Your Yanking Force
Casey:
When did we start this?
Casey:
We started this in like March of 2013, is that right?
Casey:
So it's been like eight years that we've been doing this and we're still doing all this bullshit trying to get it to work.
John:
Usually it's only one of you that radically changes your setup and has things, but now Marco wanted to get in on the action today too.
Casey:
It's not always me.
Casey:
I rarely mess with my setup.
Casey:
Marco's the one that changes computers like underwear.
Marco:
Yep, that's me.
Casey:
How many computers have you bought in the last three weeks?
Casey:
Kept?
Casey:
Bought.
Casey:
I didn't say kept, I said bought.
Marco:
Well, for my household or for me personally?
Marco:
For your household.
Marco:
He fosters computers a lot.
John:
And then basically like when he has a foster fail, that's how he gets his computers.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Marco is about 15 dogs and 35 computers, all fostered.
Casey:
Oh, golly.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
My office is a mess.
Casey:
Of the 32 minutes and 7 seconds we've been recording, do you think we have 6 minutes of content at this point?
John:
This is all for the bootleg.
John:
They need to get their money's worth.
Marco:
Oh my god.
John:
Holy smokes.
Marco:
I've been doing computer setup stuff for the better part of the last week.
Marco:
For the most part, I am still in happy mode.
Marco:
For the most part, I'm still loving computers and new computer setup.
Marco:
I'll get to this in a little bit of why this has taken me an entire week.
Marco:
Short version is I did two clean installs instead of doing any migration.
Marco:
Um, so that it just takes so much time for me to set things up, but I was happy until today.
Marco:
Cause like I had this list of things I had to do, you know, for, you know, set, set up, you know, my, you know, backblaze and Dropbox and time machine and, you know, just this list of stuff I wanted to set up on the, on the new computers.
Marco:
And I had saved until today, the two things I really didn't want to do, um,
Marco:
That would be Adobe setup and transferring the cellular plan from my old Apple Watch to my new Apple Watch.
Casey:
Well, that usually isn't bad in my experience.
Marco:
I have never had that succeed without having to invoke AT&T's chat people.
Casey:
Huh.
Casey:
I feel like I've done it once or twice.
Marco:
It's supposed to be able to do it, but it never does.
Marco:
So all this time I've been thinking, oh God, I got to do this.
Marco:
And I had forgotten about the Adobe thing.
Marco:
I had forgotten because my computer felt great.
Marco:
I had it all set up the
Marco:
I liked a really, you know, very happy.
Marco:
Everything's lightweight.
Marco:
You know, I'm using Maestro instead of Dropbox.
Marco:
I don't have that crap all over the place and like keeping everything nice and tight and clean and using new modern things.
Marco:
And then I went to record the ads for this podcast, which I do right before we record the podcast.
Marco:
And oh, I don't have Adobe Audition installed because of what I recorded.
Marco:
And I know there are other programs that are what we used to call a wave editor, like back in the very, very old days, whatever, whatever now we call Adobe Audition.
Marco:
It's a wave editor, but with a bunch more features, but it's the best damn wave editor I've ever seen.
Marco:
And it's like, you know, the modern version of what used to be called Cool Edit Pro, which I think they actually bought and turned into Audition long, long, long ago.
Marco:
I could be wrong about that, but I just love a good wave editor and I've never found a better one than Audition.
Marco:
And so I tolerate Adobe's massive amount of crap.
Marco:
Only for two apps.
Marco:
Only for Photoshop and Audition.
Marco:
I don't use any of their other apps anymore, really.
Marco:
And my god, I must really love Audition to put up with this crap.
Marco:
Because Photoshop seems to have a lot of really good alternatives.
Marco:
There's Acorn, there's Pixelmator, there's the Affinity suite of stuff.
Marco:
There's all sorts of nice alternatives to Photoshop.
Marco:
I don't know of any great alternatives to Adobe Audition.
Marco:
And for what I do with like tons of various, you know, it's basically like it's my sound utility knife.
Marco:
Like it's, I can do tons of different things with sound with Audition.
Marco:
And it's not my only one.
Marco:
I have many sound tools, but you know, this sound is much of my business and pleasure.
Marco:
And so, you know, I kind of need it.
Marco:
But
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
Installing Adobe, that is a fast way to bring my computer high down, crashing back to Earth.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
First, you've got to install Creative Cloud, and there seems to be no way around installing Creative Cloud.
Marco:
If anybody knows of an option for that for Audition, please let me know, but I don't think there is one.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
I did briefly consider pirating my copy of Audition.
Marco:
That I pay for anyway, just so I wouldn't have to have Creative Cloud installed on my computer.
Marco:
But I don't even know what that world is like anymore, so it's been a while since I've been in it.
Marco:
But anyway, other than Adobe's crap being spewed all over my computer in the worst possible way, other than that, I've had a wonderful week setting up my computers.
Marco:
I haven't gotten any work done because I've been setting up my computers.
But...
Marco:
I'm so happy to be at the stage I'm at now, which is everything is mostly done and working.
Marco:
But yeah, it's been a road getting here.
Casey:
You know, to that end, I've decided to completely change up my audio setup for today.
Casey:
And I'm doing that because I wanted to trial using my fancy new MacBook Pro, which has finally arrived.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And I am very excited about it.
Casey:
We will be talking about it quite a bit later.
Casey:
But I am now recording on the MacBook Pro.
Casey:
My poor iMac screen.
Casey:
It's actually a truly...
Casey:
stupid procedure that I'm doing right now because I have this beautiful 27 inch screen right behind the 14 inch screen that I'm actively using.
Casey:
And I'm just that, that 27 inch screen with all that beautiful real estate is just sitting there dark.
Casey:
Um, but nevertheless, I am recording on the MacBook pro.
Casey:
So if anything sounds funky, don't blame Marco, blame me.
Casey:
Uh, but in the process of getting all this squared away,
Casey:
Of course, I had to do all my installs.
Casey:
And I'd like to get a reminder out in front of all of the people, including you, Marco, although it's too late.
Casey:
Homebrew bundle.
Casey:
If you believe in homebrew, which I do, then bundle is sort of kind of like a gem file, I guess, for homebrew packages.
Casey:
And so I've written about it.
Casey:
We've talked about this on the show before.
Casey:
I've written about it.
Casey:
And I'll put a link in the show notes to my blog post.
Casey:
But you can put in a list of all the packages you want.
Casey:
Like, I don't know, if you're Casey, then maybe FFmpeg would be high on the list.
Casey:
And you can put that in your bundle file, and then you say to Homebrew Bundle, once Homebrew is installed, go install all the things.
Casey:
And there was a couple of minor issues with it this time, specifically the mechanism by which you can install stuff from the App Store is kind of broken at the moment, although I think they just merged the fix for it.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I was able to get it squared away.
Casey:
And it is really nice.
Casey:
The one thing I will say, though, is I was sold a bill of goods with this MacBook Pro.
Casey:
I'm kind of spoiling a little bit later, just a smidge.
Casey:
I was sold a bill of goods with this MacBook Pro that everything happens instantly.
Casey:
And a lot of stuff does.
Casey:
A lot of stuff really, really does.
Casey:
But you know what doesn't?
Casey:
xcode install and i did it from the mac app store which maybe that was a poor choice but well there's your problem never do that one way or the other uh the install took for freaking ever and of course like a noob i had the way i did my my bundle file which you can find off the link on my blog is i i did all of the mac app store stuff first and then all the like straight up brew stuff later and
Casey:
And I did it alphabetically because, I don't know, I'm type A. And so one of the last things in the Mac App Store section was Xcode.
Casey:
But then that caused everything to effectively come to a screeching halt because I couldn't install anything else.
Casey:
Well, I mean, I could.
Casey:
But you know what I mean?
Casey:
If I'm running through this file, it's held up on Xcode before it gets to any of the other stuff I wanted to install.
Casey:
So one of the things I've learned from this process is put Xcode at the bottom.
Casey:
So it's the very last thing you install.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Not one of the first.
Casey:
But Homebrew Bundle, I know, Marco, it's too late for you, and I know this isn't really your style because I know you don't like automating anything with these sorts of things, but it's a very neat tool, and we will put links in the show notes.
Marco:
It isn't that I'm against automating this kind of stuff.
Marco:
It's just that
Marco:
the setup that I have or the technical needs of whatever I'm installing or the packages themselves tend to change more often than I set up new machines.
Marco:
And so the result is when I am ready to use it again, either the script has broken or the packages it refers to have changed or broken and or the things I want to install are different.
Marco:
And so, I mean, if I was setting up, like, you know, if I, I mean, suppose I was ridiculous enough to buy a new Mac every year.
Marco:
And suppose that I was setting them up as clean installs every time.
Marco:
Then I would be way more likely to do this kind of setup.
Marco:
But what I do now, like, you know, I mean, I set up a clean install maybe every three to five years.
Casey:
So that's where you and I differ.
Casey:
So it makes even more sense that you would not be keen on this idea.
Casey:
But for me, I find that for my preferences, I just like doing it fresh every time.
Casey:
I just I like cleaning out all the cruft.
Casey:
And I know that's more of like a holdover from Windows time.
Casey:
But I just prefer to clean everything out and just do it fresh.
Casey:
John, when you did your Mac Pro, did you migrate?
Casey:
You did, didn't you?
Casey:
I always use Migration Assistant.
John:
I was just watching one of our Slacks people were just talking about brew and all that other stuff.
John:
Oh, boy, how you people live with these package managers.
John:
Like Margaret was saying, I update so infrequently that when I update, it's basically an opportunity for me to either update or change...
John:
which things i have right so that's the time for me to upgrade my installation of postgres and upgrade my installation of mysql if it even still exists or if it's maria db now or whatever like that's the time for me to do all that new version of pearl now and all my cpan modules let's get those and i don't mess with those for years but when a new computer comes that's the time for me to revisit all of it so i don't want an automated process it just gives me what i had before i want every x number of years to
John:
Reconsider everything that I have and migration system brings a lot of it over and because of the wonders of binary compatibility and our Rosetta My existing installs tend to just work, but it just those are just copied as files because everything is in user local And migration system tends to copy over user local or if it doesn't I can manually do it because it's just one directory tree and that's all my stuff
John:
But I do take that opportunity to say, OK, well, my stuff came over and it seems like it works.
John:
But do I want to start upgrading or uninstalling or putting something different in or whatever?
John:
So that's what I do when I get a new machine.
Casey:
All right, let's talk about the most important thing in the world.
Casey:
It is not new MacBook Pros, as exciting as they are.
Casey:
It is instead the ATP store, which is back, baby.
Casey:
Just like we said last time, the store is back.
Casey:
This is the middle of three episodes where we plan to talk about this.
Casey:
So you are running out of time.
Casey:
You are running out of time.
Casey:
So the ATP store is back in case you missed last week.
Casey:
We've got all new stuff.
Casey:
We've got ATP the flamethrower.
Casey:
No, not really.
Casey:
We've got ATP M1 Pro shirts and Max shirts.
Casey:
We have them in various flavors of black fabric with a rainbow front and printed on the back.
Casey:
Then we also have the monochrome version where the colors of the shirt are various different colors, but the ink is always white.
Casey:
And again, there is something on the back there.
Casey:
And then we also have the ATP winter hat.
Casey:
Note, this is not a chicken hat.
Casey:
Perhaps we should call it a turkey hat.
Casey:
I don't know.
Marco:
It's like the chicken hat, but just really big and less flavorful.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly right.
Casey:
And then we have the ATP hoodie.
John:
Turkey is not less flavorful than chicken.
John:
That's madness.
John:
Actually, that is probably true.
John:
You're probably right.
Casey:
Sorry, dryer.
John:
Well, that depends on who's cooking it.
Casey:
Oh, there it is.
Casey:
We've got the ATP hoodie, and then we've got the classic ATP logo shirt.
Casey:
All of these things are available at ATP.fm slash store.
Casey:
If you are listening to this right now,
Casey:
If you're driving, maybe signal and then pull over.
Casey:
If you're walking, maybe just ease your way to the side.
Casey:
If you're biking, do what you need to do, whatever bicyclists do to get into a less dangerous situation and go to atp.fm slash store and check out this sweet, sweet merchandise.
Casey:
John spent a lot of time, y'all, on the backs of these shirts.
Casey:
Don't let John down.
Casey:
Don't let us down.
Casey:
Buy a shirt.
Casey:
Buy a shirt for you.
Casey:
Buy a shirt for your friend.
Casey:
Everyone will be happy.
Casey:
atp.fm slash store.
Casey:
Also, don't forget, if you are an ATP member, you get 15% off on timed sales like this one.
Casey:
So if you want, you could become a member at ATP.fm slash join.
Casey:
You could buy your merchandise.
Casey:
You could cancel right after.
Casey:
But instead, you could hold on and listen to the amazing bootleg that we put out every week, including this one, which I can assure you was a disaster.
Marco:
This is a good one.
Marco:
If you're going to listen to a bootleg, this week is a good time to start.
Casey:
This is a good time to start.
Casey:
So atp.fm slash join to become a member.
Casey:
And don't listen to John.
Casey:
Just stick with it.
Casey:
You'll love it.
Casey:
And one way or another, atp.fm slash store to order some new sweet merchandise.
Casey:
Thank you to all of you for sponsoring this show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
We have a Ask ATP that I think I might have from somebody promoted an Ask ATP from Cesar Cavazos.
Casey:
I'm going to go with that.
Casey:
And Cesar asks, can you do a follow-up on Marco's dock setup?
Casey:
Which one will you be using with the 2021 MacBook Pro?
Casey:
If I recall correctly, both CalDigit and OWC were the culprits of network issues, or excuse me, weren't the culprits of network issues.
Casey:
But I'm also wondering if the charging power, 87 watts and 90 watts, will be an issue.
Casey:
I would also like to know this because I really think this MacBook Pro that I'm talking to you on right now is going to be my only real computer soon.
Casey:
So I would like a dock and a frigging monitor Apple, but we'll leave that for another time.
Casey:
I would like a dock.
Casey:
So Marco, what's your dock situation?
Marco:
So interestingly, so I still do own both docks.
Marco:
I keep the OWC Thunderbolt dock back in Westchester.
Marco:
So whenever I go back there, I plug into that.
Marco:
That's connected to my LG fine display.
Marco:
And I have a fine set up there whenever I need to record there.
Marco:
But my primary setup with the XDR here at the beach is using, actually, none of those hubs.
Casey:
Oh.
Marco:
I have the CalDigit here, but I use it more for, like, you know, if I had to, like, set up for a project doing something.
Marco:
Like, I'm currently playing with, you know, some gaming hardware-type stuff that I might do, like, capture of all three of us in the family playing a game.
Marco:
And to do that, I would actually use CalDigit Dock and capture onto...
Marco:
My laptop, which is actually one of the reasons why I upgraded laptop, even though I didn't necessarily need to for other reasons.
Marco:
Anyway, so the couch is just kind of floating around my house as like a utility as needed thing right now.
Marco:
What I am using, though, is still just two cables put into my MacBook Pro.
Marco:
The Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter that is currently the chain.
Marco:
Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 to Thunderbolt 2 to Ethernet, which is how we are talking to each other right now.
Marco:
Listen to the bootleg if you want to hear the story of how that happened.
Marco:
And the other cable is going to my Pro Display XDR.
Marco:
And the XDR has on its butt three or four extra USB-C ports.
Marco:
And they're not Thunderbolt.
Marco:
They're USB because there isn't enough bandwidth left over after the display signal to also offer Thunderbolt ports in the back.
Marco:
But it turns out that the only really high bandwidth thing I have is the Pro Display XDR.
Marco:
And everything else I plug into USB ports is mostly low bandwidth stuff.
Marco:
It's mostly keyboard receiver, sound devices, input and output, a couple of external hard drives or external SSDs, USB devices, charging cables for a watch and my iPhone developer tether cable.
Marco:
um so there there's mostly not a lot of high-end needs i have here i really just need a bunch of usb ports also under my desk i have a usb a hub so that provides a lot of the a lot of the you know less modern connections to a lot of that stuff too in the back of the pro display xdr i connect my audio interface that usb hub um
Marco:
something else, I think one of the charging cables.
Marco:
And that covers my needs just fine.
Marco:
It really is, like, that's really all I need.
Marco:
So for now, I'm not using any of these hubs, and I don't think I will need to add one to my desk in the near future.
Casey:
I'm blown away that you're using your USB audio interface via the XDR.
Casey:
Like, there's no reason why that should be a problem, but, I don't know, superstition just tells me that that seems like a terrible decision.
Marco:
Well, and I've been using it that way since I got the Mac Mini, so about a year.
Marco:
The thing is, I used to have that same superstition because it wasn't a superstition.
Marco:
When the USB-C generation of laptops first came out in 2015 and 2016, the USB hubs and dongles and stuff on the marketplace were very unreliable, including the ones that were on the back of the LG Fine.
Marco:
Those ports are notoriously unreliable.
Marco:
Hubs and dongles were unreliable.
Marco:
And so for the early generation of USB-C stuff, it wasn't wise to plug in something like an audio recording device into anything besides a port that was on the computer.
Marco:
And that's one of the reasons why I always wanted more ports on the computer, because the things that needed to be 100% reliable had to go into those ports.
Marco:
They couldn't go into a hub for me to actually depend on them.
Marco:
Well, the XDR's ports have been 100% reliable for me.
Marco:
I haven't had any problems with them at all.
Marco:
So it's great in the sense that I guess after spending $15 million on this display and another $5 million on its stand that I get four extra USB-C ports.
Casey:
Do you remember the actual names of the two, the OWC and the Caldigit hub?
Casey:
Is the Caldigit the TS3 Plus?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Does that sound right?
Marco:
Yeah, they've been making that for a while.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
It's like this solid block of aluminum.
Marco:
Anecdotally, or I mean, just opinion-wise, between the Caldigit and the OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock, I think it's called, I prefer the Caldigit.
Marco:
They have similar capabilities.
Marco:
The Caldigit is a little bit like...
Marco:
smaller and stockier in its shape.
Marco:
And even though they both seem to be built with high quality, the CalDigit is basically a giant block of metal.
Marco:
The outside has fins, so it cools off without needing a big fan anywhere.
Marco:
It's a really nicely built thing.
Marco:
I'm a big fan of CalDigit from this purchase alone.
Marco:
I've never had any of the previous stuff, but this device has made me a fan.
Marco:
It's so...
Marco:
It just feels so damn solid.
Marco:
They actually have something called the Element Hub that I desperately want, but it's out of stock everywhere right now.
Marco:
Because what's interesting is that now that the MacBook Pros are providing HDMI and SD...
Marco:
I no longer really want those things in a hub.
Marco:
Every little feature that a hub provides, every little hardware thing that it has built in is kind of a liability if I don't need or want it.
Marco:
Because, for instance, all these hubs have their own audio devices built in.
Marco:
They have a headphone jack, maybe a microphone, like a headset kind of microphone jack input.
Marco:
But it has all these additional things.
Marco:
And to me, all of those things are liabilities for some kind of peripheral that will be permanently connected to my computer that I can't separate from the rest of the hub that might at some point get flaky or have some kind of weird driver issue with the OS or something like that.
Marco:
I want my hubs to be mostly dumb.
Marco:
I want the variety of ports and stuff to be in the computer.
Marco:
The computer should have things like, you know, the SD slot and the HDMI port and hardware Ethernet if it's a desktop and stuff like that.
Marco:
That should all be in the computer.
Marco:
And the hub should only be necessary, ideally, to provide just more ports.
Marco:
You know, more, like, USB ports, ideally, and Thunderbolt ports.
Marco:
So what I'm looking forward to is I'm hoping to get the CalDigit element hub at some point soon once it comes back in stock.
Marco:
Because all it is...
Marco:
is Thunderbolt in, and then I think it's three Thunderbolt out, and a whole bunch of USB-A out.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
There's no networking, there's no sound, there's no HDMI.
Marco:
It's just a USB and Thunderbolt port multiplier.
Marco:
And that's awesome.
Marco:
That's exactly what I want.
Marco:
So hopefully I can get one of those sometime soon.
Marco:
And I hope that now as these new...
Marco:
a little bit more generous port filled laptops start going into the market and, and over time start taking over the market as they, as you know, they filter in and people start replacing the old USB-C only ones after, you know, a few years from now.
Marco:
I'm hoping that the world of these like big multi-port hubs kind of gets reduced and we are just seeing much more just like, you know, multiple USB port multipliers or multiple Thunderbolt port multipliers.
Marco:
Hopefully we'll get there.
John:
I wish the Element Hub worked without a power supply, though, because it is so slim and small and just has those ports on it, but it does require DC power, so you've got a power brick and you've got a cord.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
That is unfortunate.
Marco:
But as far as I know, and the other sad part, too, is that on the market, I think Caldigit makes one, I think OWC and maybe a couple others, maybe Belkin, there are other ones on the market that are bus-powered Thunderbolt hubs, but they only tend to have...
Marco:
two usb ports and then like two hdmi or two display port ports and a couple different brands make this i'm guessing it's some kind of like just standard intel chip they have in there to to do this but that to me like that's fine but i don't really need two additional hdmi ports i really just need more usb ports but i also recognize the power demands of modern usb devices you know they expect a
Marco:
While Thunderbolt can deliver a lot of power over that port, I'm sure there's, I don't know what the limit is off the top of my head for Thunderbolt devices.
Marco:
Maybe it's like 30 watts or something like that.
Marco:
But, you know, I bet they would hit that limit pretty fast once they're adding ports.
John:
Yeah, it's from their FAQ.
John:
They say Thunderbolt ports each require 15 watts of power and USB ports each provide up to 7.5 watts of power.
John:
So if you add it all up, you need a power supply.
John:
You can't get that from the bus.
John:
It makes sense, but, you know.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, John, tell me about your AirPods 3.
John:
A quick update on my AirPods 3 I talked about last week.
John:
Now I've had a week to spend with them.
John:
I've used them as my main and only AirPods, which means I use them a lot, use them while listening to podcasts, watching TV shows and movies on my iPad, did all the things.
John:
So update on the comfort.
John:
I think they're fine.
John:
My ears don't hurt.
John:
They're not fatigued.
John:
Like I was worried about that.
John:
They do still feel different.
John:
They feel larger in the ear.
John:
They press up against parts that they didn't.
John:
But it's, you know, after a week, I feel confident in saying that if these were going to bother my ears in some way, they would have already and they don't.
John:
So, I mean, that's just that's just me.
John:
You have to try them yourself to see how it works for you.
John:
But I'm personally glad that they don't bother me.
John:
uh the case size i did say that they come into charging case that's bigger uh which kind of annoys me um it's worth noting that it is smaller than the airpods pro case so if you think you're getting it looks just like the airpods pro case like it opens on the long side and everything but it is smaller than that it is slightly larger than the regular airpods case but still significantly smaller than the big airpods pro case so don't be too afraid of the case it's
John:
It's kind of like going from the iPhone 7 to the iPhone 10.
John:
Is that the time when we got one bigger?
John:
I think 7 to 10, right?
John:
It's a little bit bigger, but you get used to it.
John:
And then finally, spatial audio.
John:
These are my first headphones, besides messing with my wife's AirPods Pro, that I've used that support spatial audio.
John:
and i don't like it uh every time i try to do stuff on my on my ipad i'm like why the hell is the audio all messed oh okay spatial audio and then you know do you want head track spatial audio do you want non-head track it's like no i don't want any spatial audio i mean i'm mostly watching tv shows and movies uh but whatever whatever they're doing some of them says like don't be at most available like no i mean it's just it doesn't
John:
it sounds worse to me maybe with music i tried it with music a little bit too and even including downloading ones that are you know whatever whatever the keyword is for the music that says redownload to get the fancy spatial multi-track thing for whatever reason i just it's not what i want uh definitely don't want it on a tv show it just makes it sound like i don't like i don't want the thing where hey the sound feels sounds like it's coming from the ipad
John:
I don't want that.
John:
I want the opposite of that.
John:
That's the point of wearing headphones is that the sound doesn't sound like it's coming from the iPad.
John:
It sounds like it's right in my ears, and that's much better.
John:
But then also the music, the multi-track music, I just want it to be mixed for headphones.
John:
I don't want it to sound like everything I'm listening to.
John:
It's like stereo equipment from my youth when they first started having a concert hall mode where everything sounds like it's in a cathedral.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
It's not that bad.
John:
Anyway, it's not to my personal taste, but just for people who don't know, if they just buy these and start using their iPad and everything sounds weird, remember that you can, what is it, upper right corner, swipe down to get the control center and then hold down on the volume bar.
John:
This is not particularly discoverable.
John:
I don't even know like what the quote unquote real way to do it is, but...
John:
Anyway, upper right corner, swipe down on iOS or iPadOS.
John:
Hold your finger down on the volume slider and it will pop up a full screen thing that will have a giant volume slider.
John:
And then at the bottom of the giant volume slider, you'll see probably three buttons for like spatial audio off and spatial audio head tracked and spatial audio fixed.
John:
And then you can switch among them.
John:
And it does seem to...
John:
remember your settings per app which means that every time i use a different app oh now i'm using netflix now i'm using hulu now i'm using i gotta now i'm using apple tv plus now i have in every app i have to convince it no spatial audio it does seem to remember so far which is good but yeah not a fan oh yeah and i guess speaking speaking of not a fan the tapping versus squeezing i'm getting a lot better at doing the little pinch still miss tapping i really wish they would bring that back in a future version of these but i'm really not holding my breath but yeah the squeezing is just
John:
It's worse for my use cases.
John:
I mean, it occurred to me when I was, you know, thinking about the squeezing and all this stuff during the week.
John:
I used to frequently knock on the AirPods with my knuckles or the back of my hand when my fingers were all gross from like cooking or washing something or whatever.
John:
forget about that try try pinching if you have like you know gross fingers that have like cooking stuff on them you can't pinch with your knuckles at least i can't anyway i'm not that like i really i mean i guess i could also go with the you know hey dingus stop and hey dingus play type of thing but anyway um still the audio quality is better enough that i'm definitely going to stick with it but i will miss tapping
Casey:
Understandable.
Casey:
I still haven't tried special audio, nor the pinching versus, you know, tapping thing.
Casey:
I only have non-spatial audio tappable AirPods, and I'm not sure how I'm going to feel about either of those things when eventually I upgrade.
Casey:
One of you wanted to know what our Monterey situation is, who's updated, who hasn't, etc.
Casey:
Marco and I just got new computers, so I think it's safe to say that we've upgraded.
Casey:
You have no choice.
John:
Yep.
John:
Yeah, you didn't upgrade.
Casey:
What's your situation, John?
John:
Oh, I mean, just before we get to me, like...
John:
obviously your new computers all came with monterey and you can't use anything else but what about your older slash existing computers did you bother upgrading those marco's got so many computers i can't keep track so he's got to have some neither can he like did you upgrade everyone else's computer in the house to monterey is your old mac mini upgraded to monterey what's the upgrade story
Marco:
The Mac Mini is not, just because I had no reason to upgrade it to Monterey.
Marco:
And it's funny, you know, when the M1 Macs first launched last fall, and developers had the opportunity to either leave our apps as is and let them be available, sorry, iOS developers, had the ability to let our apps become available in the Mac App Store for M1 Macs, or you could opt out.
Marco:
And I said at the time, why would anybody opt out?
Marco:
This is like free...
Marco:
additional users for your app and i figured what could possibly go wrong of course i'm gonna leave overcast in as you know for able to run on on on max well it worked okay for the most part for for most of the last year uh until i was 15 beta started coming out and mac os monitor beta started coming out and
Marco:
They're starting to become bugs in the like now shipping versions of Xcode that build for iOS 15 and macOS Monterey.
Marco:
Now I have to actually test Overcast on Big Sur when building with Monterey's version of Xcode.
Marco:
is this actually working now or is it going to crash in weird ways um it's no longer like a like a you get this for free kind of thing so i actually i'm not saying i'm going to remove it from this i'm not um but when it does crash on big sir i hear from every single person who uses it and they start leaving one star reviews and bringing my average down
Marco:
Even though they are not that numerous, there are enough of them that if the app crashes, I will hear from them.
Marco:
And I won't hear from them in my support email.
Marco:
I'll hear from them in one-star reviews.
Marco:
So I do have a need now to become a Mac app tester.
Marco:
Like, I need to be able to test my app on old versions of Mac OS.
Marco:
I do intend at some point soon to look into, like...
Marco:
how do I virtualize old versions of Mac OS so I can do it that way?
Marco:
But until I figure that out, I'm just going to leave this Mac mini running with screen share enabled, which maybe I'll get to that story, but I'll leave it running with screen share enabled in my closet for a while so I can just log into that and test it whenever I need to.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't believe I upgraded my Mac Mini that's basically a Plex server, little else.
Casey:
But I have upgraded basically everything else that I touch.
Casey:
I don't even know what version of macOS Aaron's Adorable is on, but it's probably like two versions old now.
Casey:
But I upgraded everything.
Casey:
It's been fine.
Casey:
I like having focus modes echoed across all my devices.
Casey:
I know that's very divisive, and not everyone would agree with me, and that's fine.
Casey:
But I like it.
Casey:
I don't use it super aggressively, but as an example, I have a podcasting focus mode that comes on at 8 o'clock on Wednesdays and stops at midnight on Wednesdays.
Casey:
And so that is an example of something that's echoed across all my devices, which I like.
Casey:
And I feel like there's some other stuff, although off the top of my head I can't remember what,
Casey:
But I feel like there's some other stuff that I've liked about Monterey.
Casey:
Oh, AirPlay receiving is pretty cool.
Casey:
So I can use my iMac Pro or perhaps MacBook Pro as one component of a multi-room audio setup, which I like.
Casey:
The only thing I didn't like, though, was...
Casey:
Apparently, it listens on port 5000, which I typically use locally when I write blog posts for my blog.
Casey:
And I use port 5000 for the web server when I test locally.
Casey:
And I was starting it on the MacBook Pro in order to test or look at a blog post.
Casey:
And it kept saying, well, the port is in use.
Casey:
And I was like, what are you talking about?
Casey:
Do I have something running somewhere that I don't even realize?
Casey:
And it took me a little bit of duck duck going before I realized, oh, apparently it listens on port 5000 and one other one.
Casey:
I don't remember which one.
Casey:
And I don't know why, but that's the way it works.
John:
I think we both end up with using port 5000 as our local web server thing because I use the same one.
Casey:
I have no idea.
Casey:
It's because we're so damn smart, John.
John:
That's why.
John:
That's weird.
John:
It's not a convention that I know of.
John:
Well, is it a Node thing?
Casey:
It might be a Node thing because this is a Node-based.
John:
I'm not using Node.
Casey:
Well, you do sometimes.
Casey:
Last I heard you were doing a bunch of Node for work.
John:
No, I'm talking about my, like, hypercritical.com.
Casey:
Oh, oh, oh.
John:
My ridiculous stack of Perl garbage.
John:
There's no node in there.
John:
Fair enough.
John:
Yeah, it's port 5000.
Casey:
Well, funny how that works.
Casey:
Well, anyways, but no, all in all, it's been going well.
Casey:
How is it on your completely slow and boring Mac Pro?
John:
Well, I mean, the reason I put this topic in here is a lot of people ask, like, how's Monterey going here?
John:
We kind of said the same thing quickly with iOS.
John:
What the hell number are we on now?
John:
15?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And we all just upgraded iOS 15 and it was fine.
John:
And I have to say the same thing in Monterey.
John:
In fact, the most difficult thing about Monterey was me making sure all my backups were up to date because they just take so long.
John:
Right.
John:
Especially the ones to the Synology, because just, I guess, I don't know, like backing up over the network is always just so much slower than backing up to a local disk and when you're in a hurry.
John:
So anyway, I updated all the backups.
John:
The new version of SuperDuper is out that supports, you know, bootable backups from Big Sur and Monterey.
John:
Um, and so I, you know, I made a fresh, make sure everything was like up to date, up to date.
John:
What I like to do is all the, the, the only thing I do before the upgrade is I do all the backups and nothing else.
John:
Don't do any work because then you have to re-backup, right?
John:
So I do all the backups.
John:
I got all my backups all squared away.
John:
Back to the backblaze, super duper clone, local time machine, remote time machine.
John:
then you can upgrade and upgraded and went fine uneventful just did the upgrade it did its thing uh and nothing broke and everything's good so and i was i was using myself as the guinea pig and i did my traditional upgrade time is right after we record atp so that gives me the maximum amount of time to screw up my setup before the next recording so basically last week you know thursday morning or whatever i just started this process because i'd already done all the backups and
John:
And based on that experience, that it was fine on my computer, upgraded my wife's computer, too.
John:
So if people are wondering, hey, how's Monterey going?
John:
Now, with the caveat that there is some reports that updating Bridge OS is kind of hosing people's older Macs.
John:
So if you have an older Mac, maybe look up that problem.
John:
I couldn't find a good link for it in show notes.
John:
All the ones I saw were just like, hey, some older Macs are getting bricked because Bridge OS.
John:
gets updated or whatever and i've had that happen to my mac pro in the past and it's no fun so you do not want to get into the situation so it might be worth waiting if you have an older mac i wish i could tell you the list of macs i look at like four different articles and they all just said older macs i'm like you need to tell me what that means which specific mac should not upgrade anyway but if you have a modern mac a very up-to-date one and you're wondering is monterey okay monterey 12.0.1 or whatever whatever the version is that like doesn't ship on hardware but like that you get when you upgrade
John:
It's been fine for me.
John:
I think it's safe for you to upgrade if you have a modern-ish Mac.
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Casey:
So The Verge released their MacBook Pro reviews, I don't know, a few days ago now, and there was some very interesting kind of banter in that review, but most especially around battery life.
Casey:
And they wrote, and I watched the video review and I believe I read the post as well.
Casey:
And the video review was very good too.
Casey:
But they wrote, the 16-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro ran for 16 hours on its battery during continuous use, making it the longest lasting laptop we've ever tested.
Casey:
Period.
Casey:
Ever, ever.
Casey:
Which is pretty cool.
John:
Yeah, I mean, the Verge stuff is not particularly scientific in terms of battery testing, but they basically just use the computers to do what they normally do.
John:
So this is, I would imagine this is light use, right?
John:
But in any scenario, getting 16 hours of battery, as they said in the review, they felt like they wanted to, like, stop working and go to sleep, but the computer still had battery.
John:
Like, they ran out of battery before the computer did, so...
John:
Yeah, that 100 kilowatt, you know, the biggest battery you can put in a laptop and still have it be allowed on a plane.
John:
Apparently, you put that in combined with an M1 Pro, not the Max, but the plain old M1 Pro can result in very, very long battery life, which is great.
Casey:
Now, tell me about charging a MacBook Pro via USB-C.
Casey:
I, for one, am extremely happy that that's still a thing.
Casey:
And it sounds like it had to be a thing.
Casey:
Am I right?
John:
Yeah, Ethan C. wrote in to say that his theory is backed up by some links we'll put in the show notes.
John:
Apple is required to allow charging through at least one USB-C port in order to certify the laptop as Thunderbolt 4 compatible.
John:
Here's some text from this Thunderbolt PDF that says, required PC charging on at least one computer port for thin and light notebook that requires less than 100 watts to charge.
John:
And a similar citation from PC Magazine.
John:
So it seems like to be properly certified as Thunderbolt 4, you have to do this.
John:
Now, that said, Apple has had no problem in the past just doing whatever the hell it wants with supposedly standard interfaces.
John:
An example would be, well, I don't actually, I can't say this is non-standard, but it's definitely weird.
John:
Someone will write it and tell me whether it's non-standard Apple thing or just like weird stuff.
John:
uh the usb connector that connected to usb keyboards for max back when the power button was still on the keyboard do you guys remember that oh yeah so they had a the the us it was a usba connector but it had like a notch in it like it was weird like it wouldn't you couldn't plug in a regular usba they've always loved notches
John:
Yeah, well, it was like a little, I think it was like a triangular notch or whatever, because, you know, otherwise, you know, plain old USB, you couldn't put a power button on the keyboard.
John:
It just wouldn't work.
John:
So Apple sort of made its own thing.
John:
I think that's a totally Apple proprietary thing or some weird variant of USB.
John:
But anyway, either way.
John:
um apple has no problem doing whatever the hell it feels like with any kind of buses and just saying hey this is the way it is in apple computers or just look at apple display connector adc um which was totally made up port with a tunneled a bunch of other protocols over it or whatever so it's not like apple was forced to do this but it just seems like this was the path of least resistance for apple and we're all glad they did it
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Tell me about MacBook Pro compatibility mode and its resolution.
John:
This is a question for both of you to answer because I can't test these things and I see these things on the internet and I can't figure out whether they're true or not.
John:
So this is in reference to the sort of the checkbox that's in the get info window that we referred to on the show like right after the MacBook Pros were announced.
John:
We talked about this and now more and more people are discovering it.
John:
it is in monterey if you go in the finder select an application go to get info or hit command i there's a checkbox what does it say it's it's not it's not listed as compatibility mode it is called scale to fit below built-in camera there you go but basically what it says is hey this application might not know how to deal with the notch so just make this application think it is in a 16 by 10 screen that the notch doesn't exist right and
John:
and the way i thought it did that was it would just tell the application hey the screen bounds end at essentially where the bottom of the menu bar would normally be so hey you're on a 16 by 10 screen and just everything above that would just be black because the application wouldn't just would just ignore that part but if you look at this video that's attached here in this tweet that shows it's that purports to show this feature in action
John:
What it looks like it does instead is that it scales down the entire interface, right?
John:
Instead of chopping off the top, it takes the picture that would be displayed on the screen and scales it, including on the sides, like that it basically goes to a non-native resolution by slightly scaling down the whole image so that it gets below the notch.
John:
So it's not just shorter, but it's also narrower.
Yeah.
John:
And that seems bad.
John:
That's not what I thought this feature did, and I don't want it to do this.
John:
I would much rather have chop off the top pixel so it stays at native res.
John:
So can you guys try this and tell me if this is true?
John:
Not it.
John:
Fine.
John:
My fingers on my nose.
Casey:
We don't want you touching anything.
John:
No, you don't need to run the full screen.
John:
Just...
John:
Look at the terrible video with background music that probably just bled through my headphones.
Casey:
I'm not listening to the background music.
Casey:
But they're running this full screen.
Casey:
Well, screw it.
Casey:
I'll just try it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I took day one as an example of something that I know supports full screen mode.
Casey:
And I've ticked scale to fit below built-in camera.
Casey:
I'm now closing the info window.
Casey:
I'm starting day one.
Casey:
And it's just in a window exactly as you would expect.
Casey:
However, when I go full screen, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
It comes in a little bit for sure.
Casey:
It comes in laterally and vertically.
John:
Is it displaying non-native res?
John:
It seems like it would have to be, huh?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I took a screenshot.
Casey:
Let's see how big the screenshot is.
Marco:
Well, anyway, it wouldn't surprise me if this mode is not something that got a lot of time put into it by Apple's engineers before the release of these things.
Marco:
Because, you know, I mean, first of all, a lot of this stuff kind of seems like it was a little bit, you know, last minute.
Marco:
But also, as soon as an app is built with the modern tools, like with the current version of Xcode, that option disappears for it.
Marco:
So this is not something that Apple intends to...
Marco:
have as a long-term thing that people are going to do for certain apps all the time.
Marco:
This is literally just like, let's get us through this transition period as smoothly and possibly hackily as we can, but this is a temporary thing.
Marco:
This is not going to be a thing that you use more than a few months.
John:
I don't know if this is there's a there's a infop list key that's NS something or other or whatever.
John:
And I don't know if that is the exact same thing.
John:
Is this like it's I don't think it's just building on the new tools.
John:
The new tools may give you that key in your infop list by default, but you could in theory just delete it off of there and still build the newest SDK.
John:
So I don't I don't know if this checkbox is the same as that.
John:
info plist key but anyway this is disappointing because what it means is that you get this we get all these advantages that we were talking about having more screen space and having native resolution and always having the ability to ignore the notch if you want to on a per app basis but now it seems like if you do that on a per app basis with your older apps you're giving up the native resolution
John:
yeah i think you might be right which people maybe don't notice because again there's a lot of pixels there and it's like 254 dpi or whatever um but yeah and it does make sense for marco's like saying like maybe they didn't want to put too much time to this scaling is less work because then you're like look i don't change anything it as far as the app is concerned it is displaying exactly as it would like if it was notch savvy it's just that we literally shrink the on output we shrink the image so that it avoids the notch but everything else about it is exactly identical
John:
right because that way they wouldn't have to like build on a whole thing where like if the app asks the hardware how big is your screen in pixels you know it can just give the same answer no matter what and and you know just scale it down it doesn't change like it doesn't you know instead of this it doesn't think it's on a 16 by 10 screen and where the other apps think they're on a what is it 16 by 10 point something screen right right yeah if we figure out more about that we'll update but otherwise it's one minor disappointment everyone should update their apps to be notch savvy
Casey:
And speaking of the notch, apparently its code name was Daisy, as per Philippe Esposito.
John:
I just thought that was cute because that's my dog's name.
John:
And we have some symbols pulled out of, you know, I guess a class stump or something.
John:
You get Daisy Bounds.
John:
You get Display Daisy Bounds.
John:
Get Daisy Width.
John:
That's cute.
John:
It's a notch-shaped notch.
John:
reference acknowledged all right uh 120 hertz scrolling in mac os on the new macbook pros i can tell you from experience very hit or miss yeah that's what's nine to five mac article says uh apparently catalyst apps run at 120 hertz as you would expect although on ios there's still some things you might have to do to make your animations run at 120 hertz whatever but uh
John:
we were talking about oh marco didn't even notice the 120 hertz when he had his new computer last week uh and we said oh it must be in safari right well apparently safari is one of the apps that doesn't support or at least as of the time of this article doesn't support 120 hertz because apple has to do some update or something to it which is weird and kind of disappointing the funny thing is that uh apparently someone on twitter said that you can get 120 hertz if you run chrome in a windows vm
John:
oh my gosh right so you're virtualizing windows and then you're running windows chrome and scroll that and you get 120 hertz but not in native mac safari so apple needs to get on this i'm sure they will but that is that is quite funny all right marco tell me about your mystery terabyte did you find it
Marco:
Not really, but I can tell that it's my photos.
Marco:
So many people wrote in to say, okay, you got to give this thing full disk access or run this thing as root or both or disable SIP or whatever.
Marco:
No matter what I did, I could not find what that terabyte was.
Marco:
It always showed up as miscellaneous or system files or inaccessible or whatever.
Marco:
Every single tool people recommended.
Marco:
I did learn when I got my new desktop laptop,
Marco:
I decided to sync my entire photo library to it, because I now had the space to do that.
Marco:
And it all downloaded, and sure enough, it was about 900 gigs.
Marco:
When I'm looking at the mystery space on my Mac Mini, it is pretty much exactly that size.
Marco:
It varies a little bit gig to gig here and there, but it's about 900 gigs.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
It's very clear to me that when I told the Mac Mini, store my photo library on this external USB hard drive, or USB SSD, and it only stored 70 gigs there, it's very clear to me that that function doesn't work.
Marco:
Like, the function of, I'm telling you to store this photo library on this other volume, can't be trusted.
Marco:
Because what it clearly did instead was store all those photos on my actual main volume.
John:
That is weird, though, because like I said, my photo library is on an external disk on my computer and it will not fit on the main drive.
John:
Like the library itself is like, you know, seven or eight hundred gigs.
John:
And this thing has a one terabyte drive that is filled with other stuff that takes up that space.
John:
Like there's, it can't possibly be putting the photos on the main drive.
John:
So somehow there is like, and I didn't tell it to do it.
John:
I just put the photo library over there and then I, you know, started up photos holding down the option key and pick that external one.
John:
And I, do you have the, you have it marked as the system library, right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, and it still is.
Marco:
The one on the external drive is still marked as the current system library, and it seems to get new photos, but there seems to be some kind of mechanism that is probably in some kind of bug state.
Marco:
I don't think it started out this way.
Marco:
It's probably in some kind of bug state, but now it's just writing everything to mystery locked storage somewhere on the main drive.
Marco:
i wonder if you if you'd like deleted your photo library right would that purge the space and then re re initialize that essentially on the external drive only would it download all the photos to the external one because that's definitely weird and i mean this is this is one of the reasons why i decided to do a clean install on the desktop laptop instead of migrating that install over because you know that install that's also the same one that every time i reboot it has like the recovered items or whatever on the desktop and then i can't delete it
Marco:
every time I get an OS update so it adds those relocated items or whatever it's called and then I still haven't been able to empty my trash for a year because every time I empty it it says oh sorry x11 can't be deleted so I skip skip skip and then I have it empty everything else
John:
I told you to go into your .trash folder and use RM.
John:
Remember?
John:
We talked about that.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So the solution to that, many people wrote in, was like, okay, first disable system integrity protection and recovery, and then remove it with a special way, and then go back.
Marco:
And I just never felt like doing that.
Marco:
So I just have been hitting skip every time on the three files that won't get deleted.
Marco:
Anyway, so there were multiple reasons why I decided to leave that installation behind.
John:
I have to say, by the way, I have some experience slinging photo libraries around having the same photo library on multiples computers and having to move it from an internal next on a drive.
John:
Photo library, especially, you know, only if you use iCloud photos, it's pretty easy to just like either move it from one place to another as is, you know, copy it.
John:
I've copied my photo library from one disk to another.
John:
I've done like
John:
super duper backups of my photo library disk onto another thing or just to delete it and just to say hey icloud give me back all my photos like that's the it is it with marco's weird bug case aside it is supposed to be just a self-contained photo library directory that contains all your stuff and it's just one huge
John:
directory tree and you can move you can move it around just like it looks like a single file but you can move it around like a giant directory tree and you can delete it and reconstitute it which i think is the right thing to do i mean i'm not sure you need to do a clean os install but if it's in this weird state i you know i would just delete that and make sure you have good backups delete that library entirely and then just
John:
get all your disk stuff sorted out before you know don't even launch photos anymore just get your just stuff sorted out so your disk looks normal and then you could then launch photos and it'd be like hey where's my photo library you would say oh make a new one here and it's your system library and turn on iCloud photos then just wait you know five hours or download
Marco:
Well, and that's what I ended up doing with the new computer, but my concern there was that this is the very first time, like that break, as I'm abandoning that installation and having it redownload everything, this is the first time that I am...
Marco:
losing control of the files like until this point that has been my photo library since i started using apple photos and i've just migrated the actual files by copying them to the next computer every time that computer has changed this is the first time i'm taking apple's version of the files as the canonical ones and so
Marco:
While I have no reason not to trust Photo Library, it's been very reliable for me over time, that still is a bit of a leap of faith that like, okay, I am no longer copying from computer to computer the ones I know are correct.
Marco:
I'm now hoping that Apple's versions are correct and complete and all there.
John:
I think you already crossed that bridge in a recent update, maybe one or two OSs ago, where they basically changed the path of every single file inside your library, although you didn't know it.
John:
Lots of people complained about it because they had been relying on the paths inside the library, but they basically changed them all to UUIDs.
John:
And I don't think, like when it was like an incredibly long updated library process, I don't think it just renamed them.
John:
I think what it actually did is...
John:
pull new ones from iCloud, put them in the UUID location and delete your local ones.
John:
I'm not entirely sure what that process was like.
John:
So you may have already crossed that bridge without even knowing it.
John:
You just didn't know that it was essentially abandoning years and years worth of files downloaded from cameras and replacing them with an entirely new directory structure where every one of your photos is named with a UUID.
John:
But that already happened.
Marco:
You did that like a year ago and didn't know it.
Marco:
Yeah, because I especially like I am very careful never to do that with music because iTunes match is not that reliable.
Marco:
And for this for this music move, I actually I'm very glad that I that I have the Mac mini still that I was that I was that was being my source.
Marco:
I still have it.
Marco:
I didn't like blow it away or sell it yet because I thought I moved all my music over just by copying the music directory and then, you know, opening up new music on new computer.
Marco:
one song in each of my Phish concerts in recent, in a recent week or two, like, one song in each concert was grayed out.
Marco:
It would say, you know, location, iCloud.
Marco:
But I couldn't download it, and when I double-clased it to play, nothing would happen.
Marco:
Uh...
Marco:
okay something didn't work so i like recopied like with our sync like i just quit music our synced from from the old to the new just copy the whole directory over again start over okay and eventually i did get that to work i don't know what the heck happened the first time but yeah there there's been some some weirdness with music over the years so i never want to have to do that with music i never want to have to rely on that but it does seem like photos is much more reliable in that way
John:
Yeah, and I don't know what happened with that.
John:
I mean, maybe that's a feature that we just don't know about.
John:
If someone on the photos teams knows a legit scenario in which Marco could get into the situation where ostensibly the photo library is on an external disk, but it's taking hundreds of gigs on the internal one, please let us know.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I'm just glad that that is not my system of record.
Casey:
That's all I'm saying.
Marco:
uh-huh you should this is all a success story for photo libraries the fact that he could just delete it and pull it back down that's that's the magic yeah i mean that's that's the great thing like you know that it is very um i guess uh it's it's a good peace of mind to know that photo library is a pretty good backup like it it did fully sync over as far as i could tell looks like everything's there like i don't think it's missing anything i couldn't find anything that that would be missing um but it is still a little unnerving
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Related to this, although it has nothing to do with macOS, Kevin Chen wrote in to say that iOS isn't always good about deleting purgeable files when the phone is low on free space.
Casey:
But when ProRes is enabled, the camera app gains a, quote, free resources, quote, button to trigger this deletion manually.
Casey:
Apple says, freeing resources will clear temporary system or app data that might be stored in your phone.
Casey:
It doesn't permanently delete unrecoverable data, but might require some apps to refresh data when they're used again.
Casey:
It continues later on.
Casey:
The camera app will also free resources automatically when ProRes is enabled and less than five minutes of recording time is available.
Casey:
And apparently it'll free up about 15 minutes worth at a time, which in ProRes is 90 gigs, which is bananas when you're in 4K60.
Casey:
So that's just something useful to know.
John:
I wonder if there's like this sort of skunk works team at Apple behind both the sync messages button and messages and the free resources button in camera.
John:
Like imagine a button to make the computer do a thing instead of just like sort of crossing your finger and saying, boy, I hope this phone notices that it's almost out of space and free some space for me soon.
John:
No, just free resources.
John:
And the fact that it does it in chunks is terrible, but like.
John:
sync messages free resources don't be afraid to put those buttons in but apparently only two teams and all of apple have been somehow able to stick through sneak through a useful button in there you are that lets people do a thing that a lot of people want to do which is do the thing now free the space now purge the purgeable space now because i need the space now and you're not getting the hint it's my space and i want it now
John:
um you skipped over one item uh and uh ezekiel ellen said in mac os monterey uh i think we might have mentioned this before but it's worth bringing up again uh there is now a ui and disk utility for time machine snapshots in fact i'm pretty sure we talked about this in the past but just to remind people if you don't want to use tmutil and you don't understand where your space is going or whatever and you want to see how many time machine snapshots do i have and how much space are they taking reminder that disk utility the gui app that comes with your mac
John:
has a way to do that.
John:
You can see all your snapshots and you can delete them.
John:
You just have to go to the view menu and select show APFS snapshots.
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:
Their plans cover all sorts of needs from very small to very big.
Marco:
You can start with just five bucks a month on one of the smaller plans, and you can scale all the way up to whatever your needs are for hardware.
Marco:
So you can have high memory plans, high CPU plans, GPU compute plans.
Marco:
There's block storage, managed backups, Kubernetes, an upcoming bare metal release.
Marco:
There's so much at Linode.
Marco:
And
Marco:
For me, what's most important is that all of this is delivered at an incredibly good value.
Marco:
Now, I've been with them, again, for a long time.
Marco:
And the entire time I've been with them, they've been the best value in the business.
Marco:
As technology gets better and they can offer you more for less, they do.
Marco:
So it's great.
Marco:
They stay competitive.
Marco:
You don't get locked in forever on some high price.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
See for yourself at linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Create your free account there, and you get $100 in credit.
Marco:
Once again, linode.com slash ATP for $100 in credit.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode, my favorite place to run servers, for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Marco, you have some experience with Lutron Caseta.
Casey:
You know, I think we might have mentioned this offhandedly last week, but you and I were jockeying over who was going to talk about Caseta, who did not sponsor this week.
Casey:
But I wanted to talk and do the sponsor read because I freaking love it.
Casey:
And as far as I knew, you love it.
Casey:
So tell me, what's going on with Lutron Caseta?
Marco:
Yeah, so we decided to talk about this week as an actual topic, because they are sponsoring our show.
Marco:
They sponsored last week, and they're sponsoring next week.
Marco:
And so I thought it would be weird to talk about it as a topic on an episode they are sponsoring, because we try to be independent with that kind of stuff.
Marco:
So we decided this week is the time we're going to talk about it.
Marco:
And obviously with that giant disclaimer, they are a sponsor, but I've been using them now for a little over a year in various roles in my house.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
If you recall, last time I mentioned this kind of stuff, so Lutron, just for the record, is a smart home system of switches and outlets by Lutron.
Marco:
And I think they have blinds and stuff.
Marco:
There's a couple other things, but it's mostly light switches and a couple of switched outlet things.
Casey:
Yeah, and it's worth noting that they work on some sort of proprietary radio frequency or something like that.
Casey:
It is not thread, and I have no idea if it is or ever will be thread-compatible, but it's spiritually similar in that it's got its own hub box that will spew RF or whatever it needs to do in order to talk to the switches, and then the hub is hooked up to Ethernet so you can talk to HomeKit and whatever else you might have in your house.
Casey:
But the reason this is important is because you're not relying on every one of these switches to get on your Wi-Fi.
Casey:
And in my experience, and I think I can speak for Marco in saying this, in Marco's experience, this is way more reliable.
Casey:
And in almost all these cases, there are physical switches that you can use if you want to completely ignore a HomeKit in its entirety, which is really, really nice too.
Marco:
Yeah, and this is exactly why I wanted to talk about it because the last time we talked about this kind of thing, we talked a few months back about like I was frustrated with just the general unreliability of Wi-Fi smart outlets and Wi-Fi smart light bulbs because it just seemed like Wi-Fi stuff works like 90% of the time and then just doesn't.
Marco:
And it's very hard to find good, reliable stuff.
Marco:
And I mentioned in particular there was a role I had in my house that we have an ice maker that is loud enough that we don't want it running during quiet evening TV or movie watching time.
Marco:
But in the middle of the day, it's fine.
Marco:
And so I wanted to put it on some kind of timer outlet.
Marco:
where I could adjust when it runs and still be able to run it manually if we've ran out of ice or something, but that doesn't really happen.
Marco:
But anyway, I decided the regular 70s rotating knob timer switch, I wanted something a little bit smarter than that that I could control.
Marco:
Also, the ice maker is built into the cabinet or built into the counter and the outlet is behind it.
Marco:
And so to access the outlet, you have to pull the whole thing out and it's a big deal.
Marco:
So I wanted something that I wouldn't have to ever...
Marco:
pull the ice maker out to access physically so something that had to be able to be put back there and a still work and b never need to be touched like just and for a while i had a couple i tried a couple of different wi-fi smart outlets back there and they were unreliable like they would work for a few weeks and then stop working and then oh i gotta pull the whole thing out that sucks um and so i eventually switched um there is a hole in the lutron caseta lineup they don't make
Marco:
like a plain smart outlet the way you think of smart outlets they make one that is like a lamp box that has a built-in dimmer and a two-prong outlet only because you don't want you don't really want to be running like a dimmer circuit on anything but like an old lamp because that could mess up like other electronics i think so the idea is you're not supposed to plug in like an appliance into this thing so they have that and
Marco:
They also make an outdoor switched outlet that is huge because it has a whole outdoor housing, this big, thick, heavy cable.
Marco:
Well, I put one of those behind my ice maker because it's the only switched outlet they make as part of their system that is not like that lamp dimmer thing.
Marco:
So I installed that.
Marco:
Whenever we talked about that topic, which was probably three, four months ago now, something like that, right?
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
It has been rock solid reliable since then, 100% of the time.
Marco:
And that's something I don't think I can say 100% reliable about any other smart home thing I have ever used.
Marco:
Like, never.
Marco:
That literally has never happened.
Marco:
The Caseta stuff is 100% reliable, and it isn't just that.
Marco:
So I also have – I remember back then we mentioned too when we did our renovations here that they had installed for code compliance for the outdoor staircase lighting.
Marco:
They installed some staircase lights and a Caseta system to make them run on timers to only run when it's dark outside.
Marco:
And so I had actually been running Caseta stuff for like a year and I hadn't even really thought about it ever because it just works.
Marco:
Like it just, it worked every single day.
Marco:
It just quietly works and you never have to think about it.
Marco:
You set it up and then it just works.
Marco:
The strategy they use, I think what Casey mentioned earlier is very important.
Marco:
They don't make smart light bulbs.
Marco:
They make switches and a couple of outlets and
Marco:
And so you can use whatever bulbs you want.
Marco:
And this is great because I actually – I am a huge light bulb nerd.
Marco:
Like I love getting like new, cool, nice lights, like getting more light for the same wattage and getting higher color rendering index.
Marco:
I'm actually – I wanted to mention also –
Marco:
I'm extremely happy with these lights I have from a company called Waveform Lighting.
Marco:
I don't know how good or well known this is, but somebody tipped me off to this a few months back and I finally got them.
Marco:
They are the nicest LED bulbs I have ever used.
Marco:
Like the light they produce, it's like super high CRI and super low flicker.
Marco:
My God, are they nice.
Marco:
Like they are so good.
Marco:
The only thing is they're not dimmable, but otherwise they are super nice.
Marco:
Anyway, waveform lighting also strong recommendation.
Marco:
And yeah, I have the 4000K ones in my office there.
Marco:
Oh God, I love them so much.
Marco:
Anyway, what's great about the Caseta stuff is that it works at the switch level.
Marco:
So you can have a wall switch that is smart controlled.
Marco:
And that is by far the nicest way to do it because then you can control it from the app.
Marco:
You can control it from HomeKit.
Marco:
You can get their little wireless switches, the little Pico switches, and you can put those wherever you want.
Marco:
So I also have a pair of those on my desk
Marco:
For the two lights that I have in my office, I have like a ceiling light and like a kind of one on one wall.
Marco:
I have these other lights and those are all Caseta.
Marco:
The wall lights are actually they plug into they plug into an outlet.
Marco:
And I so I have another one of those outdoor outlet switches from Caseta to control that.
Marco:
And then I could put over on my wall a switch that looks and works like any other light switch for that outlet plug.
Marco:
I also have on the wall in the regular light switch switch box, a smart Caseta light switch that controls the ceiling lights.
Marco:
And so what this means is nobody else who ever enters this room or lives in my house has to know that these are smart lights.
Casey:
Bingo.
Marco:
Because there's a button on the wall.
Marco:
You turn it on and they turn on.
Marco:
You turn it off and they turn off.
Marco:
And it's the only way, like you can't like, you know, trip over the cord for the lamp or accidentally switch off the lamp and your smart bulb doesn't work anymore.
Marco:
Like that doesn't happen.
Marco:
Like it's just a switch on the wall that controls the lights on the ceiling and
Marco:
And it happens to also be smart.
Marco:
And that is the best of all worlds.
Marco:
When you combine that with the reliability they have...
Marco:
The only limitation I have for Caseta is that if you're using the outdoor plug as your switched outlet, it's kind of big and kind of expensive.
Marco:
I think it's like $70 because it's not made for that, obviously, but I'm using it that way anyway.
Marco:
I'm looking forward to actually when I have my Christmas lights this year outside, I bought a couple more of those to use for that because a couple of reasons.
Marco:
Number one, again, these things are rock-solid reliable.
Marco:
Number two, I'm just getting a little more conscious over time of...
Marco:
what kind of hardware manufacturer i'm letting into my house and onto my network you know i i don't really want a bunch of like no name cheap stuff from amazon from god knows what company running god knows what insecure software on my network and i know i can do tricks like you know isolating it on its own private network and stuff like that but that's that's a lot of you know administration and work and stuff and most people don't don't even do that
Marco:
I don't want to have to deal with that.
Marco:
I want to get my stuff in my house that is on my network from a smaller number of companies with a higher level of trust.
Marco:
I don't want to get the $10 smart outlet on Amazon that's made by God knows what.
Marco:
Not only do those not work very well, but I feel better not having a lot of that stuff in my network.
Marco:
But anyway, so I had I mentioned back then also this past summer, we were talking about security cameras and I was putting up a couple of cameras under my house because of some problems we were having in the area where we park our bikes.
Marco:
It's kind of under the house in an area that has some physical light fixtures like on the wall to light up that area.
Marco:
There was a switch on the wall to turn those lights on.
Marco:
And I thought, wouldn't it be nice to have a motion sensor that every time we rode up with our bikes, if it was dark out, it would turn those lights on automatically and light up the areas for us.
Marco:
Seems reasonable.
Marco:
People have been using motion sensors for that kind of stuff for decades.
Marco:
I thought I'll do it the smart way.
Marco:
So number one, I thought I will convert the switch in the wall here to a caseta switch.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
So then I can run HomeKit automations to detect motion in this area and trigger that switch to turn on.
Marco:
And the Logitech circle view camera that I have there has motion control built in.
Marco:
So I thought this would be great.
Marco:
The camera will detect the motion.
Marco:
I'm already running the camera.
Marco:
So here's what happens when you do that.
Marco:
Walking, you know, riding your bike in, the camera detects motion and turns the light on.
Marco:
Now, if I'm honest, the speed at which it turns the light on after you detect motion is kind of variable.
Marco:
Just like, again, think of any home stuff you've ever used.
Marco:
It's always like this, right?
Marco:
Any like smart home stuff, it's like it works in two seconds most of the time, but sometimes five seconds and sometimes infinite seconds.
Marco:
It never works, right?
Marco:
So like you never know.
Marco:
It's always very variable and it's a little bit slow sometimes.
Marco:
So that was problem number one with Logitech motion sensor setup.
Marco:
Problem number two is that, you know, you'd say, all right, when you detect motion, turn the light on for whatever minutes, X minutes, and then turn the light off if there's no more motion.
Marco:
Well, guess what would happen?
Marco:
The light would get turned off and the camera would say, something has changed.
Marco:
There's motion.
Marco:
Because the difference in picture between the light being on and off was considered by the Logitech circle view camera to be motion.
Marco:
So it would get into an infinite loop or it would just keep turning itself on.
Marco:
Forever.
Marco:
So that was not going to work.
Marco:
So I thought, OK, I have to separate the roles of motion detection and this camera because obviously that's not going to work.
Marco:
So most motion detectors I don't think work in the visible spectrum.
Marco:
I think they're infrared based.
Marco:
So I figure, all right, maybe that's the problem.
Marco:
You know, the camera is doing it optically in the in the visible spectrum of light.
Marco:
So it's considering this change in illumination to be a big motion event.
Marco:
If I can get any other motion sensor, that probably won't happen.
Marco:
There are HomeKit motion sensors, not many of them.
Marco:
The best reviewed one is by the company Eve.
Marco:
I got the Eve motion sensor and I've heard Merlin talk about how good their stuff can be.
Marco:
And I even got the Eve extend because it's in an area.
Marco:
It's like, you know, below the house.
Marco:
It's kind of in a poor Wi-Fi area.
Marco:
And I have since put an access point down there to fix the Wi-Fi, but it's still very far from any kind of Bluetooth reception for any HomeKit hub that might be at my house.
John:
Is this an outdoor motion detector?
John:
Of course it is.
Marco:
No, it's not.
Marco:
It wasn't.
Marco:
But this is an area where it's very covered.
Marco:
Like, it's pretty far from the elements.
John:
Have we not been through this before?
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
John, in Marco, as much as I want to make fun of Marco about this one, apparently it is IPX3 water resistance.
Casey:
Now, I have no idea offhand if that's like a droplet.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, then, so that must be, I mean, unless they think your house is going to have water in it, there's got to be some kind of outdoor thing, right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, I mean, like, in this particular location, I can use pretty much anything as long as I can tolerate temperature extremes.
Marco:
Because, you know, it does get pretty cold in the winter.
Marco:
But otherwise, like, no rain gets to where this is, ever.
Marco:
Condensation.
John:
We talked about this before.
John:
Condensation is a thing.
John:
Yes, but anyway, so... That's what distinguishes an indoor from an outdoor thing.
Marco:
All right, so go on.
Marco:
Anyway, so I tried the EVE motion sensor, and it worked occasionally.
Okay.
Marco:
It's just like every other HomeKit thing.
Marco:
It works sometimes, and it was kind of slow to respond, just like the Logitech thing.
Marco:
Eventually, I decided this is not for me, so I took that back in, and I got the Caseta motion sensor.
Marco:
The Caseta motion sensor is a little bit limited because it's not a HomeKit device.
Marco:
But you can set up automation in the Caseta app that when that sensor detects motion, it will turn on the lights that are in whatever room you say it's in.
Marco:
Night and day difference.
Marco:
So first of all...
Marco:
100% reliable like it works every single time and it detects zero false things it doesn't care at all like when the light turns off it doesn't treat that as motion and best of all it's so freaking fast like you can ride a bike up into this area as you're still riding the bike and it turns on in time like it's
Marco:
It's so much faster than everything else because it's kind of like when, when like your hand touches a hot stove and like your brain doesn't have to process that to say, Oh, pull away the hand.
Marco:
Like it just doesn't.
Marco:
That's kind of how it's like that kind of difference where like the home kit stuff always felt like, Hey, I detected motion.
Marco:
Send somebody a memo about it.
Marco:
and then somebody oh hey oh oh is that is that bob is he saying there's motion oh hey hey uh hey joe turn those lights on you know and then like you know it's like this but whereas this is just like boom motion like it's it's as if the motion sensor is built into the lights like that's how fast this is and when you compare it to the home kit stuff
Marco:
Oh my god.
Marco:
So anyway, I am just so incredibly happy with Lutron Caseta.
Marco:
And I wanted to tell all of you this in an episode they were not sponsoring because I want you to really know it's authentic.
Marco:
That it's just so good.
Marco:
It's so reliable.
Marco:
And yeah, the smart outlet situation, it's a little bit limited and pricey.
Marco:
But otherwise, I don't see any major downsides.
Marco:
Except for the fact that they only make a certain...
Marco:
set of types of things like they don't make thermostats and stuff like that you know obviously you got to go to other things for that but but yeah for the things they do make man they're good and and they are literally the only smart home system that i have found that is reliable and that i don't want to throw out the window after like a month
Casey:
You know, I don't want to belabor the points.
Casey:
I'll just very briefly say that in my experience, I completely agree with you.
Casey:
I think we talked about several times months ago, we put a screened-in porch in the back of the house earlier this year, and we used Caseta switches for the fans there.
Casey:
And then I got a burr...
Casey:
Or a bee in my bonnet to change all of the switches in the house from the like the little like levers that stick out.
Casey:
I believe they're called a toggle switch to a decorator or rocker switch, which I think looks far more modern and sleeker.
Casey:
And so I switched all of the switches in the house and only maybe five of them I replaced with Caseta switches, not because I didn't want to replace all of them with Caseta stuff, but because it is relatively expensive.
Casey:
Like you can get really crummy versions of a lot of their stuff for considerably less money, but they don't work.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, in this case, you very much get what you pay for.
Marco:
I could not agree more.
Marco:
Like a dimmer switch for them is what, like 80 bucks, something like that?
Casey:
No, I think it's like 60, which is still a lot of money, don't get me wrong, but it works every time.
Marco:
Yeah, and that might be two times as much as some other weird Wi-Fi thing from Amazon, but I'm telling you, the difference matters.
Marco:
The difference matters a lot.
Casey:
Yeah, and I was able to wire these myself, and I am a very poor homeowner in that I am very bad at all home maintenance things of any sort, but I was able to do it.
Casey:
Some of their smart switches don't require a neutral line.
Casey:
Some of them do, but some of them also do not.
Casey:
I want to say the fan switches required a neutral line.
Casey:
But I don't think regular, like on-off, or maybe it was the dimmer didn't check my work on this.
Casey:
But it is an option for those of you who don't have neutral lines in your boxes.
Casey:
But this stuff is extremely reliable.
Casey:
It works every time.
Casey:
And I think I'm cribbing from Quinn.
Casey:
uh, in saying this, but it is incredibly important to have non-smart options.
Casey:
I don't mean a physical switch that then talks to HomeKit to do things.
Casey:
I mean, a physical switch that physically switches things, you know what I mean?
Casey:
And, and that's what the Caseta stuff does.
Casey:
And it's, it's excellent.
Casey:
Um, I, I would look at Quinn's review, which we'll put a link in the show notes to it.
Casey:
Um, his video review is very good.
Casey:
And he was talking about his smart home in general.
Casey:
So it's not strictly limited to Caseta.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
But but he talks a lot about Caseta and has a lot of the same things to say.
Casey:
So I don't want to belabor it any further, but hard agree.
Casey:
I was overjoyed when we were able to get them to sponsor the show because it's one of those sponsors.
Casey:
I mean, we love all of our sponsors, but there's some that we really, really love.
Casey:
And this is one of them.
Casey:
So, yeah, Luchon Caseta stuff.
Casey:
You get what you pay for.
Casey:
They can run with that.
Marco:
It's so nice to have stuff be 100% reliable.
Marco:
Oftentimes when we replace some kind of old technology with something that we think is new and better, oftentimes we add coolness and capabilities and convenience at the cost of reliability.
Marco:
A lot of old tech works basically 100% of the time.
Marco:
And it has worked that way for decades.
Marco:
And then we computer guys come in and we're like, hey, we can do this better.
Marco:
And it's like, yeah, that doesn't work.
Marco:
So smart home stuff is definitely one of those things.
Marco:
And so to have something that literally does work 100% of the time is like game changing.
Casey:
Speaking of game changing, let's talk about MacBook Pros.
Casey:
Mine arrived on this past Monday, I believe it was.
Casey:
The MacBook Pro seemed to get stuck in, I think it was Shanghai.
Casey:
I might have said Shenzhen last time.
Casey:
It was somewhere in China for a while.
Casey:
Eventually got moving.
Casey:
It went via, I believe, Korea and then Alaska and then Louisville as UPS shipments are wont to do.
Casey:
And then eventually arrived to me actually a shade earlier than UPS had estimated.
Casey:
I think it was a day earlier than UPS had estimated when it finally got moving again.
Casey:
And it came about midday.
Casey:
And a lot of this, I think, Marco covered last week.
Casey:
So I'm going to try to be brief.
Casey:
But if we end up going off on a tangent, so be it.
Casey:
Us?
Casey:
Yeah, I know, right?
Casey:
I want to talk about several things.
Casey:
And let me set—this is probably going to be relevant in a few minutes, but let me set a little bit of expectations—
Casey:
I have this iMac Pro, I have a 2020 MacBook Pro, and I really, really love both machines.
Casey:
They're really great machines.
Casey:
But the bill of goods that I allowed myself to get sold, which I'm not saying is fact or fiction, I'm just saying this is what I was kind of setting myself up to believe, was that on M1 machines, particularly these new ones, basically everything is instant and you never have to wait for anything ever again.
Casey:
And that is kind of what I expected.
Casey:
I expected this monitor or screen display, whatever, to be brilliant.
Casey:
And I expected this thing to be a little bit on the chunky side, but overall not too different than what I've got.
Casey:
So with that in mind, physical design, I think the weight, not having measured it and not having looked it up, I think Martin John had looked it up last week, but the weight as compared to my 2020 Intel MacBook Pro seems to be approximately equivalent.
Casey:
I'm sure that is not actually equivalent, but it seems to be about the same.
Casey:
The physical design, I think it's good.
Casey:
I think later on, actually, John had asked in the show notes about how slidey it is.
Casey:
And I hadn't thought about it until I read that in the show notes, but it is a lot more slidey than it was before.
Casey:
I think the material and the feet might be slightly different.
Casey:
So it does shimmy across my glass desk a little easier than the last one did.
Casey:
But I mean, it's not ridiculous.
Casey:
It's just noticeably less tacky, I guess you could say.
John:
I wonder if that was... The reason I put this in is because I wonder if that was... So I wondered if it was true.
John:
So thanks for confirming.
John:
But I also wonder if that's an intentional feature because there's a trade-off with feet on a laptop.
John:
You do want them to be grippy, but I have definitely seen people expect to be able to shove their laptop over or even just like rotate it so someone else can see it.
John:
And the feet are so tacky that it just doesn't want to do that.
John:
So I think there is probably like a balance between making it easy to move your thing around on the surface versus making it secure.
John:
Where do you think this falls?
John:
It obviously feels...
John:
less tacky but does it feel insecure like you're actually going to knock it off like it's on wheels or is it just less tacky in comparison i would say it's less tacky also again it's not fair because i use a glass top desk which is probably more slippy slidey than say like wood or something like that would be i mean it might be less it might be less slippy slidey depending on if the glass is wet oh okay i mean if it's with the glass is wet it's definitely more slippy
John:
And, you know, you have a lot of water around your computers a lot.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
I do have a water bottle, but it is capped about three inches from the computer as we speak.
Casey:
Nevertheless, I would say I would prefer it to be slightly more tacky, but it's not so slippy that I find it to be bothersome.
Casey:
It's not like the computer's moving when I'm just using it.
Casey:
But if I put really any amount of pressure on it in order to slide it, it will slide.
Casey:
So I'm not saying it's bad.
Casey:
I actually don't have my old laptop near me.
Casey:
It's downstairs.
Casey:
I would probably prefer it a little bit tackier, but not necessarily as tacky as the old one was.
Casey:
But again, by no means is it bad.
Casey:
Other than that, the shell of it, as we've talked about, some areas are curvier when maybe they weren't before or certainly less curvy than they were before.
Casey:
None of this is bad.
Casey:
It's just different.
Casey:
The screen is very...
Casey:
Very, very, very nice.
Casey:
It is very nice.
Casey:
And it is super trippy for me to see the HDR stuff happening because I'm used to seeing that on like a phone when suddenly the rest of the screen seems to get dim and just the video you're looking at gets super bright.
Casey:
I don't have a problem with it, especially since I'm used to it on the phone, but it is very trippy to see on my Mac.
Casey:
Um, 120 Hertz.
Casey:
I wouldn't say I noticed it that often, but one place I noticed it every time and it makes me smile every time.
Casey:
And this is the, I think the equivalent of me saying that the animations like, you know, zoom is maybe not zooming, but you know, zooming in and out of an app on my phone.
Casey:
The equivalent to that on this computer is spaces, going between spaces.
Casey:
So I'm a, as we've talked many times, a devout spaces user.
Casey:
This is like virtual desktops.
Casey:
And as I slide laterally back and forth between spaces, it is buttery smooth and it makes me very happy.
Casey:
Other than that, I can't say I've really noticed a lot where 120 hertz seems obvious.
Casey:
And honestly, my eye is not stupendous for this, but there are definitely times where I'm like, oh, that is very smooth and it makes me very happy.
Casey:
I have much more to say, but Marco, do you want to jump in on this particular point or are you good?
Casey:
On the 120 hertz?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So it's interesting.
Marco:
I mean, so just to set the stage here, I've been looking at these screens a lot over the last week because what happened, I know I breezed over this a little bit earlier, but what happened is I decided to go ahead with the plan to replace my desktop with a high-powered laptop.
Marco:
And it became a 16-inch, but we'll get to that later.
Casey:
Oh, oh.
Marco:
So I spent most of the last week setting up two of these right next to each other on my desk.
Marco:
So I still had the Mac Mini as my main computer, like connected to the big XDR.
Marco:
And then I had off to my right the MacBook Air that I was transferring some data from.
Marco:
Migration Assistant failed, which has happened to a lot of people with the MacBook Airs.
Marco:
And there's occasionally some way to dive into something or other and try to fix it with system integrity protection and all this other stuff.
Marco:
But I decided I don't have to do that.
Marco:
So I'm setting up both as new.
Marco:
And because I have operated for so long as a right mouse, left trackpad user...
Marco:
My left hand can use a trackpad just fine.
Marco:
And so I spent most of the last week with one laptop on the left hand, one laptop on the right hand, trying to do stuff in parallel as much as possible, like install this, install that, click here, click there, like doing it on both laptops.
Marco:
So I was setting them up together, which was kind of fun.
Marco:
And my desk looked ridiculous, like just covered in computers.
Marco:
It was glorious.
Marco:
But all this back to the point you actually asked.
Marco:
So I've looked at these screens a lot in the last week.
Marco:
And when I go back to my poor, poor 60 hertz XDR, I literally don't notice.
Marco:
I don't know what it is.
Marco:
Maybe it's that I'm just not seeing a lot of apps that use it.
Marco:
And now that you say Safari doesn't use 120 hertz yet, that's a pretty big thing.
Marco:
Like I've been looking at a lot of Safari recently, like, you know, going to websites of apps that I have to download and trying to find the download link they've buried.
Marco:
God knows where, you know, it's a lot of scrolling and hitting command F download and stuff like that.
Marco:
So anyway, I honestly am not noticing 120 hertz as much as I thought I would, which is, in my opinion, a blessing because I still have my giant monitor that I have no intention of replacing anytime soon, nor is there anything to replace it with that would support 120 hertz at anywhere near this size and resolution.
Marco:
So this is going to be one of those things where I'm just going to be blissfully happy that I don't seem to notice it much on the Mac and that I can be happy using it without that on my desktop.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, I think so far I mostly agree with you that it's not terribly noticeable, but I wonder once Safari starts supporting it, if maybe my perspective will change.
Casey:
Moving right along, MagSafe.
Casey:
Wait, actually, hold on a second.
Casey:
You were setting up both the computers, so you're going to use the 16 as a desktop replacement and the 14 as a runaround computer?
Marco:
yes i'm i'm on the 16 right now talking to you as my as my desktop laptop oh my god and the 14 is my around the house computer so what 16 build did you get the one that was in stock which was what a max max with two terabytes and 60 and 64 gigs no the 16 came with four so it's max everything right yeah it's four terabyte 64 gigs and the max cpu
Casey:
Well, you could get eight terabytes for like $11 billion, I thought.
Marco:
Not in store.
Marco:
You can't.
Casey:
Oh, right, right.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
That's a lot of machine.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong.
Casey:
That is a lot of machine.
Casey:
And so you went and picked it up.
Casey:
You reserved it, right?
Casey:
And picked it up in store?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, I did.
Marco:
Because I was going to the mainland for some grocery shopping and stuff last Thursday.
Marco:
And so literally I edited the show that morning.
Marco:
and you know while logic was bouncing i went and reserved one at the near apple nearby apple store and then i i bounced it got in the shower got on a boat got in a car did the whole you know cars trucks boats trains whatever it was like you know to get there and uh yeah and got my my laptops it was it felt it feels really extravagant to have bought two at the same time um but
Marco:
I am very happy I did because – so as I mentioned earlier, I really did consider only having the desktop laptop as a new one and keeping my M1 Air as my around-the-house one.
Marco:
And truthfully, that would be fine for almost all conditions except I do intend to do some pretty heavy video capture stuff on it where there's going to be like –
Marco:
three different cameras, three different computers being captured, like many streams coming in, a lot of throughput.
Marco:
And so I figure like having a, having a beefier system that has more GPU power and more IO like Thunderbolt throughput, I thought would be beneficial to, to that.
Marco:
Plus not to mention more disk space and more Ram, which would also be, you know, a very big deal at some point.
Marco:
So I decided, you know, let me, let me actually upgrade all of them.
Marco:
But honestly, the desktop laptop, I'm a hundred percent confident that was the right move because,
Marco:
64 gigs of ram is awesome it's it's so good to be back to this because i think that's what my imac pro had for you know for the years i used that so to go from 64 for a few years to 16 and now back to 64 i feel it i feel that difference a lot you know bouncing between apps i know there was a youtube video that says they couldn't tell i can tell and with my workload i leave i have a lot of very ram hungry apps sometimes i'm running more than one at a time
Marco:
or switching between very ram-hungry apps.
Marco:
Now when I switch between Xcode and Logic, it doesn't bring everything to a crawl for a few seconds.
Marco:
It's really nice.
Marco:
It might even be able to run SwiftUI.
Marco:
I want to talk about that YouTube video, by the way, because a lot of people have asked about that.
John:
They just did a bad job testing something that uses a lot of memory.
John:
There's no magic in these machines.
John:
We talked about this before.
John:
There is nothing particularly magical about the ARM-based Macs that makes them magically not need more RAM.
John:
Like I mentioned when we first talked about this months ago,
John:
if anything it's potentially possible for the code size of intel binaries to be smaller because uh intel cpus have variable size instructions whereas uh arm being risk cpus have instructions that are all the same size so in theory the code portion of your applications in memory could take up more room on arm now granted you don't have to deal with 32 and 64 but that's also not true in intel anymore anyway
John:
The whole point is with the RAM thing, if you test an application that doesn't particularly stress the memory system, like, oh, maybe it uses more than 16, but not much more.
John:
Yeah, you probably won't notice that much of a difference.
John:
But if you use an application that really requires like 128 gigs of RAM,
John:
And you start swapping, which means not just pushing things into virtual memory or how much swap is used, but swapping means the program is constantly putting things into the swap file on quote unquote disk and taking them out and putting them in and taking them out.
John:
That's swapping.
John:
That's an activity.
John:
It's a verb.
John:
It is not a measurement of how much swap space is used.
John:
That's not relevant.
John:
if you see some youtube video that says oh we tried a 16 gig machine and a 32 one and it was like two second difference between them they're just doing a bad test it's not stressing the memory now if that's the thing you want to do then yeah you don't need more memory because the thing you want to do doesn't require more memory but some people do things that really does require more memory one of the ones from the apple keynote that they mentioned i think it was brought up on the upgrade interview with the uh the guys from apple
John:
uh that one of the files they opened in like the intro video for this you can't even open that file on the machine without like 64 gigs of ram or whatever because and it was this was a vram thing because basically it's unified memory and you can't buy a video card with 64 gigs of vram on a laptop therefore the only way to ever open this file on a laptop is to have a laptop with quote unquote 64 gigs of vram because it's unified ram and it gets it's accessible by the gpu but
John:
Anyway, sometimes people really, really do need more RAM, and then you will notice the difference.
John:
Not just, oh, I couldn't open the file, but you will actively be swapping, and you can see that activity if you look at the VM stat or whatever the equipped tools are on macOS.
John:
So be aware of what your use case is.
John:
Do you need more RAM?
John:
And that memory pressure thing of being like, oh, it's yellow, red, or whatever, maybe that's not the best thing.
John:
What you want to tell is like, hey, if I do this, if I do the activity that I want to do,
John:
on a machine with more RAM, how much faster is it?
John:
And that's what they measured, but the things they measured, those tasks obviously didn't need more RAM, and apparently Marco does.
Marco:
Yeah, it's great.
Marco:
The only thing is, there's actually a few people in my family and friends who need a computer, so I actually might give away the Air to one of them, but I really love that MacBook Air, the M1 MacBook Air.
Marco:
I absolutely love that computer, and I'm kind of sad to have replaced it.
Marco:
Like, in the sense that this new 14-inch MacBook Pro is really nice, but it doesn't give me that love feeling that the M1 MacBook Air does.
Marco:
And maybe that's because the M1 MacBook Air is that fun, like, weird, like, orangey-pinkish color, and the MacBook Pro only comes in boring gray.
Marco:
By the way, so Tiff got her 16-inch gen as well, you know, the stake through Casey's heart in the delivery timing.
Marco:
And so we set that up as well.
Marco:
And she has space gray, and I have silver.
Marco:
They did not make a space gray MagSafe plug or MagSafe cord.
Marco:
And it looks weird.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Casey:
It's not that bad.
Casey:
We did talk about this last week.
Marco:
I know, but now I've actually seen them in person.
Marco:
MagSafe looks perfect with the silver metal.
Marco:
And the MagSafe does not look right.
Marco:
It looks like it's the wrong cable.
Marco:
It looks like you borrowed someone else's cable when you see it against the space gray.
Marco:
It looks wrong.
Marco:
Both the color of the metal and the color of the cord are both noticeably too light for the space gray laptop.
Marco:
And I would also go as far as to say, having seen both now in my house, I think silver looks better.
Marco:
Because not only does MagSafe look better, far and away better, I think, with silver.
Marco:
But now that they've moved to a higher contrast design, like now that the keyboard tray kind of area is black, is all black, you have the nice black rectangle of that plus the black rectangle of the screen.
Marco:
against like the metal backdrop of the surrounding material, I think the higher contrast of the silver model looks nicer overall compared to the space gray, which I think looks a little bit old, a little bit dated and is lower contrast with the hardware and the MagSafe looks wrong.
Casey:
I mean, I'm obviously biased because I did order a Space Gray.
Casey:
I don't think anything you've said is necessarily wrong.
Casey:
I just don't find it nearly as bothersome as you seem to.
Casey:
And yeah, I guess the MagSafe cable does look a little bit off, but it's not something that I notice on a day-to-day basis.
Casey:
Now, maybe you do or others would, but...
Casey:
To me, it's not that noticeable.
Casey:
But that is a perfect segue to talk about MagSafe, which I wanted to talk about next.
Casey:
Something I noticed about it is that when you – I don't know how to describe this.
Casey:
Like when you peel it in order to remove it.
Casey:
So you're like putting your finger under it and peeling it upwards.
John:
You're talking about the sandwich closing force again, aren't you?
Casey:
Yeah, I guess so.
John:
This is more sandwich opening force, really.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, I guess one way or another, when you're doing the sandwich opening or closing force, it doesn't take that much to get it to pop.
John:
However... No, no, you have the opposite.
John:
The sandwich closing force is the one where it's hard, where you're pulling straight in the line of the cord.
Casey:
Okay, well, that's what I was going to say.
Casey:
I don't care what you guys want to call them.
Casey:
Peeling is easy.
Casey:
Pulling is hard.
Casey:
That's what it boils down to.
John:
But this is the same as it's always been on MagSafe, forever.
John:
It's much stronger now, though.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
See, that's what I was going to say.
Casey:
I think it's very strong.
Casey:
Like, to pull straight out from the cable, which I know I'm not supposed to do.
Casey:
I'm just saying it to illustrate a point.
Casey:
To pull directly out by the cable is very, very difficult.
Casey:
In fact, the computer wants to move much before the cable wants to go.
John:
I think there's a good reason for that, too.
John:
Like, so the big change with this MagSafe is it's just much narrower.
John:
Like, it's like the size of USB-C port, right?
John:
Whereas before I was tall.
Casey:
I wouldn't say that.
Casey:
It's like one and a half to two times the size of USB-C port.
John:
Go get MagSafe 1.
John:
I don't know if you remember how tall MagSafe 1 was.
John:
I think MagSafe 1 was taller than USB-A, wasn't it?
Casey:
Oh, you're talking about tall.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
John:
Right.
John:
So with the force that you're talking about, the easy one where you like yank upwards or downwards or, you know, well, I guess just upwards and downwards I'm talking about, right?
John:
You have to make that like sturdy enough that it doesn't come off all the time.
John:
This is the complaint people have with all the MagSafe, like if you have it on your bed and like your cover's
John:
hit the thing upwards and it comes off right so you have to make that sturdy but the problem is the magnets have this little skinny area to oppose that force right if you imagine mag safe was six inches tall that's a pretty big lever if you put a pretty weak magnet on top and pretty weak magnet on bottom and then try to tilt that the lever made by
John:
those distant points and the pivot point represented by the cord.
John:
Is this making sense to you?
John:
There's like a physics reason that the skinnier you make the plug, the more powerful you have to make the magnets to maintain a minimum amount of up-down sturdiness, right?
John:
So I feel like to make that up-down yanking sturdiness
John:
the amount that you want it to be, you have to use such strong magnets that when you try to directly oppose them by pulling directly out of the laptop, it's way harder than it used to be because the thing got skinnier.
John:
That's my theory.
John:
That makes sense.
Marco:
I would even say like, I think MagSafe is now a misnomer, you know, and I think it was also a misnomer when they brought it to the phone.
Marco:
I think they only, they used the name because it was an old name that people liked, but you know, the phone charging puck,
Marco:
Nothing about that is necessarily safe.
Marco:
Like, I think the use of the word safe doesn't really make a lot of sense there.
Marco:
Like, I don't think MagSafe charging on the phone is safer than cable charging.
John:
It's kind of the same of, like, if you walk by your phone and you trip across the cord, you won't yank your phone off the counter anymore.
John:
It's that type of thing.
Marco:
But you probably will.
Marco:
But anyway, so with this, I think the original safety benefit of MagSafe, of tripping over the cord, not pulling your laptop off,
Marco:
Back then, MagSafe was easier to pull off and laptops were heavier.
Marco:
And now, like, I mean, I could easily hear.
Marco:
Yeah, I could easily pull this across the desk by the MagSafe cable.
John:
I think you could always drag a laptop by MagSafe.
John:
But the whole point is when someone trips over it, they never or almost never pull it exactly the right angle.
John:
If you're if you're off off access by even a little bit, it disconnects with any.
Marco:
I'm going to test.
Marco:
I'm going to grab my finger here.
John:
all right yeah so if you kick it it does pop off but but it's i think it's less safe than ever like if that makes sense like i think i i think it might be more safe than ever because the thing is so skinny and because your yanking force is always going to be a little bit down unless the cord because like who plugs in their laptop where the cord goes straight from the laptop at the same level to the keyboard it's probably always going to go down and because the thing is so skinny
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm sure Apple has done these tests, but the bottom line is they were constrained by both the width of the laptop and the width of their future laptop plans, like the M2 MacBook Air that's going to be super skinny and will probably have this port on it.
John:
They had to make it super thin, and that means that it's always going to be really easy to yank even slightly upward or slightly downwards.
John:
Unless they use an electromagnet.
John:
Just using permanent rare earth magnets in that small a space, they're probably near the limit of
John:
how mag well maybe not near the limit because they have pretty powerful magnets but they're they're probably near the practical limit for how powerful they can make those magnets and still i think any kind of slightly upward or downward motion has got to get that thing disconnected yeah maybe i don't know i i think it is when they when they introduced magsafe for the phone i think they should have given it a new name and then use that same name for this anyway
Casey:
In any case, I do like having MagSafe back quite a lot.
Casey:
Although it is a bit of a double-edged sword in that I've now sprinkled like USB-C power connectors around my house.
Casey:
And not that I can't use them, but now I kind of want to have MagSafe everywhere.
Casey:
Except that my iPad doesn't take MagSafe.
Casey:
So it's like, I don't know what I'm going to do about this.
Casey:
And one example of this is I have one of them kind of like barfing out of my couch, if you will.
Casey:
And generally speaking, I would want to be able to have the flexibility of USB-C so I could plug in either my iPad or my computer.
Casey:
However, that is like prime candidate for MagSafe because if there's ever a time that someone's going to get yanked, it's in the living room, especially with the kids running around.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I don't know what I'm going to do, but if this is the problem I have, I will take this over not even having the option of MagSafe.
Casey:
So I'm still happy.
Casey:
The braided cable or whatever this is, I've only had it for a couple of days, but so far I love it.
Casey:
It is the right amount of flexible and the right amount of sturdy or stiff.
Casey:
I'm really, really digging this.
Casey:
And now I kind of want to have all my lightning cables made out of this, which I think there is a braided lightning cable or something like that.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I'm really digging that.
John:
That's what I talked about when I got my Mac Pro.
John:
Remember, I wanted all my cables to be black and braided.
John:
Yeah, they're much nicer.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And I will probably, I suspect, pick up one or two more of these USB-C to Mac safe ends, even at $50, which is, I think, what they cost.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
But I kind of want to have one, one or two stationary in the house, and then probably one in my laptop bag for when I travel.
Casey:
So I suspect I'll be buying at least one more of them.
Casey:
Battery life, similar to my expectation setting from earlier, my expectations were that the battery lasts forever and you can never even get it below 100%.
Casey:
That is not true.
Casey:
You can get it below 100%.
Casey:
I haven't done extensive testing with this, but it definitely seems like this is a multi-hour battery, which I know sounds preposterous.
Casey:
But as much as I do love my Intel MacBook Pro, I can only realistically get two to three hours when I'm doing reasonably heavy development work.
Casey:
And I've only done a little of that development work on this computer, and we'll talk about that in a second, but it definitely seems like I'm going to get considerably more battery life than my Intel MacBook Pro, which is very welcome, and I'm very excited about it.
Casey:
And even if this was heavier than my Intel MacBook Pro, I would absolutely make that trade-off.
Casey:
Give me a heavier computer and give me more battery life.
Casey:
Absolutely.
Casey:
The keyboard does feel different.
Casey:
I don't know if it's just because it's a fresher keyboard.
Casey:
I don't know what it is about it.
Casey:
And I've been racking my brain trying to figure out a way to describe this, and I just don't have the words for it.
Casey:
But it feels, I think, almost ever so slightly mushier, which is a negative thing, but in a good way, which I understand the words that are coming out of my mouth make no sense, and I'm sorry.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Something about it is it feels a little bit nicer and and I don't I'm gonna have to see if I can you know follow up in a week or two and put words to it but it's not night and day different by any means but I definitely like it and it definitely feels really good.
John:
Some people were saying that it might have had more travel that seems like something you can measure especially if Marco still got his old crappy 16 inch around.
Marco:
yeah i do i'm actually i'm actually keeping this for the 16 inch was tiff's computer until this new 16 came in for her and i'm actually gonna i'm planning on keeping the 16 intel for a while as my like my last intel test machine because it's a laptop so it's self-contained has its own screen and everything so that's nice for you know test machine purposes um and i feel like you know again like as as a you know now i'm a mac developer for multiple products now i you know i have
Marco:
I have forecast and, you know, quitter, I guess, but mainly for forecast for Intel.
Marco:
So, you know, I do have occasional needs for Mac test machines.
Marco:
And so I figure I'll keep this Intel one around for a while.
Casey:
Did you have any thoughts about the keyboard, Marco, before I move on?
Marco:
I don't think so, except the change to black for the background tray of the keyboard, it does make the keys harder to spot.
Marco:
Functionally, it does not work as well as a keyboard visual thing.
Marco:
However, I find it to be a very minor thing.
Marco:
And so I don't care really about that.
Marco:
I do love the new full height Touch ID key and the new full height function keys.
Marco:
They're really nice.
Marco:
Touch ID also just seems faster.
Marco:
I don't know why, but it seems way faster on this than the Intel's.
Marco:
And finally, the different look of the keyboard, mostly in regards to the black background thing, are one difference that instantly makes the previous outgoing 16-inch model look old by comparison.
Marco:
like as i've been as i've been using the the 16 inch like to transfer tiff stuff over in the last couple days to her new computer the keyboard background being silver and the touch bar both make it look like a dinosaur by comparison like that like you wouldn't think it would be it would be such a big difference because like the new machines don't look that different from the old machines but in those ways they do and that i noticed instantly that's kind of also good riddance to the touch bar my god does that thing suck
Casey:
You know, I do miss it.
Casey:
I do miss it for tap backs and messages, but that is literally the only time.
Casey:
I want to go back to the Touch ID briefly.
Casey:
I couldn't tell you if it's faster or not, but I will say, and this sounds kind of bananas, but it really has made a huge difference to me.
Casey:
Having a little bit of ridge in it, or maybe it's actually like a, not a depression.
Casey:
Is that the word I'm looking for?
Casey:
A little cavey area.
Casey:
It's inset slightly.
Marco:
On the Touch ID button specifically, you mean?
Casey:
Yes, exactly.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I really like having that so that I can place my finger appropriately on the button because the Intel one, it's just like a completely blank keycap.
Casey:
And so it feels different than the other keycaps, but it's still just one big flat area.
Casey:
And having the circle in there helps me center my finger appropriately.
Casey:
And I think it makes it more accurate.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The Intel one, it looks like they forgot to design it.
Marco:
Or like the CSS failed to load.
John:
It's supposed to look like it's part of the touch bar.
John:
That's why it's featureless because the touch bar is featureless when it's not turned on.
John:
And so to make the same reason the stupid escape key doesn't exist in the first ones.
John:
It was just part of the screen.
John:
But the touch ID is supposed to just look like more touch bar.
John:
So no features.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
The speakers on this are really good for a laptop, like really, really good, surprisingly good.
Casey:
And I never thought the Intel ones were particularly bad, but these are really, really good.
Casey:
And you get way more bass out of these than you would expect.
Casey:
Now, it's not going to replace a regular sound system by any stretch, but in a pinch, I think it's definitely sufficient, if not more than sufficient for any reasonable use.
Casey:
And I was very impressed by them.
Casey:
The SD card reader.
Casey:
I think you ran into something similar to this, Marco.
Casey:
So I was using the SD card reader on the device to go through my photos the way I like to do it, which I know you guys hate.
Casey:
And, you know, look at each file on this SD card and decide what I want to keep and what I want to delete before I import them into photos.
Casey:
Yes, I understand that's bananas, but it's the way I like to do it.
Casey:
Leave me alone.
Casey:
And so I was trying to do all this in Finder and I was getting constant beach balls like all the time.
Casey:
I was rebooting.
Casey:
I was quitting Finder constantly.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm currently tracking some issues, and I even end up filing a bug report with Apple with sysdiagnosis and everything.
Marco:
The generic $20 USB enclosure for SSDs that I use, like regular 2.5-inch SATA enclosure, that seems to have problems with these new Macs.
Marco:
Now, I was trying to isolate.
Marco:
It might not be a problem with the new Macs specifically.
Marco:
It might be a problem with Monterey.
Marco:
Once I upgraded my MacBook Air to Monterey, it has the same problem, or a similar one.
Marco:
Whereas the Mac Mini that has not been upgraded, that's still running Big Sur, but is also M1, does not have this problem.
Marco:
So it seems to be maybe a problem with...
Marco:
you know m1 series chips and big sir combined or maybe it's a problem with all of big sir i don't know but you mean monterey yeah sorry monterey god california is too many places anyway it's a big state big state yeah so anyway there there's something about there's something going on with these machines slash monterey and usb3 storage devices so
Marco:
Um, if you use a cable that is USB C, but does not transmit USB three speeds, like conveniently Apple's charging cable from all of their most recent laptops, except these, if you have an Apple USB C to C two meter charging cable that comes with pretty much every, every Apple laptop, maybe between 2016 and right before these came out, that cable is USB 2.0 data speeds, but has USB C connectors on both ends.
Marco:
If I connect the drive enclosure with that, um,
Marco:
it does work without any problems it's slow as crap and you realize quite how good usb3 is compared to usb2 but it does work so there's something up with that i assume i hope because this seems to have come on with monterey and also seems to apply to the old m1s but they didn't have this problem before this i would assume this is a software problem not a hardware problem
Marco:
And so hopefully we'll see a Monterey update sometime very soon that fixes, you know, USB device connectivity or whatever.
Marco:
It seems to not apply to USB two-pointed devices or to anything that is like Thunderbolt or otherwise not USB.
Casey:
Yeah, it was very, very wonky, and I did not enjoy it by any means.
Casey:
But I agree that it seems to me like it would be a software thing, but who really knows?
Casey:
Speed.
Casey:
So again, I was sold by me to me a bill of goods that this thing would load everything instantly always.
Casey:
And I think that's true with asterisks.
Casey:
Certain things, it definitely feels like it's churning on something or trying to do something.
Casey:
I mentioned, I think briefly earlier, that when I installed Xcode via the App Store, which maybe that was my first problem, but one way or another, it took
Casey:
literally like an hour or something like that.
Casey:
I didn't measure it, but it felt like a long, long time.
Casey:
However, in starting Xcode once it's been installed, it does take a few seconds.
Casey:
You can see the Xcode icon bounce a couple of times.
Casey:
But one thing that blew my freaking mind was every time I opened the simulator, like from a cold start, the simulator has been fully quit.
Casey:
There are no simulator windows open.
Casey:
It is not actively running.
Casey:
Going from that to the simulator displaying my app is preposterously fast, hilariously, preposterously, ridiculously fast.
Casey:
And it is so cool and it makes me so happy.
Casey:
Now, granted, I don't cold start simulator that often, but even just getting the simulator to come up with the latest version of my app, that is also preposterously fast and makes me extremely happy.
Casey:
I've rebooted a bunch of times, including about 15 times when I installed Audio Hijack.
Casey:
That also happens very quickly, which I like.
Casey:
And something that everyone else has talked about for six months or a year now, but I am just now experiencing for the first time, when you go ahead and switch displays, it is instant.
Casey:
And after 30 years of waiting for flash, flash, flash, black, not black, black again, not black, black again.
Casey:
Oh, there it is.
Casey:
It is amazing.
Casey:
It is so cool that this happens so quickly and it makes me extremely happy.
Marco:
Yeah, I know that somebody must have put a ton of work into like the display driving, whatever, whatever does that.
Marco:
It's so awesome.
Marco:
And this applies to the M1s as well, as you said.
Marco:
it plugging in and disconnecting monitors or opening and closing the screen lid to have things just instantly pop into the into the new place and the new configuration is so cool and again it's one of those things like we we've been trained for decades into thinking i guess that can't happen i guess you know i guess it's too complicated to to have that like it's we never even thought to expect better things in this area and when you're given better things all of a sudden in an area you didn't even think you could get them it's really delightful
Marco:
And that's one of the great things about the M1 series of computers.
Casey:
Yep, completely agree.
Casey:
A couple of funny things that I think were more to do with having a brand new computer than anything else.
Casey:
I lost all of my group chat images in messages.
Casey:
So if you recall, for group iMessages, you can set like a name that's shared across all the participants and a
Casey:
icon that's shared across all the participants and the names seem to have persisted but the with the icons because in a few cases i said custom icons and they've disappeared which is kind of annoying um also i'm constantly getting barraged with like oh casey list has a new photo for you oh marco arment has a new photo for you like incessantly and i don't really know what that's about yeah i've been getting barraged with that since they introduced that feature i just yesterday i just it's like a
John:
Routine matter, of course.
John:
I just look at the messages window and it says, do you want to update the photo for this contact?
John:
I'm like, for the 8,000th time, no.
John:
I think it's because you can set a preference that says, do you want to offer your photo to other people that you message with so that they can use it?
John:
If you set that, I think you're kind of at the mercy... On the receiving end, you're at the mercy of other people who may...
John:
be setting up a new account on a computer or something or whatever whatever makes the offer come to you you have no control over whether you receive the offer or not and it doesn't apparently remember that you had rejected the offer from this person it's just that oh this person came online and their computer wants to offer it so you get the pleasure of hitting that little x and rejecting it again
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Another thing that I thought was quite funny was that I think I was talking with Mike Hurley and he replied to an image that he had sent a few days ago before this computer was in my hands.
Casey:
And the way messages rendered that was just a little teeny black box.
Casey:
Because I mean, legitimately, I don't have messages in the cloud turned on.
Casey:
And so it legitimately had no way of knowing what that image was he was replying to because it happened long before my user had ever signed into this computer.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I felt like it was a failure mode that was a little ridiculous.
Casey:
You know, it reminded me of the old Netscape, like image broken icon, but it was just a black box.
Casey:
And I was supposed to just divine what was being replied to.
John:
Why don't you have messages in the cloud turned on?
Casey:
Because early on it was terrible.
Casey:
It's still terrible.
Casey:
Or so I remember.
Casey:
And we actually, some Slack that I think we're all in was just talking about this and somebody else said it's not terrible anymore.
Casey:
So I probably should turn it on.
John:
I mean, it's less bad than it was, but it's still pretty terrible.
John:
But a slightly inconsistent, terrible, laggy, slow syncing mechanism that constantly re-scrolls you to a new position in the scroll back is better than nothing at all.
John:
Because with nothing at all, it's like, well, some messages are on some device and some messages on other devices.
Casey:
Well, see, that's the thing.
Casey:
It's been pretty rock solid for me without messages in the cloud.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
And doesn't messages in the cloud give Apple your encryption key or something like that?
Casey:
That was the other thing.
John:
Yeah, it's totally less secure.
John:
But I was like, that's a valid answer.
John:
It's like I didn't want to turn up messages in the cloud because I don't want Apple seeing my messages.
John:
But, you know, that's not what you said.
John:
So I don't know if you have secret messages.
Casey:
But that is a small part of it.
Casey:
It was mostly because I heard it was garbage.
Casey:
And then also because it's marginally less secure.
John:
It is better than it was.
John:
But like, boy, I mean, maybe it's just on Mac messages like
John:
it's like you do have the button that you can do sync now which is great but if you don't do that and you're like scrolling through a scroll back to look at something expect that at any point the the program will decide i've done something related to sync and now i've decided your scroll back position is going to be offset by a few thousand pixels enjoy and then you'll scroll back and find where you were and start reading again and then we'll just move back again it's it's true
Casey:
So for drinks and giggles, I decided to think about what would I do if I wanted to keep this as my primary machine, which is I think what I want to do, and I want to have a monitor for it, which I don't have.
Casey:
So I tried using my OG, like literally from the Kickstarter, Luna Display, which thankfully I had gotten when my Adorable was my runaround computer.
Casey:
So it was USB-C.
Casey:
The Luna Display is very good.
Casey:
I think they may have sponsored once or twice in the past.
Casey:
I don't remember.
Casey:
It is very, very good.
Casey:
However, even over Ethernet,
Casey:
powering the 5k over the lunar display is not exactly delightful because there's so many compression artifacts and especially like i tried using xcode and every time i scroll the xcode window like all the text gets garbly and gross looking and then you wait up you wait a beat and then it all comes back in nice and crisp because it stopped moving it's not great yeah you're asking a lot of that
Casey:
Oh, absolutely.
Casey:
Absolutely.
Casey:
Absolutely.
Casey:
Without a shadow of doubt.
Casey:
I mean, the Luna display, I think, was mostly meant for running on an iPad, right?
Casey:
So what sidecar is now?
Casey:
And it wasn't, I don't think, really designed to handle this.
Casey:
And it wouldn't surprise me if my hardware is old and there's probably new hardware now.
Casey:
But one way or another, it did work.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong.
Casey:
It absolutely worked.
Casey:
But it was not super delightful.
Casey:
So I wish target display mode was a thing, but it is not.
Casey:
So I don't think we're going to have time today, but I would like very much to whine about the piss-poor state of Apple monitors because I have ordered an LG 5K from Apple that might deliver this year because I don't know what else to do.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Casey:
I don't know what else to do.
Marco:
Here's what you do.
Marco:
You swallow your pride.
Marco:
You order the XDR, and you never tell anybody.
Casey:
oh my god i don't think i can handle it i don't think i can don't get it it's not a good time to buy an xdr i i endorse i endorse the 5k plan assuming you can resell it at some point in the future because honestly we don't know what the schedule is for apple ever releasing anything better but i wouldn't buy an xdr now see thank you john i agree i mean if i was spending your money i would i would have had an xdr yesterday but i'm spending my money which is why i don't have an xdr uh by the way have i mentioned atp.fm slash store thank you very much
Casey:
uh and then finally the only uh mac os or i guess ios on mac os catalyst app that i've installed is indeed overcast because i was i was doing my normal thing where i put my iphone in like a 12 south dock or whatever it is i have on my desk and i was starting to play you know i think it was upgrade actually the aforementioned uh episode of upgrade and i started playing wait wait a second i don't have to do this i can just run it on my mac and
Marco:
I can have a mediocre experience scrolling the iPad app on my Mac.
Casey:
That's exactly right.
Casey:
And actually, well, that's not even fair.
Casey:
It was a very nice experience and it all worked really well until I tried to hit a media key on the keyboard and it was like, what?
Casey:
Nope, that doesn't work.
Casey:
Play, pause?
Casey:
I don't know what that is.
Casey:
And that was a bit of a bummer.
Casey:
So I got to talk to the developer and see if I can convince him or her to add media key support because that would be super awesome.
John:
You mean convince them to do literally anything to the app to make it aware that it's running on a Mac?
Casey:
That's exactly right.
Marco:
I don't think I have access to those keys in that environment.
Marco:
Because it isn't a Catalyst app.
Marco:
It's like an iOS Mac app.
Marco:
And Catalyst might have hooks into that kind of stuff.
Marco:
And one of the reasons I haven't made a Catalyst app is that
Marco:
Once you do that, then you have to have a whole separate entry in the Mac App Store for your app and maintain that and, you know, submit it separately, like have all these separate builds.
Marco:
And that's a lot of overhead for what has proven to be, you know, not...
Marco:
Not no users, but not a lot of users.
Marco:
Not a lot of people are using Overcast on their Macs.
Marco:
And of course, that will grow as more people use them.
Marco:
Obviously, as more people have these machines that can run it, then more people will run it.
Marco:
But it's not a huge number.
Marco:
That being said, according to my analytics that I run, it is climbing quickly over the last couple of weeks, or over the last week, rather.
Casey:
so anyway so so far so good uh i'm really looking forward to well and i i might have mentioned this last week but i was going to say i'm really looking forward to taking this somewhere like you know a patio somewhere or or somewhere where i can work outside and not have to worry about my battery all the time but it's freaking freezing here now so now that i have my wonderful new laptop my my portable desktop that i can take places i i can't really take it anywhere because everywhere's freezing and i'm still allergic to the indoors although uh
Casey:
random follow-up.
Casey:
Declan has his first shot appointment in a little over a week, and I'm super excited about that.
Marco:
Yeah, Adam does too.
Casey:
At that point, it'll be three down, one to go.
Casey:
And for you guys, you'll be all in, which will be great.
Casey:
In any case, this is an incredibly nice machine.
Casey:
I spent a preposterous amount of money on it, and I probably over-ordered on it.
Casey:
I probably didn't need 64 gigs of RAM.
Casey:
I
Casey:
i think i stand by my four terabytes but i probably didn't need the the max i probably could have been just fine with the pro and 32 gigs of ram but so far so freaking good and outside of my big monitor problems i really really really love this computer and i'm so happy it's here
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Stripe.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at ATP.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
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, so that's K-C-L-I-S-S-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
Casey:
So related to this computer and in potentially being my one and only computer, excepting my Mac mini server, which we're not talking about, I have now a, well, not right now, but soon I will have an iMac Pro that I should probably get rid of and an Intel MacBook Pro that I should probably get rid of.
Casey:
I think I am going to unload both of them.
Casey:
There's a slim chance I might hand the MacBook Pro to Erin because she's still on the adorable, but she uses it so infrequently that I really don't think she'd need the MacBook Pro.
Casey:
Like I think if anything, it being bigger and heavier would probably not even make her happy.
Casey:
So I'm going to talk to her about it and see what she thinks, but she'll probably just stick with the adorable.
Casey:
So I'll have this Intel MacBook Pro to get rid of and probably the iMac Pro to get rid of.
Casey:
i i've not really done this but a couple of times marco so i i had some questions for you let me just rattle off the questions because they're all pretty quick and then you can kind of answer them in whatever order order you see fit um first of all do you and and again save save your answers for a second here do you typically include accessories so for the for the macbook pro
Casey:
All things being equal, I'd probably just hoard the power supply and USB-C cable.
Casey:
But on the flip side of that, if I was buying a new MacBook Pro, I'd probably want those things.
Casey:
So, like, what do you do with that?
Casey:
Does the fact that both of these have active AppleCare Plus things, does that matter?
Casey:
Do I take that into account in the pricing or do I just say that that's an advantage to make the products seem more lucrative?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Um, and then more than anything else, how do you price these?
Casey:
Cause I did like a little bit of spelunky on eBay and I came up with some, some numbers that I'm not sure if they're realistic or not.
Casey:
And my recollection is that what you would do, and I'm, and I'm going to shut up in a second, let you actually answer it.
Casey:
What you would do is you would look at eBay and basically like discount a few hundred bucks or something like that.
Casey:
And so I've had a couple of people reach out and kind of kick the tires on each of these machines.
Casey:
So I don't think I necessarily need to go to eBay.
Casey:
I don't, I certainly don't want to go to Apple because those trade-in values are not great.
Casey:
But, you know, if, if these couple of interested parties end up falling through, like my plan was to just post to Twitter and be like, Hey, you know, first, first one to pee on it, so to speak is the winner.
Casey:
Um, so it was, please don't post that.
Casey:
But what is your advice and your approach to unloading not very old and still very nice computers?
Marco:
So it depends on a lot of factors.
Marco:
And it's very much like trading in old cars.
Marco:
If you do the trade-in route to the dealer, if you do the Apple trade-in, you will get the worst price but the least hassle and the least risk.
Marco:
So that is a really good option if there's something kind of flaky or wrong with it in the sense that you don't necessarily want to sell it to somebody who you know and who knows you in some way, whether that's somebody on Twitter or an eBay person or whatever.
Marco:
You don't want to be personally responsible for it if it's a little bit flaky or broken.
Marco:
So if there's anything kind of wrong with it, trade it in and take the hit.
Marco:
um also if you just want to be quickly done with it or if it's going to be a big pain and this might be something like you know if shipping it's going to be really problematic like you know if it's something that's that's big and heavy and hard to ship uh you know well slash affordably like a mac pro tower for instance like those are or an imac pro
Marco:
Or an iMac.
Marco:
Those are larger, more expensive to ship.
Marco:
I remember the last time when I sold a Mac Pro tower years ago, I remember it cost like $150 to ship it.
Marco:
It was a big chunk out of its value just for shipping.
Marco:
I'd say the original box.
Marco:
If you don't have the shipping box for some of these things, it's even more because then you have to buy shipping boxes and
Marco:
and you know padding and stuff like that so anyway so trading in is good in the sense that you don't have to worry about any of that stuff like if you do a trade-in to apple they will send you packaging material like they mail you an empty box with padding you stick the computer in it and you send it back oh quick aside about that a listener and i don't have their name handy but a listener wrote in to say they were looking to trade in their john style what is it 2019 whatever that's right mac pro yeah the current giant mac pro
Casey:
And apparently Apple was not at all prepared for this because they sent them a box that was clearly meant for the trash can Mac Pro, which I just thought was hilarious.
John:
You can't even fit the monitor stand in that box.
John:
No.
John:
Remember how big the monitor stand box was, Marco?
John:
I mean, I talked about it when I got mine.
John:
I'm sure you noticed when you had yours.
John:
The monitor stand box is huge.
Marco:
Yeah, actually, I just moved it yesterday because I was rearranging the basement a little bit, and there it is.
Marco:
It's massive and heavy even without the stand in it.
Marco:
So for selling on eBay and stuff, eBay is a great chance to be pretty much guaranteed a buyer.
Marco:
It might not be the best buyer.
Marco:
It might not be the most profitable buyer.
Marco:
You're going to have people saying, hey, can you maybe ship it to this remote island I live on that's going to be a pain in the butt for you, and you've got to fill out a million customs forms because it's like four countries away.
Marco:
No, you don't want to do any of that.
Marco:
If you go on eBay, keep it simple.
Marco:
Say continental US only.
Marco:
and you know do shipping at cost because they'll calculate it all for you the good thing about ebay is that you will get up you will get a buyer like i'm pretty much anything if unless you like grossly overprice the starting bid but for the most part you will get a buyer um and the ebay app is surprisingly good what i would suggest like back you know not too long ago if you were to sell something on sell something on ebay you'd probably do it similar to the way i used to do it which is like all right
Marco:
Take out the good camera.
Marco:
Get out the light box to get really good photos of the object and dust it off.
Marco:
Get all perfect.
Marco:
Get no speck of dust on it anywhere.
Marco:
Take the pictures, import it into Lightroom, boost them up, get the contrast nice.
Marco:
Oh, there's a speck of dust.
Marco:
Clone stamp that out so you don't see the dust in the pictures.
Marco:
Really a lot of effort going into it.
Marco:
And then you go on and you make a really nice description and everything.
Marco:
I would suggest throw all of that expectation away and just use the app on your iPad.
Marco:
And maybe even on your phone if you want to.
Marco:
But iPad is fine, too.
Marco:
You get a little more space to look at things like pictures and text and stuff on the iPad, so it's nicer.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Just use the built-in camera and don't use any fancy lighting or fancy photo setup or anything.
Marco:
Set the item on a table, dust it off in a quick way, and use the eBay app and the built-in camera in the eBay app to take five or six photos all around it.
Marco:
And then you can look up and you can say, all right, it's this model computer.
Marco:
Here's a description.
Marco:
And type in approximate description, plain text.
Marco:
Put in no effort into your listing except a handful of iPhone slash iPad photos and a quick text description.
Marco:
That's all you need.
Marco:
And what this does is it makes it really easy for you, the seller, which means you're more likely to do it and it's less hassle and time for you.
Marco:
Then when the thing actually gets sold, like now that people can buy it directly on eBay and check out on eBay, you don't have to deal with like PayPal or anything like that anymore.
Marco:
eBay just pays you.
Marco:
And it's really nice because it's really easy.
Marco:
Now, they will charge you for this.
Marco:
You always pay fees on eBay.
Marco:
You pay both the listing fee and then the final value fee, just like it always was.
Marco:
The payment fee is probably that on top of it now, too.
Marco:
You end up losing something like 20% to fees.
Marco:
15% to 20%, I think, is kind of the all-in for eBay.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
That's significant.
Marco:
This is why it's not a place to get the most money, but it is a place where you can be pretty much guaranteed a buyer and you will generally have few to no problems with them.
Marco:
The previous problems in the past of very fraudulent buyers a lot of times for laptops and stuff don't seem to be as common, especially if you're restricted to US only and only accept their built-in payment system and stuff like that.
Marco:
So they make it very easy.
Marco:
And then like, if you tell them like the dimensions and weight of your package before you even list the item,
Marco:
they will give you a shipping label that you can say.
Casey:
Oh, interesting.
Marco:
Because they're fully integrated now with the post office and everything.
Marco:
So you don't even have to do that.
Marco:
All you have to do is print it out and tape it on the box and mail it and you're done.
Marco:
So they've really reduced a lot of the old friction and a lot of the old steps you used to have to take to sell on eBay.
Marco:
It's now really quite easy to sell stuff there.
Marco:
The other option would be, as you mentioned, you know, like Twitter or, you know, if people email in saying, hey, can I buy your laptop?
Marco:
You know, that kind of thing.
Marco:
The downside of that kind of sale is that you're limited in buyers.
Marco:
So if you're selling something that your audience might not want or at a price they might not want to pay, it might not go anywhere.
Marco:
Whereas if you put it on eBay, it will sell.
Marco:
Like, no question.
Marco:
You put it on eBay, make a seven-day auction.
Marco:
A week later, it will be out of your house.
Marco:
Like, no question.
Marco:
It will definitely sell.
Marco:
So I've been leaning more towards eBay for a lot of that kind of stuff recently.
Marco:
Anything I'm not trading in, I'll usually go to eBay just because they have just made it so much easier.
Marco:
That being said, an even easier option, if you don't necessarily need the money from it,
Marco:
is to give it to a family member or friend who needs a new computer.
Marco:
That's also a really good option.
Marco:
And so whenever I have someone in my life that could really benefit from it, I try to take that option.
Marco:
That's not the common case, unfortunately, because most people in my life don't care about computers as much as I do.
So...
Marco:
So usually I end up selling or, you know, like in the case of like selling a desktop, like most people in my life who need a computer don't want a desktop.
Marco:
They want a laptop.
Marco:
And so like when I when we sold our iMacs a couple of years back that, you know, one of them went to a family member.
Marco:
The other one went on eBay and it was fine.
Casey:
So how do you price either for eBay or for like a Twitter sale, if you will?
Marco:
So for eBay, it's super easy.
Marco:
You can go search for completed items and then filter that by sold items.
Marco:
And it will show you what this exact item has actually sold for in the last whatever days.
Marco:
eBay sold items is probably the best way to figure out what is this exact thing with this exact configuration actually worth.
Marco:
see what it sells for anyway.
Marco:
It's like, well, they found buyers.
Marco:
So obviously that's about what it's worth.
Marco:
So pick whatever range you see there and make the starting bid something way low.
Marco:
So that way, and then set the buy it now price, like maybe a little bit below that range.
Marco:
Cause if you can, if yours is going for a,
Marco:
100 bucks less 200 bucks less whatever you know 10 percent 15 percent less than the like value that people see by doing this kind of searches it'll sell fast and and it'll and you you will have less trouble like getting it sold people will be more likely to hit the buy it now button and then then it's out of your house even sooner and and even with even less hassle
Marco:
Again, if you're willing to give up a few percent off the price and get a little bit lower price, you can have a faster, easier, more guaranteed sale.
Marco:
So that's, again, usually what I do is I will – I hope people pick to buy it now.
Marco:
Most of my stuff that I sold recently never even went to auction.
Marco:
People just pick to buy it now thing because I priced it 5% or 10% below what it seemed like it was worth.
Marco:
And it went, and that was it.
Marco:
If you're on Twitter doing that kind of sale, you basically do the same thing, but you can kind of go lower because you can account for the eBay fees not being charged to you in that medium.
Marco:
So what I usually do if I'm selling on Twitter, I'll look at the eBay sold item price, and I'll go maybe 20% lower than that because I know I'm not going to pay the 15% eBay fees.
Marco:
That works out pretty well if you can find a buyer there.
Marco:
But again, for more specialized stuff or for computers that you have literally spent the last few months telling all of your audience you shouldn't buy, maybe eBay is the better choice.
John:
How do you deal with payment from stuff that you sell on Twitter?
John:
Isn't that annoying to deal with?
Marco:
usually you can take advantage of the fact that people trust you.
Marco:
I know this sounds terrible, but you can use one of the options where it kind of works like cash to you.
Marco:
So the buyer kind of has no recourse after they send it to you.
Marco:
That only works if people trust you, obviously, because that's a good amount of trust to put in somebody.
John:
It's not that they trust you.
John:
I know this is not actionable advice for most people who aren't us, but the main feature that we all have is not like, oh, we're so trustworthy.
John:
It's that
John:
we have a public presence that people know about so that if marco screw someone out of a computer it's a story and so that the person i mean you might seem like oh but doesn't marco have all the power he's got the audience this poor unknown person who he's buying his computer doesn't have any power but that's not true they have the power of now i have a story now marco this person you know from podcasts and developers screwed me out of a computer that's a story sites will pick that up that will gain traction and so the main
John:
The reason we have the ability to say, oh, just, you know, you can trust me.
John:
Like, I think the mutual understanding is you can trust me because I know that I have a lot to lose by screwing you out of this thing.
John:
And so therefore I won't.
John:
And so that's that's the basis of our trust.
Yeah.
Casey:
That makes sense.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I appreciate it.
Casey:
So I got to look at some eBay completed sales and see what these things should be priced.
John:
Although I have to say I have some experience trying to exchange money with people, maybe not for selling computers and stuff.
John:
But like if you're not limited to US only, it can be surprisingly difficult to just like.
John:
Let's find a way that we can both agree on and use to transfer money between someone in the UK and someone in the US.
John:
Oh, just use Apple Pay.
John:
Oh, apparently we don't have Apple Pay Cash in the UK.
John:
I'm like, why not?
John:
I don't know, because Apple.
John:
Well, what about PayPal?
John:
Well, I don't use PayPal.
John:
Do you use Venmo?
John:
Is that a thing there?
John:
There's a million services, but if you have two parties on equal footing and no one is particularly motivated, people don't want to sign up for a new payment thing.
John:
It's like, well, I only use...
John:
You know, Apple Pay Cash and Venmo.
John:
And the other person says, well, I only use PayPal and some other thing you've never heard of.
John:
And so now it's like a, you know, a staring contest of like, well, so are you going to sign up for PayPal or am I going to sign up for Venmo?
John:
It's just, it's not super easy.
John:
And if anyone says cryptocurrency, I swear, just don't even.
John:
That's a hard no.
Marco:
No, and this is, again, not only for payment reasons, but for shipping and customs slash duty reasons.
Marco:
You don't want to ship outside the U.S.
Marco:
It's not worth the hassle.
Marco:
I'm sorry, people outside the U.S.
Marco:
You can buy from people in your countries to make things easier for you.
Marco:
As an individual seller, occasionally, of my computer equipment, it is such a pain to ship to other countries because then you have to deal with customs.
Marco:
And that...
Marco:
that is a massive wild card both for time to receive the item and for like unexpected charges either to you or to the buyer and it's just it's a it's a complexity level that's not worth it when you are not a professional seller of goods like plus you don't have the wrong keyboard right don't they have those terrible keyboards in the uk yeah they sure do like where the ender key is giant and all the punctuation is in the wrong place and they can't they can't program because their curly braces are all screwed up