And I really hope you can swipe between them because that would just make it so much worse.
John:
This is terrible.
Casey:
Yeah, it's so bad.
Casey:
And yet, I feel like, for me, I've found one worse.
Casey:
And Keith Bradnum writes, I love our microwave for its rejection of any complexity.
Casey:
Just four buttons.
Casey:
Microwave, defrost, start, and stop slash cancel.
Casey:
I'm not kidding, folks.
Casey:
We will put a link in the show notes to a photograph of this microwave.
Casey:
It's a display.
Casey:
Microwave, defrost, stop, start, and cancel.
Casey:
Or excuse me, stop, cancel, and start.
John:
What has the microwave done?
John:
You think the microwave done is like 30 seconds?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But anyway, Keith continues.
Casey:
You repeatedly press the microwave or defrost buttons to set the cooking time.
Casey:
It has an LED display, but I love how it doesn't even bother to include a clock.
John:
And sure enough, in this... Well, that's a feature, not a bug.
John:
Not having a clock is great.
Marco:
Yeah, honestly, I wish fewer appliances would have clocks on them because that's fewer things that you have to reset every time they get out of sync or daily saving time happens.
John:
That's fair.
John:
Or they would just set themselves based on the weird AM radio thing or like, I mean, everything has internet access now.
John:
But yeah, microwave interfaces are the opposite of what Twitter apps were.
John:
They're a UI playground for people to do terrible things.
Yeah.
Marco:
I will say, though, the feedback suggests that knob-based microwaves are actually extremely common everywhere except the U.S.
John:
Yeah, but did you see the European ones that they sent pictures of?
John:
They look a lot like the, like, kitchen timer, like mechanical tiki-tiki one, and that's not really what you want.
John:
Like, I know that's also a knob, but it's like the kind of thing where to get it back to zero, you can, like, push it and it goes, and it's just not great.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right, now we move into the scanning photos corner.
Casey:
Ryan writes, I'm the crazy one who decided to scan my family photos, crop them, and apply dates.
Casey:
I wrote a post on how I went about it, and we'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
It took a couple of years, but it's been incredible being able to go back and find photos by dates, get face detection photos, et cetera.
Casey:
Then friend of the show Todd Vaziri writes, one of our pandemic projects was to do something about the thousands of prints and film negatives that we had in shoeboxes in our basement and finally get them digitized.
Casey:
We ultimately used a service called Scan Cafe and were extremely happy with the results.
Casey:
The print scans were far better than anything we could have accomplished at home and the negative scans were spectacular.
Casey:
However, one thing to keep in mind before anyone embarks on a project like this is to plan and organize before you ship off your prints and negatives immediately.
Casey:
And be prepared for tons of work after you get the scans.
Casey:
Create logical batches of prints and negatives in chronological order as best you can because the service will honor your naming conventions.
Casey:
Once you get your scans, you could simply import them all into Apple Photos and be done.
Casey:
But taking that extra step of assigning them dates at a minimum and at maximum with geotags and captions will take hours and hours and hours of work.
Casey:
Be prepared.
Casey:
And all in all, we organized scan categories and dated over 3,500 photos that span over three decades.
Casey:
And I'm so glad we took the time to do so because now we have an incredible organized digital photo library that are backed up in triplicate and we never have to worry about losing our physical prints or negatives ever again.
John:
Yeah, I forgot to mention this with my scanning thing.
John:
Although it doesn't take, depending on how much work you put into it, it doesn't take that much time.
John:
Certainly not as much time as scanning with my stupid slow scanner.
John:
But the problem that you will encounter is when was this taken?
John:
If you're lucky, you have that obnoxious burned in like little seven segment display date on the picture.
John:
And if you're extra lucky, that date is right.
John:
Because speaking of setting your clocks on things, not everyone was good about setting the clocks on their like instant cameras or whatever, not instant cameras, but their, you know, their film cameras.
John:
So very often that date can be wrong.
John:
But the older the pictures get, like before the advent of that kind of date stamping, like in my childhood, those things didn't really exist.
John:
Like, what year was this?
John:
How old do I look here?
John:
Am I seven?
John:
Am I eight?
John:
Am I four?
John:
Like, if you're lucky, you can see, okay, this is when we lived in that house, in this town.
John:
And then you get into stuff from, like, my parents' childhood.
John:
They don't know when it is.
John:
I've been telling my parents, when was this taken?
John:
They're like, I don't know, sometime in this decade range.
John:
Oh, it's brutal.
John:
And the sooner you do it, the more relatives you have who are alive who could perhaps date them.
John:
I have super old pictures that I got from my uncle scanned a lot of stuff from his father.
John:
So they're super old black and white pictures.
John:
And I'm lucky if I can get a decade.
John:
I do surveys with relatives like, which decade do we think this is?
John:
40s or 50s?
John:
Forget about geotagging with location.
John:
And they're like, oh, by the way, who's in this picture?
John:
There's Uncle Bob.
John:
I have no idea who these two people are.
John:
Does anybody know?
John:
it gets harder the longer you wait and even for your own pictures even for your own pictures like i can tell we were in college but what year were we in college right it's really difficult to do and so what you kind of have to do and i really really wish photos had this feature although it's not on my very long list of things that i want them to add immediately but um the concept in and boolean logic of don't cares where i want to be able to put in a date and i can say look all i got is the year this is 1962 i got nothing else right but you can't do that in photos yeah you got to make up a month and a day
John:
right and so you have to come up with a convention where i just do january 1st at like 12 a.m but what if something legitimately happened on january 1st like wow we take a lot of pictures when we're hung over after new year's right yeah or like and it's summertime yeah and then you'll find one then you'll find one that you have a date for but now it's all messed up because you know that one came between these ones but you shove them all up into january and even though you don't know the months for those you know this one was somewhere in the middle of them
John:
It's very difficult.
John:
Even if you just know it's the 60s, you can't put like if you put 1960 later, you're going to remember that.
John:
Oh, that wasn't really 1960.
John:
I just put 1960 because I didn't know which year in the 60s it was.
John:
So photo apps aren't good at that.
John:
So do the best you can.
John:
That's why photo albums where someone wrote in like, you know, grandmotherly cursive right next to them with dates and stuff.
John:
That is a godsend.
John:
But yeah, do the best you can and realize that that is going to be even if you get them scanned, that's going to be the majority of your work, especially if you're not organized, like Todd says.
John:
when you send them off because they'll send them back to you.
John:
And sometimes the, there is no discernible order.
John:
And sometimes the order is just whatever you sent them in and who knows if that order is right.
John:
So yeah, that's a big job.
John:
And, uh, the longer you wait, the harder it gets.
Casey:
Nathaniel Velez writes, on the topic of things Apple still needs to improve on its laptops, at the top of my list is the durability of the plastic used for the keyboards.
Casey:
They become shiny with just a few days of use because of your fingertips being able to sand and polish the plastic.
Casey:
I always thought that was unavoidable since this happens with most cheap keyboards, but since getting a slightly fancier mechanical keyboard that doesn't have this issue, I learned that if Apple used different materials, we would not have to live with laptop keyboards that look disgusting.
Casey:
I'm always curious why people don't complain about this more.
Casey:
I was happy to see at least one review from CNET that mentioned the shiny, disgusting keyboard problem.
Casey:
Man, I am mealy-mouthed today.
Casey:
Anyways, we have a link in the show notes.
Casey:
I definitely noticed that my finger grease gets on the keyboard, and I don't ever feel like I've worn a keyboard down to the point that...
Casey:
It's, you know, the paint on it is being lost.
Casey:
Maybe it's because, although I do not change keyboards and computers like Marco changes his keyboards and computers, which is like most change their underwear.
Casey:
He never changes his keyboard.
Marco:
It's the same one.
Marco:
It just keeps rotating.
Marco:
Well, yeah.
Marco:
I have many, many copies of the same one, which appears to now be finally fully for real discontinued.
Marco:
Oh, I'm sorry.
Marco:
They're all gone from Amazon and stuff.
John:
Me with my cheese graters and you with your keyboards.
John:
We're just running through the back catalog now.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
At some point in the next 15 years, I might run out of them and have to switch keyboards.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Same with my cheese graters.
Casey:
Anyways.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I find that, yeah, the finger grease thing is a thing for me every month or so.
Casey:
And there's no real schedule to it.
Casey:
It's just when I noticed my keyboard is getting gross.
Casey:
I'll take one of the Mr. Clean magic erasers.
Casey:
I think there is a non, you know, that's the, what is it?
Casey:
Proprietary eponym, the Xerox, you know, name for it.
Marco:
What you're looking for is melamine foam.
Marco:
That's the actual thing.
Marco:
It's like a very, very, very fine abrasive.
John:
You got to be careful because some, some of those are also infused with some gunk, like not gunk, but like.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Some of them have like detergent.
John:
yeah and you really don't want to put that in your computer yeah when you if you're buying a magic eraser make sure it's like the plain like unscented unflavored yeah yeah because like yeah i one time i accidentally bought a little box of like the ones that use them and they like foam up with soapy something yeah and it's like oh this is totally wrong and i don't know if i would even want that grit to go there i know we don't have butterfly keyboards anymore but that stuff does kind of like flake a little bit when you're using it but anyway casey why are you taking a magic eraser what are you trying to remove like
Casey:
So to get the paint, yeah.
Casey:
No, to get the keyboard or the finger grease off the keyboard.
Casey:
I've been doing this for years and years across many, many, many different laptops.
John:
But why do you need abrasive to do that?
Casey:
You don't need abrasive.
Casey:
It's just it works well.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's just it's what I've found that works the best.
Casey:
I'm sure that's not the only way to do it.
Casey:
Maybe even just a damp cloth would be enough.
Casey:
But that's what I've always used and it's worked well for me.
John:
yeah i would i would i would suggest you maybe not do that and instead use the very slightest of dampness on a thing because you just want to like carry away the finger grease will come off pretty easily you just got to get a cleanish thing there to anyway don't don't do the keyboard this annoys me we talked about this before it annoys me that ipads i guess it's annoying too but especially macs
John:
are so not waterproof like the phones are and for reasons that make sense like there are reasons but uh maybe we'll get this if we actually get to this topic boy it would be great if they did that better because that because it makes cleaning your keyboard on your macbook and your macbook especially so fraught if you're like oh i have a vaguely damp cloth and i'm just gonna use this to do the keys and you wad it up a little bit and you press it and the little droplet of water comes out and it slips between the key and the thing you're like no like
John:
You do not want water to go inside that thing at all.
John:
You know, you can clean it when it's upside down and it's annoying.
John:
You've got to buy those apps that disable the keyboard so the thing doesn't turn back on.
John:
It's too fraught.
John:
But on the topic, Nathaniel's question about, like, why don't people complain about the keyboards being gross?
John:
I think we've talked about this before.
John:
Some people have fingers that excrete something out.
John:
that destroys keyboards and it is not a personal failing it does not show that they are haunted by demons it is just a thing wow there is no value judgment here but it's a thing that happens we all know people if you've you know worked in offices or whatever you know they'll have like a standard issue keyboard for the whole company or everyone will have macbook pros and one person will wear the letters off their keys within two weeks another person will use a keyboard for seven years and be typing madly on it all the time and it will be fine
John:
Setting aside finger grease, which is an aesthetic thing of, like, how greasy it doesn't look, it's a separate issue.
John:
I'm saying the people who have, like, I don't actually know what it is.
John:
Is it acidic?
John:
Is it they have calluses on their hands?
John:
I don't know what it is, but something about their hands just really wears down the keycaps.
John:
In terms of using different materials, I think matte versus glossy makes a difference.
John:
kind of like it does for the fingerprint showing up on like the glossy mirrored apple logo on the back of the new laptops versus the the anodized matte bumpy thing or whatever so that is a factor so part of that is the uh johnny ive hangover of like boy the keyboards look nice when no one has ever touched them and they're glossy black but then of course you touch it same thing with piano black interiors on cars which they're still making this year they're still making them please stop people it scratches so easily it looks horrendous do you remember how bad that was in the m5 marco it was
John:
awful yeah the piano black oh god they still do you believe they still do that like every car review for the past five years it's a would go has some section they said oh and they use piano black on the interior and they roll their eyes and and with they with a knowing look to the audience this is of course we all know this is a bad idea but the car makers don't think it's a bad idea probably because it looks good in the showroom and they don't care what it looks like after they sell it to you anyway
John:
i mean in all fairness it does look really nice yes until you touch it or any dust goes near it yeah it's very similar to the jet black iphone 7 finish like yeah it it scratches instantly but even with some scratches on it it still looks really nice but they also it also like the dust shows up on it a lot like especially in a car if you ever carry pets or anything or if you ever use a tissue and blow your nose and the tissue dust like goes out of this it's
John:
not a good idea um so yeah i think apple could make a keyboard appearance that is more resilient to fingers touching it kind of in the same way that they have with the anodized coating on the new black ones like just you know we're not saying it's perfect but try to improve on that obviously in some areas it's going to be difficult like trackpad which you touch a lot and you know iphones and ipads they're touchscreens we're constantly touching the screens if you really ever look at an iphone or an ipad screen especially when it's off
John:
they're covered with grease but that's why apple has the oleophobic coating and they work on that right it's an area that apple should continue to advance on i feel like on the keyboards i don't know if they're better or worse i don't we should get someone to write in and say i am a person whose fingers wear the keys the things with the keycaps and by the way i think they're not painted on there that's part of the thing we need mike early on the show to tell us all about the keyboard technology of like
John:
you know, dying in, putting in different colors of plastic and molding them together.
John:
There's all these techniques.
Casey:
Well, they're backlit, so they're probably not painted, I would assume.
Casey:
I'm the one who said painted a minute ago.
John:
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
John:
They're not painted.
John:
There are various techniques where you're not actually touching the letter part, so you shouldn't really ever wear it off.
John:
But for laptop keys, it may be more difficult because they're so thin.
John:
Anyway, I agree.
John:
This is an area that Apple should improve.
John:
But I think in general...
John:
They don't look that gross to me when I see people's laptops in real life.
John:
I think the problem of some people destroying keyboards with their fingers is it's not unsolvable, but it's going to be more difficult, especially since I personally don't understand what is the difference.
John:
But there is a difference there.
John:
You can categorize people into my fingers destroy keyboards and my fingers just wear them in the normal amount.
John:
And I hesitate to say normal because it sounds, you know, like there is a difference.
John:
And that's fingerist.
John:
Yeah, it is.
John:
I don't know what the difference is.
John:
It could be as simple as calluses.
John:
It could be different pH level to the secretions from their fingertips.
John:
It is what it is.
John:
Apple should design products to withstand the use that they expect.
John:
And they could do better on the keyboards.
John:
But I think Apple's keyboards, now that they've gotten rid of the butterfly thing, are not below average for the industry.
John:
And I personally don't think they look too disgusting, even when they're kind of greasy.
Casey:
All right, moving along.
Casey:
We got some feedback from Gokhan Avkarugulari, who writes, if you're curious about what the new A17 Pro and M3 GPU and dynamic caching is all about, and the brand new and exceptional GPU dev tooling and shader best practices...
Casey:
Apple has released a bunch of new tech talks today as this was written.
Casey:
And one in particular, 111375, I'll put a link in the show notes, is all about the new GPUs, which, what did they call them in the video?
Casey:
It was like Apple GPU 6 or something like that.
Casey:
I forget exactly what they call it.
John:
Yeah, like it has a generation number or something.
Casey:
Yeah, it was very surprising for me as someone who doesn't ever pay attention to GPUs, to be completely honest with you.
Casey:
But they did talk about and explain in a much better way, which I'm not going to try to recount, how...
Casey:
what this dynamic caching is all about, why it matters, and why it's helpful.
Casey:
And even as someone who knows almost nothing about GPUs, I was able to grok it, and it was fascinating.
Casey:
And the whole video was like half an hour, so it's worth watching.
John:
Apple Family 9 GPUs is what they're called.
John:
So this is Family 9.
John:
And yeah, what we said last week was accurate, that the dynamic caching is about cache of local memory on the GPU.
John:
Obviously, the video goes into more detail.
John:
The takeaway I got from the video is
John:
is that doing this this dynamic caching thing is not just about making more efficient use of resources or rather that's not the only point it's like okay i can see maybe you save power or like you know it's you can have a smaller gpu uh again which saves you power but you can do the same job with it
John:
But there's actually, I mean, this makes sense, but there's a performance story to it as well.
John:
They talk about it in the video.
John:
One of the things they're always trying to optimize in GPUs is what Apple and I think the rest of the industry calls thread occupancy, which is how many things are in flight inside the GPU at the same time, how many things that it's doing.
John:
And if you make inefficient use of these local caches, if one of them comes in and says, I need to reserve, you know,
John:
a 10 by 100 block of data here and i'm only going to use the 10 thing once and the rest of the time i'm just using ones but i need to reserve the whole block just for that 110 in there then there's not enough room for another job to come in because like sorry that shared resource that you wanted a chunk of there's not enough left for you so you got to wait until i'm done having more better thread occupancy means you could have more of those threads
John:
in the gpu at the same time which means in gamer speak better frame rates because something that needs to run on the gpu isn't waiting going i gotta wait for these other jobs so one of these other jobs needs to finish before i can get on the gpu and do my thing uh so it is actually a performance story there and so that's good to see and uh is relevant to pretty much anything that a gpu does it's also relevant to laptops for like you know getting your job done faster so you can power down the gpu and not be using it or whatever
John:
And you can do more work with less power because the GPU is not running as long, but it should also help give you better frame rates.
John:
So thumbs up.
Casey:
Jonathan Reagan Kelly writes, and this I think was born from that video we just mentioned, an interesting detail.
Casey:
Apple not only avoids statically allocating space for threads,
Casey:
They also unify the memory for different types of state within the shader core and dynamically allocate space among them.
Casey:
They are also pooled with the tile cache and other cache in buffer memory.
Casey:
Many GPUs do have unified memory for quote-unquote thread group, scratch pad memory, and L1 cache.
Casey:
but only allow the allocation between these two roles to be configured statically per kernel while it may seem surprising to unify quote-unquote registers and quote-unquote caches it's important to know that the gpu register storage is so large up to 32 megs on a recent nvidia gpu that it is generally built from sram not literal register file circuits so really is the same kind of thing as all the other caches and scratch pads or buffers as someone who's worked on and around gpu architectures for a long time this is indeed a promising idea
Casey:
The devil's in the details.
Casey:
What is the cost of the complexity this adds to the hardware?
Casey:
How good are the dynamic allocation algorithms in practice?
Casey:
How bad are the penalties when some state isn't cached?
Casey:
But this is cool to see and is actually a big change from how most other modern GPUs work, which could provide real efficiency wins.
John:
This is actually a good pairing with Apple's unified memory architecture.
John:
And it's of the same category of, I always use this analogy, which may resonate with some of our listeners, but hopefully you can understand it.
John:
Back in the bad old days of Linux, when you would install Linux, it would ask you to sort of partition your drive to say, how much do you want to dedicate to the slash partition?
John:
How much to this user partition?
John:
And you'd have to sort of say, okay, well, the operating system is this big.
John:
And I'll need to leave a little bit of extra room in case I want to install stuff in Slash.
John:
But most of the stuff is going to be in user, including the user home directories and anything that's in user local.
John:
So how big do I want that to be?
John:
And how big do I want to do for a swap partition based on how much memory I have?
John:
And you have to make all these decisions kind of up front of like...
John:
deciding how big these buckets will be.
John:
And the consequences of picking one wrong are annoying.
John:
It's like I got a repartition or maybe I have to erase the entire disk.
John:
And of course, with a GPU or a CPU, if you're going to have multiple buckets of stuff and you have to pick ahead of time how big those buckets are going to be, you don't want to make the buckets too small because that can be a performance bottleneck and
John:
Everyone says, oh, they made the whatever bucket too small on the CPU.
John:
It really hurts performance.
John:
But if you make them too big, you're wasting power and transistors and die space on resources that aren't going to use.
John:
And that stuff could have been used elsewhere on the chip where it would have been useful.
John:
So it's hard to pick those things.
John:
And same thing with like, you know, VRAM and regular RAM and having to have like a big pool of VRAM and a big pool of regular RAM and transfer between them and how big are the pools?
John:
Unified memory solves that in Apple's architecture because it's just one big pool of hopefully very fast memory.
John:
And on the GPU, same deal.
John:
Why have three different buckets of memory needs by the GPU?
John:
Because in any given job that the GPU is running, it may need a lot from bucket one, a little bit from bucket two, and nothing from bucket three.
John:
uh and if you get a whole bunch of jobs that are like that bucket one's going to fill up and bucket two and three are going to waste whereas if you have a unified pool you say i don't make you pick ahead of time you know when you design your chip how big these buckets are there's just one big bucket and the reason it works is because uh as jonathan points out the registers aren't like cpu registers how you learn about them in a cpu class where you well x86 you get ax bxcx like these little registers that are the size of an inch or whatever that are super fast and they're right there in the cpu they're not like that in gpus it's it's mall made of sram which is what like
John:
the l1 l2 caches are and it's big there's like 32 megabytes of it so apple making one big pool of that definitely fits with the unified memory architecture and totally makes sense uh and it seems like their implementation is pretty good i mean granted this is their first run at it but uh after three weeks of looking at dynamic caching i give it a thumbs up
Casey:
All right, M3 SSD speed versus M3 Pro SSD speed.
Casey:
John, can you take us through this, please?
John:
Yeah, last week we were saying, hey, in previous generations, Apple would sometimes ship the base model with half the number of SSD packages on the logic board.
John:
that would cause the SSD to be half the speed.
John:
And it's like, oh, if you got to 256 gigabon, it's half the speed.
John:
And then if you've got the 512, which is a shame.
John:
And then with this generation, they didn't do that.
John:
Like we looked at the M3 ones.
John:
And even if you get the base model M3, granted the base model M3 MacBook Pro has 512.
John:
But either way, if you get the base model, it doesn't have half the number of chips.
John:
And so we did speed tests on it.
John:
And lo and behold, it's twice as fast as the bad old base model M2 was, as the 256 was, right?
John:
but then we compared it to a one terabyte thing and it's like but the one terabyte is twice as fast again so what's going on here and the thing we didn't notice last week is the one terabyte one was an m3 pro it wasn't just a plain old m3 with one terabyte it was an m3 pro with one terabyte so
John:
Kind of like with the RAM situation of like, what's the deal with these RAM sizes?
John:
How do they make any sense?
John:
They make sense in terms of how many chips there are.
John:
So the M3, the M3 SoC supports a maximum of two NAND packages, two little flash memory rectangular things on the logic board.
John:
the m3 pro supports a maximum of four nand packages and if you look at an m3 pro teardown you might not see it but there's like two on top of the logic board and then two underneath on the underside so you won't see another two like things on the if you're just looking at one side of up the other two on the other side and then the m3 max supports a maximum of eight nand packages doesn't mean they're all filled in like if you get the m3 max one and you get a smaller ssd i don't know what the size threshold is but if you get a smaller one all eight spots on the logic board won't be filled
John:
Maybe only four of them will be.
John:
But the upshot of all of this is that every NAND package you add adds more maximum bandwidth in these artificial benchmarks because, you know, if you're writing to it, you can be writing to all of them at once, right?
John:
And so that's why you get twice the speed if you have two chips because now you're writing to them both of them once.
John:
you know they're both the same speed as the one was but now you get double and if you double it again to four nan packages then you can double it again and that is borne out by marco's monster m3 max uh macbook pro with an eight terabyte ssd which has all eight of the nan packages filled in and by the way each nan package yeah each each nan package has an apple custom controller die plus four to i think 16 nan dies all inside that little package that's what's in those little rectangles on the thing
John:
So when Marco did a brief speed test with that Blackmagic speed test app that everybody uses, he was getting 8,200 megabytes per second in write speed and 5,600 megabytes per second in read speed.
John:
So finally, if you pay whatever ungodly sum Apple charges for this 8 terabyte SSD, you too can have a faster SSD than the $75 one terabyte stick that's in my PS5.
John:
which by the way is 5500 megabytes per second read and write oh my god kind of depressing but anyway this is you know this is why we get this doubling why was the m3 pro twice as fast as the m3 because it has four nan packages and the m3 only supports two and the m3 max supports eight uh who knows how many the ultra will support probably only eight but we'll see uh if and when that comes out
Casey:
Anonymous writes, the single package, quote unquote, bad SSD configuration was debated a lot, and it was ultimately decided it was the right tradeoff.
Casey:
The performance analysis team, which is not the performance marketing team, this one is part of engineering, determined that there was a point of sharply diminishing returns in SSD performance in real world workloads versus benchmarks.
Casey:
They were surprised at first, too, and the SSD and NAND teams were skeptical.
Casey:
So there was a lot of discussion about this, but outside of the file copy to or from a fast or Thunderbolt external SSD, they just didn't see significant impact in real-world workflows.
Casey:
So all of us were getting our junk in a wad for no good reason.
John:
Well, anyway, this is an explanation of the bad ones on the M2, right?
John:
So why did Apple do that with the M2 ones?
John:
There was internal debate about it, and this is what they came up with.
John:
Like, okay, well, yes, it's half speed when you run a benchmark, but like,
John:
who's running benchmarks like where does it impact real thing and so the uh the little part here at the end here is outside a file copy to from a fast external ssd i think when people are waiting on disk io it's probably because they're doing a big copy so that's a pretty big exception to say oh it doesn't in fact affect real world scenarios except for when you're really waiting for a gigantic copy now obviously copies to itself on the internal drive don't count because apfs has those constant time you know instant clone copy and write magic things or whatever
John:
But if you're trying to pull something from a very fast SSD that's connected with Thunderbolt or copy something to one, that's when you're going to hit this bottleneck.
John:
So the bottleneck was there.
John:
But if you're doing pretty much anything other than that, what this anonymous source from inside Apple is saying is, in our testing, if you're doing like a real-world task that is not a big file copy to an external drive...
John:
You know, again, diminishing returns.
John:
And I still think it wasn't a good choice.
John:
And whether Apple revisited that decision, which is why we don't have the problem on the M3, or whether we don't have the problem on the M3 merely because they bumped the base config to 512.
John:
Either way, the problem doesn't exist anymore, so it's kind of a moot point.
John:
But this just goes to show when Apple does something like this, they do debate it internally.
John:
They may not come to the decision that we on the outside agree with, but they always do have their reasons.
Casey:
Let's talk about SSD prices.
Casey:
CG writes, I thought of this graph when Marco was talking about how cheap SSDs have gotten.
Casey:
If this trend continues, I'm hoping to go all SSD on my NAS in a few years.
Casey:
So this is from the Reddit community Data Hoarder, and they show a graph of SSD prices as compared to regular spinning platter hard disks.
Casey:
And back in the ye olden times of 2013,
Casey:
A spinning platter hard drive was about $36 a terabyte, and a SSD was $625 a terabyte.
Casey:
However, here in 2023, we're down to, according to this chart, about $35 a terabyte for an SSD and $13 a terabyte for platters.
Casey:
And if you chart these lines out, somewhere around 2030-ish...
Casey:
SSDs could feasibly be even cheaper than spinning platters.
Casey:
I'll believe it when I see it, but if you follow the trend line, that's what the graph would indicate.
Casey:
And that's fascinating and certainly does not match what Apple is charging people like Marco for their SSD size increases.
John:
The SSD line is pretty steep.
John:
Like, we'll put a link in the notes.
John:
You can look what the graph is.
John:
The reason they're going to meet is because the SSD line is going down faster than the hard drive line.
John:
I'm amazed at how linear both of them are.
John:
They're very well, I guess this is is this a logarithmic graph?
John:
I think it is.
John:
But anyway, yes.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Having them across in 2030, tune in 2030 to see if that has actually happened.
John:
But boy, won't that be a glorious moment?
Marco:
I mean, even just the ratio between them.
Marco:
Like, you know, back 10 years ago, the SSD was almost 20 times more expensive per byte than the hard drive.
Marco:
Now it's like three times.
Marco:
Like, that's still a large multiple if you're looking at a huge amount of storage.
Marco:
But there's also a huge number of advantages for SSDs.
Marco:
And so that actually might – now that it's, you know, quote, only three times the price per gig or whatever –
Marco:
That makes it a lot more compelling in a lot more situations.
Marco:
So this is great news.
Marco:
As long as you're buying anybody except Apple's SSDs, everyone else's SSDs in the market are getting remarkably affordable.
Marco:
Indeed.
Casey:
David Schaub writes, it's hard to believe that consumer Mac laptops have had the same base RAM since 2017.
Casey:
And the base RAM has only increased one time since 2011.
Casey:
So in the last 12 years, we've gotten one bump.
Casey:
And there is a logarithmic chart that we will put in the show notes that displays this.
Casey:
It's sad times, y'all.
Casey:
Not good times.
John:
Yeah, if you look at this graph, like kind of the point of this graph is like the graph kind of divided it down the middle, the left half and the right half of the graph.
John:
And the left half of the graph seems like we had pretty regular bumps.
John:
The slope looks pretty good.
John:
It's going up, up, up.
John:
And then in the right half of the graph –
John:
It's like a knee in the curve and it just levels off and it becomes like asymptotically approaching 8 gigs or 8.1 gigs or whatever.
John:
And David Chobb continues with the future one where he color codes the graph.
John:
He says, I don't think it's quite this simple.
John:
But the graph has the left side colored in with green.
John:
It says Steve Jobs because it goes from 1999 to 2011 when Jobs died.
John:
And then the right side is Tim Cook.
John:
And in the Tim Cook era, there has been one...
John:
bump in base ram on consumer laptops and the steve jobs era of the same length of time there were one two three four uh now it doesn't mean that does that mean that tim cook uh unlike steve jobs keeps products around longer we know he does that but there are other things that may be factors here maybe it is the case that this this is just a natural curve of ram prices in general and they just you know the the graph of ram prices also takes a curve like this
John:
I think that's really true.
John:
Someone sent us a thing of RAM, uh, prices, but one thing about the RAM price chart is it is not as smooth as the SSD and hard drive chart that we had previously.
John:
There are, there is actually a lot of volatility in RAM prices.
John:
And as the person who sent us the chart pointed out, uh,
John:
Apple doesn't sort of buy the RAM prices at instant time.
John:
They have to sort of lock in a order of however huge quantity and whatever the price is at that time, which is sometimes advantageous to Apple.
John:
Hey, we just ordered, you know, 10 billion sticks of this kind of RAM back when there were sticks at this price.
John:
And that's great because now it's gone up since then.
John:
But sometimes they lock in the price at a higher price and that's bad for them.
John:
But either way, what this graph shows, it doesn't really allow you to assign blame or say someone was doing something wrong or whatever, but it does show you that the feeling you have that RAM has not been going up as quickly in the past decade or so, that is a real feeling when it comes to Apple consumer laptop-based RAM.
John:
So hopefully we'll get that next bump soon.
John:
And by the way, the one bump that we had since 2011 was from 4 to 8.
John:
So I would love for the next bump to be from 8 to 16, but we'll see how that goes.
Marco:
Bye.
Marco:
Bye.
Marco:
Bye.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Notion for sponsoring our show.
Oh.
Casey:
Marco, you and I both have received some new treats and I feel like we should talk about them.
Casey:
So Marco, tell me what you got.
Casey:
And I don't know if you want to round robin it, if you just want to start talking and I'll interrupt when necessary, but tell me about what you bought.
Marco:
I got the big one.
Marco:
It's awesome.
Marco:
I'm so happy with it.
Marco:
Good talk.
Marco:
I did get the black, as mentioned last episode, when I had it sitting next to me on my desk, but I had not yet actually moved into it yet.
Marco:
It is great.
Marco:
I've been doing a lot of overcast work the last couple of days, a lot of having to do clean builds to work around bugs in Xcode.
Marco:
So I've been doing a lot of clean builds during regular development that wouldn't be necessary in the Objective-C days.
Marco:
But they're certainly necessary now.
Marco:
But my computer is now much faster at doing those clean builds.
Marco:
A clean build of Overcast went from about 19 seconds to about 11 seconds.
Marco:
So it's almost twice as fast at doing this surprisingly common and increasingly common task that makes me stop and wait.
Marco:
that's a pretty big gain for me i'm very happy for that the build time reduction alone would make this worthwhile to me at this point in my development life because again just how many times per day i'm having to do not only incremental builds but especially clean builds which are so time consuming
Marco:
As I push more and more of my code base into Swift and SwiftUI, it just increases how much of that and how much stress is being put on the development process.
Marco:
Because for those of you who don't know, Swift and SwiftUI are extremely complex languages at the compile side.
Marco:
Part of the reason why is that they are doing...
Marco:
huge amounts of complexity at compilation time to save you from yourself, basically, to save you from different classes of bugs, to enforce different features and protections within the Swift type system.
Marco:
And the Swift language itself is also extremely complicated.
Marco:
And of course, SwiftUI really pushes everything to the limits with the way it abuses the language to achieve what it achieves.
Marco:
Even if you're not using previews, which I actually am not using SwiftUI Live previews that much in my work so far.
Marco:
And if you do use SwiftUI previews, it pushes it even harder.
Marco:
Whereas if I compile Objective-C code today, it builds in like a half a second and it's just done.
Marco:
And if I make a mistake in Objective-C code, it highlights it instantly.
Marco:
It's so fast because Objective-C and C that it's based on are just much smaller and simpler languages to compile on modern hardware.
Marco:
But as I'm pushing my code base into the more modern languages...
Marco:
It is costing me dearly in computing resources at development time.
Marco:
Of course, that in the long run should prove worthwhile in the sense that not only does it get my code into where it needs to be for the future, but also it should prevent and avoid a lot of bugs along the way that cost developer time, which is much more precious than computing time.
Marco:
but anyway all this is to say the more swift and swift ui i'm using and moving towards the greater my computing needs are and and the slower it is to build the app if i don't keep doing these upgrades every few years so that's that's the biggest justification i have for the upgrade and that again that alone cutting the build time almost in half after only two years like you know there's been a lot of talk about
Marco:
oh, the M3 is only a little bit faster than the M2, which is actually not always the case.
Marco:
We'll get to that.
John:
Not always the case?
John:
Never the case, yeah.
John:
I've seen that same sentiment and I do not understand it, which is why I put these graphs.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to a video that you should watch.
John:
But like...
John:
when i was talking before about oh why should they compare it to the m2 because you want to know if like is this the year to buy the thing that got marco excited to buy uh this when he was not excited about the m2 is i mean i mean he just talked about it he's the main thing he does all day that he waits for is not twice as fast like if that's not enough you know forget about synthetic benchmarks or whatever that's like him doing real world stuff but if you care to look at the synthetic benchmarks uh this max tech video has a whole bunch of them
John:
Single core, you'll see the M3 line.
John:
The M2 line is barely past the M1 line.
John:
The M3 line is significantly past.
John:
Multi-core, the M3 is like double the M2 max.
John:
The M3 max is like double the M2 max.
John:
It's not even close.
John:
Like M1 to M2, tiny little increase.
John:
M3, twice as fast.
John:
The Cinebench score, same thing.
John:
In the logic test, it's like three times as fast as the M2 Max.
John:
In the logic test, it's faster than the M1 Ultra.
John:
Is this the one to buy?
John:
Is this a good year?
John:
Yeah, the M3 is a good... If you're buying the highest of the high-end, like Marco is, the M3 is a good year to buy.
John:
So I think Marco was very wise, and Casey, very wise to skip the M2.
John:
Not because the M2 was bad.
John:
The M2 was great.
John:
It was the best that you could get.
John:
But if you already have an M1, an M2 is a smaller upgrade, the M3, depending on what you're doing, could be a monstrous upgrade.
John:
The M3 Max, by the way, I'm talking about, not just the plain M3 or the Pro.
Marco:
We take this for granted now because the Apple Silicon era is just so incredibly good.
Marco:
Like, it's so bountiful with upgrades for us that seem to have basically no downsides except SSD costs.
Marco:
But it wasn't that long ago.
Marco:
Back in the tail end of the Intel days, not even just the tail end, the whole rear third of the Intel days, getting almost 50% improvement gain in two years, that doesn't happen anymore.
Marco:
That hasn't happened in the PC chip world in a long time.
Marco:
For most of the last decade or more, we'd be lucky to...
Marco:
to get maybe 15% of a gain over that same time span in sheer CPU performance during that time.
Marco:
Again, 15% between generations, maybe.
Marco:
And even then, it was usually achieved only with some real thermal aggression.
John:
and to be clear on the for the single core that's kind of what the m3 max gets over it's like 17 faster in single core than the m2 max uh but again if you look at the difference between the m1 and the m2 max it was not 15 so 15 you know 17 single core for you know over a computer that came out in january and now we're getting in november is still pretty good but the big wins come from like okay but what about the multi-core and to a lesser extent some of the gpu stuff
John:
And that's what like, you know, you might think of like, oh, compiler, isn't that a single core thing?
John:
No, there's plenty of things to be compiled.
John:
And so you can use those cores because each core is compiling a different file and many files make up an application in case that's not clear if you're not a software developer.
John:
That's why, you know, Marco is not getting 15% faster compiles because it is a multi core type of thing.
John:
And we do pay a price for it, like the prices of the M3 Max can use at peak like 50 watts-ish, and the M2 Max are using maybe 35, 37 watts.
John:
There's a little bit more power being used, a little bit more heat being generated, but nothing that I think the cooling system can't handle.
Marco:
Yeah, that is one area that it's a little too soon to say.
Marco:
I mean, I've never heard the fan so far in the week that I've had this.
Marco:
It's a little too soon to say whether that will be a noticeable difference here, because I noticed the same thing.
Marco:
I believe it was an Antec who who had like the power consumption graphs of the various max chips over time.
Marco:
And they are ramping up the power usage at peak.
Marco:
And that is, I am, I got to say, I was not happy to see that in those graphs because I'm a little worried now.
John:
You can't get blood from a stone.
John:
Like if you want it to be faster and you want to have more performance cores doing all that extra work, they have to use more power.
John:
But like it's, we're not sure about the efficiency, but that was the point that was made by someone whose name I forget in a past episode was that the M2, despite using more heat than the M1, was still more efficient because it would be done with the same amount of work faster.
John:
And I would imagine that's also true of the M3 Max.
Marco:
I hope so.
Marco:
And probably.
Marco:
But certainly it remains to be seen.
Marco:
The M1 Max was so glorious because that computer just never spun the fan up.
Marco:
And I still am so proud of the M1 Max MacBook Pro and so baffled by the M1 Max Max Studio.
Marco:
Because the Max Studio was frankly embarrassed by the MacBook Pro.
Marco:
That first-gen Mac Studio had that weird thermal design where the fan was audible at all times, whereas the MacBook Pro had the same processor as the base Mac Studio and was never audible in a laptop.
John:
The problem with the Mac Studio was that even at max load, the fans were the same speed as when it was idle.
John:
The culling system was so over-provisioned, but then it never got quiet enough for my taste anyway.
John:
right that the you know so like you'd run a benchmark and it'd be like how how fast are the fans going compared to when it was idle same speed like they just they didn't need to go any faster but it was still annoying anyway they fixed that in the m2 max studio generation so if you're worried about a max studio i'm assuming that also won't be that it'll be fine in the m3 generation as well
Marco:
Yeah, I would assume so as well.
Marco:
But anyway, I mean, I am extremely happy with this so far.
Marco:
Even the black is nice.
Marco:
I've had it now in more varied lighting conditions.
Marco:
And, you know, all the YouTubers, they're still complaining like, well, it's not that dark.
Marco:
honestly it's pretty dark like i maybe if you are in a video studio with spotlights pointing at it maybe it's not that dark it's pretty dark i'm very happy with it i um you know i don't think i will go black for all my computers in the future but i like this one being black as just like a different fresh new take on things
Marco:
And yeah, I was working earlier today in laptop mode, on a couch, in the sun, using the built-in speakers to play Phish, which are surprisingly decent.
Marco:
It was great.
Marco:
I was getting a lot of work done.
Marco:
Once again, I am very, very glad that I got the 16-inch just because I need as much screen space as possible.
Marco:
Also...
Marco:
Based partially on my need for screen space, but also on my preference for low noise, I'm a little concerned about fan noise on the 14-inch models.
Marco:
If you spec them up with the M1 Max chip, that's a lot of thermal load.
Marco:
Again, keep in mind, they've increased the thermal caps on these chips of how much power they use at peak.
Marco:
They've increased that from the M1 generation through the M2 and the M3 now.
Marco:
So if you're worried about fan noise, I might I might advise you to either not get one of the big CPUs or not get the 14 inch because I think the 16 can save you there a little bit.
Marco:
But also 16 just has a much bigger battery.
Marco:
And so that's also nice if you're ever working on battery for a long time.
Marco:
But at the end of the day, no matter what the tradeoffs were, I'd get the 16 inch for the screen size alone.
Marco:
It's a big, beautiful, awesome screen.
Casey:
All right, so I need to defend people who like laptops that are not aircraft carriers.
Casey:
I have.
Casey:
They're not that different in size.
Casey:
It's a difference.
Casey:
It's not like the 17 was back in the day.
Casey:
That thing was a monster, but it's different.
John:
That thing was awesome.
John:
It's close.
John:
I mean, 16-inch.
John:
What happened to the 15?
Marco:
Well, the 17 had a lot more bezel to get, you know, around that 17.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
I think it weighed almost twice as much.
Casey:
Those things were seriously such beasts.
Casey:
I bought a 14-inch M1, excuse me, M3 Max.
Marco:
So the computer I just told everyone not to buy.
Casey:
Yeah, that's correct.
Casey:
I bought it with 64 gigs of RAM because I just didn't feel like I needed more than that.
Casey:
I'm sure it wouldn't have hurt, but I decided to spend that money elsewhere.
Casey:
And specifically, I decided to spend it on their eight terabyte SSD because I keep my entire photo library on my Mac.
Casey:
And that's something like a terabyte and a half.
Casey:
And then you put in a few X codes and a few X code simulators or iOS simulators, what have you.
Casey:
And you start filling stuff up pretty quick.
Casey:
So that's what I got.
Casey:
And I got the space black because how could you not?
Casey:
And this thing is incredible.
Casey:
It just came in Monday afternoon.
Casey:
And I'd like to talk about in a moment what I did with it once it got here in terms of loading it up.
Casey:
But putting that aside for a moment, I haven't had the time to do very much coding work since it came in because I recorded analog yesterday morning.
Casey:
And didn't have a whole lot of time after that.
Casey:
And then I was prepping for ATP today.
Casey:
Didn't have a whole lot of time after that.
Casey:
And so I haven't done a lot of coding work.
Casey:
But in general, this thing is just like a faster, peppier, even better version of what I already had.
Casey:
And I didn't have any complaints about what I already had.
Casey:
It was already really freaking great.
Casey:
And again, I came from an M1 Mac, 64 gigs, 4 terabytes.
Yeah.
Casey:
I love this computer.
Casey:
I have heard the fans.
Casey:
The only time I have heard the fans, would you like to guess what I was doing?
John:
Running migration assistant?
Casey:
I don't think I heard the fans then.
Casey:
And you're spoiling my moment here in a minute.
Casey:
But no, that's not what I was doing.
Casey:
What would I, Casey Liss, be doing that would cause the fans?
Casey:
There it is.
Casey:
I was doing a transcode and FFM peg and those fans got screaming.
Casey:
But I mean, whatever.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
I don't mind if the fans scream when I'm doing a transcode and FFM peg.
Casey:
I forget exactly what I was doing, but I think I was taking something from H.264 to HEVC, you know, H.265.
Casey:
And I was doing it at something like 15 frames a second.
Casey:
What was it?
Casey:
It was 15x, not 15 frames a second, 15x.
Casey:
So 15 times normal speed.
Casey:
It was bananas how fast this was.
John:
Was that using, I don't know what the options are.
John:
Who does know what the options are?
John:
But anyway, were you using the ones that use the hardware encoders or were you not using the ones that use hardware encoders?
Casey:
I understand the question.
Casey:
I actually don't know the answer.
Casey:
I was using Lisa Melton's scripts, if memory serves.
Casey:
And so I think those will try to use hardware encoders if possible.
Casey:
I am very not confident that I'm telling the truth.
John:
I'm just wondering, because if the fans spin up, you would think the fans wouldn't spin up if it's just using this tiny corner of the chip that is just the fixed function H.265 encoder or whatever.
Yeah.
John:
yeah i honestly i again i understand the question i i don't know um you should just look up at your menu bar you have those eternal cpu usage bars and say hey are a bunch of cores lit up or is it just you know anyway um yeah in the benchmarking like you would see less of this back and when they were benchmarking the m1 max and the m2 max but uh but when they do the m2 max versus m3 max test
John:
You can see that you can get the fans to spin up on both of them.
John:
They're just laptops, right?
John:
They will spin their angry little fans and spew out hot air from their two little vents, but most people are not doing things that will torture your SoC like that.
John:
But if you do, be aware that you are going to hear those fans when you're using 50 watts.
Casey:
Yeah, but otherwise, ignore Marco's propaganda.
Casey:
I was doing a little bit of Xcode remotely this morning.
Casey:
I went to my beloved Wegmans to do my ATP research, and then I had a little bit of time to do some Xcode work.
Casey:
No fans.
Casey:
Don't listen to his propaganda, people.
Casey:
The 14's fine.
John:
Well, I haven't yet seen a good 14 versus 16, but for the M1 generation, 14 versus 16, the 16 did have better cooling capacity, which doesn't really make a lot of sense to me.
John:
Because when you look at the teardowns, you're like, it looks like they have the same heat pipes, the same fans, the same... Why should it make such a difference?
John:
Just because there's a little bit more lateral room in the 16-inch?
John:
But it did in the M1 generation, so I haven't yet seen M3 tests.
John:
But yeah, I don't actually know if the 14-inch is going to have appreciably...
John:
worse or noisier or cooler than the 16, but it's a possibility.
Marco:
I mean, I'm guessing it's going to be worse, but not in a way that most people will typically run into.
Casey:
And that's probably fair as well.
Casey:
I'd like to spend at least a minute talking about what I did when the computer came in.
Casey:
In years past, I've always done a fresh install.
Casey:
Unlike Windows, which last I used Windows, which admittedly was like 10 plus years ago, every six months you needed to start from scratch.
Casey:
It's just the rule of Windows.
Casey:
Every six months you start from scratch.
Casey:
You move everything somewhere else, you start anew.
Casey:
That's just the way it works.
Casey:
And I have not had that experience with the Mac.
Casey:
There have been some times where I feel like, you know, a reset in start anew has been necessary.
Casey:
But I can count those times on probably one hand.
Casey:
And I've been using a Mac for like 15 years now, something like that.
Yeah.
Casey:
I typically will do a fresh install, but this time I decided, you know what?
Casey:
I'm going to try Migration Assistant.
Casey:
And thankfully, I had my friend Marco here to run through the gauntlet of Migration Assistant first and instruct me on all the ways I need to save myself if things go wrong.
Casey:
That being said, I did, I think the same thing that Marco did, and it pretty much just worked.
Casey:
So what I did was I used, my cable is white and it's not braided, but I think the current- Sometimes it just happens to you?
Casey:
Yeah, sometimes it just happens.
Casey:
I use the... It's an Apple cable, and I think it is a Thunderbolt 4 cable.
Casey:
I looked to put a link in the show notes just a moment ago, and I couldn't find it, but I found what I think is the new version, which is the Thunderbolt 4 Pro cable.
Casey:
This is a one-meter-long cable, so about a three-foot-long cable.
Casey:
That is $70.
Casey:
$70.
Casey:
It's bananas expensive.
Casey:
But that being said, when I was doing this migration...
Casey:
It took a while for it to admit to me slash itself that it was connected via Thunderbolt.
Casey:
So I connected via Thunderbolt from one laptop to the other.
Casey:
And it really was not happy at first with doing that.
Casey:
And I wonder if, Marco, you might have bailed a little too soon on getting that process to work.
Casey:
I wish I should have taken better notes.
Casey:
It's not that I was rushing.
Casey:
I just didn't think to take copious notes as to what I was doing.
Casey:
But as you're going through Migration Assistant, which if you're not familiar, it's an Apple thing where you start basically kind of sort of a server on the old computer and you start a client on the new computer.
Casey:
That's probably not strictly accurate, but you get the idea.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And it'll transfer all your stuff from one to the other.
Casey:
And when you're doing it on the target computer, on the new computer, it really, really wants you to sign on to Wi-Fi or perhaps, you know, if you have an Ethernet connection, it really wants you to get on the Internet via Wi-Fi or Ethernet.
Casey:
And I did neither.
Casey:
So I just kept saying, like, no, thank you.
Casey:
No, thank you.
Casey:
No, uh-uh.
Casey:
Nope.
Casey:
Not now.
Casey:
Not going to do it.
Casey:
But eventually, it finally relented.
Casey:
And then I saw that connection detail screen that you can pull up where it says, OK, here's all the ways I can connect from the source to the target Mac.
Casey:
And sure enough, it says Casey's MacBook Pro, or MacBook Pro is what I call the old one, Ethernet to Ethernet on this Mac, which, by the way, the only thing connected other than power to the new one was this Thunderbolt cable.
Casey:
So I guess it's some sort of like Ethernet over Thunderbolt or what have you.
Casey:
Anyway, it's sampled at 37 megabytes a second.
Casey:
Peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, surprisingly sampled at 68 megabytes a second.
Casey:
Not sure how, but, you know, hey, that's what it says.
Casey:
The Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt on this Mac, 882 megabytes per second, which, to be fair, is I watched on and off.
Marco:
Wait, that's all?
Marco:
Mine was 2000 when I got Thunderbolt working.
Casey:
Oh, really?
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Then maybe my cable should be updated to a Thunderbolt Pro cable.
Casey:
But yeah, that's all I saw.
Casey:
And I saw a max of around then, although it would definitely dip lower.
Casey:
It took, I would say, a couple of hours, two or three hours.
Casey:
And I think I had something to the order of two or three terabytes in use on the old machine.
Casey:
But once I finally convinced it to freaking use Thunderbolt,
Casey:
It flew.
Casey:
Like, it went real fast.
Casey:
And apparently it would have gone faster if I had a better cable.
Casey:
I didn't even realize.
Casey:
But it was fast.
John:
I mean, it might have picked up speed as it was going, too.
John:
Like, here's the thing about those rated speeds.
John:
It's not just copying one giant media file, right?
John:
So you're not going to see those speeds because what it's doing is making literally millions of tiny files and directories and
John:
I know there's not a read head moving back and forth, and I know random access is not that much slower on an SSD than sort of sequential access, but there is more stuff for it to do in terms of I have to read all these different files and all the metadata about the files and all their different attributes, and then I have to write that out, and then the other thing has to receive that and get that information and write it out, and so basically the rule of thumb, which was way more true with spinning disks than it is with SSDs, but it is still true to some degree with SSDs, is that
John:
Doing tons and tons of little files is way, way, way, way slower than doing one gigantic file.
John:
And doing migration assistance is going to let you copy tons and tons of little files.
John:
So you're not going to get the full rated speed, but it will go a lot faster if you have a Thunderbolt connection or something similar.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And like I said, I didn't sit there and watch the whole thing because it was literally hours, but I did take a couple of photographs because I don't think I could take screenshots because you can't really do anything while this is going on.
Casey:
But I have a photo that I took and I'm about two thirds of the transfer done.
Casey:
So there's about a third remaining.
Casey:
And at this point I had transferred four and a half million files.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And there was an hour and five minutes remaining at 551 megabytes a second.
Casey:
So yeah, it's a lot of stuff.
Casey:
But that being said, it seemed to work lickety-split.
Casey:
It said it was all done.
Casey:
I start the new machine.
Casey:
I had to do some stuff that was fairly annoying.
Casey:
I had to redo the whole dance with the Audio Hijack audio capture engine and get that to reinitialize itself.
Casey:
I did get all the prompts that Jason has been understandably complaining about because he's right to complain about it.
Casey:
Oh, this wants to look at the desktop.
Casey:
Oh, now it wants to look at your downloads.
Casey:
Oh, now it wants to do this.
Casey:
Oh, this other thing wants to look at the desktop.
Casey:
Can you do that?
Casey:
Hey, well, this.
Casey:
What about this?
Casey:
What about this?
Casey:
What about this?
Casey:
And it was not quite to the level that Jason had, but it was not great.
Casey:
The only real problem I had, and perhaps this was my own lack of patience, I'm not sure, but I went to start grabbing GIFs to send in messages, whatever.
Casey:
And I happened to use Alfred as my launcher.
Casey:
And Alfred lets you do very quick and easy file system searches.
Casey:
That's not unique to Alfred.
Casey:
And I would type in the name of a GIF that I knew I had, and I would get nothing.
Casey:
I was like, huh, that's weird.
Casey:
I wonder why.
Casey:
And I thought, well, maybe Alfred has, no, Alfred's just asking spotlight.
Casey:
So what's going on with spotlights?
Casey:
Then I tried spotlight and I tried typing in the same file name and it's like, Nope, I got nothing.
Casey:
I don't know what you're talking about.
Casey:
So I tried via the, the system preference or system setting or whatever to try to get it to reindex my home folder.
Casey:
And I,
Casey:
I couldn't get Spotlight or MDUtil.
John:
Why are you telling it to re-index?
John:
It has to index it first, once, right?
Casey:
I agree.
John:
So maybe it hadn't finished the first pass.
Casey:
Which is why I thought maybe this was user error.
Casey:
But I gave it about a day before I gave up on the fact that it hadn't indexed yet.
Casey:
And I tried doing this in system settings.
Casey:
It didn't get it to go.
Casey:
Eventually, I found the MDUtil or whatever it is where you tell it, all right, here's what I want you to do.
Casey:
Do it now.
Casey:
And sure enough, within 20 minutes of me saying, go ahead and...
John:
doing whatever incantation i need to do with mdu to get the re-index to happen then everything works pretty much straight away you've asked it util util he also said straight away we're gonna call him on his britishism and his pronunciation uh yeah at least hey at least you have a command my utility unlike face recognition and photos at least you can look up what the the mdu incantation is to
John:
It's kind of weird that it didn't do it after a day, but it does remind me of like the photo stuff where it's like, hey, laptop, you've been here for a day.
John:
When are you going to get around to that first spotlight pass?
John:
And it's like, oh, I don't feel like the time is right yet.
John:
You can go to the command line and say, no, the time is right.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
So that was the biggest one of my problems with Spotlight not seeming to want to re-index.
Casey:
But now that that's done, pretty much everything has worked lickety-split.
Casey:
I'm sure there's something I'm forgetting that I needed to tweak or fiddle with.
Casey:
But almost everything worked, I'm sorry, not straight away, right away, John.
John:
Thank you.
Casey:
And it's been really great.
Casey:
And I think part of the reason I was willing to do Migration Assistant rather than start anew was that there was no nagging software issue that I've been too lazy to properly deal with on the old machine.
Casey:
Everything seemed fine.
Casey:
I had nothing I was running away from or anything like that.
Casey:
And so if you're in a situation where you don't have any complaints with your current system, Migration Assistant gets two thumbs up from me.
Casey:
Marco, do you want to talk at all about what you ran into or do we just want to move along?
Marco:
I just had a bit of trouble getting a migration assistant to use the Thunderbolt connection automatically.
Marco:
I was able to solve it within a half hour or 45 minutes of random troubleshooting and trying different things that people on the internet suggested.
Marco:
This was the first time Migration Assistant has ever not been just super easy and automatic for me.
Marco:
Usually, I'm a Migration Assistant unicorn.
Marco:
So I figure after all these years of using it, one time I had to spend a half hour getting Thunderbolt to connect.
Marco:
Oh, well.
Marco:
There are worse things.
Marco:
Overall, it has worked fine for me every other time.
Marco:
I did learn...
Marco:
That target disk mode is kind of gone.
Marco:
I thought that might be easier to make the old Mac go in target disk mode and just plug Thunderbolt cable in that way.
Marco:
And that doesn't work anymore.
Marco:
Apple Silicon Macs do have a disk source mode.
Marco:
You got to reboot into that recovery environment and launch it from there.
Marco:
But the migration assistant process doesn't recognize those.
Marco:
So, like, not only does it not work over Thunderbolt, like, it doesn't work at all.
Marco:
Migration Assistant, just, you cannot use it with target disk mode if the source Mac is an Apple Silicon Mac anymore.
Marco:
That's just unsupported now.
Marco:
So that was kind of a bummer.
Marco:
But otherwise, I did get it working, you know, through Migration Assistant on both computers eventually.
Marco:
And then it was very fast, and I ran it overnight when I went to bed.
Casey:
Did you have Ethernet or did you get on the Wi-Fi at all during that process?
Marco:
So the first couple times I did it where I wasn't using Thunderbolt correctly, I had told the computer during its little activation step, here's my Wi-Fi network, yeah, please proceed.
Marco:
Whenever I would start it that way, it would never use Thunderbolt.
Marco:
I would even try running Ethernet between the two computers and that would work, but it would never switch over to Thunderbolt when that was an option.
Marco:
What I ended up having to do was on the source Mac, before I went into Migration Assistant, set up a Thunderbolt bridge interface in the network settings, give it a static IP address, and then set up internet sharing to share my Wi-Fi to my house over the Thunderbolt bridge.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Then, with the new computer, have it reset itself back to its initial state, which it makes very easy, fortunately.
Marco:
When you do that, if you have the Thunderbolt bridge with internet sharing connecting to the new computer, the new computer won't ask you for your Wi-Fi information.
Marco:
It will activate using the shared internet connection over that Thunderbolt cable to the old computer.
Marco:
And so it bypasses Wi-Fi activation completely.
Marco:
And then the only networking that computer knows at that point is Thunderbolt.
Marco:
And then it works that way every single time.
Marco:
So if you happen to have trouble getting Thunderbolt recognized, have it reset itself.
Marco:
The Apple Silicon Macs have this thing during setup where you can say, reset everything back to its initial state.
Marco:
and so you do that like if it fails you do that and then it's uh it's a very simple process once you learn that thunderbolt bridge and internet sharing over thunderbolt bridge trick um there's probably a simpler way to get it to work i mean many people have reported that theirs worked just like yours just totally fine perfectly you just plug the cable in and it finds it and i was trying everything i tried i i found every thunderbolt cable in my house which i mean there's not that many of them there's like three but i
John:
i tried them all i tried different configurations i tried different ports i tried like which computer do you plug into the cable first when do you plug it i tried everything before that could not get it to work how long did you wait to casey's point is i had seen i know this is old data probably about intel max or whatever but like sometimes you'd plug in the faster thing and it wouldn't find the faster interface immediately but eventually it would find it so how long did you let it sit there to see if it's gonna find it
Marco:
The longest I let it sit was about five or ten minutes.
Marco:
I went to go brush my teeth and wash off and everything.
Marco:
And it hadn't found it by then.
Marco:
So I figured it wasn't going to find it.
Marco:
And I wanted to go to bed.
Marco:
So I made it work.
Marco:
So I'm like, I'm not going to let this go 75 hours or anything.
Marco:
I'm going to make this go quickly or not at all.
Marco:
So anyway, got it to work eventually.
Marco:
It's now amazing.
Marco:
And I'm very, very happy.
Casey:
Yeah, the only thing I would say is I did not give the computers any other mechanism to talk to each other other than the Thunderbolt cable.
Casey:
I guess they may have been able to sort out, and it seems like they sort of did, sort out a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi.
Casey:
But when I talked earlier about the Ethernet connection, there was no Ethernet connected to the target computer, the new computer.
Casey:
Granted, my old one was in my normal setup with two displays and Ethernet and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But the new computer literally only had power in the Thunderbolt cable.
Casey:
I never plugged in Wi-Fi information.
Casey:
I never plugged in an Ethernet adapter.
Casey:
It was just the Thunderbolt.
Casey:
And it took a lot of no reallys and no thank you.
Casey:
No, not Wi-Fi.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Yes, I'm sure.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But eventually, I don't know if it just needed some time, to John's point, to do the handshake before it got satisfied and was happy with me or what the deal was.
Casey:
But eventually it did give up on having me do the more conventional approach.
Casey:
And once it did that, everything was golden.
Casey:
So, yeah, these new computers, I love mine.
Casey:
I can't stress enough.
Casey:
I loved, but I still do, I say it as though it's dead, but I love my M1 Max MacBook Pro.
Casey:
It is such a phenomenal computer.
Casey:
It is so unreal to have the power of an iMac Pro in your bag.
Casey:
And as much as I'm snarking with Marco about, you know, 16 versus 14, ultimately either one is fine.
Casey:
Like, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
These machines are so frigging good.
Casey:
The M1s were.
Casey:
And now you're just cranking it up even more.
Casey:
So now instead of an iMac, an old and busted, you know, Intel computer, because who would want to use those?
Casey:
Now instead of that in my bag...
Casey:
I've got a Mac Studio in my bag.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
And the screen is so good.
Casey:
And I do feel like it's probably I'm probably, you know, incepting myself or I'm telling myself that it's true.
Casey:
But I do feel like I noticed in the brighter area and Wegmans today that it was that the standard def stuff was just a touch brighter than I'm used to.
Casey:
The screens are phenomenal.
Casey:
The keyboards are great.
Casey:
It's got plenty of ports.
Casey:
Everything about these machines is so freaking great.
Casey:
I cannot stress enough.
Casey:
If you have the means, I highly suggest you picking one up.
Casey:
And honestly, even an M2 or M1 MacBook Pro, particularly an M2 or M1 Max MacBook Pro, they are so, so good.
Casey:
We are in such a golden time for the Mac, and I'm so thankful for it and so in love with it.
Casey:
This is such a great time.
Casey:
No matter what you get, even if you don't want a pro, the M2 MacBook Air is great.
Casey:
Aaron has an M1 MacBook Air.
Casey:
Other than not having MagSafe, which bums me out a little bit, that's great.
Casey:
Like, all of these machines are so freaking good right now.
Casey:
If you're still on Intel...
Casey:
if you're still on Intel, for the love of all that's good and holy, treat yourself first to an ATP bit of merch.
Casey:
But after you buy your ATP merch, treat yourself to a computer because they are so, so good now.
John:
And if you can find like a used M1 Macs
John:
uh macbook pro that is probably a steal now because no it's not going to be as fast as the m3 is going to be twice as fast or whatever but like it's such a good computer and you're getting such a bargain it's kind of like buying a very fancy car they depreciate so fast the higher ends ones depreciate so fast so uh it may be hard to find like you know an m1 macbook air for one third of the price but i bet you can find a well configured m1 max for one third of what it was new
John:
I know everyone wants like the, you know, the Black Friday sales to find like, oh, I want an M3 Max for $150 off.
John:
Look, look at the M1 Maxes.
John:
MacBook Pro is like, they're such a good deal now because, you know, the M2 is here and the M3 is here.
John:
But the M1 Max, to Marco's point, was such a great machine.
John:
And if you can get it for a bargain, especially one that's specced up, because that's the whole thing.
John:
Like, you know, someone paid an extra $800 for that RAM.
John:
You're not going to pay an extra $800 for that config when you buy it two years after it was introduced.
John:
So hunt for those bargains.
Marco:
Yeah, that's a good point.
Marco:
Similar to cars, you pay a lot for those options at purchase, but at resale, they're worth a lot less.
Marco:
And so similar to that, as Norman was saying, when you buy a used computer or even just like a closeout last year's model computer that's still technically new but just not the newest model,
Marco:
you pay a lot less for those ram and ssd upgrades than they do when they're new that could like i i personally i would rather have a used m1 max macbook pro than a brand new like you know low spec you know m m3 macbook air yeah like base model like where you get like if you could if you could get an m1 max with like you know four terabytes versus an m3 max with 512 go to the m1 max all day like you
John:
You know, the base config, especially on a laptop where you're constrained on RAM or storage, that's going to annoy you so much more than the speed will thrill you, right?
John:
So get the M1 Macs with the more SSD and the more RAM.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I'm just so happy, again.
Marco:
being in the laptop world like right now you know honestly I feel like if I was a big fan of Apple's desktops right now I would feel a little left out and and I was in the desktop world for so long I know what that's like but you know the reality is Apple's desktop market it feels kind of like the the iPad multitasking market
Marco:
Where it's like, here's the thing that some people care a lot about, and it seems like if you care a lot about Apple desktops, you care more about Apple desktops than Apple cares about Apple desktops?
John:
I don't think that's entirely true.
John:
We focus a lot about how they really screwed up with the Mac Pro, and I kind of agree.
John:
But the fact that the studio exists is such a great change from before it existed.
John:
Because you're just saying desktops.
John:
You're not saying Mac Pro, right?
Marco:
No, I'm saying including both desktops.
Marco:
Because I think what I'm getting at is right now, the MacBook Pro has all the best processors in the Apple lineup for most metrics.
Marco:
The 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro, the M3 Max, is actually better in certain ways than the M2 Ultra.
Marco:
And so right now, if you want the fastest Mac at certain things, at many things, it's a laptop.
Marco:
And I feel like if you're in the desktop world, the Mac Studio is always kind of playing second fiddle to the MacBook Pro now.
John:
It's just a staggered release schedule.
John:
I mean, when the Ultra comes out, when the Ultra came out of the Mac Studio, it was twice as fast because it had two Maxes in it.
John:
It was just straightforward.
John:
And if you got the desktop, you got to enjoy that twice as fastness until the M3 Max comes out.
John:
But guess what?
John:
There's going to be two M3 Maxes stuck together in an M3 Ultra, and then you'll be twice as fast again.
John:
It's a staggered release, and you're right.
John:
Right now, M3 Max is the fastest for most things, except for GPU stuff where the Ultras tend to still win.
John:
But that will change when they come out.
John:
So yeah, it would be great if they were all put out together, especially since they do sell Mac Studios with the M3 Macs.
John:
Why don't we have that now?
John:
Oh, I don't know.
John:
They don't have enough of them to go around.
John:
They sell more laptops or whatever.
John:
But I honestly don't feel like the Mac desktop line is particularly neglected.
John:
I feel like the Mac Pro is in a bad spot.
John:
But the fact that there's the mini and the studio is an embarrassment of riches in recent decades when it comes to desktop Macs that don't have a screen.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
So I'm not super mad about it.
John:
And I think...
John:
an M3 Max or an M3 Ultra Max Studio is going to be a pretty amazing desktop machine, all things considered.
John:
So, yeah, right now, laptops, laptops has always been in a great place.
John:
And right now, due to the staggered release schedule and the fact that they're not giving you a Max Studio with the M3 Max,
John:
Like, I kind of understand because they want to roll out the Max and Ultra in the studio at the same time, but I don't think the desktop line is neglected.
John:
The Mac Pro is kind of sad over there.
Marco:
Yeah, no, it's more just like, you know, there's going to be, you know, if they continue this release pattern, then there's always going to be this like six or eight month span where the MacBook Pro is in some ways better than the Mac Studio.
John:
yeah but that conditional you put at the beginning there i think for the first three generations of apple silicon what we've learned is that it's very difficult to discern any kind of pattern is it because just well this you know stuff happens or whatever but boy the m1 to m2 to m3 has not been a regular predictable cadence of anything it's been so weird like in the m1 like okay it's the first one it's going to be weird but then we'll then we'll get a rhythm going nope
John:
Just you never know what's going to happen.
John:
The three nanometer thing threw everything off.
John:
The fact that we got M3, M3 Pro and M3 Max at the same time where we had never gotten that before.
John:
So who the heck knows what it's going to be like in M4, but I guess we'll find out.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Richard Levitt writes, what exactly is a neural engine?
Casey:
I imagine it to be something akin to database search optimizations, but it seems it must be more than that.
Casey:
So what's going on there?
John:
Yeah, this is a good question.
John:
The short answer is, for me personally, I don't know.
John:
But the long answer is, I don't need to know specifics because I know what it is in general.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to, I thought we had a link to a video about this.
John:
Maybe we just have a link to the documentation on GitHub.
John:
to uh google's tpu tensor processing unit which is a similar type of thing here's what you need to know about the neural engine and lots of things that are on the soc that have names that are not like the cpu uh or gpu to a lesser extent um
John:
When you have something that you know you're going to need to do a lot of and it's very regular, you could have the general purpose CPU do it because, hey, the general purpose CPU can do all the math.
John:
It can do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction.
John:
It can do bit shifts.
John:
It can do masks.
John:
It can do all of those things and it can do a bunch of them at the same time and it can reorder instructions so it can keep those execution units running.
John:
It can do it.
John:
It's a general purpose processor.
John:
But what if you know actually what I'm going to need to do is take
John:
this huge list of numbers and add every single one of them in a particular pattern to this other huge list of numbers and then put the result in another huge list and i'm going to need to do that just so many times you can't even imagine you could send all those numbers to the cpu here's no here's a number number one from the third set here's the first one from the second one please add them together take the result
John:
write it back into memory of this location okay here's the next number and you can have five of them going at once because you have five execution units in the cpus and you're going through well we have vector instructions i mean we ever since mmx yeah so cpus also have a thing you know that's like simd a single instruction multiple data it's like do i need to add individual numbers what if i could add together five numbers at the same time i'll just pack all those five numbers into a
John:
single thing send it to the simd engine here's five numbers and five other numbers in a single operation five those five numbers all get added to the other five numbers i take those five results and put them in a new location that's five times faster that's amazing simd every cpu core has some kind of thing i figure what they call it for arm isn't like neon instructions or something it's not
John:
Yeah.
John:
But that's still the general purpose CPU.
John:
But you're like, no, you don't understand.
John:
I don't have like five numbers to add together.
John:
I have like 300,000 numbers to add together.
John:
And you're going to be doing literally the same operation to all of them, right?
John:
Let's say it's like matrix operations, which you can look up on a Wikipedia page where there's various operations you can perform to matrices.
John:
It is a rule book.
John:
You take this from there and that from there and do that into this and put the results over there and you just do it over and over again.
John:
So the neural engine, a lot of the algorithms that you have to run for these, you know, machine learning, neural processing, inference, whatever things,
John:
are like that.
John:
You're going to have to do something over and over again to just so many numbers.
John:
And doing five of them at once or 10 of them at once, that's not really going to cut it.
John:
The TPU, I'll try to find a link of the video for the show notes, but the TPU stuff, here's some specs.
John:
Obviously the TPU is an entire gigantic thing that only does stuff kind of like the neural engine does, but it's custom designed to just do this one thing.
John:
So instead of having a one or two little adders and they pull from memory and they add the numbers together and write the result back into memory,
John:
They sit there and say, all right, give me the first 100,000 numbers.
John:
And give me the other group of 100,000 numbers.
John:
Now I'm going to smush them all together and now I'll write the result out.
John:
And that's all they do.
John:
They can't do any other, they're not like general purpose processors.
John:
They're like, they're made to do this, right?
John:
So here's some numbers from the TPU thing, which again is much bigger than Neural Engine, but it gives you an idea of the scales here.
John:
The TPU can do 250,000 operations per clock cycle.
John:
So, your general-purpose CPU, you turn the crank, one clock cycle goes by.
John:
It's like, I added five numbers together.
John:
Good job, general-purpose CPU.
John:
I added 250,000 numbers together in that same clock cycle.
John:
And the other thing is, how many operations per instruction?
John:
256 million operations per instruction.
John:
You can send it one instruction that says, hey, take these 256 million things, take these, you know, 175 million things, like...
John:
such because they know it's like i'm not going to send you to these onesie twosie i'm not going to pack them into groups of five or ten to do sim d i'm just going to tell you there's a hundred million numbers over here and another hundred millions numbers over here smush them together and write the new hundred million out in the other place ready go one instruction
John:
250,000 operations per cycle that's what the neural engine does obviously not on that scale because it's a tiny little thing but it has functional units that are designed to do the specific thing that they know you need to do for various machine learning algorithms and those things need to do some brain dead simple thing over and over again on huge lists of number and they do not want to be fed those numbers onesie twosie they want to get them all at once smush them together through this gigantic massively parallel machine like in a single turn of the crank
John:
and then do that over and over again that's what the neural engine now what are those operations what is it doing is it doing multiply accumulate is it doing matrix transformations i don't actually know right but it doesn't matter that's what this thing that's what these functional units do and it's even more kind of like not brain dead but like simple and parallelizable than things like the h265 encoder because that has a job to do like encoding and decoding video but that is a much more complicated job than what these things do these are just like think of them as just
John:
huge rows of these machines and the one big crank at the end and you turn it and it doesn't process five widgets it processes hundreds or thousands of widgets all in each turn of the crank that's where you get the bang for the buck for the neural engine
Casey:
Mike Hoffman writes, with regard to Apple beta OSes, how often is it appropriate to report the same bug?
Casey:
Do you report it after every update or do you wait until the GM release and report it again if it still exists?
Casey:
Well, since Apple's feedback mechanism is totally broken, then you should do it hourly because that's the only way you have a chance of them noticing it.
Casey:
So hourly is our answer.
Casey:
Moving on.
John:
Santiago writes.
John:
So here's the thing.
John:
It depends who you ask.
John:
It's difficult to know what the right thing to do is.
John:
I'll give you an example of my window dragging bug, which continues to drag on.
John:
I'll tell you what I chose to do there and how that's working out for me.
John:
What I chose to do is what I usually choose to do is file a bug.
John:
And I've heard very often from people inside Apple that if some if the conditions change in some way, it might be a good idea to file a new report.
John:
Maybe the old one got chucked in the trash can.
John:
Maybe the old one didn't have enough information.
John:
Maybe the other one is caught in, you know, limbo somewhere or whatever.
John:
Like, say something has changed.
John:
There's a new beta that comes out.
John:
Or in my case, you've learned new information about the bug.
John:
Oh, I found a better isolation.
John:
I was mistaken about what I thought caused it.
John:
I filed the bug against the wrong component.
John:
When you do a bug report, it makes you pick, like, what is this bug about?
John:
And it's a pop-up menu.
John:
And there is an other choice, but I always fear the other choice.
John:
Because now I'm, like, at the whims of whoever, like, triages the others.
John:
But then the other choices are, like, I don't know.
John:
What is, like, window dragging.
John:
Needless to say, there's no choice for window dragging.
John:
There's a system performance choice, which is kind of good.
John:
But, like, when I'm filing a bug against, if you're filing a bug against an app, there's probably a choice for, like, photos or whatever.
John:
But anyway, it's hard to know where you're filing it.
John:
And so if you learn something new about this bug and you say like, oh, I thought it was a bug in X, but it's really a bug in Y, file a new one.
John:
If a new version of the OS comes out and it's still happening in that new OS, file a new one, partially because I imagine that...
John:
If there's a bug filed against the OS that they just released, those get more priority than bugs that you filed against the previous version because it's like, ah, that was the old version.
John:
We're not looking at those bugs so much anymore, but oh, we just released a new version and there's a bug against that.
John:
Maybe that gets looked at more.
John:
The downside of that approach is, as I found out with my window dragging bug,
John:
From what I have heard, work is happening on my window dragging bug, but it's happening attached to one of my older reports from an older version, which is a shame because all my new good information is in the new reports.
John:
Like as I've learned more and I've refiled against new versions of the US, but it happened to get picked up a while ago on one of the early versions.
John:
So now I have my effort.
John:
I was going to say the feedback scattered around, but let's be honest, there's no feedback, right?
John:
There is a tiny bit.
John:
Apparently some metadata changed recently on one of them that said that a fix is coming or whatever.
John:
But anyway, I haven't gotten any replies on any of them.
John:
By filing multiple reports...
John:
You're not sure which one of those, if any, is actually being worked on by Apple.
John:
So and if they are working on one, maybe they're not working on the one that you're putting your effort into.
John:
You keep adding new comments.
John:
Oh, I've discovered new things.
John:
Here's a better sample project.
John:
Here's a new screen recording.
John:
Here's a new cyst diagnose.
John:
Oh, the new version came out and I retested and it's still there and I filed a new bug.
John:
You may think you're doing important work, but it could be that that bug is being worked on with by the like the second one you filed like a year ago.
John:
so as with all things i don't know how best to handle this but i would say filing new bugs is probably a good idea because if you file one two versions of mac os ago you know like i hope they get to that one eventually if it still exists refile against the new os if a new beta comes out and it's still there if you don't refile add a new comment that says hey just so you know i tested as the new beta and it's still there
John:
Is that the right or best thing to do?
John:
We do what we can out here.
John:
We throw stuff over the wall and we hope it sticks.
John:
But I think the only thing I can definitively say is the wrong thing to do is assume that the one bug you filed a while ago is sufficient because it almost certainly isn't.
John:
Yeah, I mean, this is just...
Marco:
So a long time ago, a deep cut on this show maybe, I discussed a challenge that I had against one of Apple's APIs where my solution was to build an automatic kicking machine.
Marco:
This was a terrible hack that when you're exporting a share clip from Overcast, sometimes the video encoding API that I'm using to generate the share clip video files, some deep Apple API, sometimes it just hangs.
Marco:
And the only solution is to just cancel it and restart it.
Marco:
And so I actually built this process in the clip sharing feature where it observes the progress.
Marco:
And if the progress stalls for too long, it just cancels and starts over.
Marco:
And I describe it on the show as an automatic kicking machine.
Marco:
This is kind of how we are treating Apple's bug reporting system and how Apple employees tell us to treat it.
Marco:
The fundamental problem is the Apple bug reporting system is just hopelessly, deeply, massively broken and dysfunctional at every point.
Marco:
possible level and it reflects a huge amount of problems that the company has internally managing itself and then also the problems it has managing any kind of both feedback or communication or QA or prioritization from the outside world.
Marco:
Every part of this system in the company is dysfunctional and inefficient at best.
Marco:
And so we are told by many Apple employees over and over again, you've got to file bugs often.
Marco:
Yes, it helps.
Marco:
File them often.
Marco:
Oh, and Apple employees have told us every single beta, refile your bugs that aren't fixed yet as new bugs, new copies.
Marco:
Don't just go and comment on the old one.
Marco:
Refile them.
Marco:
Now, what this does is it takes a massively broken system and just breaks it more.
Marco:
The unofficial word from Apple employees is always...
Marco:
For us to dump more of our time and effort into this broken system, wasting our time even more so that they can avoid fixing their problems on their end, their deep fundamental problems in this area, we should collectively all waste all of our time way more to make their dysfunctional system work slightly better for them.
Marco:
What I say is, F that, I'm going to just complain to the press.
Marco:
Because, as you know, running to the press never helps.
Casey:
Except it always does.
Marco:
Yeah, it always does.
Marco:
And so, yeah, maybe file a bug, but also talk about it as much as you possibly can.
Marco:
Talk about it on Amazon.
Marco:
Make blog posts about it.
Marco:
If you have a podcast, talk about it on the podcast.
Marco:
Because really, what helps with Apple to get over their broken bug system is public attention on something.
Marco:
It's like many other parts of Apple.
Marco:
What helps is the right people seeing it.
Marco:
And if you go through the plain bug filtering system that you get in the feedback system, to get through that...
Marco:
The odds of anyone ever seeing that, I'm convinced, are very, very low.
Marco:
The odds of the right people seeing it, like people who could actually maybe do anything about it, are even lower than that.
Marco:
And then the odds that those people will actually have time to fix your bug seem even lower than that.
Marco:
And so you have to treat a bug that you care about like something that needs marketing.
Marco:
You have to market your bug.
Marco:
You can't just submit it in the background in Feedback Assistant and hope it will get fixed.
Marco:
It won't.
Marco:
You have to get in public and talk on Twitter and talk on MassDone and talk on threads and whatever else.
Marco:
Get it out there and market your bug if you want Apple to have any chance of fixing it.
Marco:
And no, this system absolutely should not work this way.
Marco:
There's so many problems with this, but it's the truth.
Marco:
If you don't market your bug, it won't be fixed.
John:
And, you know, we recognize it's kind of hard to market your bug when you don't have a tech podcast.
John:
Maybe you don't have a popular blog.
John:
It's even difficult to say, OK, well, I don't have a popular blog.
John:
Maybe a popular blog will pick it up.
John:
Like we recognize this is not this is not great advice for regular people.
John:
No, this is why it's so broken.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Although I still even, you know, I think about the air network change thing, which, yes, we did have something to follow up about it, but I got pushed it next week.
John:
Don't worry.
John:
It hasn't gone away.
John:
This is a bug that's been hanging around apparently since 2019.
John:
I only really heard about it when it started happening to me.
John:
And that's a similar story to other people, right?
Yeah.
John:
you'll know when this bug is getting close to being fixed by whoever is responsible for fixing when there's like a verge story about it or network change change plaguing people who use chrome based things like that's when you like let's say it's not somebody's pet bug like my photos thing or my window dragging thing that i constantly talk about on my stupid podcast let's say it's something more general like our network change which is happening to lots of people what's going to cause that to get fixed
John:
No one who's working on Chrome or has any control over this is probably listening to this podcast because that's really not our focus, right?
John:
But if there's a story on The Verge about it or some popular tech website or like the big thing like with apples and keyboards, there's a New York Times story about our network changed or butterfly keyboards or whatever.
John:
you can be sure that apple is paying attention now and it goes from the top down right it's not like the people in the rank file don't want to fix your bug they would love to fix your bug they don't have time no one gives them the time to fix it if you this is if you're not a programmer you might not know this but most people who are programmers especially good programmers if you have responsibility for something whatever it is i work on the dns subsystem on the mac or i have the sound things or i work on these apis on ios or whatever the
John:
The last thing you want is to know that there's some bug in the new version of the thing that you just released and not be allowed to fix it, not be given time to fix it.
John:
You want to fix it.
John:
You don't want to put out code that is like, oh, I made a dumb mistake.
John:
Oh, I see what it is.
John:
You want to get that fixed out as soon as possible.
John:
But if you work in a big organization, A, getting a bug fixed out, quote, as soon as possible could take weeks or months.
John:
And B, you might not even be allowed to do that because you've got a bunch of other stuff you're supposed to be doing.
John:
You don't get to set your own priorities.
John:
And it's only when some vice president sees a story on the verge that they talk to their person below them or talks to their person below them, talks to the other person below them that finally they say, hey, that bug you've been wanting to fix for six months.
John:
Now you have two days to do it.
John:
Go.
John:
That's how things work in big companies.
John:
And it sounds dysfunctional.
John:
But if it didn't work this way, programmers would just spend their entire time gold plating the one corner of the functionality they're responsible for.
John:
We never have any new features.
John:
So you have to find a balance between those two ends of the spectrum.
John:
obviously we often think apple is way too far in the direction of ignoring bugs but you can go too far in the other direction too i would love to see apple go too far in the other direction for a change of pace uh but i'm not holding my breath so right now the best we're doing is you know complaining on podcasts and trying to drag apple kicking and streaming a little bit more towards the gold plating angle which is a businessy phrase that maybe people haven't heard and maybe it's out of date or whatever but i can't think of a better name for the other one uh the other end of the spectrum but yeah they're way too far in the end of the spectrum where bugs just go unfixed for years and years
John:
unless they get a story in the verge unless they get a new york times story unless some senior vice president actually notices you know and with the air network change it has the great thing about it if like it's not even clear whose bug it is it is it apple force is chrome's fault is it both of them is it neither uh it's just like a problem that users are encountering and it's not severe enough to cause to appear as a story at anywhere except for here but maybe someday it will be
Casey:
Santiago writes, I just noticed that when you geotag photos in the Mac Photos app, the location information is not added to the file metadata.
Casey:
It's probably kept somewhere in the library.
Casey:
Quick aside, I think this is true for music as well, which is frustrating, but nevertheless.
Casey:
Santiago continues, this means that when using some backup solutions, that data will be missing.
Casey:
Is there any way to take the location information from the photos library and add it to their respective photos?
Casey:
This is why I process all that junk before ingestion into photos.
Casey:
I don't know if there's a way.
Casey:
I'll ask my co-host here in a second.
Casey:
But I view photos as kind of a lens into my photo library rather than the...
Casey:
I can't think of the word I'm looking for the one true version of the photo library and that's probably dumb of me and I'm probably missing out on some things but that's the way I treat it because I just I want the files to stand on their own and have all that metadata just like Santiago does so John is our in photos expert I guess is there a way to do this that you know of
John:
Yeah, so first thing is that feature that is described here, the fact that like, hey, there's what's in the file, but then there's also the separate stuff that's in the library and the library stuff takes precedence when you're viewing it through the lens of Apple Photos, but then it's not written to the file and backup programs don't see that.
John:
That is also kind of feature in certain scenarios.
John:
One of the features I've talked about about Apple Photo Library that I love is you can do all sorts of stuff to your photo knowing that the original is still there.
John:
crop it alter it do all this stuff none of it get none of that gets baked in so you always can say oh i've changed my mind oh i and i do it frequently i'll go back to a photo that i edited seven years ago and i'll be like you know what i'm better at photo editing now let me undo most of that and redo it better and there's no problem because this things that you the changes you made in photos were written to the photos library not to your file your files unmodified so that's great but in this case like well what about stuff that i really like it's not like edits or whatever i just would rather have the date in the photo so
John:
The good thing about Apple's photo library, and I think also about their music library, is this is one of the rare cases where Apple has public, open, supported third-party interfaces to the photo library.
John:
It doesn't help you as a user unless you can find an app that does it, but technically speaking, is there a way to take that location information from photos and add it from the library and add it to the photos?
No.
John:
There is a way you'd have some code that you that someone wrote in an app, they would read the library and write that data out to the photos and modify them.
John:
Someone could 100% write that program.
John:
Maybe they already exist.
John:
Maybe next week, 50 people will send us a bunch of app suggestions or whatever.
John:
But like, this is one of those cases where it's not like, Oh, Apple doesn't let you do that.
John:
And there's no API for that there is there is an API for doing all that you could do this one could do this.
John:
if there are not lots of apps like this it may reflect the fact that most people like ah it's in the photo library it's fine i don't care like not everybody cares like casey does of having it baked into the file or like santiago does but i'm saying it's technically possible so i'm hoping somewhere out there is an app that you that could do this there's also command line tools and other things that you could potentially do this for obviously casey does it like up front with his own tools before he goes to the photo library but if the dates are in the library
John:
Yes, there is a way for one to programmatically get that data out.
John:
And there also is a way for one to programmatically write that to a photo file.
John:
That is all technically possible and supported without any weird hacks or whatever.
John:
It's just a question of whether somebody wrote that app.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsor this week, Notion.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-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
Casey:
Marco, I heard some rumblings that you had some sort of hardware related, and I don't mean computing, I mean hardware store related project, which means you presumably made something between five and 500 trips to Home Depot recently.
Marco:
Not Home Depot.
Marco:
Fortunately, this was with a local hardware store in town.
Marco:
So this was for the new house.
Marco:
The HVAC people had installed some dumb thermostats, even though I had requested smart thermostats.
Marco:
And in particular, I had requested Nest thermostats.
Marco:
Now, I had the very first generation Nest thermostats a million years ago.
Marco:
They're in the house that we are selling.
Marco:
I'm not taking my ancient Nest thermostats with me.
Marco:
They're staying with the house.
Marco:
They are quite old.
Marco:
Some of them have lines through the screens and everything, but they still work.
Marco:
Anyway,
Marco:
At the beach, when I smartified these thermostats, I tried Nest first and it gave me all sorts of problems with connectivity because the walls here are very thick and radio signals aren't very effective here.
Marco:
They get blocked really easily.
Marco:
Wi-Fi is very challenging here.
Marco:
I had constant problems with the modern Nests and I ended up switching over to the Echo Bee HomeKit smart thermostats.
Marco:
The Echo Bee thermostats started out being a little more ugly and clunky than the Nest's, but at least they were HomeKit, and at least I was done with the Nest hardware.
Marco:
And then they kept getting software updates that make them even worse somehow.
Marco:
The Echo Bee recently redesigned their interface to do things like change the temperature of the thermostat on the thermostat, which you would think would be,
Marco:
an action that they would optimize the design to do and this is always something that nest was fantastic at and now nest makes up a whole bunch of thermostats some of which are like those really like they made like a really cheap version and by the way and i know upgrade plus listeners i know jason snell is literally just making the opposite move like right now so we'll see maybe maybe jason maybe i'll mail you a whole bunch that could be someday but anyway
Marco:
Echo B has worked fine with my HomeKit setup.
Marco:
It doesn't work exactly as well as I would want it to.
Marco:
When you look at HomeKit secure video cameras, which again, I've had my issues with my Logitech circle views.
Marco:
Maybe I'll mail those to Jason too.
Marco:
Don't get circle views.
Marco:
HomeKit Secure Video, the way it works when you set up a device that uses it for most things, including Logitech ones, that's all they do.
Marco:
They might have their own separate app, but they're really first and foremost designed for HomeKit Secure Video.
Marco:
That's not the way Echo Bees are with HomeKit thermostats.
Marco:
It's more like, okay, yeah, we'll talk to HomeKit, but that's not what we're designed to do.
Marco:
Echobee wants you to use their own app.
Marco:
It's very similar to Nest in the type of problems it tries to solve.
Marco:
It tries to get you to do all these efficient things and be smart and automatically adjust your temperature and all this stuff, most of which I disable because it doesn't really work very well for people who work at home.
Marco:
The Echo Bees, I have had moderate mixed success with.
Marco:
I don't hate them enough to replace them, but I don't like them enough to buy any more of them.
Marco:
And the recent update to the UI and the Echo Bees,
Marco:
makes it so that if you want to change the temperature on the thermostat it takes something like five or six taps and a decent amount of time as you have to wait for it to like wake up and then animate into a few different positions and then you can adjust it and it's so error prone it's i don't know what they were thinking with this update like it's bad um and the echo bees they don't look as good as the nest even to even to start with even when they're off they don't look as good so it's it's it's a downgrade anyway
Marco:
The new house that we're renovating is a much simpler, more traditional layout.
Marco:
The thermostats are just there's one upstairs, one downstairs.
Marco:
They're both in the middle of the hallway, so they get great Wi-Fi coverage from anywhere.
Marco:
So it's a much easier thing.
Marco:
So I said, you know what?
Marco:
Let me go back to Nest because the Echo Bees are just so annoying to use.
Marco:
I'll just do Nest.
Marco:
So, get there.
Marco:
The HVAC people, we have all new, brand new HVAC systems because this house was, we're heavily renovating it because it was a very old house that was really not kept up much.
Marco:
It's kept up now.
Marco:
We're renovating everything.
Marco:
Brand new HVAC systems.
Marco:
They installed the wrong thermostat.
Marco:
So yeah, let me just do this myself.
Marco:
Like we're trying to get everything done as quickly as possible so we can move in.
Marco:
So I go there today.
Marco:
First of all, there was no one working today.
Marco:
So there was no one around to like, you know, help out or borrow tools from.
Marco:
And I look around the house and there are no tools anywhere.
Marco:
This is a construction site, but they cleaned it up pretty well.
Marco:
And so there's buckets of nails and a dumpster full of drywall fragments, but there's no tools.
Marco:
There's one little area of the house where we were able to shove a few of our things and not have them be touched.
Marco:
And in that one little area, I found...
Marco:
a small battery powered drill that had one bit the phillips bit okay that's i can do something with that so i was able to take the old thermostats off um and and fortunately the you know once you get in there the wires are all these little press wires and what i learned when i open up the nest nest actually comes with i oh and i got the nicer nest like the old kind with the turning knob because they're more pleasant to use and they let you change the temperature really easily on them a feature that echobee should learn
Marco:
Anyway, so Nest actually comes with a little tiny screwdriver to take off the old thermostats wiring and you can pop in the new one.
Marco:
So anyway, I have basic tools, a little, little tiny flat screwdriver and a medium sized flow screwdriver and this drill.
Marco:
And I was able to get one of them installed just fine.
Marco:
But I noticed when I did the wire, like, wow, the wire colors on this are not at all what I've seen on any other thermostat before.
Marco:
Now, I've installed a decent number of smart thermostats.
Marco:
I've never seen the color scheme that the installers of the new system used.
Marco:
I'm trying to figure out like what what the heck are these wires like where is the common wire what is this blue one why like there's all these colors and I'm like looking up on my phone what the heck are these colors well I'm like you know if I had a multimeter
Marco:
I could just test them and see where, you know, where is the 24 volts AC?
Marco:
Like, is it between this and this or this and this?
Marco:
And I didn't want to, like, you know, start to short them together to, like, see, oh, if I short these two together, does the heat turn on?
Marco:
Like, I didn't want to start doing that before I knew what I was shorting together.
Marco:
So I'm like, all right, well, let me, if I just had that.
Marco:
And then one of the wires they hadn't connected yet, like, they hadn't connected the AC stuff.
Marco:
They'd only connected heat because it was the bare minimum to, like, keep the work going through this cold month.
Marco:
So I'm like, let me connect the AC also.
Marco:
I might as well.
Marco:
And I'm going to need a multimeter to figure out which of these wires has that.
Marco:
And they're not even stripped.
Marco:
So I'm like, all right.
Marco:
So let me run to the hardware store real quick.
Marco:
There's a hardware store right in town.
Marco:
I'll get a cheap multimeter and a cheap wire stripper.
Marco:
And I'll get this going.
Marco:
And all of my other stuff at this point is a 45 minute or a half hour drive away, like over the sand.
Marco:
Like I'm not going to go all the way back, you know, to get all my other stuff.
Marco:
So I'm like, all right, let me just, let me just go to the hardware store right in town.
Marco:
So trip number one, multimeter and wire strippers.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Go back to the house, figure it out.
Marco:
Okay, I'm pretty sure I know what these wires do.
Marco:
And let me just test.
Marco:
I've measured the voltages.
Marco:
They're all right.
Marco:
Let me just test.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure this one's the air conditioning wire.
Marco:
It's blue.
Marco:
That seems like it would make sense.
Marco:
It's not standard, but it's at least something.
Marco:
It's the only other wire here.
Marco:
Let me try.
Marco:
I connected that wire to the other one, and a little spark formed between the two wires.
Marco:
I'm like, hmm, that's probably not good.
Casey:
That's not good.
Marco:
And then it stopped working.
Marco:
like then there was no voltage in any of the wires i'm like oh crap did i just break my brand new age vacuum if you're gonna break somebody's thing breaking your own works out yeah so i'm like all right now what how do i solve this problem like all right i think i just broke something and at first i tried let me just go flip the breaker off wait a minute flip back on see if i can reset whatever needs to be reset
Marco:
did that no luck oh man you're getting to the point where now you realize you're gonna have to explain to the people you're paying to fix your house that you're like you know when you weren't there i decided i'm gonna i'm going to play contractor and pretend that i can fix the house but i broke it yes that's and that's what i was dreading i'm like oh man can i i gotta figure out how to fix this myself like i don't want to have to call the hr people back to like look hey i i tried to do this i just broke my slash your brand new system
John:
it's like if they came to you and said yeah we made a bunch of changes to the overcast code and now it doesn't compile anymore we're not sure what we did anyway we uploaded that we uploaded that bill to the app store just can you fix it yeah right like i'm like i i felt like such an idiot i'm like oh man like i i should not have done this so were you hey you decided at this point uh to avoid that you're gonna dig further it sounds like you did considering you made more trips but i
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Well, it was time for lunch.
Marco:
I go have lunch.
Marco:
And as I'm, you know, eating my quick microwave, whatever, I'm looking up like YouTube videos.
Marco:
Like, you know, what if a Bosch air handler doesn't have any?
Marco:
And I somehow found through a web searches and Reddits and stuff like that, an HVAC installer saying, hey, these people keep blowing their control board fuse.
Marco:
And somebody was like, oh, that's usually what happens when there's a short somewhere in the thermostat wiring.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
It happens when homeowners start connecting wires.
John:
They don't know what to do in the spark forms.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And I'm like, oh, I shorted my control wiring probably.
Marco:
And I did more research on that.
Marco:
And it's like, oh, yeah, this tends to happen, especially if you short the common wire directly to the other side of the transformer.
Marco:
Then it will blow this fuse instantly.
Marco:
great this is almost definitely what i just did like it everything lined up i definitely shorted the common wire to the r wire definitely okay so i go back to the house and i like go into the crawl space under the house find the new air handler i'm like all right where where where how can i get to this control board and it has really big flathead screws that hold the panel on on top of the control board
Marco:
and i don't have a flathead screwdriver you don't have a dime because you're not living in the 50s with change in your pockets i scoured the house no for anything that could yeah i didn't find i thought of coins i couldn't find anything that could be a big flathead screwdriver i tried the little one that i had it was way too small wouldn't turn it at all
John:
nothing i had anywhere in the house i'm looking around i'm like looking at the like the the strips of nail gun nails that look like ammo and i'm like maybe if i like use the side of one of those like yeah i feel like if you were like even just even just in our parents generation i know that my dad when i was growing up uh when he came home from work and he emptied out his pockets he was always emptying change out of one of the pockets like he had his wallet he had his keys but he always had like loose coins and that just is not the way i live my life as an adult at his age at the age he was like
John:
Yeah.
John:
Dads constantly having change in their pocket is not a thing anymore, I feel like.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I'm not like a knife guy either, so I don't have knives in my pockets or anything.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
You don't have your Leatherman strapped to your belt for 364 days.
John:
So on the 365th, you can unscrew these big screws.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
What I'm learning is you need to really refine your EDC after this experience.
John:
No.
John:
Or you could just have a box of tools at the house that's being worked on.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
John:
Or you just let the people who you're paying to work on it.
John:
Anyway, there's many solutions here.
John:
Continue.
Marco:
What did you actually do?
Marco:
And I'm like, I'm pretty sure it is this blown fuse.
Marco:
I don't want to have to make two more trips because I don't know how big and what kind of fuse.
Marco:
So I can't just go buy a fuse and a screwdriver in the same trip.
John:
You got to take the donkey across with the chicken.
John:
You don't want to bring the hay at the same time.
Marco:
Yeah, so first I had to go buy a screwdriver, then go back to the house, take the cover off, find the fuse, pull it out.
Marco:
Sure enough, it is very blown.
Marco:
And then go back to the hardware store a third time saying, I need this, please.
Marco:
I bought a five-pack.
Marco:
So I'm like, first of all, it's all they're coming in.
Marco:
Second of all, I'm like, I'm probably going to need this.
Yeah.
Marco:
anyway finally got it all back popped it in it worked perfectly sure enough that was that was indeed the common wire apparently they are sometimes blue now um and so now finally i have my nest thermostats in the house and now i have to just have them patch the giant space out holes they made with the wrong thermostats
John:
yeah think about the smart thermostats and the pressing connectors the thing that i was always fearing when i was messing with mine is that the the cable with all those various wires is just barely long enough to reach because you have to kind of connect it to the and i was like if i screw this up like if i like bend it back and forth too many times and like the stripped end breaks off or whatever like i don't have i'd have to like go to the basement and somehow free some slack somehow to go up through the walls and it's just so precarious with these
John:
tiny little wires and these little press connectors like for all the you know that we complained about like computer connectors the lack of connectors with just like house wiring is you know especially if you're in a very old house because a new house is like oh a good electrician will leave you lots of slack and the wires are very robust and they're sturdy and but if you have an old house i mean you don't have that excuse this is new construction but in my old house the wires are just barely long enough to reach and older than everybody in your family combined and
John:
It's so just ready to fall apart at the moment you like look at them funny.
John:
So it's always a little bit scary to be messing with stuff.
John:
But yeah, I'm sure the people who are working in your house are glad that you had this little do-it-yourself project that you accomplished without them.
John:
Yeah, I'm just not going to tell them.
John:
I mean, they're going to notice that the thermostat that they installed is no longer there and this new thing is.
John:
well yeah i guess i guess they will they will eventually see that what did you do with the what did you do with the old thermostat that you paid for by the way i rested it on the floor below it and walked away i don't think they'd be like oh the thermostat fairy came in the night and just set this down yeah then you put out wooden shoes and it takes your old thermostat and puts them inside i don't know what they're gonna think you need to communicate i mean i do feel like you should own up and say yeah so i'm a little bit of a do-it-yourselfer and
John:
It only took me three trips to the hardware store and one blown fuse, but I did it.
John:
So let me know if you need my help later.
Marco:
I'm just glad that that was a fuse and I didn't like fry the whole control board.
Marco:
That's what I was really afraid of.
John:
That's what fuses are for, right?
John:
But I believe in you.
John:
If you had a coin, you could have bridged that fuse thing with a coin and then really blown the board.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
The old thing is like, you don't need a fuse, just take some foil off your pack of marblers and put it in there.
Marco:
Yeah, what do you need a fuse for?
Marco:
Just bypass it.
Marco:
I'm sure it's fine.
John:
Yeah, fuses are pointless anyway, right?
John:
Speaking of microwaves, I think that's one of the few things that did go wrong with microwaves.
John:
I do believe I blew a fuse at one point, like those microwave fuses, and I don't know why, and I think I replaced it and it hasn't blown since in years, but yeah.
Marco:
I still can't believe you're using a screenless microwave for all this time.
Marco:
It's got a screen.
Marco:
Well, it doesn't work, but it's there.
Marco:
I mean, it might as well not be there.
John:
Yeah, well, no.
John:
It has become screenless.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think one of the seven segments in one of the things lights up or something.
John:
It never changes, but it's always just... Anyway.
Marco:
It doesn't occasionally blink on like, oh, it's a multiple three.
John:
Don't talk about it.
John:
It's very sensitive about its screen.
John:
We consider it a whole microwave.
John:
although the fan now that we did that episode i swear after we did that episode the fan is starting to sound make noises i'm like did you hear the podcast microwave what are you doing get the breville you gotta get the breville and you're like oh it's just a vibration maybe if i touch it oh it went away and i so i'm giving this thing side eye now and to be fair already like the door opening closing was being wonky which is why i had done that research that i referenced but now that we did that podcast it's like i heard you talking about me
John:
yeah hey look i i know i know your wife listens to this podcast i'm just saying you know both christmas and your birthday are coming up real soon she doesn't want a new microwave either when i was doing microwave research everyone i showed her she's like oh i don't like that what's wrong with our microwave i mean you just named quite a few big things that are wrong with your microwave yeah well you know we'll see but i do have my eye on that uh i'm asking for so much kitchen stuff for my christmas stuff but it doesn't currently include a microwave
John:
just eight cheese graters no it is it is similar stuff like that it's way cheaper than a microwave and a microwave on john's counter that's the end of the song i gotta say i was so damn proud of myself when i got the thing working like i was so ashamed when i broke it and you had you had erased the the memories of the previous failures like this is a pure victory yeah this was totally worth like two hours flawless execution yeah
Casey:
I actually, a few months ago, I told myself I was going to replace the train thermostats that came with our redone HVAC that we did in 2014.
Casey:
I told myself I was going to replace them with like an Ecobee or something equivalent.
Casey:
And I looked specifically at the Ecobee and I wussed out because even though I don't think my HVAC is actually that unique, I'm just so scared that I'm going to screw something up.
John:
You could totally do it.
John:
It'll be fine.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, all these thermostats, the Ecobee and I imagine the Nest ones, they come with just such extensive instructions and wizards to guide you through.
John:
And if you do not have a weird house, you'll be on one of those happy paths.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, the fact that I was able to do it with almost no tools and basically no relevant expertise except having done it a whole bunch in the past.
John:
Well, the important thing, and I think maybe this is where you went wrong, Marco, is...
John:
assuming the installers had installed the one that they installed correctly that is your key to understanding what all the wires do yes well if they use the same letters yeah yeah but that's the thing about the guides they sell you like this may be y1 on your thing or maybe r2 on this thing like they try to cover all the bases and i you know again the historical baggage of usb is nothing compared to the letters that
John:
they assigned to thermostat wires and the the decades of history behind that that only like these installers know and that they don't even need to know the history it's like you just suffice it to say you just have to know that r1 and r2 and y and g and p and q and the colors and you know it's just it's once you know it i'm sure it's it's fine but you don't have to know all like the history behind it but yeah for yours casey
John:
when you take the worst mistake you can do is take off your other one okay old thing take take take it off and then just be left with a bunch of wires in your face you made a big mistake there take a picture of the back of the old one first so a worst case you can always put the old one back exactly the way it was because and then label the wires if you have two wires that are the same color label them put a little piece of tape around and label them you know
John:
They give you that with the kits.
John:
If you buy one of these things, like the eco thing comes with little tiny tags to put on the wires.
John:
So you don't, because they know you're going to lose track of the two, you know, both of the, in my case, all the wires are the color of ash, right?
John:
They're just all ash gray or they're space black, Apple would call it.
John:
so you have to label them because they literally all look identical they all look like they've been in a fire and they all look identical so they give you they give you stickers with the thermostat to put on your little wires because they know you're gonna forget so i believe in you casey unlike the fiber optic thing i think you can do the oh you know the thermostat replacement i don't know i i'm again my system isn't that unique but it's like a heat pump you have nine connected wires here oh wait one of them's a loop what the heck is this i'm saying oh that's nothing it's fine
John:
Look how easy this is.
John:
These are huge fat wires with plenty of slack and gigantic connectors.
John:
This is like glory.
John:
You should see the back of the Ecobee thing is like doing microsurgery compared to this.
Marco:
Yeah, no, this would be fine.
Marco:
The bigger problem is you'd have to use one of those ugly big plate covers to cover up the... Oh, no, look at the size of it.
John:
His hole is small there.
John:
Like he's just... Oh, I guess he has the screws.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I think this is... We're zoomed in pretty far here.
John:
I think he could get away with... I think a Nest might span those two Phillips screws right and left.
Marco:
no and also the problem is nest mounts on top and bottom so you could use that bottom screw you have to drill a new one in the top and you have to seal up the left and right ones but uh but yeah no you could you could do it it's it's it's not any harder than like changing a light switch it's actually easier because you're dealing with low voltage wiring yeah look at your you also yours are separate colors you see the jumper between rh and rc with the with the red one going into rc like that's the tricky stuff that would be a pain for you to figure it out on your own but here it is you got the key like assuming these labels are correct which they probably are
Casey:
and you have a common wire yeah which is blue just like my new one so in theory you know even if i really hosed it up uh we're friendly with our hvac installer like we we talk to them periodically just why don't you just have them do it well i should but i also i also want to be self-sufficient you can do it yourself way cheaper i think it's worth trying it yourself exactly then you can call him and say hey i tried to do it myself and i screwed it up save me yeah
Casey:
Which is what I would do.
Marco:
I got to say, like, really, like, the process of installing the Nests and using the Nests, it's a lot nicer than the Echo B. Like, they're both easy, but the Nest is nicer.
Marco:
Now, I know Nest's whole backing service is, you know, slowly being neglected by Google.
Marco:
And I know that it doesn't have HomeKit support.
Marco:
google abandoning a product no but like the the actual experience of use of physically using it is so much nicer than echobee it's not even close so i i know it's annoying to have to go into the dumb nest app or have to run some kind of home bridge kind of thing why are you doing either one of those things like not that i'm i agree with you i think the echobee's interface is terrible but like
John:
Once you get it set up, are you constantly micromanaging it to tweak it up and down?
Marco:
Up and down, not.
Marco:
Occasionally, yes.
Marco:
I also turn it on and off a lot, especially in transitional seasons like this, like earlier this week.
Marco:
It was super sunny and bright during the day and then freezing at night.
Marco:
So during the day, I actually wanted to open some of the windows upstairs because it was so warm and the sun was coming in.
Marco:
And so I turned all the heat off in the middle of the day.
Marco:
And then later on that night, turn it back on.
Marco:
Like that kind of stuff.
John:
But why do you need to turn it off?
John:
Why don't you just...
John:
like let the heat won't come on unless it needs to come on like you're you're going for a target temperature right you're not going for heat on or heat off that's what the thermostat yeah but i didn't want the situation where like i open the windows it goes one degree below my set point and then the heat's blasting with the windows open i wanted to avoid that
John:
But then it would stop as soon as it got bad.
John:
Like, it's a thermostat.
John:
That's what it does.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
Also, like, you know, we do workouts in the house.
Marco:
We do FaceTime workouts with a trainer.
Marco:
And so, like, I'll turn the heat way down, you know, a few hours ahead of that.
John:
You need focus modes for home kids.
John:
Like, when I'm in a workout focus mode, turn the temperature in the house down.
Marco:
Yeah, but it has to be, like, earlier than that.
Marco:
It's a whole thing.
Marco:
We tweak it all the time.
Marco:
We're like, you know, hey, some nights...
Marco:
you're a little cold, and you want to turn the bedroom like one or two degrees.
Marco:
Some nights you're really high, you want to turn it down a few degrees.
Marco:
That's just what happens, you know?
Marco:
So, anyway, I like having... That's the whole point of thermostats!
Marco:
You can adjust them!
Marco:
And every smart thermostat I've ever seen that wasn't a Nest was just a horrendous interface to actually just... Let me just raise the lower of the temperature one degree or so.
Marco:
Like, that's... Oh, God, it's so hard on everything else.
Marco:
And I don't know... Like, Echobee has blown it so hard.
Marco:
They are so... They have...
Marco:
some of the pieces in place to be really amazing, and they just blow it on minor design choices.
John:
I think that some of that is, I mean, some of the lack of HomeKit integration, the fact they want to use your own app, I consider that a feature.
Yeah.
John:
because i i enjoy my thermostat not being connected to that ecosystem which i have found not to be particularly reliable so i like that my ecobee has no idea about that other stuff i don't i disable the thing that lets it use siri or whatever like that's what what it kind of attracts me to the ecobee is that it is less smart and i don't want it to be particularly smart i want it to be straightforward and i set it and forget it and yeah that's it's basically and obviously my needs are less demanding how many thermostats do i announce just the one
John:
Actually, not true.
John:
There's a thermostat in this room that controls only this room, and then there's one for the whole rest of the house.
John:
The thermostat for this room, by the way, it's one of those ones with the coil of metal wire, you know, like the old round ones that you would see like maybe in school when you guys were in school.
Marco:
With the mercury blob inside?
John:
No, not the mercury bra, but like the little, it's not, I can't say that.
John:
Maybe it does have the mercury in the caps.
John:
I haven't looked inside it, but I think it's just got the bimetallic, strict, curly thing, but it's super old.
John:
It's not smart, in case you didn't know.
John:
But it's real easy to change the temperature, just turn the dial.
Marco:
Yeah, see, that was what Nest did.
Marco:
For all of Google's mishandling of this company, their thermostat is very nice to use.
Marco:
It's nicer to look at, way nicer to look at than the Echo Bees.
Marco:
The Echo Bees is not ugly, but the Nest is just way nicer.
Marco:
And it's so much nicer to actually physically use.
Marco:
It's not even close.
Marco:
And it is kind of sad when you look around the thermostat industry how few nice options there are.
Marco:
There's just not anything nice except Nest and a little bit Echobee.
Marco:
And everything else is crappy industrial garbage.
Casey:
Like I said, I've been flirting with the idea of Echo Bees.
Marco:
After my sales pitch here?
Casey:
I mean, honestly, I want nothing to do with Nest.
Casey:
Everything I've understood is that everything around the physical.
Casey:
I mean, this is a different.
Casey:
I think you mean Google Home.
Casey:
Well, that too.
John:
That stupid transition that I have like one Google Home camera and two Nest cameras and two different apps.
John:
It's not great over there.
Casey:
Anyway, yeah, but my understanding is exactly what Marco said.
Casey:
Like, the physical interaction with Nest is great.
Casey:
Everything else is just utter shit.
Casey:
And I just – I don't – no, thank you.
Casey:
And so what is the other choices?
Casey:
Ecobee.
Casey:
There's your other choice.
Casey:
Like, that's all you got.
Marco:
That's the thing.
John:
Like, how are there not more of these after all these years?
John:
If you are – I said it and forget it.
John:
There are more.
John:
Like, the traditional companies all have, quote, unquote, smarter thermostats now.
John:
But I feel like they are –
John:
less good than and then the ecobee like ecobee is a nice medium between like ones that have just like a plain lcd screen with that isn't bitmap based like it's just you know again a bunch of like little things those ones uh there's ones with e-ink screens then there's the full-fledged nest ones ecobee is kind of in that middle spot which i think is kind of a good place to be but if you don't like that you can buy for basically the same amount of money or more than an ecobee one of the ones from traditional uh
John:
thermostat companies like honeywell and stuff that's what i've got look they look janky but they have all the same features as ecobee but their app is a hundred times worse but they'll probably also last longer like it's one of the things i did was i was justice to uh casey when you take out your old one the one that was over here save it oh yeah oh i absolutely would yeah yeah and put it somewhere and keep everything all the parts with it and labeled or whatever because like if you're a loophole if you had winter and then you lost heat in the middle of that winter
John:
Because your stupid smart thing died or got bricked by a software update.
John:
It's so handy to be able to just look at this picture, bring out the old one, bop, bop, bop.
John:
Now you're back up and running.
John:
And those old ones just do not die.
John:
Like my one that I replaced, it was powered by like a single AA battery that lasted like seven years.
John:
It has an up and a down button, a plus and a minus button in like a VCR type scheduler.
John:
They are just bulletproof.
John:
And, you know, so definitely save your old one.
Casey:
Well, I agree with the broad strokes of what you're saying, but this is not a joke.
Casey:
About a week ago, I had to kill the breaker to the thermostat downstairs because Aaron does occasionally fiddle with them.
Casey:
I almost never touch them, but Aaron will occasionally fiddle with them.
Casey:
And she was complaining, justifiably, she was complaining that it took her forever to change the temperature on this thing.
Casey:
And it's a touchscreen and so on and so forth.
John:
It's a touchscreen?
John:
That's pretty modern already.
Casey:
No, it's 2014.
Casey:
That's what I'm saying.
Marco:
That's what these all suck at, changing the temperature.
Marco:
What else are you doing with a thermostat?
Casey:
No, but it's, it gets better because what I ended up doing was throwing the breaker to the thermostat, which of course killed the, or to the furnace, which killed the thermostat.
Casey:
You gave it a five count, turned it back on.
Casey:
And you know what suddenly was way more performant and was much faster because I guess whatever frigging memory leak had been cleaned my thermostat.
Casey:
So yeah, it's great.
Casey:
Except that it has a frigging memory leak that after a few weeks.
John:
Yeah, no, you don't have one of the old reliable ones.
John:
I was thinking you had something powered by a AA battery with rubbery buttons and no smarts.
John:
Yeah, those things last forever.
Casey:
Yeah, this is not what I have.
Casey:
And I mean, the one that I have, you can control via a truly terrible app, which is nice, but it's a truly terrible app.
Casey:
There are like three of these apparently in the world, and so I haven't yet found a HomeBridge plugin for it.
Casey:
I actually have...
Casey:
a search running periodically to see if eventually one pops up, and it hasn't in the literally six years that I've had this search running or something like that.
Casey:
I want to get rid of it, and I kind of want an Ecobee, but I'm scared of it, and they're expensive, and so that's why I haven't done it yet.
Casey:
Oh, and this is 100% got Mercury in it, John.
John:
That's not mine from the wall because I can't reach it with my headphones on, but that's more or less what it looks like.
Casey:
I'm pretty sure there's mercury inside.
Marco:
Yeah, the old round Honeywell with the heat on top and the cooling on the bottom or whatever.
Marco:
No, that's not cooling.
John:
That's just saying what the current temperature is.
John:
That's right.
Marco:
Heat and cool is a switch on the side usually.
Marco:
Well, you don't have cooling on yours.
Marco:
I don't have any cooling.
John:
Don't worry about it.
John:
my thermostats essentially connect one wire to the other that is the sole function because there's only one thing you can do is either heat on or heat off that's it yeah yeah this is exactly what we had in my house growing up just with with cooling also yeah but you can change temperature real easy you just turn that dial that's it yeah
Marco:
exactly that's what like that's what the nest was ripping off because that's literally like you know the nest was designed after all the digital ones had come out that all that all had these complicated button things and you know tony fidel was like hey what if we just made this a knob it's nicer like the old ones boop you just turn it and everyone's like oh my god that's amazing and look you made a round screen somehow yeah late late 2023 is the year of the knob for marco