A Strong Number Four
I'm enjoying a wonderful vanilla cream house seltzer right now that I had to open with the pliers that are still in our fridge from whenever that intro that we did to our show with Tiff was like six months ago or at least.
You'd be like all buff from the rowing now.
You should be able to just crank that sucker open.
Actually, my arm's all messed up right now for other reasons.
Oh, what happened?
Well, I've had some shoulder rotator cuff challenges over the last six months.
I've been working through it with a PT friend, so we're getting there.
But I currently have this black tape on my arm, this rock tape, that makes me look really cool.
That's not from trying to open the seltzer, right?
Well, maybe.
I mean, I guess I can't fully be sure what the root cause was.
Maybe I opened so many seltzers over the last five years that I wrecked my whole left shoulder.
It's all that major league pitching you've been doing.
Yes, especially with my left arm since I'm right-handed.
Not to mention the fact that I'm not a baseball player.
I was for one year in school.
i was actually held back in t-ball for an extra year that was fourth grade but then fifth grade i played my regular baseball and i'm pretty sure i got one hit for the entire year and did not play baseball after that how many at bats though because if that was your only at bat that's a great average yeah
Unfortunately, far more than one.
It's funny you say that.
I've told the story somewhere on the internet before, but when I was in fifth grade, this was toward the height of me being interested in and playing basketball.
And at my very best moments, I was a passable basketball player.
I was never good.
But when I had a good day, I was passable.
And our fifth grade, so this is not middle school.
This is still elementary school in the States.
Our fifth grade school team, which in and of itself was weird to have a school team in fifth grade, but be that as may, it was a school team that would travel to other schools and play basketball against them and stuff, which is usually something that doesn't happen in America until you're older, at least for school-affiliated teams.
Well, anyway...
I tried out for the fifth grade basketball team, which is about the most athletic thing I think I've ever done in my life.
And I tried out and I made the team.
And then I moved like two weeks later.
And it wasn't until I was an adult that I realized, wait a second, they knew full well I was moving this entire time.
That was totally a pity, except this wasn't it.
You don't know they knew you were moving.
I think they might have, but I'm going to claim that.
Did you move in order just to get away from that team?
Do you think the team paid off your parents to make you move?
I'm pretty sure they did not.
It is possible, but I'm pretty sure no.
I think it's pretty permissive.
Fifth grade basketball teams probably pretty much let anyone on who shows any sort of desire to be on the team.
So I don't think they knew you were moving.
I think they just basically take everybody.
I mean, certainly my fifth grade baseball team was pretty permissive if they let me on there.
John, do you have a fun sports-related story, sports-related failure perhaps you would like to share with the group?
I mean, my quote-unquote career sport was tennis, which is brutal in the same way that Microsoft used to be where everything is force-ranked.
So if you were going to be on the tennis team, the players are pitted against each other to determine the rankings.
Yeah.
So there's no question about where you are in the hierarchy.
And if you want to play at all, you have to be in the top four or whatever.
Depending on what school you went to, maybe they only had like four or five courts.
So only the top four or five people are going to play, period.
So if you're number six on your team, you're just not going to play at all.
And the only way for you to get higher is to beat the number five person.
So that's the crucible I was formed in.
Aren't sports great?
I mean, the funny thing is like sports weren't even the most emotionally damaging part of my school career, but they certainly didn't help.
I love tennis.
Like I mean, the first year I played in junior high.
No, I didn't get to play in the matches because I was like number six or number seven, but I worked my way up.
So you played in junior high, but you did not play in high school?
No, I played in junior high and high school.
Were you varsity in high school?
Yeah, I was good at tennis.
I am having a seriously difficult time imagining any of the three of us doing varsity anything.
I'm very athletic.
Oh, sure.
I am.
Well, more than us.
Oh, let's put it this way.
I'm very coordinated.
Team sports I was less good at, but that was mostly because I didn't have a lot of confidence for reasons that you would imagine.
But no, I was good at tennis.
I mean, I wasn't number one or two, but, you know, I was number four.
Strong number four, occasionally a number three in high school.
In a team of four?
No, it was like eight people.
Cruel.
Tiff and I just re-watched Freaks and Geeks.
It's the first time I've seen it in probably five to ten years.
It's been a while since then.
I've never seen it.
Oh, it's a fantastic series.
I re-watched it like three months ago, coincidentally.
I re-watched it because The Incomparable was going to do a show about it, and they said, hey, you should re-watch this.
So I did, and then I just forgot about the episode, and other people aren't anyway.
But I saw you say that you were re-watching it, and I assume you're not.
I didn't do it because of The Incomparable, but it's weird that we both just re-watched the whole series.
i think i did actually do it for the incomparable but uh i don't know you did were you on that episode they haven't recorded it yet but uh uh man that show not only does it hold up and not only is it great and it has a whole bunch of famous people in it that weren't that famous at the time so you get to see them like when they're super young you get like like a 16 year old seth rogan like it's it's pretty cool but um man that show is painful to watch like if you if you were a
wow that is there is some deep pain when watching that show sounds great i mean and everybody watching that show is going to look at these three characters and be like well that's us like that's like you know obviously it's me you know me and you guys which character do you think you are marco though because i can tell you which one i was more or less i mean i think everybody would say you were bill the only thing is i i'm unclear whether i would be sam or neil i i definitely have seen have some overlap with with each of them yeah um so i'm not sure
The problem with Sam is he does get together with an unrealistically more attractive girl for a plot point in the season.
Right.
And that sure as hell was not going to happen to me in high school.
Exactly.
I mean, it works in the show because of how that turns out, but practically speaking, not going to happen.
Right, so that's why I think I'd be, realistically, I'm probably more a Neil.
Yeah, my rewatch, since it's not going to end the episode, I'll give you my tiny capsule summary.
The only thing that really changed from my first watch, I watched it when it actually aired, because I'm old, the only change from my rewatch is I felt like the main character, Lindsay, what's her name?
The main character's motivation was not well sketched out.
And it's not the fault of the actor.
It's mostly the fault of the script.
I know the arc that they wanted her to go on, but a lot of the time she just seemed to be going through the paces of the script because she had to and her motivations were not clearly outlined.
But other than that, everything was great.
I never once looked at it that way.
Well, I mean, it depends on who you're identifying with in the show.
But, like, if you're identifying mostly with her little brother and their friends, then maybe you don't care about that.
But she really is the heart of the show.
And the problem is a lot of her, like, what she does, it's not unmotivated.
Like, the show says things in it, like, here's why she's doing this.
But it's never really on the screen.
It's just, like, they'll drop a hint on it here or there, and then she'll just act under the influence of that one hint for three episodes.
It's like, what are you really trying to do, Lindsay?
She just felt a little bit like a leaf in the wind.
Watch how I soar.
That's a reference.
Yeah, but I was doing the Forrest Gump thing.
I just said feather.
All right, we have a lot to do.
We should stop goofing off and let's start with some follow-up.
It is back because it's not keynote week.
All right, so let's talk about universal control and device arrangement.
A lot of us were wondering, you know, when you do this universal control thing, which is like Synergy was slash is, where you have one keyboard and mouse attached to one computer, but it's controlling multiple computers, then how does it know if, you know, say you have an iPad and an iMac, which side is the iPad on?
And I think this was actually discussed in the talk show, if I'm not mistaken, but we also got feedback via Andreas Beyer-Bauden, who apparently saw or received an email from Federighi, which reads, as Federighi's words, when you move to an edge, we default to assuming you are moving to the most recently active device that is nearby and not yet, quote unquote, paired.
So if you turn your iPad and put it next, turn on your iPad, excuse me, and put it next to the Mac and then move the cursor as I did in the demo, we will assume that you were attempting to access that iPad versus say another Mac that you had not interacted with as recently.
And once you're quote unquote connected, we remember that arrangement.
There is of course also a displays arrangement, system preferences pane, but we've designed the features such that using these sorts of settings should generally not be necessary.
This is, if it works, and I haven't tried it, this is Apple at its best when it's using like some really smart inference, maybe.
I'm not sure what word I'm looking for, but it's using evidence based on circumstance to figure out what you want before or without you having to explicitly tell them.
And I think that's super cool.
And if it works well, it's going to be very impressive.
Yeah.
It's like a magic trick where once you hear how it's done, you're like, oh, that is clever, but that's not as complicated as I thought it would be.
They're essentially letting you, the user, tell them where things are.
Now, it's not perfect because if you do that, first of all, once you know how the trick is done, it's trivially easy to confuse it.
But second of all, you're basically just picking whether the computer is left, right, or maybe even up or down from where you are, but you're not really picking the exact height that the screen is joining each other, so you're going to kind of get the default...
i haven't i don't have enough systems running these this new stuff to do this but i'm interested to see like so once you do that it shows up as a display like like in the displays panel and then you could arrange them after that i don't it's not entirely clear to me because i haven't seen this demoed but but anyway the magic trick of how they do this is very clever um and it's like it makes for a good demo and in practice it will sort of magically just work for people who don't know how it works and it'll be super impressive um
And I suppose there are a couple of failure modes where it'll get messed up.
As long as there's a place where you can go to like, oh, arrange it the way you want, like the displays panel, like Federighi says.
This is very clever, very interesting.
Additionally, some information about initiation from a friend of the show, Federico Vatici.
A universal control can only be started from a Mac running Monterey.
You cannot start dragging the pointer from an iPad towards a Mac.
It only originates from Mac OS, and then you can move it around freely after that.
This falls into the same category as my snarky tweet during the WWC keynote, which is get an iPad.
It's a great accessory for your real computer.
Oh, brutal.
Because everything in the keynote was like, from your Mac, the iPad can help your Mac out in various ways, right?
But it was so clear that the Mac was in charge and even in universal control.
If you're on your Mac, yeah, you can bring your cursor over to your iPad, but you can't take that stinking iPad cursor and bring it over to your Mac.
Anyway, maybe this will change one day.
And that's mostly just snark, because obviously iPads are incredibly powerful and amazing, and I love them.
But it was a change from the norm to see kind of the Mac taking center stage.
And we talked about that in the last episode, but I think it's worth reemphasizing the sort of unspoken theme of the keynote.
Yeah.
Which is that features now come across all of Apple's platforms because all of the barriers to stopping that from happening have been knocked down one at a time, right?
It's the same chip architecture.
It's the same framework, SwiftUI.
Like, you know, we have the catalyst to bring UIKit onto the Mac.
And so all of Apple's resources towards, like, we're going to do a new thing.
Now they can essentially do a new thing, whatever that new thing is, once.
optimize it for their own chips, write it in a framework that they know runs on all their platforms, you know, within reason, obviously, you're not going to write something that runs on, oh, maybe on the watch too, because like SwiftUI as well.
But anyway, they can literally do one thing and have it everywhere.
So almost all the features that rolled out as part of WWDC are on all the platforms.
and that hasn't happened in a very long time granted there's varying degrees of jankiness depending on how mature whatever it is that you're doing is it a catalyst app is it a swift ui app both of those things have limitations versus a pure app kit app on the mac um but it gets at least this year we're not like oh well this feature is available here and here but
either the mac doesn't have it at all or the mac has a worse version of it in general if they're rolling out something new it is available and the same everywhere which is refreshing and a big payoff from the many years of transition that apple's been going through
And I'm sure there are examples of that not being true.
Like center stage is a great example of that not being true, which actually quick aside, I had a FaceTime call with somebody with a new iPad that was using center stage and holy smokes, that's super cool.
Even on the quote unquote receiving end, you know, on the viewing end, it was super cool because as the friend of mine that I was speaking with was like walking around a little bit or, you know, gesturing with his arms, it would zoom in or zoom out or pan or what have you in order to keep the
what was relevant in focus.
It was super duper neat.
And whenever it is I get around to upgrading my iPad, which I'm not planning on doing as I sit here now, I'm really looking forward to having that.
Because is that on both size iPads?
Is that correct?
Or is that only on the big boy?
No, it's on both.
Okay, good.
Did it look like unnatural when it would do the movements or was it kind of subtle and smooth?
Uh, it looked unnatural insofar as it was something you don't expect to happen on a FaceTime call, but it did not look unnatural insofar as like it's zooming at twice the speed you would expect or that it's, you know, like whipping to the side and then stopping short.
It was very gradual, very appley.
Um, and it was not, it wasn't distracting as a movement.
It was distracting as a holy crap.
I understand all the work that's going in to make this work.
And this is amazing.
So it was very cool.
It's weird that some of the remaining differences almost sort of come down to hardware.
Like, why don't the Macs have FaceTime?
Why are the Mac cameras so much worse?
Or even just with center stage, like why is it on these iPads and other ones?
Like, what is it that the center stage requires?
And we'll get to that later in the topic section about what features require what things.
But there is still a remaining hardware gap.
But in general, like in terms of major applications or even major features, one example I think is like Focus.
That's on the Mac too, right?
Which one is – oh, the do not disturb on steroids.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
I believe that's on the Mac.
There's no way that that would have been on the Mac if it came out like three years ago.
Just no way because it is so obviously phone-centric.
But it's like now it's like why not put it on the Mac because we can write it essentially once in one of our cross-platform frameworks and it makes sense to be on the Mac.
and it's actually not that much more work so let's go do it right and even you know even last year when uh the the iphone got widgets but the ipad didn't it's like well what's the excuse there those are like practically the same platform even though you renamed one of them ipad os like it used to be just ios like why didn't the ipad get it there and that was kind of it seemed like tied up in the ipad multitasking stuff where they that was that whole suite of things wasn't ready and they didn't just want to ship
uh you know just widgets on the ipad or whatever so there's always like how are things prioritized how many resources do you have and what can you hold till last year but in general technology wise we're finally getting to a place where the reason why something might not be on a less popular platform is no longer that oh we'd have to write an entirely new app using app kit if we want that on the mac so that's too much effort never mind
All right, let's talk about object capture and the quality thereof.
Object capture is the thing where you take a zillion pictures of a 3D object and then do magic and mathematics, and then suddenly you get a 3D model coming out the other side.
Somebody anonymous, because they've since deleted their tweet, and I don't know if they're trying to remain anonymous, writes, I work in motion production, live action and animation.
And while this certainly isn't ready for final production quality, the ability to quickly mock up a quote, good enough quote concept is actually quite valuable.
So even if this isn't a perfect representation, it's still useful to have.
And that's not particularly surprising to me.
Yeah, since seeing Apple's demos and the sessions on it and all that other stuff, lots of just, you know, users, individual people have been posting their experiments with using this feature.
And I have to say, everyone that I've seen is way more impressive than Apple's demos, which is weird.
Usually Apple picks very good demos to show off their feature.
So we'll put some links in the show notes.
Matt Waller did a scan of a plush Baby Yoda toy, and...
The object capture of it looks amazing because it's a challenging shape.
It's not, you know, it's fuzzy and it's got weird pointy things with the ears and the clothes and everything.
It looks amazing.
And someone else posted a pineapple, you know, like a whole pineapple looks like with those little pointy little tendrils that come out the sides.
They did an object capture of that and it looks fantastic.
Like you wouldn't think you think it would just melt all the little things together and that, you know, just look like a flat football with a pineapple texture on it.
It doesn't.
So, yeah, obviously, these things will need to be touched up.
But the more examples of this that I've seen, the more impressed I am at how good you can get with this.
Now, back to Marco's point of like, oh, this would be cool to share an object with somebody.
It seems like you just have to take too many pictures for that to be feasible.
You have to take a lot of pictures, and there has to be a huge amount of overlap.
So you have to take a picture and then move a little tiny bit, and take a picture and move a little bit, and take a picture, and your pictures have to have 70% overlap between them.
So I don't think you're going to want to spend five minutes slowly walking in a circle around some object just to send it to someone in a message thing.
If you could take one or two pictures and send something, that might be conceivable.
For now, I think it is basically...
You know, amazing results if you're willing to put in the time from hardware that everybody has.
So it is lowering the barrier to entry, but it is not to the point where you can take two photos of, you know, a couch that you're looking at and then give someone a 3D model they can spin.
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did you know that in mac os monterey the what is the live text the ocr thing that they're doing now it works on captures too because why wouldn't it which is super neat that's fantastic i mean to be fair that we'll put a link to someone's video like the capture they're doing is not one of those challenging ones but yeah lots of people are posting impressive results of like oh live text like pulled text off of my laptop screen that's viewed at this incredibly oblique angle um
In general, humans are impressed when computers can do things that would be difficult for humans to do, but very often they're not difficult for computers to do because the strengths and weaknesses are different.
But yeah, live text looks pretty good, and it's impressive where it's able to pull text out of.
Indeed.
I have good news, which I did not even look into myself, to be honest with you.
But Jason Aiton writes that the app library in the dock is optional on iPadOS, though, according to Jason, there's no good reason to turn it off.
I actually have left it on so far and it hasn't bothered me, but I've barely used my iPad since putting the beta on it.
So, you know, take that for what you will.
Yep, the setting is right next to the other one that I turn off, which is show suggested in recent apps in the doc.
I'm not surprised that you turned that off.
All right.
John, I know that the world was shocked, devastated even, when they saw the new Safari toolbar and realized everyone's favorite Safari extension may not be long for this world.
Please tell me, please, John, tell me the reload button like a phoenix rises from the ashes to live again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And last episode, I thought like, well, there is no more toolbar.
It's just like because they put the tabs up there right in Safari 15.
There's the tabs and there are some fixed buttons.
And that seemed like that was it.
I'm talking about on the Mac right now, not on the phone and not on the iPad.
I was like, well, there's, you know, so much for my reload button.
Right.
And the absurd thing about it was that there doesn't appear to be any reload button.
the only place you had reload was like in the address bar there was a little dot dot dot on the far right and if you clicked on the dot dot dot a menu would pop up and then you could select the word reload from that menu and i saw this in wwdc sessions so you'd be watching a session and the person in the session would have to reload a web page and to make it clear like because it's a video you don't if they just hit command r it wouldn't be clear to the viewer what they're doing so you have to do something visually on the screen to show that they're reloading and so
It was one of the Safari videos.
The presenter had to reload a webpage multiple times to show changes, and every time they did it, they had to click on the three dots, move the mouse down, click reload.
Click on the three dots, move the mouse down, click reload.
And it was so painful to watch.
I was like, oh, goodness.
We really need to have an always-visible reload button.
So, of course, I installed Monterey on one of my
Actually, I installed an external hard drive and booted from that because I didn't want to screw up one of my computers because all the computers in the houses are still used, at least until my kids get out of school.
And saw what the deal was.
So first of all, there is still a customizable toolbar.
And now you're fighting with the tabs for space, but you can, in fact, customize the part to the left of the tabs and shove as much stuff up there as you want, stealing space from your tabs.
When you do the customized toolbar thing and the sheet comes down, reload is not among those choices.
So you don't have a choice to put a reload button in your toolbar.
And there also is, you know, the reload button that is currently in the address bar in Safari, that's also not there.
All you get is the three dots from which a menu spawns and you can click reload.
The good news is that my Safari reload button extension still works.
You can run it on Monterey.
It runs just fine.
I didn't even need to recompile it or anything.
It just works as is.
And then you can put a reload button up there.
The bad news is presumably in order to save space, like I understand why they did this because, again, the toolbar is now fighting for space with the tabs because they're all on the same line.
They change the back forward buttons to be quote unquote smart so that there is no forward button until you've gone back.
So instead of it being a back forward with like a less than and a greater than sign, it's just a less than sign.
And then if you ever go back, suddenly the greater than sign appears next to it because now you have a place to go forward to.
Which means that the back forward button, which used to be a pair of things, now changes size depending on if you have some place to go forward to, which makes everything move around.
I understand why they did it to save space, but it just looks...
not great to me i don't like when things squirm around as established in the past show with the squirmy soup of rectangles and i don't like it when buttons change size in the like in the toolbar and i just don't think it looks unbalanced and the other thing that's this is a minor point but uh when you do when you put a button on the toolbar in current safari or in safari 15 they make you supply like an image for the button
And there's a limited number of formats you can make it, but every format that I have tried, every way I've tried to make this image, it basically uses it as a template image.
And you don't have control over how it positions the thing vertically.
I tried putting empty space above and below to move the thing around, and it's like, nope, I'm going to find the edges of the blackness in your monochrome picture, and that's what I'm going to consider your border to be.
And that's a concern to me because when the lonely less than sign is next to my reload button, the reload button, if you know what it looks like, it's like a circle, an incomplete circle.
But then there's an arrow on one end of it.
And the arrow sticks out beyond the top part of the arrow sticks out beyond the diameter of the circle.
Right?
Right.
So what you'd want, visually speaking, is the center of the circle to be aligned with the point in the less than sign.
You know what I'm saying?
But that's not how it works, because as far as Safari is concerned, the height of that graphic is not the height of the circle, but it's the height of the circle plus that little stem that sticks out.
So it shifts the whole thing down.
So when I just see that less than sign, and then my reload button shifted down to be slightly below the less than sign, it's very upsetting.
Oh, no.
Anyway, I'm still glad to have a reload button.
You know, I'm...
i'm living with it but i'm still i spent a long time uh rebuilding that application with differently sized and shaped buttons to try the only way i can get it to work is to is to have a non-transparent background because then it thinks my image is the size of my image but of course if you have a non-transparent background it looks awful right so
so i'm sorry can we play this back the same man who has superhuman hearing when it comes to extraordinarily small and quiet fans and will do anything to get fans out of his house is the same person who can't just hit command r to reload a tab and must have an offset icon on on the toolbar don't make me tap the sign casey
Yes, I know Command-R exists.
I tried to preempt that in my tweet about it.
You have to put it in the same tweet because if you put it in a follow-up tweet, no one will ever see it.
That's true.
Yes, yes, I know Command-R exists.
Sometimes I'm using the mouse.
Sometimes the mouse is near there.
Sometimes I like to click on mouse buttons.
Like the GUI exists in addition to the, yes, I know about Command-R.
I absolutely know about it.
And I do use it.
But sometimes I also click the button.
I mean, in and of itself, that's fine.
I'm flabbergasted that someone who is as particular as you would be able to look at this all day, every day, look at this offset icon and not be driven mad.
Whereas... It was offset in the previous version of Safari 2.
It's emphasized more due to the tighter spacing and I think the smaller or less than sign.
So it looks a little bit worse.
The same problem existed before.
This is not a new thing.
Well, the good news is if you want to go back to the old style tab bar, there's a way to do that.
Yes.
Someone discovered like this feature flags plist somewhere in the OS.
And I put the XML for it in the show notes to see what the keys are.
So the key is unified bar.
It's in like the...
You know, library preferences, feature flags, domain, safari.plist.
I'm presuming this is like a temporary thing for Apple messing with feature flags.
And the reason I say that is because a unified bar is the key and then the value is a dictionary.
And some of the keys of the value dictionary, one of them is called disclosure required.
And then there's a string that looks like UUID.
And that makes me think that the way they do feature flag, for people who don't know, the parlance inside Apple about whether you as an Apple employee are allowed to know about a thing is are you disclosed on that thing, right?
So a lot, you know, it's like an Apple.
If you're not working on Safari, you wouldn't be disclosed on the new Safari.
So there'd be no reason for you to know about the new Safari.
And in your builds of Monterey, if this disclosure required field didn't have this special UUID in it,
It wouldn't show up on your version of Monterey or wouldn't be enabled on your version of Monterey.
And I presume they trust their employees not to hack in and try to figure out what resources are new in Safari or whatever.
This is my guess.
I don't know any of this for a fact about this is what it's for.
But the fact that there's a disclosure required field with a string that looks like a UUID makes me think this is part of how they control...
showing new features in Safari to other people inside Apple.
Obviously, it's not controlling anything for us.
But what it means is that you can disable this feature and go back to the old one just because they still had that code in there, maybe for the non-disclosed people for a while.
I presume it will eventually go away.
Maybe it will go away before release.
But if you really, really don't like the new Safari and you're using a beta, you have a way to turn it off for now.
Just keep in mind that kind of like every Chrome Flags feature that I used to rely on, it will eventually disappear and you'll be forced to use the new thing.
Yeah, but you know what?
I feel like on principle of that, there are certain things that Apple adds where they make some change that I don't like, but the old behavior is still available through either a checkbox preference somewhere or some kind of P-list hack like this or a default write command or something like that.
And I used to think like, well, I might as well adopt the new thing immediately because one day they're going to remove this ability to use it the old way.
And I might as well adjust on my terms now rather than later being forced to.
But now I think, you know what?
Some of those things never go away.
I still haven't switched over to their, quote, natural scroll direction.
I still scroll the old direction, and it's fine.
Are you serious?
You monster.
Me neither.
I'm never switching it.
Here's the thing.
What?
Sometimes they'll do something new that people don't like.
um and i think the natural scrolling is an example where apple said look enough people like it the other way that we can't really get rid of this it's natural scrolling has been around what five years seven way more than that way more like ten right and so and it's not a big deal it's easy to switch and why not just leave the preference so that's the right call for them toppy tabs speaking of safari they tried a different tab arrangement and
I think it was just the press or whatever making a big stink about it.
And Apple, you know, just kind of wimped out and said, you know, we're getting a lot of better views of this, so maybe we won't do it.
I think Apple's going to stick with the Safari design because they're a little bit, you know, they're more gutsy now than they were.
They have more courage now, let's say.
Well, they don't... I mean, they have... I hate to bring this up.
They have a different design leadership going on now.
And I think they... I don't think...
the current design leadership has shown a lot of willingness to respond to feedback.
Yeah.
I watch more of the sessions explaining the new Safari.
As I said in the last episode, part of the new design is that Apple has signed itself up to...
bunch of readability challenges because they explicitly are allowing the content of the web page to essentially color the user interface so it's now up to apple to make sure that no matter what color the interface is that the elements that are part of the interface are visible like you have to still be able to see the buttons you have to be able to read the address bar they gave an example in one of the sessions because uh actually like safari 15 will do a smart this is again all on the mac
It'll do a smart thing where it'll like pull a color from the webpage up, but you can also from your webpage explicitly specify what color you want that to be.
So on my website, I immediately specified that it should be UI colored.
You just specify white and it stays UI colored.
Anyway, you can specify the color.
And in the presentation that the Apple person said is like,
You can specify pretty much any color, but Safari will stop you from specifying certain colors, and they gave an example.
If you specify the color of the toolbar in Safari should be the same color as the close widget, effectively making the close widget disappear, yeah, they won't let you pick that color, right?
So this is the kind of special case codes they have to be.
You can't make it red of the stoplight.
You can't make it yellow.
You can't make it green, right?
If you make it too dark, they have to switch the text to be light on dark instead of dark on light.
Like all the same challenges as the menu bar, which they also decided to make translucent and pull stuff through.
And the menu bar changes from light text on dark to dark text on light, depending on what's in the background of your thing, right?
So now they've signed up for that challenge on a per web page basis, because you can change that color, not just per site, but per page.
um and it's kind of fun that you know you kind of fun design element where you can make your and you can also do it in light mode and dark mode right you can do lots of fun things but as marco said last episode sometimes the content people care about is in fact their tabs and not the web page or at least on equal footing that they care about the tabs and the web page and tying the two together in sort of a unified design thing may not be what people want like sometimes you do want
a clear separation between here is the Chrome of my application, which doesn't change colors or shape or wiggle around or do any weird stuff and is always readable, and then here is the content of the webpage.
And Apple, their current design direction is minimize that bar, make it as small as possible, put everything on one line,
So they all have to fight for each other for the same amount of horizontal space.
They even had a thing where they're saying, like, oh, make sure your page titles are short and put the important stuff up front, which is a general good practice for web design, period.
But the reason it's even more pressing in Safari 15 is, guess what?
Your tabs have even less space for a given window size because they're fighting with the toolbar.
You know, so...
i used it a little bit it's not terrible i will eventually get used to it probably but it's a design choice that i wouldn't have made and i sincerely hope that websites don't adopt the thing where you can colorize that top toolbar thing because that's not really what i want and by the way now that really matters because if you don't want that speaking of options there is an option in safari's preferences to say hey don't let websites do that
I forget what it's called.
I should have put a screenshot in it.
There's a checkbox that says, even if a website says the top bar should be black, just ignore that.
And then we'll just keep the top bar the same color all the time.
I feel like we keep relearning this lesson in our industry.
We keep unlearning and then having to relearn
You know, we shouldn't allow arbitrary colors and things from user content or web content to be under and behind and through the UI because it causes problems in lots of edge cases.
And not even edge cases, lots of just common cases.
And, you know, we had like Windows Vista forever ago with its translucent everything.
We have, you know, we've had the history of translucent backgrounds and sidebars and toolbars and everything in macOS and in Windows and everything else.
And we keep relearning this lesson over and over again.
Oh, it actually is better to have the Chrome of the interface be mostly or entirely opaque because it actually improves legibility of critical interface elements.
When are we going to finally stop fighting this fight?
We keep unlearning it.
Every two years, somewhere new, we have to fight this fight again.
Well, to Apple's credit, they have gotten, over the many years, way, way better at this than they used to be.
If you just go look through the history of a Mac OS X reviews from 10.0 on, it was one of my first complaints.
And if you watch as the years went on, you're right that Apple keeps going back to that well because they want it.
They want it so bad.
And every time they do it, they do a better job.
Even the menu bar, whatever OS released, it was a Catalina or whatever when they first rolled out the current menu bar thing, the first few iterations of that in the beta,
I mean, I filed bugs on it myself, and people had screenshots of it, like, look at this menu bar, it's totally unreadable.
And they made adjustments.
Essentially, like, Apple has become an expert at figuring out how to solve this specific design problem, mostly because they keep signing themselves up for it.
The sidebars, the menu bar, the Safari toolbar.
they're way better at it like it it's rare that you get a case that is completely unreadable like it used to be it's just it is a challenge and it's kind of it's kind of a war of choice right and so it's clear that someone somewhere or groups of someone's over the past decade or more inside apple really want this they want like your desktop image to color your windows and your have the personality come through like i understand why aesthetically it's a desirable thing but
It's, you know, it is a difficult problem, but Apple is pretty, really good at it now.
And also they give you lots of checkboxes to turn it off.
So window tinting, that's a checkbox in general preferences that I assume is just going to stay there.
Sidebar tinting was also a checkbox thing, like not just a P-list thing, but like they actually have GUI to turn this off.
And in Safari, same deal, a checkbox turned off.
The default is all that crap to be on, and a lot of times people aren't going to find those checkboxes.
So if you see someone complaining about their computer being hard to read, and you just go through those preferences and check, check, check, check, then people will be like, oh, why I wasn't like this to begin with, which is, to Marco's point, why maybe that brass ring that you're going after maybe isn't worth pursuing because what are you even doing?
It's probably worse for most people, but...
I will give Apple credit for doggedly pursuing this stupid goal and being probably the best in the industry at doing it, even though the result is still probably worse than just having everything be a normal color and be readable.
I'm sorry, I'm still stuck on you two monsters not using natural scrolling.
You know, I am the middle child of this podcast.
I am the middle child of this podcast by birth date, but I am easily 30 years younger than both of you.
Natural scrolling is not an old young thing.
I'm surprised that Marco doesn't use it because he uses a trackpad now.
Natural scrolling doesn't make sense if you still use a mouse wheel, which I do.
If you use a trackpad, I can understand why people like natural scrolling.
And it is two separate settings, by the way.
You can have natural scrolling on your trackpad and quote-unquote unnatural scrolling on your mouse.
No, that's correct.
It's two separate settings.
But yeah, the reason I think they leave that checkbox there is there are enough people that will just never get used to it.
Enough people probably inside Apple who are just like, just leave the checkbox.
It's not skinned off your back.
It's really easy to do.
It's just like some negative number flipped somewhere in some code.
Just...
absolute monsters well and going back to like the reason I brought that up is like I feel like you know like the original thinking was as soon as they change something that that you don't like just adopt it quickly just go for it that way you know you're not surprised later well I've recently decided you know what I'll be surprised later
That's fine.
If they give me an option to turn Safari... If this option that was discovered in this P-list thing... If this sticks around or if there ever is an exposed GUI option to turn Safari back to the way all web browsers have looked forever...
You know what?
I'll use it because I want my tabs to have the full width of the window to expand into their tab list because so often I have enough tabs in one window that they start collapsing the little text down and become icon only, and that's worse.
And so I try to then keep the number down because I like being able to see part of the title of the text because that's useful UI.
And if the tabs end up having like two-thirds or half of the space they had before total...
that's going to significantly impede the usability of this browser.
And so if there's some setting to just change it back, then fine, I want that setting.
And if they take it away in five years, fine, I'll reevaluate then.
But until then, I might as well enjoy it the good way.
I mean, but in this specific case, the quote-unquote setting isn't even like a P-list in the Safari P-list.
It is like disclosure required in the feature flags P-list.
And I really wonder how long that's going to stay around or be functional.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, that probably won't even make it through the beta.
But if it does, and I hope it does, I will probably end up using it that way.
Now, the real question is, can you somehow hack the iOS Safari to not suck as much as it does right now in the beta?
You know, I don't know about that.
Yeah, I haven't...
I've mostly just been messing with the Mac ones, but I am curious to see what the iOS ones are like.
In principle, I feel better about the iOS changes, but I will have to try them.
Yeah, and I should clarify, iPad's not too bad.
I don't love the iPad version, but it's not as bad.
The iPhone version is what's not strong.
Strong disagree.
Strong disagree with you there.
iPad is mediocre at best.
And iOS, I actually think, is very good.
I like having the address bar down at the bottom so you can use it as like a second home indicator affordance, whatever you call that thing.
Oh, speaking of the address bar on the bottom, that's another one of the focuses of one of the sessions, right?
So you've got the address bar on the bottom, but if you think about it, if you scroll, like the address bar like collapses to that smaller version, right?
And then moves up to be floating right to the bigger version.
and when it moves up like that it can possibly block what is at the bottom of the web page depending on how you scroll right and so they have special you know like there are settings in css that you can do to make it aware of when that button appears so your web page will scoot up out of the way of the ui and it's like oh come on apple like
It works.
You can do it, but it's like, it's adding work for web developers that basically no one's going to do except for people like me who have nothing better to do, right?
Because who's going to make a change that only, maybe Safari, mobile Safari is so popular that they'll make the change anyway, right?
But it's like,
The UI of your web browser makes me have to change my website to accommodate for it.
That is backwards.
It should not be that way.
It should be the other way.
However my website is, your browser should accommodate because my website is the show and your browser is supposed to be the Chrome website.
That's wonderful wishful thinking that the entire web is going to somehow make this work.
The reality is we've seen for how long?
Over a decade as iPhone users?
Whenever you see a web view or a web page that opens up and they've put something in the bottom 44 points of the viewport,
And you just can't tap it because if you try to tap it, the toolbar comes up, right?
And this has been a problem forever.
You can't rely on the entire internet to update all of their designs for all of time to work around some of these UI hacks that Apple puts in every iPhone.
A lot of web developers will do it right, but even if 95% of the webpages you visit do it right,
that 5% is going to really bother you.
And so to add even more like little custom Safari behaviors that interfere with web content in order to have the web content like flow around the background of a toolbar, it doesn't seem not only worth it, but also it just doesn't seem pragmatic.
I think that's going to break even more pages than the previous thing did.
And again, and I keep asking for what, like,
I don't mind the concept of having the toolbar at the bottom.
I think that's an interesting thing to explore.
There are some challenges there, but given how phones are really big and everything, that's an interesting thing to explore, I think, for the UI.
But the way they implemented this bottom toolbar with those two different modes and the giant drop shadow around the large mode of the address bar and burying everything, I feel like...
This is like version 0.2 of this design that shouldn't have made it out of the lab and needs some more iteration.
A lot more iteration.
They did this with the hardware, too, if you remember.
This was also in the same session where they reminded people of the thing that's been there for years now, which is when they added the notch to the iPhone, a hardware feature.
Now, if you're looking at a web page and you rotate it and you turn it into landscape view, you can't really have the web page getting stuck under the notch.
So what they do is say, OK, well, now when you rotate it into landscape, the actual edge of the Safari, quote unquote, window is clear of the notch, right?
But then sometimes it looks weird because now it looks like you're not using the full width of the screen, right?
So there is a feature, again, in Safari with CSS, where this is a basic CSS feature, right, to say what is a safe area insets or whatever.
But there's a viewport directive that you can use to make it so that your background extends into the notch while keeping your content clear of the notch, right?
And most of these features, if you look at them in the abstract, like, well, this is not really a feature for Apple's notch.
It's more like a feature of saying essentially where is a safe area for me to draw my content versus where is an area where my background could go.
And that is a generic feature and web standards are supported.
And I applaud all of that.
But if you look at the sum of things that Apple has done to make lives more difficult with people running websites, sometimes purely in service of its own particular devices or its own particular design, like you said, Marco, like there are lots of ways to do a bottom line.
navigation bar that don't have this problem at all right lots of them but it's part of the problem is like if you're when you're a designer like if you look at the solutions they came up with when you when you have a design like this and it's like okay this design has problems when you solve those problems quote unquote solve those problems by like oh here's how we can do this with an existing css standard and some directives and just do this on the web page and blah blah and then we can make a wwc search about and explain to people how to do it you feel good that you've solved those problems because you have done a clever thing you had some problems and you solved them but you also made the problems
like the problems are there because of the design that you picked and so while it feels good to solve those problems and it's cool when you can come up with a generic mechanism to solve them that it doesn't just solve your problem but solves this entire class of problems you still think well if you just did a normal bottom toolbar that might have been better now there's this trade-offs for a regular bottom toolbar too because it wouldn't be as high and as big like i understand you know
It's a little muddy, and we'll all live with this thing for a while and see how it is.
And maybe we'll never be able to go back to the old one where you had to reach way up to the top of the phone to do anything.
But it's weird.
But anyway, my website is updated.
Everything I just mentioned, my website is updated to accommodate.
So if you ever look at my website when I put a post on it once per year, everything will work great on your phone.
you update the website like in its design and technical stuff more than you post on it way more often no because it's probably like a once a year thing i still haven't done dark mode that's the one thing i don't support mostly because i couldn't it was just too much effort to try to come up with a good dark mode uh color scheme and i kind of don't like the idea of websites turning dark in dark mode i kind of like my website to look the same all the time i'm so i'm sorry for blinding every blinding everybody in dark mode oh
Oh, my God.
I have never been in opposition with you two more than I have tonight.
You both have had a string of impressively wrong opinions this entire episode.
I don't know what to do with myself.
Do you run in dark mode?
I run dark mode when it's dark outside.
I don't run it all the time.
Oh, no.
That's the worst.
I don't like my things to change like that.
I understand people are into it.
I run it on the phone, but not on a Mac.
You run it all the time on the phone?
No, on the phone, I do auto-switching.
But on everything else, I'm light all the time.
Maybe when you get older and start losing your night vision, you'll like dark mode less.
But I feel bad.
I should come up with a good dark mode.
But actually, coming up with a good dark mode color scheme is much harder than you think it is.
Apple, again, Apple does an amazing job of this.
A lot of their dark mode color schemes are fantastic.
And you really have to understand color theory.
Because if you take the eyedropper and sample the colors, you're like...
that's the color they're using it looks awful but then you look at it in the ui like oh it looks right you know it's the same way that if you you know old optical illusions if you like have a piece of paper that covers up the whole picture except the one little square where the color is the color looks nothing like you thought because that's how color our perception of color works so anyway coming up with a good dark mode color scheme is difficult if i could come up with a good one from our website i would probably put in a dark mode just to satisfy people but i personally don't use it
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Let's talk more WWDC stuff and let's see what wrong opinions you two have about this stuff.
There are ARM-only Monterey features only on Apple Silicon, which is kind of a bummer.
So the following features are listed in some fine print as requiring a Mac with the M1 chip.
Portrait mode, blurred backgrounds and FaceTime videos, live text for copying.
Oh, man, really?
I didn't realize that.
I
Keep reading.
Now you're feeling bad.
Live text for copying, pasting, looking up, or translating text within photos.
An interactive 3D globe of the earth in the Maps app.
More detailed maps in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London.
Which, by the way, those maps are crazy cool.
I was impressed by that when I saw it in the keynote.
And I have the beta on a Test 11 Pro and on my day-to-day iPad.
And those maps are incredibly cool.
text-to-speech in more languages including swedish danish norwegian and finnish on-device keyboard dictation that performs all processing completely offline and finally unlimited keyboard detection which is previously limited to 60 seconds per instance that's uh that's a bummer particularly the uh the maps thing and the live text thing i think are super super bummers that's too bad
so this is a quite a mixture of features many of which were kind of headlining features right and people might be surprised to learn if they're not on intel now obviously like this is on apple's web page and they have a little footnote that says they're not available on intel maybe that will change before release but it's not like this is just how it is in the beta and we can guess they did put it on a web page like it's it's apple.com slash mac os monterey hyphen preview so it's not a public web page where they're saying hey if you got an intel mac don't expect this
Some of the features have a plausible, if still frustrating, explanation, right?
The portrait mode blurring, FaceTime video, whatever, right?
Features that were developed for iOS devices and for the neural engine on the ARM chip and all that stuff...
Yes, they could rewrite it so it worked on Intel.
But at this point in Apple's transition to ARM, how much effort do you think Apple wants to spend rewriting something for Intel to be GPU-powered or to use Intel's SIMD instructions or whatever?
There's lots of ways you could do this.
It's not like Intel Macs are quote-unquote incapable of it.
The neural engine is pretty amazing, though, but still.
You could do it on Intel Macs.
But Apple doesn't want to have to invest time in writing that.
And like a lot of the frameworks that they use to do it are probably, you know, Apple neural engine frameworks because this feature was building on work that was done when this was only ever going to ship on something with the neural engine and all that.
So...
that i mean it's disappointing it's not actually a technical barrier but you can understand why apple wouldn't want to invest the time to make an intel version just as they're flushing the rest of the intel max down the toilet right so sad but understandable some other ones though you're like does this require anything having to do with the arm you know with arm uh apple system out of chips or is it just that they had finished working code that works in arm and they didn't even bother bother even like recompiling and dealing with the issues
And one example of that is the app Globes view.
Apparently there's a way to re-enable that feature with a debug flag, and it works just fine on Intel Macs.
So maybe it has bugs on Intel.
Maybe they didn't want to test it on Intel.
But it all kind of gets into the sort of the corporate horse trading of like, what is Apple deciding to spend its time on?
And it seems like any time spent on things just for Intel Macs is kind of below the line, as we say in the business for Apple these days.
with the possible exception being the newly revised Mac Pro Tower that supports the NVIDIA 6900 video cards that has been rumored for a while.
So if they come up with the new Xeons and everything, if they come up with new Intel Macs with the new Xeons and new video cards, but still you can't do like the globe map thing on Intel Macs, that's quite a mixture of corporate priorities.
But I suppose the priorities for the SuperDuper Pro group and their customers are very different than the priorities of everyone else.
But it is going to make people feel disappointed.
Like if live text doesn't work and it's like, oh, I saw that, you know, I thought I see people doing that on their Macs.
Why can't I do it on my Mac?
Oh, you've got an Intel Mac.
What's Intel?
Like people don't know why they can't do it.
It just seems like a shame.
Granted, everyone should have our Macs, but Apple's not going to give everyone one of those for free.
So I really hope...
that Apple kind of changes its mind on at least a few of these and puts in the work to make an Intel version of these features because I don't think it would be that much work.
And even though Apple's not going to be selling Intel Macs pretty soon, people are going to have them for a long time.
It is kind of funny to think, like, you know, back when we were all in middle school, you know, when we'd be talking, oh, yeah, do you play the latest, you know, Doom or whatever?
And, you know, the one kid would be like, oh, I have a Mac.
Yeah.
And I was like, oh, you poor kid, right?
You sweet summer child.
Yeah, your games suck.
And now, eventually Apple moved to Intel, the same processors PCs we're using.
You can install Windows on it and everything, the maximum compatibility with everything.
Now they left that world, and now we feel bad for the Intel Macs.
Oh, you can't do this new feature.
That's too bad.
We really have come full circle.
Yeah, that's because the Apple's new big thing is the phone new big thing.
Right.
But that's where all the action happens.
And so it's like all the cool features happen on the phone.
And if the Mac can benefit from that, great.
But if it can't because it uses the wrong kind of processor, oh, well.
i mean that's the whole reason they did the transition to begin with but i remember speaking of mac and doom i remember playing doom on my mac what was it it was like it was a doom port to the mac which is not a good port and it was many years after doom was you know obviously out on the pc and there was some kind of thing you use for mac os that gave you like oh youtube will tell me what was the weird pc networking that doom used for for deathmatch ipx ipx yeah yeah
anyway it was a mac os ipx extension so you could play doom deathmatch against people on pcs but through like the world's jankiest network stack that somehow is like a house of cards like making it was like i don't even know if it was i guess it had to be tcpip like the because tcpip used to be like an extension you know it wasn't built into the operating system back in the day so like trumpet windsock days you know when it was like a thing that you would get for your computer and add on so you could get on the internet um
Anyway, the framework was terrible, and I'd already played Doom for years on my friend's Pentiums, and it was kind of pointless.
The funny thing is, through this entire circle of having the wrong processor, then having the right processor, now having the wrong processor again...
games on the mac have always sucked and still have still suck and will always suck i mean that shows that the hardware is not usually the main barrier but there was a time in there when we are on intel and you could get nvidia gpus when yeah it was still a grim situation but at least you could just boot into windows and have the same stuff you got the same processor you got the same nvidia graphic card you got the same windows and it would run at the speed that you would expect a pc that you built for one eighth of the price would run that same game
So since I've made fun of you two for being old, let me make fun of myself for being old.
I remember vividly having friends bring their like mini tower to tower computers and their 8,000 pound CRTs to my house to have a sleepover and a quote unquote LAN party.
But this was during the days of DOS.
And so it wasn't a LAN party.
It was instead like two computers would connect to each other with what you would think is a serial cable.
But oh, no, no, no.
Do you remember what it's called, Marco?
A null modem cable?
Mm hmm.
With a no modem cable.
And so you could play against each other because there was no like any sort of networking at that point that that was I mean, I'm sure it existed, but it wasn't on DOS or anything like that.
And then fast forward a little while.
And a lot of these games on DOS, like Doom, for example, supported the aforementioned IPX networking, which I don't know where or how that ever existed for real, but apparently it was a thing somewhere.
But, and I've talked about this several times on the show over the last few years, but I remember getting a piece of software called Kali, K-A-L-I, and I'll put a link in the show.
Oh, that was huge.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so what it would do is it would emulate an IPX network, like a local IPX network, but it rode on top of the Internet on top of TCP IP.
So it was like a combination of this like network facade as well as a like game match system.
And I'm sure that there's a better term for that with kids these days.
But I don't know.
That's what I called it at the time.
And so you could find, and I remember playing Descent with this all the time, but you would figure out on the internet a group of people to play Descent, and you would find these rooms in Cali, and then you would connect, and then it would fake out the IPX network so you could all play each other.
And this was applicable to many, many, many different DOS games, and in Windows as well at the time.
And it was amazing.
And it was shareware.
And I remember I like asked dad if I could have his credit card to spend like 20 bucks one time to have a license in perpetuity, which I don't have that information anymore.
But I guess if I wanted to download Cali again, I think it's still valid.
But anyways, it was just amazing.
And it's so wild.
how far we've come from bringing these exceedingly heavy computers and extremely heavy monitors upstairs to my house where we had these no-modem cables where we would sit and eat too many Doritos and play games against each other.
See also when we would play point-to-point via modems.
So you would have your modem call the other person's modem, and you could play point-to-point in a local area against each other.
It was just it was so barbaric.
But at the time, it was the coolest thing in the entire world.
And it was a miracle that we could get it to work.
And golly, now it's like it's thinking about that.
It's so ancient and preposterous technology, man.
Even though I had Macs during all this time and never owned a PC, everything you've listed, I've done.
no cables collie like because just because i didn't have a pc doesn't mean i wasn't around people who had them so i was there as technical help to do what marco has described to spend the first hour and a half just trying to get everyone to get the map and get everything set up and get the connections to work or get get us to like call on the phone and say we're going to call you now okay hang up all right hang on then have to do the modem thing oh it was a nightmare oh god
I miss, I miss those days.
Like, I don't really want to go back to these days, but I do miss those days quite a bit.
And Marco, you did a fair number of like honest to goodness land parties in your day, didn't you?
Yeah, actually, because we had – like in our little group of friends, we had – three of us had some concept of a home network, like Ethernet wiring running somewhere with multiple computers.
But mostly it was us bringing our giant tower computers and giant heavy CRT monitors to each other's houses and plugging in somehow to some kind of Ethernet situation.
I mean, these days it's so much easier because these days most kids have laptops instead of desktops.
So even if your gaming performance on a laptop would be inferior to desktop performance, it would still be far more useful for bringing it to your friend's house and playing together.
Not to mention the fact that Wi-Fi exists, which back then it was just barely starting to come out and none of us had it.
Oh man, we had so much fun.
To go from...
not being able to play computer games with each other in the same room to the first time we experienced that was such an upgrade in fun and in coolness.
I still remember those early games.
I mean, the very first one we played was Doom.
We didn't have a null modem cable, though.
And one of my friends, his parents, had two computers because they both were computer-using professionals.
And they had two phone lines because, again, they were professionals.
Oh, so you would dial it yourselves?
Well, by lacking a null modem cable, we used one computer to call the other one, tying up both phone lines, which naturally that did not last.
The parents were not super pleased with us tying up both of their phone lines for indefinite amounts of time to play Doom.
But man, we do have it a lot better today, but those times were very fun as well.
Yeah, it's funny you bring that up because we had two phone lines for most of my childhood, which made us pretty spoiled.
And the reason we had it was because, you know, my dad, when he came home, was often living on the computer.
We were talking about this just a couple of weeks ago, continuing to use profs, which was this like terminal based email solution.
And he would be on the phone, you know, dialed into IBM for hours in the evenings.
And if we didn't have two phone lines, like it would be a mess.
But
And dad would go to bed pretty early because he always woke up early.
And so there were a couple hours at night that I would be awake that the second phone line would be empty.
And so it was not unusual to have a late night gaming session with one of my local friends where I would dial that person or they would dial me or what have you.
And it's also funny, too, because I don't know how it is today, but when Marco and I were in college, and I think, John, you had a similar experience with different games, but when Marco and I were in college, Counter-Strike was really big, and Quake 2 or 3 or something, I forget which one it was, but one of the Quakes was really big.
And as Neil underscore underscore underscore in the chat points out, college dorms were just LAN parties across several rooms.
Yeah.
I played an unreasonable amount of Counter-Strike, both against people in my own dorm and across the internet when I was at college.
And again, I miss those days.
They were so fun.
John, you had some sort of collegiate networked gaming experience, didn't you?
Yeah, it was.
I mean, with the Mac people, you could do like Apple Talk Networks with the phone net thing, right?
So it was like a little adapter that let you use phone cord to tie.
There were a lot of Mac, not a lot, but like there were Mac games.
There were only Mac games that use Apple Talk Networking.
and only apple talk networking to do their network gaming so if you wanted to play those games you needed an apple talk network and nobody had an apple talk network like there were some schools you'd hear you hear stories of a school like yeah this school is so bought into apple stuff they have an apple talk network in their dorms you're like an apple talk network really anyway we'd have to make our own in our school we weren't we weren't that lucky slash unfortunate depending on how you view having an apple talk network in your dorm um apple talk is cool lots of reasons but uh
Not so cool when the internet came out, I can tell you that.
But yeah, Bolo is the old one.
But when I was in school, we were playing, I think it was Ambrosia Software.
I never knew how to pronounce it because no one ever said these words and there was no audio on the internet, but it was A-V-A-R-A.
It was either Avara or whatever.
Anyway, it was like a...
you were like a 2d chicken walker mech 3d rendered and you would shoot projectiles out of the other 2d chicken walker mechs in a 3d rendered world so it was flat shaded no textures but polygons and so it was a 3d first person online shooter and your your movement direction was independent of your view direction um so it was novel in that way and you were sort of controlling a you know a little vehicle things anyway uh
we do that over apple talk or over various versions of apple talk tunneled across various things throughout the computer labs because to be able to run that you needed a bunch of macs that were powerful enough to do 3d stuff mostly in the days before 3d cards you needed actually a pretty fast cpu and a fancy color screen which a lot of macs didn't have because they were black and white a lot of the older ones and also an apple talk network
Bolo is a video game initially created for the BBC Micro computer by Stuart Cheshire in 1987.
You know that guy.
Yeah, I know that guy.
And then later ported to Cheshire, by Cheshire to the Apple Macintosh.
No freaking way.
So Stuart works at Apple now and is Mr. Discovery.
Well, not Discovery.
What's the MDNS responder?
Zero Conf.
Rendezvous.
Yep, yep, yep.
That was his baby.
And he's still at Apple as of just a couple of months ago anyway.
So that is super wild.
I didn't realize that was Stuart.
That's super cool.
You could find people to match against by going to the chooser where you chose your printer.
No way.
That's absolutely bananas.
That's super cool.
Well, see, now I feel old too.
And now we're all even again.
All right.
Now that I'm in a better mood and don't hate you two anymore, tell me what's exciting about Disk Utility, John.
everything disk utility has been updated is this an area where you really want excitement like it's like that's true you really want exciting things in disk utility i mean last last time they touched it it was not good yeah well that that's the problem they they changed disk utility i forget when a couple years ago now and they changed it by essentially like it seemed like it was almost like it was an all-new app because the ui looked all new but all people really cared about was hey where is this feature that i used to be able to do in disk utility it's not there anymore
So the interface was new and looked clean and was, quote unquote, simplified, but a bunch of features were missing.
And slowly but surely, most of them have come back.
Some of them haven't.
Some of them have left just because of the massive change in the way Macs boot, especially the M1 Macs.
Like even on Intel Macs, they've been changing the way they boot to adding the T1 and the T2 chip and all that other stuff.
with the arm base max the boot process of max is totally different and much more like it is on as you can imagine on the phones and the ipads and that impacts what you can and can't do with disk utility and of course apfs came out which changes everything about the file system and how it works and for a while disk utility didn't have the features to didn't understand couldn't do all the things that apfs could do so you'd have to do them from the command line and
It's been a long time coming.
But anyway, Disk Utility is getting more and more features.
And this year, finally, in Monterey, if you open up Disk Utility and select in the sidebar one of your APFS volumes, you will see at the bottom a new little section of the UI that shows you all your snapshots.
And not only does it show you snapshots, but you can add and remove snapshots from a GUI.
Hey, imagine that.
You don't use tmutil anymore.
And it also has a bunch of columns.
You can customize the columns and show more of them.
But some of the columns that are included are something called Tidemark and Private Size and Size.
And if you mouse over these things and get help about them, a little tooltip will explain what they mean.
this is trying mightily to explain how much extra space is taken up by this snapshot.
If I deleted this snapshot, how much space would I get back?
And it has to do with, well, what is the delta from this snapshot to the previous one?
And what is the tide mark of the largest allocation byte, you know, used by this snapshot?
It's
The definitions are complicated and it's not particularly clarifying to the average person.
But if you really want to know some more details, now there is an actual GUI to show you information about snapshots.
I hope people don't send other people here to say, hey, if you can't install my software, open disk utility, go down to the snapshot, select everything and hit the minus button.
But at least that's better than telling them go to tmutil, delete local snapshots, and then type a date in the special format.
It's less fraught than going to the command line.
So I'm glad to see disk utility expanding to finally start to actually expose a lot of the functionality that has been in APFS.
Now, if only the finder could do a better job of telling us how much space is really free on our disks, we'd be making some progress.
Baby steps.
I imagine that.
So when there seemed to be a convergence of macOS and iOS, a lot of Mac fans, including me, got really nervous because it seemed like bad things could come here.
You know, here be the dragons.
But there are some things that seem really cool that have been integrated or brought from iOS to macOS.
And here's one of them.
Apparently, macOS Monterey allows you to erase a Mac without needing to reinstall the operating system.
That is super cool.
Seemingly in system preferences, there's an option to erase all user data and user installed apps from the system while maintaining the operating system currently installed.
Because the storage is always encrypted on Mac systems with Apple Silicon on the T2 chip or the T2 chip, the system is instantly and securely erased by destroying the encryption keys.
Very cool.
So this was many years in coming because, like, if you remember the path the Mac has traveled, first it was just like a Mac and you had a boot disk and everything was on it.
And if you erase the disk, everything was gone.
And then they put the operating system on a separate partition.
And then they said the operating system is on a separate partition.
It's read only.
And then they said the operating system is on a separate partition.
It's read only.
And actually you're booted from a snapshot that's cryptographically signed.
And at that point, you basically have parity with iOS, which, and this is what Apple says on their webpage, the phrase they use, a phrase that should be familiar to iOS users, people who are familiar with iPhones or iPads, erase all content and settings.
That's been an option on our phones forever.
Oh, if I want to get rid of my stuff on the phone, say I want to give this phone a hand-me-down to my kid, I want my stuff to be off it, you just do erase all content and settings.
And what that would be doing on your iOS device is essentially throwing away the encryption key
for the user data section of the storage.
You didn't have to reinstall the operating system because on iOS, the operating system was sealed off somewhere else.
And now the Macs are like that too.
And now you get the advantage.
Now you can essentially wipe your Mac just as fast as you can wipe your phone.
Extremely cool stuff.
All right, John, tell me about iCloud Private Relay and how this all works.
This, I think when we talked about it in the keynote episode, it was like, oh, this seems kind of like a VPN, but it's subtly different than that.
There's been a lot of articles about this, but I think it was worth touching on briefly.
I'll put a link to Jason Snell's article where he explains it well.
so to recap what a vpn is a vpn is like uh when you can and you can have a vpn for subsets of the network or the whole network but essentially we're going to tunnel your traffic over this secure connection through some servers that we control lots of people's workplaces use them so you know you can tunnel into your work's internal network
Normally, all of your internal work stuff would be completely invisible because they use internal IP addresses that are not publicly routable.
But hey, if you get on the VPN, it will make a little secure tunnel with your authentication credentials so that on your home, from your home network, when you're working from home for a year because of COVID,
you can actually get on your work's internal network.
That's what a VPN does.
And like I said, a VPN, you can say, okay, every piece of traffic that goes to and from my Mac over the network goes through the VPN.
Or you can have, say, only for this subset of addresses go through the VPN.
You have some flexibility, but that's what a VPN is.
People use VPNs
for non-work purposes to essentially disguise where they're coming from.
Disguise, you know, who they are, where they're coming from.
Because from the perspective, once you go through the VPN, the VPN is the thing connecting to the rest of the internet.
And the rest of the internet thinks, I'm getting a connection from whatever this VPN is, but they don't know who you are as part of the encryption.
So you can make it seem like you live somewhere where you don't.
If you go through a VPN that's in a different country, as far as the servers that you're connecting to are concerned, it looks like you're coming from that country and not where you really are, so on and so forth.
icloud private relay is not a vpn but it's aimed at trying to preserve your privacy while you browse the web so here's the description of how it works instead of using a vpn which is essentially one single proxy that you go through uh icloud private relay uses two separate parts here uh one called an ingress proxy and the one called the egress proxy so the the ingress proxy is managed by apple
And that's the thing that hides your IP address.
You connect to the ingress proxy and the ingress proxy sees your IP address because you're connecting to it.
There's no way, unfortunately, if again, if you're not on a VPN, there's no way to avoid that.
The ingress proxy sees your IP address.
But the ingress proxy doesn't see what you're trying to connect to because that has been encrypted on your Mac and sent over the wire.
So the ingress proxy says, okay, well, I know this person's IP address and then I have this encrypted packet that says where they're getting to, but I don't know what's in that.
And then it passes this information on to the egress proxy.
But when it connects to the egress proxy, the egress proxy says, who's connecting to me?
And it sees the IP address of the ingress proxy because that is who is connecting to it.
So as far as the egress proxy is concerned, oh, I'm getting a connection from Apple's...
you know ingress server right oh and by the way here's the content it's this encrypted packet of telling me where i'm supposed to go now apparently somehow in a way that hasn't been explained anywhere that i've seen the egress proxy has the keys to decrypt
the place where you're trying to get to.
And so it decrypts the place where you're trying to get to, say apple.com, and then it connects to apple.com and gets the information and the data flows back that way.
So it's trying to split up the information so that one place knows your IP but not where you're going, and the next place knows where you're going but not your IP.
And Apple pitches this as privacy preserving because Apple runs the ingress proxies, but it doesn't have to run the egress proxies like it farms them out to third parties.
Right.
And you can imagine how there can be a public private key exchange over this whole route where you could get it.
So the egress proxies know how to decrypt the thing.
But here's the problem.
Apple keeps pitching.
This is like, well, with the VPN, you need to really trust that VPN provider because they see all your traffic like everything goes through there.
Right.
They have all the keys to the kingdom.
and in this thing you don't need to trust anybody because apple knows one thing and doesn't know the other and the third party knows the other thing doesn't know but the problem is you have to trust apple like in the end with all the stuff you have to drop out because apple is the one telling us that oh yeah on your mac we'll encrypt the the where you're trying to get to uh and then we'll send it along and
Apple's the one deciding to do that encryption.
They could choose not to do the encryption.
They could do the encryption and then send the keys somewhere else or use a well-known.
In the end, you have to trust Apple because they're writing the software that implements the system.
So Apple could know all this information.
Apple is telling us, and I 100% believe them, that they're not doing that, that they are literally encrypting it and passing it on.
Because Apple doesn't want to know this information.
They want it to be secure.
But in the end, you have to trust Apple.
Or rather, let's say Apple is hacked and someone puts a backdoor in their operating system.
It would be trivially easy to get access to all this traffic because, again, Apple's operating systems and frameworks are the ones implementing it and deciding to encrypt this stuff.
Right.
So the thing I'm curious about is actually the key exchange of how does the egress proxy has the egress proxy have the ability to decrypt the encrypted address that gets sent along to it?
while the ingress proxy doesn't have that ability.
I'm not sure how that key exchange works, and I don't think it's been explained, but either way, that's what it does.
And the second thing that's different about this in a VPN is, well, what's included in this?
Is it all network traffic?
Is it a subset of the network?
It's even more specific than that.
The only things that Apple says are included are,
browsing from the safari web browser specifically so it seems like some of this is implemented in whatever framework safari is using like when when you go to connect to a web page safari itself or some frameworks that it's using says rather than making http connection to the target website i'm going to encrypt where you're trying to get i'm going to connect to an ingress server and pass along whatever packet in whatever format to the ingress server and you know like safari or some framework is doing that but
The other thing that's included is DNS queries, which makes sense because if you don't see where people are browsing but you see what they do DNS lookups for, you still know where they're browsing.
Oh, they did a DNS lookup for www.apple.com, but then I don't know what webpage they went to.
They probably went to apple.com.
It's metadata, right?
So they're tunneling the DNS queries through the private relay as well.
There are lots of other ways to secure DNS, too, by the way, but this is what they're doing.
They're tunneling it over this thing.
And they will also go through the private relay for what they call a subset of app traffic, by which they have explained that they mean plain HTTP, so non-HTPS traffic, right?
So apparently if any app tries to make a plain unencrypted HTTP connection, it will go through private relay, right?
And here are the things that it doesn't apply to.
It doesn't apply to LAN connections, so anything on your local network in any form, private relay doesn't do.
It doesn't apply to private domains.
I'm not entirely sure what they mean by that, but maybe just like domains that are not in the public DNS but are just privately routable.
Yeah, I believe that's internal, yeah.
um doesn't apply to network extensions vpns apple has apple still supports vpns you can run a vpn and also use private relay like the vpn is a separate thing like i assume that if you ran both of them either private relay wouldn't go through the vpn or it would go through the vpn on its way to hitting the ingress server you know what i mean like it'd be interesting because if you're doing a vpn that makes it look like you're coming from a different country
Would it use the ingress server in that country?
Because that's another thing about private relay.
It's intentionally not making you look like you come from a different place.
So it will use an ingress server that's nearish to you.
So it won't be like they won't be able to pinpoint you, but they'll be able to tell like the example they gave was like they'll be able to tell you somewhere in the Bay Area, but they won't be able to pinpoint you to the same way they could if you had if they had your IP address because the Bay Area is a big place.
and i imagine the farther away from big cities you get the less the bigger the potential area where you could be is because i'm not sure they have 7 000 ingress servers in wyoming right um and the network extensions are things that are used to like see network traffic as it goes by and filtered all that stuff still works with private relay that stuff it doesn't obsolete them it doesn't replace them they still function and then finally if you have some configured proxy and
It says, okay, well, they already have some other thing they need to go through, so private relay can't work because you have to go through the proxy, right?
The interesting bit towards the end of the WWDC session about this was like, for all you people out there, because anytime you say anything about networking, everybody who has to support Macs and the enterprise and businesses is like, oh, no.
What is this going to do to all my, like no one's going to be able to get to the internet and everything's going to break or whatever.
So the question is, Hey, what if you run the example, the example to give, if you are an enterprise or education customer and you don't want private relay to be on your network.
And I can imagine there are a lot of people who work in education and enterprise who don't want private because it's just another headache, right?
Here's what you can do.
Here's their suggestion.
So the first thing is step one,
block the dns resolution of apple's ingress servers because you know it's like apple systems will try to say i need to talk to an ingress server let me look one up by name presumably there's apple's going to give you a list of the dns names of all their ingress servers but basically block the dns of that because if you control the network you also control dns and make sure you're it makes it unresolvable right once you've blocked that dns
Apple's devices and, you know, operating system will still try to connect to private relay, but they'll fail.
And when they'll fail, you get a message that we have a screenshot of here in the notes that says that they can only give campus Wi-Fi isn't compatible with iCloud private relay.
You will not be able to access the Internet unless you turn off Apple private relay.
for this network turning off private relay means this network and monitor your internet activity blah blah blah blah and so you will be prompted to turn off private relay when you are on this specific network for example on your works wi-fi and if you say continue without private relay then every time you connect to your works wi-fi it won't even try to use private relay but then when you're elsewhere it will use it so basically private relay is essentially on by default for everybody who has this feature um
And the only way to stop it is if you own the network, make it not work.
And if it doesn't work, the operating system will say, I see it's not working.
Do you want me to just not try on this network anymore?
It's pretty bold of Apple to do this.
It shows their commitment to privacy.
It's pretty weird in that the privacy still depends on you entirely trusting Apple, but I can't.
Rolling out features like this, I find terrifying.
I'm terrified by proxy.
I'm terrified for them because, boy, you can just break everybody's stuff so easily if you mess this up in even the smallest way, and I'm sure network admins are not relishing the idea of having to deal with this.
Yeah, this this kind of came across my radar pretty quickly because it occurred to me that my beloved pie hole, which is a DNS server that I run.
It's never going to stop being funny.
It's a hilarious name.
The pie hole that I run in the house, which is a DNS server for the house that will block advertisements and trackers and things of that nature.
Well, that's going to be in conflict with with with the private relay.
And so I for a minute there, I thought I'm going to have to go in on all the devices and go ahead and disable private relay on for myself on anything, you know, on anything I want to use in the house.
And it looks like that's not the case.
I can just on the pie hole.
I can tell it to not resolve these servers and that should fix me up.
So I'm pretty excited to see.
Why don't you just why will it not be compatible with it?
Because the whole idea is that the way the pie hole works is it's a DNS server, right?
So maybe I misunderstood private relay, but the idea is when... Oh, you think it's going to bypass your DNS server?
Exactly.
And I'm pretty sure that's the case.
I'm pretty confident that's the case.
If you make your pie hole have a publicly routable IP address, you can make it work.
Sure.
Yes, that's what I know.
I think you're right, but I would also argue with all the stuff that Safari is doing with its own built-in tracker blocking, then the difference between what you're getting from PyHole versus that is really then just full-on ad blocking.
so like maybe it's worth it maybe not but you know maybe you could shift that onto the the software side and you know do ad blocking extensions in your browsers and stuff yeah you can run yeah you can run those network extensions that i mentioned ad blockers like you know i understand why pie hall is more attractive you run that in one place and it works for all your devices but all apple devices support you know network extensions that block ads
Totally.
But, you know, what Piehole also blocks is other things like the Amazon tube phoning home, my television phoning home.
And yes, we could have discussions about whether or not I should have an Amazon tube or whether or not I should have my TV connected to the Internet, which actually at this point maybe I shouldn't since the Apple TV has been updated and has all the 4K goodness now.
How are you blocking that from the pile just by blocking the DNS lookup?
Because if you know where they're trying to connect it to, why don't you just block that like in your router, essentially?
Let's say don't allow connections.
That's effectively what I'm doing, though.
because i'm doing it in the pie but but you're doing it from dns you're like you're not blocking the connection if they knew the ip address they could connect which is a flaw in your system because for all you know these tv manufacturers are going to be hard coding a list of ip addresses in their stupid tvs so they don't have to do dns lookups but i mean everything you said is accurate but but i like the fact that even for the non-technical users in my home they are getting the benefits of all this without having to do any work the benefits slash breakage
Uh, yes, but I've tuned it such that it very rarely breaks for Aaron and she, and she has a shortcut, you know, like an Apple shortcut in order to turn the pie hole off.
Should, should she need to?
And she just says, you know, how to shut your pile.
She knows exactly how to shut my pie hole, John.
It's that's exactly right.
She has so many ways of shutting my pie hole.
I cannot even begin to tell you how many years we've been married.
We're coming up on our anniversary.
It is 14 years this year.
So she knows very well how to shut my pie hole.
Don't you worry.
Going back to this feature, I really am very interested to follow the direction this is going because so much of tracking and privacy protection falls down at the IP address level.
So much of it is like, well, we can block trackers and we can block certain access things and cookies and all this other stuff, but...
creepy companies can still form pretty reliable identification for us based on ip address and we see this in the podcast space like all the podcast trackers and everything like there's that's just kind of like this this unavoidable hole in our privacy that like the ip address is always like here's where it falls down and that's why you know a lot of
But this is like the one big wall that keeps us being tracked a lot more than I think most people would want or find reasonable.
And to have Apple taking such a big step towards removing that as a trackable data point for a large portion of users, that's a significant step.
And that affects tons of stuff.
Like, you know, going back for a second to the podcast business –
This is going to massively break podcast analytics and podcast ad tracking.
And as podcasters, we should definitely be a little bit apprehensive about going into this.
However, first of all, we don't have a choice, so here it is.
But I think this is breaking it in a good way.
I think this is going to be very destructive to a large part of the advertising and tracking and stats collecting business.
But where we are afterwards, once the dust has settled and once people have figured out how to do things like count unique podcast downloads in a reasonably approximation way without using IP addresses to identify uniqueness, and the rest of the ecosystem as well, all the different ad trackers and everything, some of them will die or have things made harder for them.
Oh, boo-hoo, here's this tiniest violin.
But
Once the dust settles on all of this, a year or two or three down the road, and even assuming that maybe Apple goes even further with this in the future and expands it to more transfer types, like more network transfer types and more apps and everything else, I think we're going to be in a really good place because the IP address as a tracking mechanism will become so much less useful.
And we really need that for privacy.
The whole industry, society, we really need that.
Because we still have people out there arguing that IP addresses are not personally identifiable information and therefore shouldn't fall under the protections of various privacy laws and everything.
And it's total BS.
It's total garbage.
Every data broker can reverse look up an IP address to a person.
That's just...
The data is out there.
It's so easy.
It's trivial.
It's cheap for people to get it if they want to.
And so IP addresses absolutely are personal information and are extremely trackable and extremely exploitable for creepy reasons by creepy people and companies.
So to remove a big chunk of that is a very good move for the internet and for society as a whole.
And so as much as it will cause a lot of disruption in the short term, long term, this is going to be great.
it's good for privacy but when you talk about the internet as a whole coming from the perspective of a networking like if you're a network engineer which i am not but just in general like trying to funnel everybody's traffic through like if you didn't know about the privacy thing you'd be like what are they doing like because these these ingress and egress servers you're gonna have to have a lot of these and they're gonna have a lot of traffic funneled through them and it is not the most efficient way to get data from point a to point b it is you know it's a rube goldberg machine
Technically, you're right, but the way this appears to be implemented is with CDNs, which is actually really clever if you think about it.
One of the things Apple talks about in explaining this and in the sessions and everything is that this largely doesn't break region detection.
And the reason why is because they're using...
basically CDN endpoints all over the world so that you're still going to come from your approximate region.
You know, you might be like, you know, a city size granularity or like, you know, you know, central Ohio, maybe like instead of, you know, your exact neighborhood with your cable company or whatever, but you're still going to be like nearby.
And if you think about like using CDNs as, as like the nodes in the system is actually really clever because basically,
Just by the nature of what you need to deploy modern CDNs, you have endpoints everywhere.
You have tons of them all over the place.
And so if all you're doing is going to the nearest CDN node, not only are you not going very far, and not only are there tons of those around the world to help share the load, but also because it's a node of a popular CDN,
It might even already have the content you're looking for in its local cache.
So it's only a short trip to go from you to the egress node.
And then the egress node might not actually have to go very far to get your data in the first place.
It might even be local.
So I think ultimately this is probably going to prove to be pretty effective and pretty transparent most of the time.
I think what you described is basically why it won't be a complete disaster from day one, hopefully.
But it's not as secure as that weird fish nerve that goes through your body, but it's also not ideal.
Because sometimes you are connecting to something that would be much more straightforward to you.
I mean, maybe it depends on where you live.
I connect to servers, some of which are local in the area.
And going to the CDN first, even if it's a CDN that's also in Boston,
and then going out of that CDN to a server, it would be more straightforward for me to go right to the thing.
You know what I mean?
Like, it's not as circuitous as, oh, I have to go to London and then back to get to some server in Boston.
But sometimes, if the thing you're trying to get to, like, the reason CDNs work is because stuff that's on the CDNs is farther away from you than the CDN.
But that is not necessarily the case when you're doing this, because everything goes through the private relay, you know, when you're browsing in Safari, right?
Um...
As opposed to just the things that are closer to you because they are in a CDN, right?
So, you know, CDNs in general, if you look at them, you're like, okay, this makes some sense because if the CDN didn't exist, maybe they'd take a different route, but they'd have to go farther.
They'd have to go more hops.
They'd have to go geographically farther to get this because the actual servers in California, now they got it from CDN that's like 10 miles away from that.
that's good thumbs up even though it looks a little bit weird but this one it's not quite as clear a win and because cdns like i said have been built up so much it will probably be okay this capacity is probably there like apple never says this but like the reason the egress servers are third party is because if they weren't apple would have to have thousands and thousands and thousands of servers all over the world and guess what that's what cdns already do so that's why it's a third party provider i don't know how they don't say it could be like
they probably have contracts with every CDN that would give them a time of day all over the entire world because you really have no choice to even just make this feasible at all.
And it's also why they're not routing everything through it.
But just doing Safari DNS queries and playing HTTP, given the number of devices they have in the world, is a lot of traffic.
So I imagine there is a big red button somewhere inside Apple, metaphorically speaking, to say, let's turn off iCloud Private Relay because everything is broken.
The internet doesn't work.
We'll fix it in the next release.
Well, and to clarify, it's not just HTTP traffic in Safari.
It's all Safari traffic.
Yeah, I said and, not and, in.
So it's Safari, it's everything in Safari, every DNS query, and also any plain HTTP from any app.
Exactly, yeah.
So the only, so like, you know, like Overcast will be able to use this for the downloads of podcast episodes that are not servitive for HTTPS, which is admittedly most of them's.
So you can screw up our own stats for us.
That's nice.
Thanks.
Yes.
Ours are served through HTTPS.
Thank you very much.
All right.
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Oh.
Let's do some Ask ATP.
It's been a while since we've done it.
Abel DeMose writes, How's Marco finding the transition to Apple Silicon as a developer?
Has anything in Marco's tech stack broken as a result of Apple Silicon?
I'm hesitating to make the jump because I hear that Homebrew is janky on the Apple Silicon Macs.
Homebrew has proven to be no less reliable for me on my Apple Silicon Macs than it has been on all my other Macs.
You know, you have such homebrew problems.
I really don't.
I'm not trying to say you're wrong.
I'm not trying to say you're holding it wrong.
It's just, it's funny to me because I really do not have homebrew problems and you are constantly complaining about it.
Once I set it up, it works as long as nothing has to get touched.
Now, eventually, over time, you need to install something else or change something or update something.
And at that point, the entire thing breaks.
And the only solution usually at that point tends to be remove everything in Homebrew and reinstall it.
I have a shell script that I maintain for mostly reconfiguring my Homebrew stuff.
Even that, I usually can't just run it six months later or a year later because it doesn't work if I just run it.
But I can at least use it to copy and paste one command at a time and see how it fails and modify and edit the file so that hopefully next time I can just run it.
And of course, I never can.
But yeah, otherwise, other than my homebrew drama, which is going to expand now because I don't know if you saw the news on Twitter today that macOS Monterey no longer includes PHP at all.
like they've been warning you on the command line for a few releases now like hey you should stop using this it's going to be removed in a future release well it's removed actually what they what they say about php specifically if you run php dash dash version p they just don't they just say php is not recommended that's it just like broadly speaking in general it is not recommended the other ones they do say oh you should get it in a version or whatever but yeah
so PHP is gone which other ones are gone because I think Perl and Python are still there or Python 3 I don't think anything else is removed as of this version PHP is totally gone Perl and Python I believe are still showing those errors or those warnings rather but I believe they're still there and I know there's something about Python being it's like 2.7 and that's apparently ancient now but anyway I don't know anything about that but
So going back to the question, Apple Silicon as a developer has been largely fine.
I really have had no downsides to it besides the fact that certain very long compiles, I'm cranking away at those cores and I want more cores.
Other than that, it's been totally great.
I don't think I have any other problems really.
That's exciting.
I really want to get myself a new laptop.
As we've discussed many times, I do not want to give up any of my four ports.
And I don't want a big one.
I want a 13 or 14-inch or what have you.
And I really want to get a new laptop.
But then if I get a new laptop, then my iMac Pro will be slow and ancient, and I don't want that either.
Yeah, that happens.
Then there's the monitor situation because there's no big iMac yet.
Then there's the monitor situation because there's no big iMac yet.
Yeah, it's just a mess.
It's just a mess.
As soon as they release that 40-core Mac Pro, I'm in.
I know you are.
The best thing is going to be when the new 40-core Mac Pro comes out, but it doesn't support the Protos Play XDR.
Oh, God.
The resale value just drops through the floor on them after we all find out.
All right, moving right along.
So, Ralph Krakowski writes, what year do you think that Apple will release a version of Mac OS that no longer supports Intel?
Yeah.
That's a good question.
I would say, if it's 2021 now, I would say 2026 would be my guess, at about five years.
And I think that's aggressive, actually.
I think it might be even later than that, but I think 2026 is the earliest.
2026, hmm.
I actually did a little bit of...
preparation for this question because it's been in the notes for so long so here here's some background on the most recent transition the intel transition was announced at wwdc 2005 the first intel mac shipped in january 2006
the first intel only mac os 10 shipped in august 2009 so it was three years and seven months after the first intel mac so we go to arm transition was announced at wwc 2020 first arm mac shipped in november of 2020 so if we fast forward three years and seven months that pins it at pretty much exactly wwc 2024 apple announces the first version of mac os that does not support intel
That's if they exactly follow the Intel transition.
The question is, are they going to transition faster than they went to Intel or slower?
And it's a complicated question because they seem to be going pretty fast, but there's still that nagging rumor of the revised Intel Mac Pro.
And it's like, maybe everything will be converted.
But if that Mac Pro is still hanging around, they can't ship a Mac OS that doesn't support it for a while.
So I don't, I don't know.
I would say 2024 is when you should like...
that's the what i don't know the betting terms like i feel like that is probably i don't want to say it's the earliest it could happen because they could do it three years flat like i think there's a pretty broad range because i think apple will be will have all of its line converted except maybe the mac pro pretty darn quickly and they seem to be moving very aggressively again witness the features that are not supported in monterey
on intel and again seemingly not just a thing about the betas but they put on their public web page information for customers that says yeah this isn't going to be on your intel max so maybe 2023 is conceivable for when this could happen
Marco?
I was going to go with you, Casey, with about a five-year timescale, but, man, John makes some good points.
I had to look up the dates because in your mind you think, oh, yeah, it was probably like five years after, no, three years and seven months after the first Intel Mac.
Here's the thing.
That's when they shipped the first Intel version, Intel-only version of Mac OS X. That doesn't mean that's when everyone upgraded to that version, especially back then people didn't upgrade as quickly, right?
So there was the question.
I was like, when do you think they will release that version?
But on that day, suddenly your Intel Macs don't puff go up in a puff of smoke.
How many people are still running, like, high Sierra on their Macs right now?
Like, I know Apple pushes the updates much harder than they used to, but practically speaking, a lot of people just keep running the old operating system, and they just, like, live with that badge on their system preferences and dismiss those annoying nags and just...
you've seen people do it on their phones too somehow people are able to weather the storm of apple's like constant messages for trying to force you to update and they just won't do it and it just becomes part of their life is just dismissing those dialogue boxes so um so yeah one you know the day apple releases the first mac os doesn't support intel it isn't the day your intel mac
melts down to nothing.
Your Intel Mac.
In case he's multiple Intel Macs.
It's hard to estimate this because on one hand, Apple does usually support old Macs for quite some time with software updates.
The lifetime of Macs and software update support is pretty long.
Often to the point where you probably shouldn't update the new one, but you can if you want to.
But the other side of this is that when Apple has moved on to a new something, like a new technology, a new paradigm, whatever...
they are very fast to drop the old one, to drop support for it, to pretend like it never existed, like to move, quote, move forward.
And that's, it's a wonderful euphemism for like instantly drop support for everything old.
And so what, like combining those two conflicting factors is,
When nothing major has changed, as the Intel line has gone along, supporting new Intel Macs and old Intel Macs in the same software release isn't that different.
But because the Apple Silicon transition is so significant and there's so many interesting and major differences in how the hardware works and the hardware's capabilities, I think they're going to be more aggressive with this.
I think it's going to be a shorter time span than we think.
but the problem is the question is asking about mac os specifically and like like they they're not going to release a version of mac os that can't run on their still still being sold intel mac pro probably so if the mac pro is the wild card if they do revise that machine and it takes them longer than we think to come out with the arm one they're just going to have like i don't i don't see them shipping a new like i said announcing a new version of mac os wwc and this will run on all our macs except for our very latest mac pro
well no they would just pretend like they don't sell it anymore like they would just they would show a big slide on screen that showed all the other macs and just that's just missing but it's fine to drop older models like they always do that oh this won't run on your you know 2014 iMac or whatever but to drop literally because this is a scenario where they don't have the ARM Mac Pro out so there would be literally the newest Mac Pro available unsupported so I just that's that's the only thing that makes me think they might actually make it to WWC 2024 before doing this but
If they continue with their current pace, they could do it sooner than WC2024.
WC2024 is just like it's pretty much down to the month exactly the gap that they had with the Intel one.
So maybe that's the middle of the range.
But I agree with Marco that they could definitely go earlier.
And the thing is...
they move fast when they can obviously in certain things like they move they moved as fast as they could with swift but it practically speaking it took a while for swift to develop and also they can't drop quote unquote drop support for objective c because half their operating system is written in half their apps are written in it you know what i mean like they can't do that but they very quickly move on like you know to the point where when swift was announced all the wwc slides had to have examples in swift as well as objective c right
they're very clear like this is the new thing and unless something very terrible happens swift is going to be it and it just takes a while to come and so with hardware it's even easier it's like look arm is the new thing we all know it it's awesome everybody loves it it's going great and so as soon as the sooner we can forget about that intel stuff the better and the thing is when you when you don't when you quote unquote no longer support it
Those Intel Macs keep working.
They can live out their natural life and eventually just be older and slower than they are now.
The operating systems they have are fine.
It would be nice if Apple maybe extended its security update interval a little bit longer for the Intel Macs.
You know what I mean?
Like just to say, we know you're not going to get any more OS updates, but practically speaking, your Mac works fine.
You can continue to use it and maybe we'll give you software updates for one extra year, but we'll see.
And then finally, Brian Pirey writes, in all the speculation about Apple's high-end Mac processors and the number of cores of different types, I haven't heard much talk about what the performance difference is between the low power versus the high power or high performance cores.
In broad strokes, how do the Ice Storm cores use only one-tenth the power of the Firestorm cores?
That's a pretty simple answer.
They got less stuff in them.
We'll have some link in the show notes to comparison of the Ice Storm and the Firestorm course.
But these are all superscale designs, which means they have multiple units that do a thing.
So a unit is like a thing that can add numbers together, right?
CPUs, modern CPUs, don't have just one thing that can add numbers.
They don't have just two things that can add numbers.
They have like six or seven things that can add numbers.
And those are just for the integer numbers.
And then how many floating point units do they have?
How many load store units do they have, right?
The low power cores have fewer execution units, fewer things they can add, fewer load store units, fewer flowing point units.
If you think of those things as like the little machines that do the math that a computer does, it just has less of them.
And so it takes less power to run them.
It's like if you think, I mean, it's weird to think about this, but if you think about a car that had like...
17 different V8 engines, right?
Those are like the adders, right?
And then like five V12 engines.
Those are like the SIMD engines or whatever, right?
How much gas does that thing take?
And then you take another thing that has two V8s and one V12.
It just takes less gas because you're running less stuff.
It's the same thing with electricity execution units.
So the most important way is that they just have less stuff.
In fact, sometimes, depending on the things they have, there may be some execution units that the low-power ones just don't even have at all.
I don't think that's the case with Ice Storm versus Fire Storm.
I think they can all...
execute the same instructions um but they have fewer units they may also be clock lower when you have fewer units you need less machinery shorter pipelines lower you know uh execution windows like there's lots of things you can do like the associated machinery needs to keep track of fewer instructions that are in flight at any one time and that also shrinks the amount of essentially circuitry you need which shrinks the amount of electricity you need um so that's what it is and people say like oh i don't want my stuff running on the quote unquote slow the ice storm units
they're only slow compared to the firestorm ones they're plenty fast like you know in yeah i don't know if this is how low power mode works but imagine you could have a lower power mode for your mac they would turn off the the high performance things and just run your mac entirely on the quote-unquote high efficiency units i wonder how many people would tell if you're not like you know executing like uh encoding video or doing a big compile or something
you probably wouldn't even notice like that's that's why i was talking about the auto sort of auto low power mode the high efficiency cores are plenty fast like if you benchmark just the high efficiency cores against whatever in old intel mac you're using right now it may embarrass them right so don't worry too much about um using the slow cores in in practice like that is an effective use of resources because when you're just clicking around on web pages
nothing's happening until you click and then for brief fractions of a second maybe the high power ones could come into being and do something and then go back to sleep so yay for ice storm units they're probably what most of us are going to be using most of the time while the computer sits around for the dumb human to do something
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Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S
So long.
The Bugatti Chiron has two V8s in it, basically.
That's true.
It's got a V16, but all he did was just take two Volkswagen V8s and just shove them, weld them together into one giant engine.
Serially, right?
What is it?
It's the W16 because it's the two Vs. Make it W. Oh, yes.
That's right.
That's right.
It's not serial.
It's not parallel either.
They're interleaved.
Also takes a lot of gas.
What was the stat on that?
It wasn't that.
It was the – what was the one before the Chiron?
The Veyron.
The Veyron.
That it could run at full throttle for 12 minutes before running out of gas.
Yeah.
You know, since we're in a post-show neutral now, goodbye, everybody.
It was nice having you.
Marco and John and I were talking in our – as the industry calls it, our super secret private channel.
and did you know gentlemen which i know you two did that the brand new tesla model s the whatever version it is that has plaid mode zero to 60 in under two seconds contested contested highly well because i don't think anyone has measured that and there's like if you find search for it on youtube you'll find some youtube channels explaining how engineering wise it is extremely unlikely that that is true unless you you know about rollout casey
Is that where you get a little bit of a roll and then stand on the gas?
No.
If you search for rollout on YouTube, you find some explanations for it.
It has to do with limitations in rollout.
Nicely done.
Limitations in instrument technology on the drag strip from back in the day.
You had a drag race and you wanted to race these cars and give them times at the end of the drag racing.
Drag racing is spinning around for decades and decades.
And we didn't have good technology for saying, when has the car started to go?
So they use essentially light sensors, right?
And it would be like, so when the light is hitting the sensor, you're not breaking the beam.
So you're at the starting line, right?
And they wanted to say, or actually, I think they have you break the beam.
And then when the beam is continuous again, you have passed it, right?
So you would break the beam.
I don't know the details.
I'm screwing it up.
But the bottom line is that for some period of time, your wheel will be rolling past the beam.
And during that whole time your wheel is rolling, that beam is blocked.
And only when the wheel has rolled enough to get past the beam does it connect again.
And so that amount of time when you're going from zero to my wheel has rolled around enough to pass the beam...
That doesn't count against your like whatever your time is, your quarter mile time, your zero to 60 time.
And the tradition of allowing that rollout has continued so that in every car magazine, when you see a zero to 60 time, that's not the time it took from the car stationary to the car going 60.
It's the time it took after the car had done its rollout.
and then from because the car is already moving that the clock starts when the wheel is already moving so you get essentially zero to one two three four or five miles an hour for free and that's just tradition from like every car magazine does that because otherwise you couldn't compare the zero to 60 times across decades right and so they just keep doing it and so any zero 60 time you see you might have to ask the question is that zero to 60 or are you allowing for rollout and even with rollout some people are saying that sub to uh
with street legal tires no matter how much power you have it's kind of a friction it's a friction situation you'd really need the just the right road surface because you could have infinity power it's just a question of how quickly can you transfer the power to the road and so i haven't seen actually any measured uh plaid pluses at sub twos and most of the supercars that you see like the videos for the uh
the rimac and the vera i think i'm getting that name right have you seen those there's a bunch of them on youtube now it's like a 2 000 horsepower uh electric supercar uh it's ridiculous it doesn't it does not lack horsepower i think it has like 2 200 pound feet of torque or something it's got four motors one for each wheel and it weighs like an eighth of the model s right the problem is how do you turn that power into making car go forward and it's surprisingly difficult with street legal tires on regular roads um
But even that, it was running like eight and a half second quarter miles, which is phenomenal for a street legal car if you know anything about drag racing.
And it was zero to 60s were in the very low twos.
Breaking through the twos really does not come down to how much power do you have or even just how light your car is.
Like how much traction can you get on the ground in that short period of time?
And then whether or not you're accounting for rollout or how you're accounting for rollout.
So it's mostly academic.
But the bottom line is the Model S Plaid is an extremely fast car that will, as Marco has said multiple times, make you feel like someone is punching you in the face when you accelerate in it.
Yeah.
In an unpleasant way that you probably won't want to repeat unless you're trained to be an astronaut.
Yeah, that's so true.
It's funny, though.
I'll let you guys decide whether or not you want to explain the context here.
But I was building a Model S just for fun, just for fun.
And there are not very many options these days, which in most cars I find extremely frustrating.
In this context, I actually don't really mind because...
But one option that I really wanted to see that I didn't see was the option for a fucking steering wheel, because that thing has the stupid yoke here in the United States.
And it's the only choice you have.
And I can assure you that may be the best automobile that has ever been produced.
But the chances of me buying one money, no object, the chances of me buying one
with that stupid yoke on it, are zero.
Not approximately zero, literally zero.
What are they thinking?
I mean, NHTSA will probably make them change it after a bunch of people die from trying to use it.
Seriously.
No, that's... It's preposterous.
Absolutely preposterous.
That's the one option that everybody wants them to make an option, and they won't do it.
What do you think happens first?
You can buy a new Model S with a steering wheel again, or Apple improves the design of Safari and iOS 12 so that the bottom bar is a little bit more.
I appreciate the humor you're going for, but I think the better question is, will we get a full-size steering wheel as an option or perhaps a retrofit on the Model S, or will Apple make meaningful changes to improve the experience for independent developers on their platforms?
Or will they fix notifications on the Mac?
These are not equally impactful problems in the world.
No, they're not.
Earlier today, I had to dismiss a stack of notifications.
It was like two calendar notifications stacked up.
And I had to click the little X to make it form the clear all button and then click that.
However, and that's hard enough in regular circumstances.
However, through some combination of what might have been a bug...
the top half of the clear all and x buttons was under the menu bar so i had to click on only the bottom half like it's nearly impossible to hit these click targets reliably when they're at their normal size try it when they're half size it's preposterous oh my god
I can't get over, because as much as I love to poop all over Tesla, which has become basically one of my favorite pastimes, I particularly like the Model S in general.
I like the three.
I've been in an X, and I liked that quite a bit.
But the Model S, leaving the incredible amount of money aside, is a really, really nice car.
I really honestly believe that.
I'm not blowing smoke.
It's a really nice car, and if I had more money than I have, I might even own one at this point.
But I cannot fathom looking at that god-awful yoke and thinking, yes, yes, I would like that, please.
That sounds delightful.
Just, no, absolutely not.
And then if you don't get the Model S with the yoke, I don't know, does the X have the yoke as well?
I think they're going to if they haven't already.
Those tend to get updated together.
Right now, if I had to get a new Tesla today, if I couldn't just buy a used one or buy my current one, which is what I'm going to do, but if I couldn't just get used, if I had to pick new...
I think I'd probably go with a Y just because it's closest... It does have the oak.
The X does have the oak.
God bless.
What are they thinking?
The Y at least has a steering wheel.
It doesn't have a dashboard, but it at least has a steering wheel.
So I just...
This is why – like, I got to drive my car yesterday for the first time in probably almost a month, and I was so happy driving it.
Not driving, mind you.
Regular – like, the act of driving I no longer enjoy because usually driving is running an errand and going through traffic and –
It's almost comical how much all of Westchester is always under construction.
The same roads are under construction constantly.
The main arterial local traffic roads that are around my neighborhood...
are always under construction.
I don't know why.
Like, there's never a break.
It's not like they repave it once and then it's done.
Like, they're just always tearing up different sections of it for God knows what reason.
I'm trying to remember if COVID made us all forget, but like the same deal around here.
It's almost like the, you know...
I guess they couldn't do construction during COVID because everyone was home and didn't want to have people gathering together.
But everything is under construction here.
I think it is worse.
I think it's not just that I forgot because I'm – well, I don't know.
It's hard to say because I'm going back and forth to school a lot because my kids aren't taking the bus because they weren't taking the bus during COVID.
I was driving them.
And just trying to find a way to get to and from school with the everyday new construction hazards, like just totally blocking off or making miserable major arteries, everything is under construction.
I think it is like a hangover of the construction that didn't get done during COVID.
Now it's all coming due.
I mean, that's a reasonable theory.
It might be true for you, but for us, like even before COVID, I've lived there almost 11 years and it's always been like this.
Well, at least your roads are getting repaved.
I think I've sent you pictures of my quote unquote road that's in front of my house that is more pothole than road.
Oh, no, they're not repaving it.
That's the thing.
They're like tearing it up to put different water pipes under it or whatever.
They're fixing gas leaks.
it seems like there must be some kind of like water construction mafia in Westchester that they're always tearing up water mains they just call that the mafia yeah they literally just like they tear up the same mains like every two years like I don't anyway so I was driving a lot yesterday and running a lot of errands and sitting in traffic and being frustrated however
If I'm going to be driving a car, the Model S is my favorite car ever.
I'm so incredibly happy with the one I already have.
And when I look at the new one, no part of it makes me happy whatsoever.
They took away the interior color options I liked.
They took away the sunroof that I like.
They took away half the steering wheel and all the stalks.
I don't want...
The idea of getting a new one of those ever is not appealing to me at all.
It's a shame because I love this car.
That's why I decided I'm going to buy mine out.
My lease is up in a few months.
I filed today for the buyout quote.
I'm just going to buy it out because I just want this car to continue.
I would get no joy out of the new one.
Because when I bought it, it actually was significantly more expensive as they are now.
the price for me to buy it out is not that much less than it would cost for me to buy a new one with the options i would currently get but i don't even want to do that i'd rather buy the one i have because it's a better car i like it better and like i i really i will reiterate what i said last time we talked about this which is i really do feel like my model s is the last one they designed to be driven by a human it
the reality of the current situation of auto driving technology is that you still have to drive it like a human most of the time.
And I, I certainly still do in the conditions I drive in, uh, like the world, the, you know, the Northeast, like this, we have weather and terrible roads that are full of water main construction.
And so, uh,
I am very happy now having decided I'm not going to have to buy a new car this fall.
I'm not going to have to make any decisions or do any research or take any risks.
I'm just going to keep driving the car I already have because I love it and nothing they're currently making tempts me at all to make a different choice right now.
So start your clocks, everybody.
This is me versus Marco.
Both of us are in the same situation where we feel like we can't buy the new version of the current car that we love and also that our current car is the favorite car we've ever gone, which is true of my Accord.
Accords don't come with sticks anymore, so I basically can't buy a new Accord, so I basically have to keep driving mine forever.
The weird thing is, though, the car I'm looking to replace the Accord with someday is like someday if there's an electric car that fits within my budget and that I actually like.
I could consider that.
I'm not a big Tesla fan.
But anyway, yeah, I'm planning on running my Accord forever.
And at this rate, right now, Marco doesn't see another electric car that he wants or another car, period, that he wants more than his Model S. So we were just both sticking with our current cars.
You know, if only there was a different luxury brand that had been making cars for a really long time that offered an electric version of one of their cars.
Marco has many more choices than I do.
You have to admit it.
oh yes the large four-door sedan with that that i find appealing that has a stick shift transmission there's like zero of those in the u.s and i actually spent a while on those various auto used car sites looking at used versions of my current car just seeing what was out there and how much i could get them for is like a backup car like i should get you know oh my gosh it's like the cheese graters you know it would be like a kid's car like the kids could drive it or whatever but like
it's like it's like my t's grader they don't make anymore i should keep buying black 2014 era stick shift accord sports and just have just have them in a warehouse somewhere so that each time i wear one out i just take a new one out well i feel like that's that's not a terrible approach i mean that that can last you a long time like if if you actually want to do that you know whenever this car it whenever you're done with this current car you can which is probably going to be a while it's an accord it's going to last forever and it's extremely low mileage
Right.
Yeah.
As every car has been for the last year.
But even before COVID, like you get my car as a 2014 model.
So I bought it in 2013.
Guess how many miles are on my car?
Let's see.
So normally I would say that's about seven years old.
So you'd probably be at roughly what?
80,000, 90,000 miles.
I'm going to guess you're in the high 20s, low 30s.
If you're saying so, I would have said, you know, 80,000 like Marco just implied.
But given that you've already hinted that it's extremely low miles, I'd say high 20s, low 30s.
Unless, and this does happen to me sometimes, unless I've been confused by my display because, you know, you can switch between trip and whatever.
But I'm pretty sure I'm in low 20s.
Wow.
That's impressive.
That's fantastic.
Also, my car I bought almost exactly three years ago, and I just recently crossed 10,000 miles in the last couple of months.
I hear you.
How am I ahead of you?
I'm at 19 on mine.
You keep going back and forth.
Yeah, that's why.
Since it's just the three of us and there's nobody else around, can I tell you a little secret?
Yeah.
I had a really, really, really uncomfortable thought like two days ago.
Was it white?
No.
You're trying to buy a Jeep?
No.
Well, actually, yesterday I saw a Wrangler with no doors on it.
No, yesterday I saw a Wrangler with no doors on it, and I had a very comfortable thought about how I want a Wrangler again.
But that's not what I'm talking about.
I had a very uncomfortable thought just two or three days ago.
I'm starting to think it might be okay to get an electric car.
Yeah, it's great.
No, I don't want to hear your propaganda.
I don't want to hear your propaganda.
But up until just a couple of days ago, I was thinking, even though there's a lot that appeals to me about an electric car, I don't want to give up the stick shift.
And there's no electric car that I think, just like John said a moment ago, that I'm interested in and fits my price range, right?
Yeah.
And I still think that's true, but it seems that the floodgates are opening and they're opening slowly now, but I think they're going to be opening ever more quickly soon.
And there's going to be just a tremendous amount of options on the market.
And I really think there's a better than 50% chance that my next car will be an electric.
Now, I'm not planning to upgrade for two, three, four, five, six years, but I think it's a pretty good chance that the next one I get will not have an internal combustion engine.
can i interest you in a 2014 honda accord sport with a stick shift for eight thousand dollars do you see how i can get these like cheese gratters for eight thousand dollars i can get my car i mean granted that's 230 000 miles in it but i'm saying like they're they're in the range they're in the range from like 7 000 to like 15 000 for my exact car
Think of how many of these you could get for one Marco car.
Again, if I could fit them in my basement, I would just store them there.
The problem is I'm looking at all these used cars, and I look at them, and I'm like, what does that car smell like?
A basement full of Honda Accords.
That would be amazing.
What does that car smell like?
Does it smell like cigarette smoke?
Does it smell like someone spilled something in it?
Because I've always used cars, especially when they're extremely high mileage,
230 000 hard miles in that but anyway these are the stick shift ones and they're rare like when you like i go to i'm at car gurus because that just came up with google right uh transmission and they have check boxes automatic 123 manual eight there's not a lot of these cars in manual but the thing is they're not apparently particularly desirable so you can get them for less than 10 grand
God, that's wild.
I mean, I feel like there's like, so for reasons that I don't want to get into this show because it's too long, I bought a brand new, well, new to me, Super Nintendo yesterday.
What?
And this is like a 30-year-old game console.
And I feel like
If today you can still go buy a 30 year old game console in perfect working and cosmetic order, like if we really if you really want to buy a 2014 Honda Accord Sport with a stick in 2040, like somebody will probably be able to sell it to you.
It's going to be hard to find ones that are not modified and that are in good condition.
That's the tricky thing about this.
I mean, you should watch M539, the YouTube channel.
It's great.
He gets old BMWs, and the problem is he doesn't want them to have been modified.
So if anyone's messed with them, it's not as desirable.
But you want one as this just like – because that's what's desirable about them.
You want it to be collectible, and you want it to be like it was when it was new.
And Hondas in particular –
are extremely attractive to people who want to modify them.
Now, the Accord's not as bad as the Civic, but finding in 2040, yeah, you'll be able to find an Accord of 2014, and with the stick shift, and you'll be able to find parts for it and all that, but every one that you find will look nothing like it did when it's new.
It'll be modified in all sorts of ways, and it'll be all mangled, it'll have parts replaced with non-original parts, and so what you really want is to find one that is, like, if in 2040 you had...
a mint condition like new 2014 honda accord it would be worth a lot like because a collectible is all about condition it's just like right now if i had an apple 2e but nobody's looking for it except you except yeah but but to john it's worth like 80 grand think of anything in the world think of the apple 2e which was an extremely popular computer that made tons of have you had a mint in the box never opened before perfect condition apple 2e that's worth a lot of money
Even though they made a ton of them.
It's not like it's rare.
They were all over the place, but it's all about condition.
John, stop lying to yourself.
If you somehow, like, let's suppose some listener bought a 2014 Honda Accord Sport with a six speed.
It is six, not five, right?
Okay, God, I got worried.
So some listener has a 2014 Honda Accord Sport that was put on blocks with five miles on the odometer.
You can't put it on blocks.
You have to carefully preserve it.
If you just leave it outside, it will rot.
For the love of God.
That's the thing, though.
Do you really want what is almost a 10-year-old car that hasn't been run in 10?
10 years?
No, you have to take care of it like a collector.
That's why they're valuable, because it actually takes effort.
You can't just put it in the garage for 10 years.
Again, watch the M539 channel.
He buys cars that have been like, this has been sitting outside for 20 years, and it's grim.
Like, let me tell you, right?
It ran when we parked it, and then we parked it for 20 years.
To actually keep a car alive that you don't drive takes serious effort, because cars do not stay...
We talked about the gas and how that goes bad, but pretty much everything in an internal combustion engine should not be sitting.
And even if it's sitting in a climate controlled place, you have to do lots of things to keep it going.
The rubber will just harden and rot out and all the tubes in there.
You'll have to replace all those things like it's it's not easy.
And that's why it helps if you have a manufacturer that continues to make those parts.
Like a lot of times you can get you can get a part for, you know, an E46.
It seems to me that someone is still, maybe BMW, is still making many parts for the E46 because when you buy them, it's not like that part was made in the 90s because it would be rotted out just like the rubber tubes that are in your engine.
They make new parts that are essentially OEM parts exactly like the old ones but are still manufacturing them.
So that's why collectibles are valuable based on condition because finding one in like new condition 40 years later is like a miracle.
Yeah.
Golly, I cannot imagine you, you know, what's going to happen is you're going to clear out your garage and it's going to be pristine because you're going to find that unicorn of a 2014 Accord Sport and you're going to park it in there.
So you have your backup cheese grater to your current Accord Sport.
I don't really have room.
That's the problem.
I don't actually have room on my property for another car.
That's the problem.
Yeah.
I would need to rent out another building to store my cheese grater cars.