The First Miniboss
Marco:
I am happy good there's a couple of significant reasons why right now I shouldn't be this happy I shouldn't be incredibly happy because I have a flat tire I have to deal with oh on your bicycle or your car on my car that's been parked in a parking lot for a while yeah somebody hit it a little bit and tore the tire tore a hole in the sidewall on the tire specifically so the tire is slow down very slow down yeah somebody just casually hit your car how were you made aware of this
Marco:
I was made aware of this by when I went to grow grocery shopping a few days ago.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
After taking the boat over.
Marco:
After taking the boat over in like the one time slot in the entire day that I could do this because there's only two boats on the weekends.
Marco:
It was at this point that I arrived at my car, got in, drove out of the parking spot, and the car started yelling at me about dangerously low tire pressure.
Marco:
So got back out of the car and observed, oh, yep, that's a pretty flat tire on the front passenger side.
John:
Didn't you take driver's ed?
John:
You're supposed to walk around the perimeter of the car inspecting it for damage before you get in.
John:
Does anybody ever actually do that?
John:
Well, now you know why.
John:
Now you know why they teach you to do that.
Casey:
I do only when I'm going on a long, long, long trip.
John:
Casey does to make sure none of his wheels fell off.
Casey:
Well, that's true.
Casey:
See, you never know.
Casey:
It could happen.
Casey:
Could happen.
Marco:
Here, I just sent, I'm pasting three pictures into our private channel, you can see.
Marco:
So you can see there's a hole in the sidewall of the tire and there's a bit of paint scraping around.
Marco:
So somebody, and this was the front wheel in on the spot.
Marco:
So somebody hit the like inner corner of my car.
Casey:
Oh, this is not delightful.
Casey:
Holy smokes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So that's that's not great.
Marco:
And and because fortunately, I had brought a friend on this particular grocery shopping trip.
Marco:
This is the first time I'd ever brought a friend to a grocery shopping trip.
Marco:
So fortunately, I brought a friend and he had a car.
Marco:
So we just took his car instead.
Marco:
But this was – this is what I have to deal with.
Marco:
So I actually have to go off probably – back off the island again probably on Friday, wait for Tesla roadside service to come with the loaner tire, with the wheel of shame, and then deal with it after that.
Yeah.
John:
What could possibly hit the sidewall?
John:
What pointy thing on another vehicle is at that level?
John:
Maybe like the corner of their plastic bumper-y thing?
John:
I don't even understand this.
Marco:
My initial theory was maybe it was a higher-up bumper from a truck because at this time of the year, most of the people going in and out of this parking lot are contractors, and so it's a bunch of trucks and SUVs.
Marco:
But that front corner paint scrape,
Marco:
on on the the very low that's very that's well below a truck's bumper um so it's it had to have been another like you know low car uh but anyway honestly i don't really want to dwell on this um because i also have server crap i'm dealing well before we leave the car thing does your does your car have the thing that it's like records a security video of everything that goes on around it all the time
Marco:
It has that feature.
Marco:
It's called Sentry Mode.
John:
Let me guess.
Casey:
You don't have like an SD card in it or something like that.
Marco:
No, no.
Marco:
I have the USB thumb drive and it's actually the only time I ever bought a thumb drive was for the dash cam feature and the music playing feature on my car.
Marco:
The only reason why it wasn't running is it's off by default and you can put it on but I've heard that it noticeably increases the idle power drain if your car is parked somewhere long term.
Marco:
And that's the opposite of what I need right now because my car sits here for weeks at a time.
Marco:
So that's the last thing I need is to increase power drain.
Marco:
So I had it off.
Marco:
And honestly, I have spent over the last five years, cumulatively, probably a year and a half parked in this parking lot.
Marco:
And this is the first time anything's ever happened.
Marco:
So it's like my average is still pretty good.
Marco:
So I'll just, you know, I have to get it fixed and, you know, whatever.
Casey:
So how does this work with a lease?
Casey:
You would either repair it and disclose it upon returning the car or just not repair it and take a big ding when you return the car?
Casey:
Like, well, how does that work?
Marco:
They have a certain allowance of – and the different brands do this differently, but usually it's either like a money allowance of like they expect a certain amount of monetary damage to it, and if you go over that, you have to pay for it.
Marco:
Or they have certain metrics like a scratch can be smaller than a quarter, and you can have up to five of them or whatever.
Marco:
They'll have metrics like that when you turn it in.
Marco:
And they allow you to have an inspection a few months before you turn it in so that you can get warned about this and have a chance to go deal with it yourself first.
Marco:
In practice, I have never had a lease charge me significant extra money.
Marco:
I think I lost a few hundred dollars on one.
Marco:
It was a Tiff's car where a tree branch fell on it, and it wasn't bad enough to get it fixed.
Marco:
It was noticeably dented.
Marco:
It didn't go through the paint, but there was a...
Marco:
noticeable dent in a panel and i think they charged a few hundred dollars but that you know that was fine it would have caused us more than that to get it fixed um so it was it wasn't a big deal and so and i mean obviously my my previous tesla turn-in had had a lot of issues with it uh with that whole thing where they forgot to cancel the lease when i turned it in oh that's right i'd forgotten about that yeah yeah yeah
Marco:
So that – I don't know how – what their normal process is because I know I didn't go through the normal process.
Marco:
So we'll find out because my lease is up in September.
Marco:
But I think I'm going to – when I bring this to the service department to have them give me a new tire, at least one new tire, I'm going to have them also take a look at this and just say like, hey, is this within bounds or not?
Marco:
Because it's some pretty substantial paint scraping going on there.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, you have to redo your fender and your whole front bumper.
Marco:
Yeah, I really hope I don't have to do that.
John:
I mean, someone does, because you can't lease a car in this condition.
Marco:
Yeah, well, we'll see.
Marco:
Anyway, I have even better news, but first...
Marco:
I have terrible server experiences from this week.
Marco:
I have been fighting server stuff, and most of it has gone well, except when I got to this stupid database issue.
Marco:
And I have to now devise a whole new MySQL backup solution in the meantime until Percona releases extra backup 8.0.23 to match MySQL 8.0.23, which is what all the servers came with that I instantiated, and I don't want to have to roll those back.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Even that and even my flat tire are not enough to prevent me from being happy right now because a few days ago, I got a wonderful email from Phobio, Apple's trade-in partner, saying, your trade has been accepted.
Marco:
Here is your gift card.
Marco:
And that gift card was the trade-in value for Tiff's laptop, the last butterfly keyboard in our house.
Wow.
Marco:
it is gone the butterfly keyboard is gone from our house it will never come back into our house and i couldn't be happier and i'm i'm very glad i was not totally sure they would give us the full value of this keyboard or this computer rather because the space bar was dead and it was covered in vinyl stickers that we couldn't quite peel all of them off and so i thought surely there is a high risk of getting that the dreaded email of like we're reducing your value do you accept or not um nope they took it
Marco:
And so the butterfly keyboard is gone.
Marco:
We now have a nice credit to spend on future Apple products for the rest of this year.
Marco:
And I'm so happy to be done with the butterfly keyboard era in our household.
Marco:
And for those of you out there who are not yet done with the butterfly keyboard era in your household...
Marco:
I can assure you that the wait will be worth it.
Marco:
When you are finally done, it is so great to be here.
Marco:
In the meantime, hang in there.
Marco:
You too someday will be done with the butterfly keyboard and it is glorious on the other side of it.
John:
Just make sure your laptop doesn't slash your car's tires on its way out.
Marco:
yeah yeah i kind of i didn't i didn't quite win the uh the luck lottery on that one but you know it's it's fine the butterfly keyboard is gone so when i go to sit in my car for a few hours on friday morning after sitting on a boat for an hour uh so that i can wait for some server's van to come give me the tire of shame so i can actually drive my car i will be typing on my macbook air my favorite computer i've ever had so far with its wonderful non-butterfly keyboard
Casey:
You know, I don't know if I said this on the air.
Casey:
I don't think I did.
Casey:
But there have been a handful of times recently that have been asked, you know, what laptop should I buy?
Casey:
And as we definitely discussed in the past, it's been delightful because I just say a MacBook Air.
Casey:
Like, just max out as much as you can.
Casey:
Get a MacBook Air.
Casey:
What are you doing with it?
Casey:
Don't care.
Casey:
Get a MacBook Air.
Casey:
And a lot of times people will be hemming and hawing between a MacBook Air and a MacBook Pro.
Casey:
And my favorite way to make this whole situation go away is the following.
Casey:
You know, I have a friend who had a $7,000 iMac who traded or who got rid of it in favor for a $1,000 MacBook Air.
Casey:
And maybe that's not 100% true, but that gets the point across...
Marco:
Neither of those prices are right, but it's close enough.
Casey:
You get the idea.
Casey:
You get the idea.
Casey:
But then the problem just goes away.
Casey:
And it is quite nice to not really have to think about it when you not have to be like, well, if, you know, all of that, except in the most, you know, one-off scenarios just completely goes away and it is delightful.
Marco:
Yeah, because we didn't have that for so long.
Marco:
We didn't have an unqualified recommendation of the default computer to recommend was this, and you didn't have to add a bunch of asterisks to it.
Marco:
We didn't have that for probably three or four years.
Marco:
And so now we have that again, and it's wonderful.
Marco:
And really, the last one of those that we had...
Marco:
was the previous MacBook Air, not the 2018 model, but the 2010 through 2015 model.
Marco:
But the retina transition ruined that for the last half of that time.
Marco:
So it really has been a while since we've had that one computer that we could say, you want a new Mac?
Marco:
You probably want X. It's been a long time.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
It's not since the amphibious MacBook Air that we've been able to do that.
Marco:
And this was also a good time to bring up that Apple has discontinued officially my other favorite computer ever, the iMac Pro.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I shouldn't sigh.
Casey:
Like, I shouldn't sigh.
Casey:
It's for the best.
Casey:
But it's sad when the thing that you're actively using to talk to you gentlemen on right this very moment has been put out to pasture.
Casey:
I love this iMac Pro.
Casey:
I am very lucky because I have yet to experience an M1 Mac.
Casey:
And I think once I do, that's going to make me have very uncomfortable feelings about my iMac Pro.
Casey:
But I love this machine.
Casey:
I love the way it looks.
Casey:
I love the way it runs.
Casey:
It's been, by and large, almost foolproof for me.
Casey:
I'm sad to see it go.
Casey:
I really am.
Casey:
It totally makes sense to me why it's going.
Casey:
I don't think it's something we need to discuss very much.
Casey:
modern non-pro iMacs are just as good if not better in some ways and if you really want to set money aflame well okay we can talk about that in a second then but if you really want to set money aflame then you can be absolutely ridiculous and buy a Mac Pro that you don't need hi John anyway so I'm sad to see it go but I totally understand it Marco tell me why I'm wrong should it stay
Marco:
No, I mean, it should be.
Marco:
Ideally, it would have been updated sometime, you know, and and the reason why it's going now does make some sense in that, like they are, I think, really close to releasing, you know, based on the latest rumors, it sounds like the the first Apple Silicon based iMacs are coming out like any day now.
Marco:
So it does seem like it's about to be replaced by something that should be better.
Marco:
But no, the part I disagree with is that the regular iMac is generally better than the iMac Pro now.
Marco:
I disagree with that.
Marco:
It does outperform it in many benchmarks and stuff, but...
Marco:
what made the imac pro so great was that amazing cooling system and the fact that it had like things like ecc ram and all and zeons like all that the high-end pro hardware in a imac case that you know in this in this you know relatively compact uh totally silent uh thing you know until until it got clogged with permit dust and things started filling on the motherboard but before that like
Marco:
I think John Gruber said in his post about the discontinuation, he said that this might be his favorite Intel iMac ever.
Marco:
And I think that's actually a fair characterization.
Marco:
It's hard for me to point to any Intel Mac, like the entire Intel Mac era.
Marco:
Are any other Intel Macs better than the iMac Pro overall?
Marco:
Yeah, the cheese grater.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't think so.
Marco:
No.
Casey:
No, definitely.
Casey:
I can't agree.
John:
That whole lineup.
John:
It's the MacBook Air of the desktops.
John:
It was such a great design for so long.
John:
It had such incredible flexibility.
John:
It could hold host to all so many things, so many different times of upgrades.
John:
It was exactly the promise of a tower-type computer.
John:
And they were actually fairly cheap in sort of their heyday.
John:
You could get one for...
John:
A reasonable amount of money and then just soup it up with aftermarket parts and aftermarket RAM and run it for years.
John:
It was great.
Marco:
See, the reason why I think the Atomic Pro is better.
Marco:
So first of all, when you're judging computers, when you're trying to figure out what's the best one ever, you've got to obviously judge it in the context of its day.
Marco:
And so when you're using the Intel iMac or the Intel Mac era, you know, that's, that's from 2006 until now, basically, or until, you know, November of last year, when, you know, whenever you want to declare that the Intel Mac era is over, you know, 2006 until roughly now.
Marco:
And most of that time, the first Retina Mac was 2012.
Marco:
So most of that time it was Retina and the, the, the cheese grater Mac pro and indeed all Mac pros until the current one never had a good story for Retina.
Marco:
And that makes it hard.
Marco:
And I also, for most context of how you want to balance things like power and heat and size and everything, the cheese graters are huge and loud by comparison to the iMac.
Marco:
They're not loud.
John:
They're less noisy than a non-Pro iMac, that's for sure.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
But by comparison to the iMac Pro, every Mac Pro ever made, except for the trash can, is pretty loud.
Marco:
But you put them onto your desk.
Marco:
They're not on your desk.
Marco:
You don't hear them.
Marco:
Right, but still.
Marco:
Because the Mac Pro is so much larger and bulkier and louder.
John:
But it's a different type of machine.
John:
That's what it's for.
John:
It's the big truck, right?
John:
So you have to judge it in the context of if you wanted a big truck,
John:
The big truck to have was this one, and this was the time to have it because it was back when you could do all your Intel gaming and you had Parrot.
John:
It was like a gaming PC and a Mac for not that much money.
John:
You're not going to convince me.
John:
I love the iMac Pro.
John:
It's great.
John:
It was certainly the best Intel iMac that there's ever been.
John:
But the best I'll give you is a tie with a cheese grater, because that entire line and design just did exactly what it was supposed to do.
John:
Now, I'll grant you, it's for fewer customers.
John:
It's more narrow interest, right?
John:
It is not the mass market thing, although I would argue that the iMac Pro isn't really particularly mass market either.
John:
But if you squint, if you gave someone for free an iMac Pro, they would love it.
John:
If you gave someone for free a Mac Pro, they probably wouldn't, unless they're the type of person who would like a Mac Pro.
Marco:
The iMac Pro is such an amazing generalist.
Marco:
Obviously, it wasn't priced as a generalist, but as a machine, there is almost nobody who had needs that a desktop could solve at all that couldn't be solved by the iMac Pro.
Marco:
It was so good, and it continues to be so good for those out there who are still using them.
John:
You're glossing over your problems with it.
John:
If something goes wrong, you've got to bring the whole thing in, and when it fills with spider eggs, the fan gets noisy.
John:
And that never happened to my ancient, much abused, dented, dust-filled 2008 Mac Pro that just trundled along for 10 years without complaint.
Marco:
Yeah, and I'll give you that.
Marco:
I mean, that's the problem that I've had with every iMac is that it's great for like three years and then something starts getting worse at that point, usually seemingly related to thermals or the screen wearing out.
Marco:
I will give you that, but still, what an amazing machine, and especially one that seemed like it was not part of Apple's long-term plan to create it, and certainly once they did create it, it seemed like it was kind of a bridge product to this next era and to the next iMac Pro, but
Marco:
Man, what a great machine that was.
Marco:
In the same way that it didn't seem like Nintendo thought the Switch was going to be a big deal or Nintendo didn't have a lot of time to make the Switch hardware really fancy.
Marco:
So they used basically the NVIDIA, whatever platform they used, they didn't really customize it that much.
Marco:
That kind of feels like what the iMac Pro was.
Marco:
It seemed like it was kind of a rush job, but they did such an amazing job on it.
Marco:
And what resulted from it
Marco:
was so good that it should be, on some level, possibly kind of frustrating to Apple that...
Marco:
It did seem like it was kind of a bridge product, and it was so much better than what came before or in some ways after.
John:
Well, it wasn't supposed to be a bridge product.
John:
This was supposed to be the Pro Max story before they had a change of heart and decided to continue making towers.
John:
So I think that's why it's so good.
John:
This was supposed to be the flagship, and that before it shipped but after it had been designed and mostly developed...
John:
They said, oh, no, we actually got to make a Mac Pro, and they did that big announcement.
John:
So when this comes out, and it looks like a bridging machine in hindsight when you look at the whole line as it exists today, but I think when it was conceived, it was like, this is why we don't need a Mac Pro anymore.
John:
We're just going to have such an amazing iMac.
John:
And they did have such an amazing iMac, but they miscalculated what their Pro customers want and need and accidentally made an amazing all-in-one computer.
John:
Yeah.
Yeah.
John:
one thing i want to add to this though and the reason why i was in topics is like it's interesting that it's being discontinued rather than doing what they're doing with the intel iMacs because as we all know all these intel Macs are going away like there's there's arm-based iMacs coming out and there's arm-based Macs are going to come out and replace the intel ones right so every intel Mac is essentially quote-unquote discontinued like there's we see the end of the line for all the intel Macs right with the possible exception of the Mac Pro we don't know when that's good what's happening there but probably eventually right
John:
But why the premature announcement?
John:
Is it because they don't want to deal with getting a Xeon stock?
John:
They don't want to deal with the parts of this low-volume thing?
John:
Especially as Marco noted, it's so close, we think, to the iMac introduction.
John:
Why pre-announce this?
John:
Was it so popular they were running out of stock and they didn't want to bother building anymore?
John:
It's kind of weird that of all the computers to sort of pre-announce and say, hey, get them while they last because they're running out and we're not making anymore, that they chose to do the iMac Pro.
Marco:
My best guess is that there was some component of it that they can't get anymore because, you know, it hasn't been updated in three years, three and a half years, whatever it's been.
John:
They can't get such old Xeons anymore.
Marco:
well i mean intel sells zeons forever it probably wasn't zeon but maybe it was like the gpu or some other component like it could be it could be a lot of i mean it could be almost any component in it because at this point like apple's not going to invest in the engineering and testing when you know all the overhead required for any kind of component swap so if any part of that computer that if they can't get it anymore at this point it's yeah they're just going to kill it so that's probably what happens is like some component they can't get anymore
John:
The other thing I was thinking about for this is – we don't know yet, of course, because they haven't announced the ARM iMacs.
John:
But it's an open question of whether – we were talking about this before the ARM transition started.
John:
Will they make an iMac Pro in the ARM era?
John:
There's no reason they can't because, you know, it fills a different role in their line.
John:
It is –
John:
an all-in-one computer with all those trade-offs but you could make an all-in-one computer that has pro-like internals you know ecc ram and a high-end cpu and so on and so forth but now that we've seen what their arm uh hardware looks like i first of all i don't know the answer to this question whether the current r max have ecc ram um i'm pretty sure they don't but i've also i also remember reading stuff about how uh
John:
All of the modern RAM standards, if you squint at them, have a little bit of error correcting baked into them.
John:
But anyway, set aside the ECC RAM for a second.
John:
Does Apple want to introduce a CPU variant that is the desktop CPU variant for the iMac, but a Pro version of that?
John:
Because without that and without some other feature, how do you differentiate an iMac Pro version?
John:
from a plain iMac, and in the ARM era, in the Intel era, it was easy.
John:
You put Xeons in it, and you give it ECC RAM, and you give it much better cooling.
John:
It was very well differentiated, plus it was slightly darker gray.
John:
It had a cooler keyboard, right?
John:
But in the ARM era, thus far, having seen what Apple has put out, it doesn't seem like they want to make a huge variety of different system-on-it-ships, or a huge variety of different
John:
hardware so although apple could of course make a cpu with like more cores or a system you know like they they could pro it up a little bit in the inside of that iMac pro i'm guessing that they're not going to bother doing that but instead say this is the sort of
John:
you know hardware set apple silicon hardware set that defines an iMac and we'll make a lot of iMacs with them and you can get good better best and some part of it will vary probably just storage or whatever maybe they'll come in colors and that's it and we don't have a pro product for you because how would we make it pro especially if it has an integrated gpu that's even higher uh you know bill to say okay we're gonna make a whole new system on a chip just for the iMac pro that like nobody's gonna buy um so
John:
It's sad that the iMac Pro is going away, but I think the result of that will be no ARM iMac Pro, but every ARM-based iMac, kind of like every ARM-based laptop so far and Mac Mini, will be so good that no one will care.
John:
They're going to be faster than the iMac Pro.
John:
The plain iMac is already faster than the iMac Pro.
John:
They're going to be quieter.
John:
Just everything about them is going to be better.
John:
The only possible exception is the iMac Pro.
John:
You could get that with a pretty beefy GPU, and it may be tough for Apple to beat that with an integrated GPU and an iMac unless they really go all in on it.
John:
Because remember, this is the prediction that they're going to make a single system on a chip for the entire iMac line, not a custom one for an iMac Pro with a much bigger GPU.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
But I'm sad.
Casey:
I'm sad that it's going away.
Casey:
But, you know, hey, we don't know what's coming and it could be way, way better.
Casey:
It sure seems to be.
Marco:
I'm only sad in the sense that it was a really, really good product.
Marco:
And I'm sad in a nostalgia, fondness way.
Marco:
Not that I want to buy one right now because, again, we're so close to the replacement.
Marco:
This seems like it would be a terrible time to buy one.
Marco:
But
Marco:
Man, was it good.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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People who have been intimidated by technology before might not even think to do this.
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Tell them to do it themselves at Squarespace to try it.
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Marco:
When you decide to sign up, make sure to head back there, squarespace.com slash ATP, and use offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
That's once again squarespace.com slash ATP, code ATP for 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, let's return to neutral just very briefly.
Casey:
I offended some people with my why buy Audi question from last week, but thankfully I was not besmirching Tesla, so I only offended a handful of people.
Casey:
The only really good answer I heard, and I did hear some decent answers, but the one really good answer I heard from a couple of people...
Casey:
were you buy Audi for all-wheel drive.
Casey:
Because if you look at, say, particularly Volkswagen and to some degree Porsche, most Volkswagens are not all-wheel drive.
Casey:
In fact, you know, outside of the SUVs and maybe a wagon or two, I think that mine is the only one.
Casey:
I might have that wrong.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
But pretty much every Audi is all-wheel drive.
Casey:
And so that is one thing.
Casey:
Also, a bunch of Europeans reminded me of Skoda.
Casey:
And what's the other one that I'm not thinking of?
Casey:
There's one other.
Casey:
That's a Volkswagen Auto Group brand that's even crummier than Volkswagen.
Casey:
I can't think of what it was off the top of my head.
Casey:
But suffice to say, there are things that exist in Europe that don't exist here.
Casey:
And that is also true.
Casey:
And that changes kind of the relative positioning of Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche and so on.
Casey:
But yeah, all-wheel drive.
Casey:
That's a pretty good reason to buy Audi.
Casey:
uh kiss guy kiss guy is real uh this was we were i don't remember how it came up but we were talking about and i think john had brought it up about how the foo fighters had asked a gentleman on stage who was dressed as one of the people from kiss and he played uh the foo fighter song monkey wrench with them
Casey:
And I finally, a few days after we recorded, got the chance to watch that video.
Casey:
And it is absolutely delightful.
Casey:
You should definitely watch it.
Casey:
And we'll put a link to this in the show notes, as well as a kind of behind the scenes, if you will, or an interview anyway with the gentleman who was Kiss Guy.
Casey:
So both of these are worth your time.
Casey:
They were delightful.
John:
Yeah, we didn't have the link to the video in last week's show, so I wanted to include in this one.
John:
And the Kiss Guy's real part is, like, we tweeted about this, and we're going back and forth on Twitter, and a lot of people are like, that's obviously fake.
John:
He was a plant.
John:
That guy was there.
John:
Like, is this set up?
John:
You know, people are so cynical.
John:
But here's a link to this article, which is an interview with the person.
John:
And he says, no, it wasn't a set up.
John:
Yes, I really did come to the show with a sign.
John:
Yes, they really did pull me out of the audience.
John:
Uh, so believe who you want, but I choose to believe this was a actual real spontaneous thing that happened, uh, because someone came to the show, dressed his kiss with the giant side that said, let me play monkey wrench.
John:
Uh, and he did.
John:
That's all it took.
Marco:
You know, and I didn't realize too, this is like a thing that they do.
Marco:
Like the, the, the food fighters do this frequently.
Marco:
And so like that's, it's different when it's like a thing.
Marco:
And so you can go to a show and actually expect that it might happen to you and you can actually prepare and practice the thing that you want to, you know, so that's, I think that actually makes it very plausible.
John:
Right.
John:
And, you know, I mean, this guy was dressed up as Kiss and had a giant sign.
John:
Like if you want to get attention, if you want to be the one who gets pulled off on stage to do the thing, this is a great way to do it.
John:
So I totally believe it's like they don't have to set this up ahead of time and, you know, have their people go out and talk to somebody and give them a seat and say, no, you come here and we'll call on you.
John:
Like that's there's no point to doing that.
John:
Right.
John:
So I believe I believe Kiss Guy is real.
Casey:
all right uh let's see here what else is next we've got ben packard writing us uh with regard to swift quote-unquote header files um it is let me get this right it's control command up and if that is out of order i apologize i'm reading from the show notes
Casey:
Control command up and control command down to toggle a Swift file's header view in Xcode, which is in the menuing system as the oh-so-obvious navigate menu.
Casey:
Okay, fine so far.
Casey:
Jumped to next slash previous counterpart.
John:
Okay.
John:
It's the counterpart file.
John:
Like we were saying, going between the .m and the .h in Objective-C.
John:
So that makes some kind of sense.
John:
Of course, when you do this, you aren't traveling from one file to the other.
John:
What you are doing is taking the file that you're editing, which is a .swift file, and...
John:
And changing into a read-only view that only shows you essentially like what you would see in a header file, just the signatures of the, I guess it's the public functions.
John:
Maybe it's just some of the functions.
John:
Anyway, the odd thing about this is it's not command control up and down arrow to toggle.
John:
And like command control up arrow is like jump to one.
John:
It's one of the is either next to previous jump to previous counterpart and the opposite direction is jump to next counterpart.
John:
You can just continually hit one of those commands.
John:
Command control up, up, up, up, up, up.
John:
And as you hit up, it just goes back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.
John:
But they are both toggles for each other is very strange, very strange adaptation of those.
John:
keyboard shortcuts so you don't have to like look at what mode you're in and hit in the opposite direction just any of the any either one of those keystrokes will toggle it to the opposite of what it's currently in and there's a delay when you toggle it too so like it's is it like compiling it to extract the metadata to find out the signatures
John:
I'm assuming it caches it after the first time or whatever, but there it is.
John:
Somewhat hidden feature of Xcode.
John:
Indeed.
Casey:
I don't remember exactly where in the flow this happened, and maybe I made it up in a fugue state, but I could swear, and I was trying to repeat it a moment ago, and I can't prove to myself where it was, but I could swear at some point when I was doing the Commonwealth of Virginia's vaccination pre-request whatever thing,
Casey:
which happens to be at vaccinate.virginia.gov.
Casey:
At one point during that process, you know how I logged in, Marco?
Marco:
Passwordless login with an email link?
Casey:
That's exactly right.
Marco:
Yay!
Casey:
I don't really have much to say about it other than that, but I thought at least Marco would be amused, and I thought I would hear at least a grunt of disappointment from John, but I only got half of that, so you can't win them all.
John:
I was on mute, but I do disapprove.
John:
There we go.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So moving right along, we have a very interesting entry in the show notes entitled families, colon, how do they work?
Casey:
Question mark.
Casey:
I would assume like magnets.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
How do they work?
Marco:
I'm a little worried.
Marco:
Is this about to become a sex ed podcast or like a marriage counseling podcast?
Marco:
Neither one.
Marco:
Lucky you.
John:
Yeah, it's going to what it's going to become is picture it.
John:
Sicily, March 11th, 2011.
John:
Yeah, this is the when you're hearing this, if you hear it on day release, it's possible that you were hearing this on exactly the 10 year anniversary of a podcast episode I did called No I Life is an Island.
John:
in which I complained that Apple didn't understand how families work, as in families have multiple people who may take photos, but the photos, some of those photos, a subset of those photos, belong to the family and not the individual person.
John:
That's why in the days before digital photography, you would have family photo albums and not mom's photo album and dad's photo album and the son's photo album and the daughter's photo album.
John:
You would just have a family photo album.
John:
And many other things related to that.
John:
The idea that the iLife Suite at that time had the idea that you were an individual person who lived by yourself and had your own silo of things.
John:
And if you were in a family, every single person had their own things.
John:
And it was frustrating then.
John:
And here we are 10 years later, and I thought it would be a chance to revisit this topic.
John:
Now, in June of 2014, a mere three years after that episode,
John:
Apple rolled out their family thing, family sharing or whatever, where you can build a little family in iCloud and say, what is it, the organizer?
John:
I'm the family organizer, and here are the adults in the family, and here are the children in the family, and so I can form a little family.
John:
And I remember being optimistic.
John:
A mere three years after complaining about something on a podcast, Apple has taken action to lay the groundwork to solve this problem one time for all because now it understands my family and it knows the people belong to it.
John:
Now it's only a matter of just updating all the relevant programs.
John:
to also understand families and allow them to have a relationship with each other with respect to their, you know, iCloud data.
John:
They did a little bit of that, like with purchases, where one person can purchase a thing and the other people can see that person's purchases.
John:
And fast forward to 2021, they did sharing of an app purchases as well.
John:
But in general, that's been all the progress that they've made.
John:
They set up families and they did purchase sharing and a bunch of other integrations, but they didn't really do it where it counts, which is the actual data.
John:
Even something as simple as context, which we've been talking about a little bit recently.
John:
It's a tiny amount of data.
John:
And again, in the pre-digital days, very often a household would have an address book that had the names and phone numbers of everybody that the family knew.
John:
Granted, children could have their own address books with the names and phone numbers of their friends, but there was still a family address book.
John:
And so when grandma moved, you didn't have to update it in every single person's thing because grandma's address and phone number was only in the family address book, right?
John:
So the concept of having a family that shares some subset of data amongst themselves while also having their own private data
John:
A great place to try that out would have been on contacts.
John:
But of course, the big one is photos.
John:
Photos continue to be a thorn to everyone's side.
John:
We talk about Ask ATP, we get questions, repeated questions, and sometimes we answer them like once a year just to get them out there.
John:
We are constantly being asked, hey, how do you guys deal with photos in your family?
John:
Because...
John:
I have photos in my photo library.
John:
My wife has photos in her photo library.
John:
And how do they, you know, how do you deal with sharing them?
John:
Do you have one photo library?
John:
Do you have a third Apple ID?
John:
It doesn't belong to either person that you both sign into.
John:
Do you have an Apple store ID, even though there's family sharing and purchases?
John:
What do you do?
John:
What's the solution?
John:
How should I do this?
John:
And it's a, you know, it's a disappointing question to get because kind of like the laptop situation used to be, we don't have a good answer.
John:
There's no good solution for this.
John:
And we always say, well, this is a problem that Apple has to solve.
John:
I used to say it optimistically, like, well, they just rolled out family sharing and probably maybe in the next, you know, few years they'll roll out new versions of their apps that will support family sharing in a sophisticated way.
John:
Nope, hasn't happened.
John:
So...
John:
Here we are, 10 years later to the day, still no progress on one of the biggest remaining sort of fundamentally annoying things about being an ideal Apple customer.
John:
You've got a family, you buy all sorts of Apple junk, you sign up for all the services, and you just want to have like a normal, smooth business.
John:
lifestyle and workflow with apple stuff and so much of it works well you know multiple user support on macs people being able to log into them all the new the new macs and the laptops purchase sharing even media sharing uh managing what apps your kids buy stuff like that but the family photo library and the family collection of contacts
John:
just i mean contacts is more minor because i've just given up and i say my wife's is the canonical contact thing wanting to look up someone's info i go to her address book but again the volume of data is small it's not a big deal but photos it is just such a pain and to celebrate 10 years photos on my mac has decided that my previous technique this is what i was doing and i do not recommend this because it's terrible but my previous technique is i would take pictures on my phone and then i would plug connect my phone with a usb cable to a mac that's logged in as my wife
John:
and manually import from my phone via usb photos into her photo library periodically this is like a casey workflow it's like oh i just gotta remember every once in a while every once in a while i gotta do this thing well to celebrate 10 years photos said you know what that's not gonna work anymore what happens now is i plug in my phone and it thinks for a really long time because it because the photos app on the mac latest version of everything the photos version and latest version of ios latest version of mac os the photos app is like hmm
John:
Seems like you've imported a lot of these photos already.
John:
So I have to sort these in the UI to say, okay, here's all the ones you imported before.
John:
And then here's photos that haven't yet been imported.
John:
First of all, I don't need to do this at all.
John:
If it just gave me a reverse chronological list of photos, I would just scroll a little bit and select the ones that I wanted to be imported.
John:
Second of all, I intentionally don't import all of them.
John:
If there's like a screenshot or some random photo that I don't want in the photo library, I don't import it.
John:
Right, exactly.
John:
Or my toe pictures.
Marco:
That's not going on this show.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, sir.
John:
i don't import those what that means is that from that point on i'm going to continue to see those photos presented to me as hey do you want to import these because you haven't imported them before right but recently all this broke down and now i just get kind of like a a grid of blank thumbnails if i scroll too quickly sometimes photos will crash sometimes it will just stop filling in thumbnails like and i'll just have a bunch of blank thumbnails and now i don't know which ones to select to import because it's just a giant grid of blank thumbnails that will never fill in
John:
This, by the way, is after you get past the first mini boss, which is when you plug in your phone with photos, it says, please unlock your phone to allow photos to access the pictures on your phone.
John:
Like it tells you to unlock your phone.
John:
Like there's a prompt on the screen that says, please unlock your phone.
John:
And if you follow this instruction, say, okay, you pick up your phone, which is plugged in with a USB cable.
John:
You swipe up your face ID.
John:
It's unlocked.
John:
Put the phone down.
John:
Photos will continue to have on its screen a giant window that says, please unlock your phone.
John:
no progress indicator no nothing just says please unlock your phone it's like but i just did unlock my phone what do you want me to do and that will stay there for 30 seconds a minute two minutes until eventually it goes okay i'm gonna starting to load your thumbnails right it's the worst ui ever but if you if you get past that and you know that it's just lying to you and you really did unlock your phone and just be patient eventually it will start filling your screen with uh empty uh thumbnails that don't show anything just totally blank gray rectangles
John:
So what I've taken to doing now is I use image capture, which still does work and shows me a reverse chronological list of photos and has no awareness of which ones I've imported.
John:
And I manually import photos into a folder with image capture.
John:
This is sounding more and more like Casey, isn't it?
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
And then I drag those photos from the folder onto the photos app.
John:
Again, this is all on my wife's account.
John:
And then import them into the photo library.
John:
And that, as far as I can tell, is a lossless way to get them in.
John:
But it's a super pain in the butt.
John:
Happy 10-year anniversary.
Casey:
That is utterly preposterous.
Casey:
A couple of quick observations.
Casey:
First of all, you know, it's a kind of uncomfortable feeling that a KC workflow is indicative of something being just unbelievably wrong, which I can't really fault you for that analogy.
John:
Just specifically about photos.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe your other workflows are fine.
Casey:
uh-huh uh and that's only that's the second time in like 48 hours i've heard some sort of reference like that because you know we're doing a little bit of work on the house and we had an electrician come out and visit it and he was explaining that he was probably going to do the work for our house on saturday because that's when he does his special projects and i never got a clear read from him even after asking him directly does that mean we're just really important to you or that more there is our project that jacked up and i'm not really sure
Marco:
Sounds like you're really unimportant.
Casey:
I'm not even sure.
John:
But nevertheless, like special teams and football, like you're football players technically, but you're the kickers.
Casey:
Yeah, right, right.
Casey:
I don't even know.
Marco:
But now we're going to hear from all the kickers.
Casey:
Yeah, it's so true.
Casey:
I don't think we will.
Casey:
Well, we'll see.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I can't believe I remember this episode.
Casey:
I cannot believe it has been literally a decade.
Casey:
And
Casey:
You know, this is one of those times, and I feel like I've made a similar speech a few times in the last few months, but as a consumer and user of Apple products, how is this not fixed already?
Casey:
How is this still a thing 10 years on?
Casey:
I mean, my son, my eldest child, is six and a half.
Casey:
this problem has been going on almost four years longer than he's been alive.
Casey:
Like it's, it's, and I know that doesn't really, it's not a great metric for anyone but me, but it's a pretty startling metric for me.
Casey:
And on the one side, I feel like, how is this possible?
Casey:
You are one of the biggest companies in the world.
Casey:
Your job is to fix things like this.
Casey:
That is why you exist.
Casey:
That is what you're here for.
Casey:
You don't get to take shortcuts like me or Marco or John do.
Casey:
You don't get to do the easy way out like me or Marco or John sometimes do.
Casey:
What you get to do as an Apple employee is do the hard thing, like always.
Casey:
That's what you do.
Casey:
And I can't believe that 10 years on...
Casey:
This isn't solved.
Casey:
Now, the flip side of that, however, is, A, this is an impossibly difficult problem.
Casey:
Well, not impossibly difficult, but a very difficult problem.
Casey:
A very difficult problem.
Casey:
And I don't envy the people who are surely working, well, maybe working right now trying to fix it.
Casey:
And it's challenging.
Casey:
And this is why software is hard.
Casey:
And this is why software is difficult.
Casey:
And shoot, I think it was on Dubai Friday, maybe on the after show that Merlin was describing, if I recall correctly, describing all the what ifs and gotchas involved with some piece of, I think, home automation software.
Casey:
Or maybe it was control plane with you on rec diffs.
Casey:
I don't remember where it was, but he was he was backing into in a way that I've never heard someone who doesn't write software for a living able to describe it like something that sounds easy.
Casey:
is actually really freaking hard.
Casey:
And this is something that sounds hard, so imagine how hard it would be.
Casey:
And the funny thing is, I almost wonder if we're better off this way, because as much as I love Apple, server-side stuff is not off in their strong suit.
Casey:
And the idea of them conquering something like this kind of scares me a little bit.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Maybe I'm just – maybe I'm ye of little faith.
John:
My recollection of the discussion of this back in 2011 was that I recognized that it's a hard problem, starting with just like the policy decisions you have to make.
John:
Forget about actually implementing it or whatever.
John:
Just saying like how should it work is actually a fairly complicated question.
John:
Because the way I described it, like you do want to have a family photo album, but you also want to allow people to have photos of their own.
John:
So how do you even present that interface?
John:
Right.
John:
And then comes the implementation.
John:
And this was back before Apple was as good as they are today with dealing with photos, period.
John:
So I recognize that it's a hard problem.
John:
I didn't expect them to solve this problem immediately.
John:
Again, I said I was optimistic when three years later they just introduced the concept of families because that's a prerequisite for dealing with this, having formally baked in, built in, supported concept of a family of Apple IDs, right?
John:
And they did that and it was three years later and I was optimistic.
John:
So I wasn't expecting them to come around the next year and fix this or even in five years and fix it.
John:
But in 10 years, if you told me in 2011, in 10 years, they won't even have taken a swing at this.
John:
I would be like, 10 years?
John:
Like, that's the thing about hard problems.
John:
I don't expect them to be fixed quickly.
John:
I know it's going to be hard.
John:
But I also like Casey was getting at.
John:
It's not like a mysterious problem that no one ever had.
John:
That's why we get asked this question all the time.
John:
We will always get asked this question on this program.
John:
It will be like it's some baseline percentage of ask ATP is people asking this exact question in one way or another, because everybody who is in any kind of family arrangement has the same situation.
John:
we all and especially now that all the kids have phones and stuff we all take pictures but a lot of those pictures if you're on a family vacation are family photos and dealing with that being like i just want to look at the family photos and having people send you photos and airdrop them and send them and people like take screenshots of photos and give them each other like with the quality loss and the metadata loss going into that and just the general hassle and not keeping track of who has what photos where and where was that photo and
John:
it's a problem that is not going away and it is not a mysterious unforeseen problem granted you don't fix it in your version one like version one maybe you do simple let's just do photo libraries and internet-enabled photo libraries right and then let's introduce families they just need to take the next step and casey's casey's doubt about whether they're working on this like i remember saying the same thing probably on this episode like surely someone in apple is working on this or at least thinking about it but it's going to take a while
John:
I really hope that's true.
John:
I really hope someone is working on it and thinking about it and they haven't just given up or convinced themselves that, you know what?
John:
One photo library per Apple ID is fine.
John:
This is not a problem that needs to be solved.
John:
People will just stop complaining about it.
John:
And I don't think it's like...
John:
a terrible problem like the butterfly keyboard or something that needs to be addressed immediately and like you know something that'll get written about in a mainstream uh i was gonna hit a newspaper or whatever like in the mainstream press will catch on to this it's just a minor annoyance that anybody who wants to sort of get a handle on their digital life will inevitably come to some point and say this part is annoying this whole thing with the photo libraries and who has what photo that part is annoying
John:
Maybe they'll never get there in contacts, although arguably I have the same complaint of like, you know, if you have friends of the family, it's a pain to have their contact information in various versions in various individual people's contacts rather than shared in some way.
John:
But I just think it's they it needs to be addressed.
John:
Google tried to address it with their like you can mark these photos to be shared.
John:
with other people in your family, their solution isn't great, but at least they did something.
John:
At least they tried something.
John:
And, you know, if Google cared about this at all, they could make a second cut and a third cut or whatever.
John:
That's not the Google way.
John:
They'll just eventually cancel the product or whatever.
John:
But Apple, of all companies...
John:
I think they are well positioned to solve this problem.
John:
I just want them to do it.
John:
So I guess we'll meet back here in 10 years from now and see if they did.
Casey:
I would like to hope and think that the three of us will still be lucky enough to be doing this in 10 years.
Casey:
Can you imagine if in literally 10 years...
Casey:
we will all still be in the same position.
Casey:
Like, can you imagine what that conversation will be like?
Casey:
Oh my gosh.
John:
I'm going to put it in my calendar right now because that's why this, I put this in my calendar probably around 2014.
John:
And now I'm going to put the 10 year anniversary in my calendar now for us to revisit this.
John:
It's probably going to sound a lot like this.
Casey:
I hope not.
Casey:
Golly, I hope not.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Well, the good news is you can do something about it.
Casey:
And what you can do is you can move from Apple Photos or whatever it's called, Photos in the Cloud.
Casey:
I don't even know what it's called anymore.
Marco:
iCloud Photo Library is what you're looking for.
Casey:
Yep, thank you.
Casey:
You can move from iCloud Photo Library to Google Photos because Apple will let you do it now.
Casey:
Maybe this is how they fixed it.
Casey:
They'll just tell people who whine about this, oh, go to Google Photos.
Casey:
It's great.
John:
I mean, so this this is interesting.
John:
It may be GDPR related.
John:
Right.
John:
Why does Apple ever do anything like this?
John:
Lots of companies that have tried to be good service citizens have at various times had abilities for you to export your data in a nice format.
John:
Google has an entire what is it called?
John:
Google takeout.
John:
Like an entire section of their website that's like, here's all the data Google has about you, and here are ways you can dump it out.
John:
And Google did this long before they were required to by law, as far as I know.
John:
It was back when Google's motto was don't be evil, and they actually did things that were trying not to be evil.
Casey:
Man, remember that?
Casey:
Those were the days.
John:
There were always a lot of asterisks on that, though.
John:
True, but the people who believed it were working at the company and making decisions about products.
John:
And so you'd come out with stuff.
John:
I remember when it first came out, I was like, oh, this doesn't help Apple.
John:
It doesn't help Google competitively at all.
John:
They just did it because it's the right thing to do.
John:
you know you can here's your data you can get it out in a non-proprietary format and then do with it what you want same i mean they obviously did it the other way with uh importing as well i think i got all my email into gmail by like importing in an mbox format or something i exported it from uh what clara's email or whatever the hell i was using then in mbox format and then pronounced mbox rhymes with mbob you know
John:
But I've always appreciated their export.
John:
In fact, speaking of calendar events, I have an annual calendar event that reminds me to dump all of my Gmail email to my local file system.
John:
If and when Google unceremoniously cancels my entire Google account for some reason that I can't appeal or talk to a human about, I will at least have all of my email for all history up to on average six months before that happened.
John:
um and i also do i also do a pop of gmail down to my local thing in a local email client although i think uh outlook is taking away pop support so i have to switch to apple mail which is its own can of worms anyway export um twitter does the same thing you can get if you don't know this and you care about this at all you can dump all of your own tweets
John:
uh in a very cool sort of local html and javascript uh version to you know as a big zip file that has expanded to a bunch of files and i do that periodically dump all my tweets just because that's the thing i care about and i like that companies uh provide me a way to do that this i think is the first time i've seen apple do anything close to that it does as far as i know it doesn't give you a dump locally it can only send to let me look at this i can only send to google photos they they say it's a you know
John:
uh, requests to transfer a copy of iCloud photos to another service, but another service means Google photos right now.
John:
Um, I looked at this because as we've discussed in past episodes, I do Google photos is my backup, backup, backup, backup service.
John:
Uh,
John:
I have the Google backup and sync thing shoving all of my photos into Google Photos.
John:
The backup and sync application is terrible and does a bad job, and I'm pretty sure it misses photos, but it's better than nothing.
John:
um and so i just run that continuously and it's like my fifth level backup of my photos in case everything else fails uh i will still have 90 of my photos in some form or another in google photos and i pay for all that storage and all that other stuff so i looked at this and said okay well here is this has got to be better supported than what i'm doing now because it's apple doing the transfer and it's like an offline thing and they'll do it over the course of several days and
John:
preserve as much in the metadata as they can i hope and you know because they're apple they know about their photo library format right but as far as i can tell having not tried this this is a thing where they will take all your photos and put them into google photos and that's it and then they just sit there right and so then if you want to do that again they say oh do you want us to export all your photos again and put them into google photos well no apple actually i don't i want you to just put in the photos that are that have been that have been added or modified since the last time you did it and they're like no that's not what this is about
John:
This is like we take your whole photo library and put it in Google Photos.
John:
You've misinterpreted our relationship.
John:
Right.
John:
And it's like I don't.
John:
And after that, that's it.
John:
Right.
John:
And so in theory, I could transfer all my photos into Google Photos and then every year first delete all my photos from Google Photos somehow.
John:
And then do the transfer again, right?
John:
But that's much more cumbersome, especially since the transfer takes several days or whatever.
John:
Much more cumbersome and will protect far fewer photos than my current cruddy Google backup and sync thing.
John:
So...
John:
I'm glad Apple is doing this thing.
John:
Uh, it's a good way if you go with Apple photos and you get frustrated and just like decide you're never going to do anything with Apple again, it is an escape hatch for your photos.
John:
You can send them to another service.
John:
Hope you like Google cause that's your only choice.
John:
Um,
John:
There are other escape hatches.
John:
If you have any Mac that has a local copy of all your photos, and you should have at least one Mac that has a local copy of all your photos, you can, of course, export all of them, you know, export unmodified originals, right, to another disk or something.
John:
Like, there's other ways to get your photos out.
John:
They don't like your photos are trapped, but I presume that this transfer service will try to preserve as much of the...
John:
as much of the original quality and information about your photos as it can what i really care about and the reason i'm really stuck with apple photos is all the photos i care about have edits i don't think there's a single photo that i have you know made a favorite or whatever that doesn't have some kind of edits to it
John:
And if you gave me all my originals back, it would be like, okay, I hope you enjoy doing 10 to 15 years worth of edits over again.
John:
Hope you remember what those were.
John:
And I don't.
John:
And I don't want to do 10 to 15 years worth of edits.
John:
And I also don't want to bake in my edits like Casey does because I'm not a monster.
John:
So I do like having my photos in Apple Photos because Apple preserves my originals while maintaining my
John:
all my metadata, all my face recognition, all my tags, and yes, all of my edits.
John:
So I'm not going to use this service even to make a backup, but I would be super excited if Apple ever enhanced this service to sort of do incremental backups or periodic dumps or something like that.
John:
But I'm not holding my breath.
John:
And honestly, they should do the family stuff first.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm a little more cynical about the motivation for this.
Marco:
I mean, I think they're clearly right now in a time where they're under a pretty significant and seemingly rapidly increasing amount of regulatory and antitrust pressure and possibly legal pressure from competitors as well.
Marco:
So I think a lot of the moves that we're seeing Apple make recently that seem kind of like, huh, I never thought they would do that or that's a little odd.
Marco:
Why did they do that?
Marco:
I bet a lot of it is like they are trying to dodge some kind of regulatory problem or legal problem they see coming down the pipe.
Marco:
And in this case, you know, Apple Photos or iCloud Photo Library is part of, you know, Apple's possible monopoly risk in the sense that it has way better integration with the iPhone than anything else can.
Marco:
And so it is kind of part of their like, you know,
Marco:
unfair advantage moat that competitors could have a problem with and so maybe this is just like something else they can put out there that didn't take them a lot of time or effort probably that they can you know they don't have to really radically change the way they do anything or really take any significant risks by doing stuff like this but it can relieve a little bit of pressure that's building up somewhere in that you know antitrust area
John:
i feel like the thing about the service is i it's probably expensive for apple to do and they're only saved by the fact that no one is going to do this because it is obscure like there's no big shiny gooey button to do it like in photos like it's not an obvious thing people who don't listen to tech podcasts or read apple news probably don't even know that it exists and will have to be told that it exists by someone at an apple store or or a tech nerd friend or something right
John:
Because to do this, what they're probably doing behind the scenes is running a big batch job in one of their data centers that calls the Google Photos API that reads photos from where Apple keeps them in their cloud storage and writes them through Google's public APIs that they expose to the Google Photos service to your Google Photos account, which means they have to allocate computing resources for multiple days for each individual customer.
John:
And then they have to do all the data transfer from wherever the data is being stored.
John:
So they're reading from their own storage and then writing over the wire, over the network into Google's thing.
John:
And I don't know if Google is charging per API call, but probably something like that.
John:
It's not like I don't think Google is giving this all away for free for just to do a single person's photo library is a non-trivial amount of money that Apple is spending on Google.
John:
you know but somebody's data centers or you know even it's just electricity and cooling right it is way out of proportion to the normal stuff that you get for apple essentially for free so yeah this definitely does read like a thing that we either have to do for regulatory reasons or that we want to be able to say that we offer but please don't do this like if if any if like 50 of apple's customers did this they would lose a ton of money not to mention you know losing all the photos
John:
and you know i'm sure google would be happy to have a bunch of more people's photos to analyze or whatever so yeah it's it's a weird feature it every like you were saying marco everything they do whether it really is motivated by the current political climate or not it's just you view it through that lens if it's any if it's in any way uh you know relevant to that if it any way helps or hurts them you just immediately view it through that lens and the the timing of all these things is so coincidental that you have to believe there's some motivation here but but like
John:
They had someone had to write this someone had to code up this whole batching system and a way of initiating it.
John:
And I can't think of anything else that you can do from Apple that you can initiate and then they will run a batch job for you and tell you several days later that it has completed.
John:
like there's nothing else like that uh app reviews kind of like that yeah i suppose but but they're like they're the whole point is most of the time they're not doing anything for you you're in a queue then they pop you out of the queue and you get your review but this is just like the whole time that you're waiting presumably that you're not in a queue they're just you know grinding away because if you have you know hundreds of thousands of photos uh it's going to take a while
Casey:
You know, I would like to challenge something you said a little while ago.
Casey:
I don't know that Google would charge Apple for this because if you think about it, Google is almost certainly taking on a customer at this point.
Casey:
So why wouldn't they, you know, welcome Apple with open arms and all of this customer's data?
Casey:
And of course, bring that to Google Photos because we're going to charge them soon.
Casey:
Works for us.
John:
I don't know what Google's business model is.
John:
Normally, you want to have API limits, and the customer here is not the individual.
John:
Well, I guess it is.
John:
They're authenticating as an individual.
John:
But Apple potentially could send a lot of API requests to Google if any non-trueal number of people did this.
John:
And then Google will throttle them, and then Apple can't do your thing within this promised seven days or whatever.
John:
And then maybe money has to change hands.
John:
But yeah, in general, cloud providers like S3 or whatever will make it very easy to get data into S3.
John:
but much more expensive to get it out again.
John:
So it's not that they don't charge you at all, because sometimes we won't charge you for data transfer in, but we'll charge you per API call a tiny amount for each thing.
John:
And like I said, that's for individual customers to AWS, right?
John:
For Apple and Google, the relationship between their two data centers and what kind of deal they work out, who knows?
John:
I don't know if any money changed hands here.
John:
There's any kind of agreement, but I think there has to be some kind of discussion because
John:
It would be pretty surprising for Google just to wake up one day and, you know, say a tiny, tiny fraction of a percentage start doing this, even just out of curiosity, like I almost did it.
John:
That's going to show up on Google's radar of like, whoa, what what's going on here?
John:
Suddenly there's a huge spike in API calls to our Google Photos API and these giant batches.
John:
And they're all coming from this one Apple data center.
John:
And then, you know, I feel like they would they would have a discussion before this rather than just surprise Google.
John:
But who knows?
John:
Stranger things have happened.
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So a few weeks ago, almost a month ago now, it was announced, I guess, that Apple was cracking down on apps with, quote, irrationally high prices, quote, as App Store scams are exposed.
Casey:
And so Apple said that in a very Apple-y way, customers expect the App Store to be a safe and trusted marketplace for purchasing digital goods.
Casey:
apps should never betray this trust by attempting to rip off or cheat users in any way unfortunately the prices you've selected for your app oh i'm sorry this is uh in the case of you charging a thousand dollars for a fart app uh the prices you've selected for your app or in-app purchase products in your app do not reflect the value of the features and content offered to the user charging irrationally high prices for content or services with limited value is a ripoff to customers and is not appropriate for the app store and then they give you you know different resolution steps
Casey:
The next submission of this app may require a longer review time, and it won't be eligible for an expedited review until this issue is resolved.
Casey:
Thank you, but please get off my lawn.
Casey:
Love, Apple.
Casey:
I mean, I don't know that there's that much to say about this other than finally.
Casey:
I mean, this seems completely reasonable to me.
Casey:
And I was thinking about this a little bit earlier.
Casey:
If Apple wants to have this like walled garden, there's no side loading.
Casey:
We are the only way.
Casey:
This is the way to get on the phone.
Casey:
I mean, in and of itself, I don't have an extreme problem with that, although that's kind of a discussion for another day.
Casey:
But if you're going to do that, if you're going to cultivate this walled garden, it better have some pretty flowers in it and it better not be full of weeds.
Casey:
And so if this is Apple finally weeding,
Casey:
then okay, cool.
Casey:
Let's get these weeds and all the other weeds that are there because there's a lot of them.
Casey:
And this analogy is getting beat to death.
Casey:
But nevertheless, you get the idea is that there's so much garbage and just nasty stuff in the app store that's maybe not nasty in the sense of inappropriate content, but just it's nasty in the sense that it's like a bait and switch.
Casey:
And it's just gross.
Casey:
And so why not clean this up?
Casey:
And you know what?
Marco:
You know, I hope this is actually some kind of ongoing thing, but I think, again, this is important to look at the context that surrounded the timing of this.
Marco:
When this came out about a month ago, this was right around the time when there was a lot of, like, Twitter storms coming up about scam apps in the App Store, and a lot of people were shining a lot of light on just how prevalent...
Marco:
scam apps have become especially in regards to using usually weekly subscription billing to seemingly trick people into paying absurd prices like you know ten dollars a week for an app that has like you know one screen and does a really simple thing you know stuff like that where you end up like if you do the math it's like wow this is like four hundred dollars a year for this really simple app that does one very basic thing if it even does that at all um and so and it has seemed for so long
Marco:
that no one's job at Apple seems to be to monitor the top-grossing apps or the top apps on the top charts for scammy apps.
Marco:
And maybe this is someone's job, but it doesn't look like that.
Marco:
From the outside, you see apps climb those charts all the time that are obvious scams.
Marco:
And they stay there until someone says something, usually.
Marco:
And so anyway, so what was happening last month was there were a bunch of people on Twitter who were really shining lights on this and calling attention to, in particular, specific scam apps that had been there for a long time.
Marco:
And then when they made a stink on Twitter, a day later or a few hours later, they'd be taken down.
Marco:
And again, these are apps that had been there for months or weeks beforehand.
Marco:
So it does seem like, as usual, Apple has...
Marco:
not seemingly been running the app store with the kind of resources it actually needs to be good or not prioritizing or not caring about those things enough but then also we know how apple works when a light is shown on something that is unpleasant to them or makes them look bad
Marco:
they do fix it like running to the press always helps right like they always respond to negative press oftentimes that is the kick in the butt they need to do something that they should have done a while ago or that is obvious but that they just didn't care enough before to prioritize it or to give it resources to to to get done and so it does seem like in the context of when this was raised they
Marco:
That was during a storm of bad press about App Store scams, in particular around scammy pricing and scammy subscription price apps.
Marco:
And so in that context, I think this could have just been them reacting to that in a quick Band-Aid kind of way.
Marco:
I hope that's not it.
Marco:
I hope they're actually devoting significant resources to making the App Store seem less like a crappy, scam-filled flea market.
Marco:
Because it has needed that for almost its entire life, if not its entire life.
Marco:
The App Store, Casey's right, the amount of curation that Apple says they're doing, which again...
Marco:
go back to antitrust pressure.
Marco:
Apple is trying to project the image to regulators and governments that they are protecting users from scams and stuff like that.
Marco:
And that's why they need to maintain their incredibly rigid hold on the gatekeeper status they have over the app store and ripping off 30% off of all of our money while they're at it.
Marco:
Apple needs to defend this image because they make a lot of money from this image, from the gatekeeper role that they have
Marco:
that this image is their defense to current and future government probes about whether they should be allowed to keep this control.
Marco:
So if the App Store is obviously filled with scam apps, and anybody who looks at it can instantly find scam apps in the App Store, that weakens Apple's argument to these regulators that are putting increasing pressure on them again.
Marco:
That weakens their argument that they need to be in control of this to protect us, I guess.
Marco:
So again, looking at it in context,
Marco:
this this is not something apple's doing out of the goodness of their heart this is something that they're doing because they got bad press about it and because their app store monopoly is likely to be continuing to be threatened by regulation and so they need to make sure their argument is actually you know visibly apparent that like yes they actually are keeping this a safe place and
Marco:
This walled garden, it has seemingly been about as safe as Central Park in the 80s.
Marco:
It's not a great walled garden for skimming people out of their money.
Marco:
And honestly...
Marco:
most of app store pricing pre in-app purchase and specifically pre subscription options was fairly straightforward we didn't have a lot of pricing scams besides just like paid up front apps or in-app purchases that then like wouldn't work the way they want but that's a lot easier for app store for app review to catch but
Marco:
The biggest root of this problem seems to be specifically subscription billing apps and specifically apps that try to mislead people into starting subscriptions with either free trials or just weekly prices or both because those both kind of like bury and obfuscate the true cost of something to people.
Marco:
And this is something that Apple can totally fix.
Marco:
I think there are two very obvious things they could do here that for some reason they haven't.
Marco:
Number one, I said this on Twitter, I'll say it again, I think they should eliminate weekly billing as an option.
Marco:
Because while there are some legitimate uses for that, like people say newspapers are a common one, and I'm pretty sure that's why it's there.
Marco:
I think it's there basically for the New York Times.
Marco:
If they even still use it, I don't know off the top of my head.
Marco:
But most things people pay for
Marco:
on an ongoing basis, are not paid weekly.
Marco:
Most things that you pay for on an ongoing basis are paid monthly.
Marco:
And most legitimate subscription apps don't charge you weekly.
Marco:
They charge you either monthly or annually.
Marco:
Weekly seems to only be used by a handful of important publications and every single price scammer on the App Store.
Marco:
And so I have to imagine...
Marco:
That pro to con ratio on weekly billing is really poor.
Marco:
It's really not good.
Marco:
And if they got rid of weekly billing, that would prevent so many scam apps from scamming so many people out of so much money because it would make the pricing terms much more clear to people.
Marco:
And then secondly, as many people on Twitter have pointed out, the design of the in-app purchase confirmation screen is not great.
Marco:
Everything's just like small and illegible, and it doesn't call attention to the price very well.
Marco:
It spends a lot of screen real estate on emptiness or on BS text.
Marco:
It also shoves into the app the responsibility of a lot of disclosure of things like, what are you buying?
Marco:
Most of that is left up to the app and is enforced by app review.
Marco:
Of course, that means it's selectively and inconsistently enforced.
Marco:
Much of that should be moved into the design of the purchase screen.
Marco:
That could significantly cut down on the problems that in-app purchase scams create and what they can do, how many people get fooled, etc.
Marco:
And why Apple hasn't modernized the in-app purchase screen for subscriptions, I don't know.
Marco:
I can only leave it up to a combination of the Allendai software design era of...
Marco:
not caring about legibility and clarity for people and instead caring about minimalism.
Marco:
And combined with the seeming like moving mountains effort that it takes to change anything about the store and the purchase like store kit and like the, that whole area of the OS and the services ecosystem seems like it moves glacially for whatever reason.
Marco:
So combine those things, and I'm not expecting big changes here anytime soon, but again, I wish they would put more resources into really making the App Store better for customers in ways like this that really matter instead of just giving lip service.
Marco:
And I don't know why...
Marco:
Things have been as bad as they are in this area for as long as they have been.
Marco:
But I hope they find reasons to fix it besides just doing the minimum required to fend off antitrust problems.
John:
The regulatory angle on this is interesting because I think Apple is relying on, and I think they're smart to rely on because I think they're correct, relying on the fact that the technical nuances that I think most people who would listen to this show or are up on tech news understand are never going to get a fair hearing interview.
John:
in a sort of public forum or any kind of like congressional you know congressional hearing anything like that which is when when apple makes a claim that you know that you were just saying margaret like we make the app store safe that's why we need control it's about safety we're protecting customers so on and so forth the truth is that most of the safety comes from the design of the os and sandboxing and has nothing to do with app review or the or the control over the app store but that is a technical nuance that
John:
I think most people involved in this at the highest levels don't understand.
John:
And even if they did understand it, trying to articulate that technical nuance is going to make you look like just a, you know, a wonk who's just like getting into the weeds.
John:
And it's like, you're missing the big picture here.
John:
It's Apple Control.
John:
It's like, but this is...
John:
This technical distinction actually is important because it is the main thing that undercuts, one of the two main things that undercuts Apple's argument that their control of the App Store is essential for customer safety is that most of the safety has nothing to do with the App Store.
John:
Apple's going to say, we have fewer viruses, it's safer, blah, blah, blah.
John:
That's all true, but it's not because of the App Store.
John:
It's because of...
John:
Since day one, apps have been sandboxed and have very limited access to resources on the iPhone and everything.
John:
Now, granted, obviously, you know, if things didn't go through the App Store, it would be easier to exploit things because people can't silo.
John:
There is.
John:
that's why this is nuanced that I get off into the weeds of saying okay well but Apple doesn't allow private APIs and private APIs might be more exploitable or you can't distribute a jailbreak through the Apple store and it's harder for people to jailbreak and if sideloading was available it would be easy to jailbreak and you know like all that is true but still it is a nuanced distinction
John:
And what it's undercutting is the idea that the app store is the one and only most important bulwark against chaos on the iPhone, and it is not.
John:
It is part of a solution, but I don't even think it's the biggest part.
John:
The second big argument against, oh, we're keeping customers safe, is alluded to in an ironic way by the first sentence of this little message.
John:
This is a message that you get if you have an app that, like Apple, decides it's priced too high.
John:
that Casey wrote earlier.
John:
Customers expect the App Store to be a safe and trusted marketplace for purchasing digital goods.
John:
Do they?
John:
Why would they?
John:
Anything you do on the App Store as a regular person, like, say, you hear about a cool app and you want to go download it, so you go to the App Store to find it, you will be flooded with thousands of scam, clone apps that are not the app you want, that have hundreds of five-star reviews, that are in the top of the search results and maybe are the top one because they paid for ad keywords, and
John:
It is not a safe and trusted marketplace at all.
John:
Anybody who has been in the app store in the last several years has known that it's just very, unless you know exactly what you want and are very careful to go exactly to that one, not to pick the scam clone apps with identical looking icons and similar names.
John:
It is a terrifying place to be, not because the apps are going to like root your phone and steal all your pictures or whatever, but
John:
Because, you know, again, sandboxing prevents that.
John:
But because you're going to end up getting the wrong thing and that wrong thing may end up costing you money and making you accidentally sign up for a $4.99 per week bill that it starts off as a free trial, right?
John:
And you're going to, you know, well, I can just look at the reviews and it's a curated collection.
John:
It's like, no, it's not curated.
John:
Apple lets any junk through.
John:
And the reviews are meaningless because they can be scammed and Apple hasn't stopped that, right?
John:
And the search results are terrible.
John:
So even if it's the most popular app in the world and you search for it by name, you might get some five other results before the one you want.
John:
So the nuanced technical argument about sandboxing versus the App Store and the caveats about sideloading combined with Apple's terrible job, the actual job of curation of keeping scam apps out of the App Store?
John:
totally undercuts their safety argument but let's set that aside for now because that's a huge thing to set aside right but you're right but right so did you enjoy the play mr flinken right but this this particular story is about one new thing that they're doing that apple is doing to try to reduce the scams right and and and this new thing i'm going to come at this from the entire entirely the opposite direction although it'll it'll come around you'll see um
John:
It reminds me of my very first thought, and I brought this up on past shows, my very first thought when the App Store was announced.
John:
It flashed in my head when they were talking about it on screen in the presentation.
John:
Here comes the App Store, right?
John:
And here's what you can do.
John:
Because, you know, I was virtually surrounded.
John:
I wasn't there in person, but I was virtually surrounded by all my other Apple nerd friends watching the same keynote remotely or in person.
John:
And we're all taking it in.
John:
I think it was a live stream.
John:
Who knows?
John:
I can't remember.
John:
It was too long ago.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And they put those slides up that the app store is coming.
John:
And what I thought was, here are all these people that I know, my friends, who are what we called indie software developers back then, who make a living by selling software for Apple platforms.
John:
And they sort of do it on their own, maybe with a couple of people in a small company or maybe literally by themselves.
John:
And
John:
And they've been doing it for years, and they are sort of, you know, these indie software developers living the dream.
John:
They found a way to, you know, make something that people are willing to pay money for, and that's how they make their living.
John:
And, you know, even though we all had stars in our eyes about what promised to be and really was a gold rush for, you know, being able to make lots of money on the app store, on the iPhone, to make apps for the iPhone...
John:
I saw all those people suddenly changing from indie software developers who made something with their labor and sold it and got money.
John:
Those people would be getting money from all their customers.
John:
Their customers would, you know, back in the day, you'd write checks for shareware, like you'd actually put a check in the mail.
John:
Or getting credit cards, you know, online and, you know, charging people's credit cards and, you know, getting their money and then giving them a code for the software or allowing them to download it or whatever.
John:
All those people were suddenly going to change from that form of income to a new form of income.
John:
And that new form of income was every month you will get a single check signed by Apple.
John:
It doesn't mean they suddenly work for Apple, but I was like, well, this really changes the relationship of all these supposed indie developers.
John:
Previously, they were getting money from their customers for things that they made.
John:
And that, you know, if they go all in iOS, that's gonna end.
John:
And they're no longer getting money from customers.
John:
In fact, they no longer have customers.
John:
What they're getting is money from Apple.
John:
And they're not Apple employees.
John:
It's kind of like they're sharecroppers for Apple, right?
John:
Like when all of your income is checks signed by Apple, the relationship that you thought you had as a quote-unquote independent software developer really changes.
John:
That was my first and I wasn't I'm not and wasn't then an independent software developer.
John:
That was my thought of like, oh, geez, this is this is really a bigger change than we think it is.
John:
Not to say that people shouldn't develop for the app store because they totally should.
John:
And it really was a gold rush.
John:
And it was a good time to get in there and get some good apps out.
John:
And, you know, it's like not that it wasn't.
John:
But it was just a thought in my head that this this fundamentally changes the relationship.
John:
and this this altercation of the relationship between independent software developers and the platform they develop on has always been there and every once in a while something like this will come along and give me that same feeling when this came along where apple's deciding you know like apple's always had control over the app store like
John:
They decide what's in, they decide what's out, they make up the rules, they change their mind.
John:
Like that's always been the way it is.
John:
And occasionally they make a decision that's bad and people complain.
John:
And sometimes they make a decision that's good and people cheer, right?
John:
But the relationship, the power dynamic has always been the same.
John:
Here Apple is deciding, like calling attention to the fact
John:
that they really do control everything now you could argue that decisions like oh the minimum price you can charge is 99 cents that is a pricing decision that apple's had basically since day one you could have free or you can have 99 cents you can't have 98 you can't have 50 you can't have one cent you can have 99 right
John:
and i think apple did some stuff with like the i am rich application at least strongly discouraging it from being like a thousand dollars or whatever like not that there's a cap because i think some apps can be very expensive because they're very fancy apps but in general apple has set pricing parameters but most independent software developers developing for apple platforms through apple's app stores have not felt like apple is telling them how to run their business i mean other than telling them what apps they're allowed to develop and the fact that their minimum price has to be 99 cents and here's what you can do descriptions but in general
John:
I would think if you ask developers, they would say, well, I decide I decide how much to charge my application, right?
John:
Like if I think I can get away with charging $99 for my app, I'm going to try to do it.
John:
And if I'm a dummy and really no one's going to buy it, then I'll change my price.
John:
Right.
John:
And there's lots of arguments for the downward price pressure of the app store and free apps being hard and, you know, all that stuff.
John:
But in general.
John:
It always seemed like, okay, Apple sets the rules, but then we all, we as independent software developers or whoever, and just companies or whatever, we get to play in that space and decide how to price our products based on our notion of what we think is the right move in the current competitive environment.
John:
And a move like this is Apple saying, you know what?
John:
Sometimes we can just tell you, you know that price you pick for your product?
John:
Yeah, no.
John:
It's not because it's below 99 cents.
John:
We just think your app isn't good enough for the price that you are charging.
John:
They come right out and say it, right?
John:
The price you've selected for your app do not reflect the value or features of the content offered to the user.
John:
That is an incredible statement, incredible flex of power.
John:
It's like, just so you know, I haven't thought about this lately, but we can do anything in the App Store.
John:
And we've decided...
John:
That your app isn't worth the price you're charging it.
John:
Now, the context here is, okay, well, these are scam apps.
John:
Everyone can tell they're scams.
John:
And I just got done complaining that the thing is full of scams.
John:
Shouldn't we get rid of the scams?
John:
Yes, absolutely.
John:
We should get rid of the scams.
John:
But the power they're exercising and the judgment they are displaying is terrifying, should be terrifying to everybody because it's basically saying, okay, we've always known we had this power.
John:
Now we're telling you that we're willing to flex it.
John:
right and i feel like once they've opened this door to like set this precedent that like previously we had this power and didn't use it now we have this power and we're using it we know that the app store rules and guidelines are applied very poorly and inconsistently i can imagine some if they're not careful at some point in the future someone doing an update to their app and changing the price from 5.99 to 10.99 and
John:
For their in-app purchase and Apple saying, we've decided that the value of your app does not, you know, the price of your app does not reflect the value of the features of your content that you offer.
John:
Having to explain, how do you appeal that and say, well, I think it is worth $10 a month.
John:
Well, Apple thinks it isn't.
John:
you know and apple is in charge of everything it is really really scary and and sometimes things like this scary things like this are important because they remind people that this has always been the power dynamic you might not have been aware of it before and might not have thought about it and because you felt that like it might not impact you and even this you can say well i'm not a scam app so this isn't going to affect me but see also everyone else who has ever thought that about some enforcement in the app store and then suddenly found themselves on the receiving end of it right
John:
You know, I don't think this particular decision, to be clear, they should do this.
John:
In fact, they should do this even more aggressively.
John:
They should do all the things that Marco said.
John:
They should get rid of scam apps for sure, right?
John:
But as Apple becomes better at doing the thing they supposedly say they're doing, which is curating the app score to protect customers, they're getting farther and farther from one of the things that has been protecting the app store, which is that it's more or less a free-for-all within the constraints Apple offered.
John:
So even though they're the only place where you can get apps,
John:
you can get pretty much anything any old piece of junk like you know no one's being kept out of the app store for being a bad app developer everyone can get in there it's great it's like a quote-unquote level playing field whatever right and that allows a large diversity of apps within the rules if apple actually started curating and saying we prefer to only really have
John:
good apps within the rules as in no scams and then eventually that's like okay well no apps that are really crappy or whatever the number and type of apps available to you gets narrower and narrower which is good into and that's what we want as customers i don't want the scam apps i don't want the crappy apps but on a platform perspective the relief valve of allowing all that junk into the app store allowed the app store to look more like a free market than it has ever actually been
John:
So if Apple ever does get good at curating the App Store, it's going to be so much more obvious to regulators that it is not a free market or a level playing field or, you know, like it is entirely like the only way to get apps onto this thing is this very increasingly narrow corridor.
John:
And it's great for customers as long as those customers agree with Apple entirely about everything that should be there, right?
John:
So I think Apple is...
John:
Not painting itself into a corner, but every time it does something like this as a reaction to regulatory pressure, it further highlights the thing that they're going to end up getting regulated about, which is that they do have all the power and every exercise of that power that narrows the app store makes it more and more clear that they do have that power and that it is a very narrowly defined thing that does not allow all the possible innovations that could be out there in the world from being available.
Yeah.
John:
you know and i'm not using this to argue that apple should immediately allow sideloading and allow extra app stores and epic to have its own app store and all that stuff all i'm saying is that they are in a little bit of a pickle because if they do a good job of this you know if maybe this is the maybe this is the middle road they're going for if we make moves in the direction of being more open but do a half-assed job of it the app store will still look like an open marketplace but we can cite these examples as things we're doing to protect customers
John:
I don't know how this is going to turn out, but I found this this whole thing as another reminder to me of exactly how little the power dynamic has ever changed in the App Store.
John:
And it's mostly I think we did we name an episode after this a while back, mostly just all of us relying on the benevolence of the powerful and trying to feel good about it.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Nick writes, Apple Silicon is rightly getting a ton of praise, but how much of that work is due to what Arm is doing and how much of it is because of Apple?
Casey:
Is it Arm with Apple sprinkles or Apple with Arm sprinkles?
Casey:
If the latter, why wouldn't Apple just make its own chip architecture from scratch and fully control everything?
Casey:
This is a...
Casey:
That's a really good question.
Casey:
I don't know the answer, but if I were to wager a guess, I'm very curious to hear what you guys have to say.
Casey:
I think that it's really kind of both, isn't it?
Casey:
I suppose Apple could come up with its own chip architecture and put itself behind by several years because it would have to throw away the work it's already got.
Casey:
But I mean, plenty of other ARM chips exist in the world that aren't near as fast as this.
Casey:
So if I had to pick, I would probably say Apple, but I'm biased.
Casey:
But I really think you can't have one without the other.
Casey:
I don't know, Marco, am I bananas or does that make sense?
Marco:
I'm not a chip designer, and I really don't know to what degree, like, how much the ARM architecture and instruction set is being used here, and how much Apple is going their own way once you get below the instruction set level.
Marco:
There's all sorts of decisions you can make when you're designing a chip.
Marco:
that if you know what software is going to be running on it, and if you can control things like the compiler that is making most or all of that software, you can make your software and hardware work very, very well together.
Marco:
You can really optimize them for each other.
Marco:
And that's what Apple's doing here.
Marco:
And I don't know to what degree they do it, like on what level of the chip design, but it seems like they're doing a lot of it.
Marco:
And it seems like they are able to...
Marco:
take a lot of the advantages of the ARM instruction set and basics of the architecture and then optimize the crap out of the stuff that goes below that and the compiler that compiles the software for it.
Marco:
So I'm thinking, just based on my relative amateur level of knowledge of this kind of stuff, I bet a lot of the goodness of how great Apple Silicon is is on Apple.
Marco:
Because you can look around the rest of the industry
Marco:
And lots of people use ARM chips.
Marco:
And ARM chips are good overall.
Marco:
There's a reason why lots of people use ARM chips.
Marco:
They can be tweaked to lots of different workloads.
Marco:
They are very good at certain things.
Marco:
They're very efficient in lots of ways, which almost the entire industry needs efficient chips.
Marco:
So there's a reason why ARM chips are used everywhere.
Marco:
The ARM...
Marco:
architecture and everything is very good.
Marco:
And using the ARM instruction set also comes with a lot of advantages in that there's already tons of existing tooling and software around it.
Marco:
So it makes sense why lots of people use and create and customize ARM chips.
Marco:
Another reason people use it is that it can be customized easily and it can be optimized for certain applications easily.
Marco:
And I think that's largely what we're seeing with Apple is like every other smartphone that we know of runs ARM chips, but they don't outperform the iPhone, not even close.
Marco:
Like Apple has maintained this huge lead.
Marco:
And that's in part because, you know, advances in iOS and power efficiency and stuff like that over Android or whatever else.
Marco:
But it's largely because Apple has done a better job
Marco:
optimizing the hardware for their software ecosystem and vice versa than the other players in smartphones have done so far so i i think again it's it's probably some of a some of b like i think apple silicon is largely good because of arm because arm was a really good foundation to build upon but that probably most of the reason why it's so good is
Marco:
is that Apple has just customized the crap out of it to be optimized very, very well for their workflow and their software needs and their hardware needs.
John:
i think i lost track in this analogy like are the sprinkles like what are we are the sprinkles the thing that don't matter or the sprinkles the things that do matter like like which is the sprinkles good or just the frill anyway uh yeah i agree with what you both said like it's it's 100 not 100 but like the answer is whether it's which one of these is more important the fact that it's armor the fact that it's apple the fact that it's apple is absolutely the more important factor um
John:
And it's like people said, like, just look at the other ARM chips for doing the exact same job being in a smartphone.
John:
Apple's chips crush them and have for years, not by a little bit, not by 10%, by huge, embarrassing amounts.
John:
And yes, Apple can and does custom tailor every aspect of the entire stack to fit together and work well.
John:
But that type of optimization alone does not account for the massive lead that they have.
John:
Apple has some of the best chip designers in the world.
John:
They were blessed to be able to start with an architecture that was well-suited to their application.
John:
It's kind of an accident of history of like, well, we need a chip for the phone.
John:
It should be a low-power chip.
John:
ARM seems to be the leader in this area.
John:
They didn't start with a weird architecture that wasn't suited for a phone, so it was a blessing there.
John:
But Apple only started to pull away once they started to make their own ARM chips.
John:
When they were using other people's ARM chips, they had performance like other people's ARM chips, and it seemed like it was fine.
John:
But then they just stretched that lead out when they started doing their own thing, whether it's being first to 64-bit or just having the amazing chips they have now.
John:
apple's chip designers are amazing it's a really easy ab comparison look at the other people also making arm chips and the thing is if you think of like intel or other things apple's platform especially now that it's in max is pretty broad they make tablets they make phones they make max all with their same architecture back when it was the wintel duopoly it was a similar situation where the big platform that mattered before smartphones and everything was personal computers and
John:
and Windows was the massively dominant software platform, and Intel, or x86-based chips, were the hardware platform.
John:
At any point during that very long stretch of time when Wintel was the thing...
John:
there could have been and i'm sure there was the same type of work granted across companies but like intel could design chips knowing hey most people who buy this chip are going to run windows on it and windows people run these applications like microsoft office or photoshop or whatever like there were known workloads that intel absolutely could and probably did design its chip to be high performing it or like games like gpu gpu vendors do this today gpu vendors make sure that they're
John:
silicon and their drivers they have custom tweaks in the drivers for specific games to perform better it detects when you're running a specific game to change how it behaves to get better scores on those benchmarks for those features right this is not an unknown you know type of thing tweaking your hardware to the software it's just that a it's easier for apple to do it because they're all one company and b apple seems to be better at it like they're just like just like the silicon design why aren't everyone else's arm chips as good as apple's
John:
All those other smartphone vendors and other people making ARM system-mounted chips could also tailor those system-mounted chips to work well with Android, which they know is going to be the operating system that runs on the things.
John:
And they know what people are going to be running on them.
John:
So, like, it's not like Apple can do something here that no one else can do, that only Apple can do this.
John:
Everybody can and has done this.
John:
Apple is just doing it better.
John:
uh and you know again because they're a single company but because they have a lot of smart people and you know sometimes you just get the right it's the right set of people around in the right place at the right time and you know that's the result so if the sprinkles is the good thing the sprinkles is apple
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Glad we got that sorted.
Casey:
Matt Chapman Jones writes, what do you think Apple would need to do to actually make gaming on Macs on par with gaming on PCs?
Casey:
Hypothetically, let's say a new Apple Silicon G1 is announced with similar power to an NVIDIA 3080 or that Apple starts offering an AMD RX 6800 XT and Mac Pros.
Casey:
What more would they need to do to actually get developers on board in a real way to make the Mac a platform that...
Casey:
AAA titles come to on the day of release.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Do they need DirectX, John?
Casey:
What do they need to do?
John:
I mean, Marco, was it Marco who mentioned the Switch earlier?
John:
The Switch is ample evidence that even if your hardware is not good, like not competitive, not powerful or whatever...
John:
That doesn't mean you can't be a player in the gaming space.
John:
Apple's problem with respect to games, some of it, yes, has been hardware, but their big problem is APIs and the software development ecosystem.
John:
Games are not made for Apple's APIs.
John:
They're made for APIs on other platforms.
John:
They're made for DirectX, they're made for the consoles or whatever.
John:
And if your platform...
John:
knows how to you know cultivate uh you know gaming content and get developers to make games for it you can field really ridiculous hardware like the ps3 with the cell and still people will develop for it because you're sony and your product is the playstation and you know how to deal with developers so apple's problems here have nothing to do with like
John:
oh apple can't make good enough hardware or their gpus aren't powerful enough or what if they made an amazing chip or an amazing gpu like they can do all those things and you know it would help them maybe run some games that are all available now a little bit better but they would never be a player in the game market unless they essentially did what everyone who has ever entered and succeeded in this market has done which is play the game woo the developers form the relationships um
John:
Build the platform.
John:
Get the players.
John:
Like, you have to do all those things that have nothing to do with making a great chip.
John:
Apple already makes great chips.
John:
Like, the chips in all their iPads are more powerful than the stuff in the Switch.
John:
But no one is, like, you know, clamoring to play the latest iPad game any more than they want to play the latest Zelda.
John:
What does Zelda have that these games don't?
John:
Like, Apple has tons of powerful hardware.
John:
They don't have the games.
John:
And they don't have the games because they don't have the developers.
John:
And they don't have the developers because they don't know how to build those relationships.
John:
Because it's not like...
John:
It's not like software developers.
John:
It's not like the app development platform.
John:
Games is much more like their experience with streaming services.
John:
It's a creative industry.
John:
It's like making movies and TV shows.
John:
You don't know when you're going to have a hit.
John:
It's not a straightforward formula to get one.
John:
See the recent stories about Amazon...
John:
um and google trying their various gaming initiatives both of them are trying to sort of have in-house gaming studios but they have no idea how to make a good game it's like it's like saying i want to make a hit movie can i do that i know and it's like well maybe but it's actually really hard and i can't tell you exactly what to do otherwise everyone would make hit movies right it's it's a different skill set and even if you hire all the right people if the culture of your company is wrong where you don't
John:
You don't create an environment where a hit game can come into being because your company is structured to make, let's say, really great operating systems or great apps or something like that.
John:
Games are different enough that it is a big effort to succeed in this market totally independent of hardware.
John:
I always point to Microsoft because Microsoft, you know, Microsoft has a long history of gaming on the PC.
John:
They decided they wanted to enter the console market.
John:
They were already the biggest PC gaming platform because they were PCs at that point.
John:
And even they had difficulty merely doing a slightly different gaming thing, which is we're going to make a gaming console.
John:
They were already the platform for PC gaming.
John:
And even they took years and lost tons of money and had to really stick to it to figure out how to make a viable console gaming platform.
John:
And even then they didn't come to dominate.
John:
They are just now one of three remaining big players in the market.
John:
And, you know, the lead shuffles around as time goes on.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's really hard.
John:
and the hard parts have nothing to do with hardware so what does apple have to do they basically have to do what sony and microsoft and nintendo have done to become the gang power as they are now and the answer to that question is not feel the really great chip
Casey:
Ram Sreenath writes, do you use any battery backups with your desktops?
Casey:
Do you plug your NAS into it too?
Casey:
Do you know if I can use the USB almost running out of power dingus on the UPS to turn my Mac off?
Casey:
This Apple support page says that my iMac consumes 295 watts at peak power.
Casey:
Do you know how that translates to how big a UPS I should get in VA?
Casey:
What does in VA mean?
Casey:
Old amps.
Casey:
Yeah, there you go.
Casey:
Sorry, I'm so used to seeing Virginia for that and I was very confused.
Casey:
For me, I have a very old UPS and I have the USB dingus attached to my Synology because honestly I'm more worried about that knowing when power is about to run out than I am my iMac.
Casey:
But plugged into the UPS is the Synology, my iMac, and I think my Eero, and very little else, if anything.
Casey:
And it lasts long enough, even though it's several years old now, it lasts long enough to keep the lights on, so to speak, for the typical power blip that we would get around here.
Casey:
I would guess I would measure how long this lasts in 10 or 20 minutes, but that's enough for me, and that's how I do it.
Casey:
Marco, what do you do?
Marco:
what I do is possibly different from what I recommend what I do is I have a UPS everywhere I have a desktop and I have a UPS at my networking gear station in the closet so that way it keeps the router and the switches and everything all running and of course the Verizon ONT thing is also put into that so that way basically power goes out we still have internet as long as the internet service is up
Marco:
And that kind of setup is great for if you have the space and if you're willing to spend $150 here and there on UPSs and if what you have to plug in is SS.
Marco:
Now obviously laptops, I don't think you need one because the laptop itself kind of
Marco:
kind of includes one built-in, so that's not really necessary.
Marco:
But certainly the quality of life improvement, if you frequently have power blips, of having your internet connectivity never drop is wonderful.
Marco:
That being said, what UPS is right for you depends entirely on your situation, and it can vary a lot.
Marco:
If you are somewhere that almost never has any kind of power blackout,
Marco:
And if your desktop suddenly turning off in the middle of a big windstorm is something you can tolerate, then you probably don't need a UPS at all.
Marco:
If you do have a UPS, I think it makes desktop life a little bit easier.
Marco:
If you get a really nice and massive one, it also makes a very good footrest because they don't move when you push back and lean on them because they're so heavy.
Marco:
Because the big ones are basically car batteries with a very small amount of metal around them.
Marco:
So that could be a fun thing.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
For the most part, I spent a long time with cyber power UPSs and before that APCs.
Marco:
I generally prefer the cyber powers now.
Marco:
I find they give you much better bang for your buck than APC does.
Marco:
APC seems for a while like it has been coasting on its reputation, in my opinion.
Marco:
So cyber power is where it's at.
Marco:
There are multiple different kinds of UPSs.
Marco:
I like the kind that have the pure sine wave output.
Marco:
Not necessarily because I need a perfectly smooth wave, but because that typically means it has really good voltage regulation and stuff, and that kind of gets you into the high tier of UPSs.
Marco:
And please, power nerds, forgive me, because I don't know the actual details of how this stuff works, again.
Marco:
But basically, at the very low end of UPSs, they're not always...
Marco:
running the power through their like power regular circuitry.
Marco:
They're running the power straight through most of the time.
Marco:
And if they need to, they like switch over.
Marco:
And my understanding is the kind of higher end version of UPSs are always running the power through their circuitry.
Marco:
And so there is no switchover change to happen.
Marco:
And that, I think, is better if your power is a little flaky, but is not just going pure on or pure off.
Marco:
So that's usually... I usually end up going for whatever is the entry-level...
Marco:
version of that type of UPS.
Marco:
So not like the super big fancy server versions or anything like that, but the mid-range of UPS versions.
Marco:
And CyberPower makes those in the $150 range pretty easily.
Marco:
So that's usually where I go.
Marco:
I usually go around the...
Marco:
1000 to 1500 va range in part because i don't entirely understand what that unit means and and in part because usually i'm less concerned with runtime and more concerned with just how much wattage can it can it handle at a time because i'm usually plugging into it a giant desktop with a giant screen and everything else so
Marco:
Having something that can handle 1,000 watts or 600 watts or something like this is probably a minimum.
Marco:
And that usually, as you increase the wattage, usually you get higher VA ratings too because I assume that's kind of somehow related.
Marco:
But I'm sure I'm going to read some Medium article next week about how it's actually not related at all and it's actually a big scam or whatever.
Marco:
But anyway, what UPSs are good for is dealing with short power interruptions like that.
Marco:
If your power is going out for hours and hours at a time,
Marco:
This is probably better solved in a different way, like some kind of backup generator or solar power or something like that.
Marco:
But for brief interruptions, like if you just have unreliable power or you have occasional brownouts here and there, or if you're somewhere that has a lot of overhead power lines and you frequently have...
Marco:
a half hour off or something like that, then obviously get a UPS.
Marco:
The only other thing I'll add to this before I let John take over is if you have frequent power problems where the UPS is frequently having to kick on and things like that, there's a pretty good chance it will shorten the life of the battery in the UPS because it's just being used a lot.
Marco:
There's not a great way around that except just expect that to happen.
Marco:
Don't spend a whole bunch of money on a really great UPS if you frequently have little power blips here and there because it probably won't last more than a few years.
John:
Yeah, the only things I add are for trying to size your UPS.
John:
The peak power draw or like the rating for your power supply in your computer is not a good way to size things.
John:
So if you try to use those like sizing tools they have on the website or whatever, they want you to enter the information like that.
John:
Like, you know, my Mac has a 1500 watt power supply.
John:
What is in the Mac Pro?
John:
It's like 1300 watts is something ridiculous, right?
Marco:
It's the most you can draw from a 15 amp circuit without requiring a special outlet or plug.
John:
But I think it's under that.
John:
I think they're under the 1500 limit.
John:
Right.
John:
It's not a space heater, literally.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Well, because and you also can't you can't have like you can't draw 15 amps sustained.
Marco:
If it's a sustained load, I believe you have to cap it at 80 percent of the amperage of the circuit.
Marco:
So it's I think there are 13 or 1400 watts, something like that.
John:
yeah but anyway the point is like that's that's what's in my mac pro right but my mac pro my actual mac pro is never drawing that much power like because you can just add up the power draw of the things that are inside it and they do not get to that now if you filled my thing with like you know dual gpu uh video cards and filled every single slot and filled it with like eight spinning hard disks and like you know
John:
Yeah, that's why the power supply is in there.
John:
But MyMac doesn't have that in it, right?
John:
So don't size your load based on the maximum possible power that your computer could draw.
John:
Size it based on what your actual computer does draw, right?
John:
And how do you get that measurement?
John:
There's lots of cheap tools you can use to, like, plug in and try to measure it.
John:
But, like, you can make an estimate or whatever.
John:
Like...
John:
all i'm saying is that if you use one of the sizing tools you're gonna be like this is telling me i need 900 dollars worth of ups's yeah that's what ups websites will tell you that you of course they're going to tell you you need 900 you don't right i have what i'm saying is i always undersize my ups's i've undersized them on every mac that i've ever had i get very little battery time when the power does go out but that's fine because all i want is enough time to you know shut down or to have the computer shut down
John:
on that uh on that aspect of these things the little ups connection or usb connections from ups to macs the mac has a surprisingly used to have a surprisingly a good amount of built-in support for ups and there was a time again back in the good old days of my cheese grater when i could have my ups plugged into my mac
John:
with zero drivers installed from the ups maker and the mac understood it and the ups could tell it hey you're on battery power you should probably shut down now and the mac would shut down like that's what you want to happen right since then i've become super paranoid in two aspects one i don't like weird usb things connected to my macs because usb on macs has been flaky in the last i don't know decade or so and
John:
And so, like, I hate debugging problems that have to do with USB.
John:
And two, I hate having, you know, cruddy, non-updated software from a UPS manufacturer running on my Mac.
John:
If it even does run on, you know, with the current driver model and everything like that.
John:
So all that to say is my current UPS that is hooked up to my Mac Pro is not connected through USB at all.
John:
And I'm just relying on the fact that my Mac is always asleep and that when it's asleep, it can probably last a surprisingly long time on this big cyber power giant brick thing that I have here.
John:
So don't worry about that.
John:
The Synology, on the other hand, is also on a UPS.
John:
My NAS, yes, my NAS is on a UPS.
John:
It's got spinning disks in it that are like spinning all the time.
John:
It's on a UPS and it is connected via USB.
John:
And that will shut itself down if power goes out.
John:
As for batteries, yeah, you'll need to replace them.
John:
In fact, I just replaced four days ago the battery in the UPS that is connected to my NAS, which I think the first time I had actually shut down my NAS in I don't know how many years.
John:
It's just been on continuously.
John:
The UPS has had this incredibly obnoxious impossible to disable screeching siren telling me my battery is dead.
John:
And so, yeah, I went down and the batteries cost like, you know, especially for a NAS, like they don't draw too much power.
John:
It's like 20 or 30 bucks to get a new battery.
John:
You don't you can replace the batteries in these.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I haven't replaced one in a very long time, but the one time I did replace when it was back in like a big APC one years ago, but it cost almost as much as a new unit.
John:
Well, this is like a dinky one.
John:
My Synology is connected to one of those ones that looks like the world's biggest power strip.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
Like the big chunky thing.
John:
And it's like APC, the RBC32.
John:
It's like $23 from Amazon.
John:
I bought so many of them, right?
John:
They're actually surprisingly small batteries, right?
John:
you know if you have a small device like a nas with a couple of drives in it you can get a pretty small cheap ups and every time the battery dies and this and so this is the first time i've swapped the battery out this thing has been on a ups since 2013 so it's lasted eight years down there um so you know you can swapping batteries is viable just you know again if you buy like a 900 ups yeah the battery is going to be expensive too
John:
and the final thing i'll note about this is forget about power going out once you have things on ups that are aware they're on ups you'll find out just how much time you have these little miniature brownouts now power supplies in in in modern electronics are actually really good about smoothing that out same thing with the sine wave stuff like the fancy power supplies that are in all of our macs and everything you don't have to worry too much about pure sine wave because the power supply itself will do that but
John:
And they'll also smooth out like dips in the power.
John:
But once you have a UPS in front of that that like notifies you, you'll be like, wow, I never noticed this before because I didn't even notice the lights flicking or anything.
John:
But guess what?
John:
We have just enough of a power dip like when the vacuum gets turned on at the same time as the toaster is going that I noticed my UPS ticks on for a second.
John:
hmm that's interesting and then you feel like oh i'm glad i have the ups there because then at least the power supply on my mac doesn't have to deal with that blip which it's designed to do and would be fine but it's just nice to have something else there in front of it um and then of course the synology always emails me every time it's like i'm on battery power no i'm back on regular power i get like two emails in quick succession anytime anyone vacuums in the basement because my entire house is my entire house like the whatever it is the uh
John:
the main circuit or whatever, it's not, it's like barely enough to power my house.
John:
Uh, so any kind of elevated spike is enough to sort of perturb it.
John:
I think I have like 150, uh, amp service and I should have 200, uh,
John:
Right.
John:
So you never know how well sized your house is, but having UPS is on the stuff that you care about is important.
John:
And they also provide surge depression, most of them as well.
John:
So that's another thing that you should have going.
John:
In fact, most recently, the few things in my house that aren't on a UPS, we have like a power blip.
John:
uh one of them is my uh playstation i was like i should put that on a ups because no it doesn't really matter but if i'm in the middle of a game and it was just a blip and it took out my playstation but everything else didn't even notice i feel cheated out of whatever game i was in the middle of playing so
John:
uh yeah this is a long answer to say yes you should get UBSs yes your NAS should be on one maybe you should hook it up to USB uh it's better if there's no drivers uh and you know and don't uh don't be afraid to undersize them a little bit as long as you understand that all you're getting is five minutes of panic to shut everything down
Casey:
I remember I was standing in Jason Snell's house during Dub Dub week.
Casey:
I don't know, it was like five years ago.
Casey:
And I was getting constant messages from my Synology because Aaron, poor Aaron back home with I think Jess Declan at the time, was going through like a truly terrible wind and rainstorm to the point that I think she was getting worried and legitimately worried about like a tornado or something like that.
Casey:
And so I'm exchanging texts with her as I'm trying to be social with you guys amongst others at Jason's house.
Casey:
And my watch is vibrating incessantly like, oh, the EPS power is down.
Casey:
Oh, it's back.
Casey:
Oh, it's down.
Casey:
Oh, it's back.
Casey:
Meanwhile, Aaron's like, oh, man, this storm is really, really bad.
Casey:
And I'm just sitting there like, I wish I could do something.
Casey:
But it was a very eerie way to hammer home that Erin was, and it's not her style to exaggerate, but that she was not exaggerating.
Casey:
There was a really bad storm going on because we were losing power constantly.
Casey:
And then fast forward like a year or two later and a tree that's right outside our neighborhood that was constantly losing branches and knocking out our power.
Casey:
I guess the power company got tired of it and they chopped back that tree quite a bit.
Casey:
And knock on wood, we haven't had a power issue since.
Casey:
So I know what you're talking about.
John:
One more thing.
John:
Marco touched on this, like the different kinds of power supplies, the ones that run all of the power through the power regulation circuit all the time versus the ones that pass it straight through until it gets cut and then they swap.
John:
The ones that run the power through all the time, I think they're called continuous UPSs.
John:
I forget what the name is or whatever.
John:
You probably don't want one of those because those tend to have fans.
Yeah.
John:
Oh, God forbid.
John:
are don't just have fans but like loud fans fans that you probably don't want in your house now like my cyber power ups has a fan it's the first ups i ever bought with a fan and i was afraid of it but then i did enough research to say okay well the fan only comes on if if and when it switches to battery power and that pretty much never happens so it has fans in it but they're not on right so i would say for home use
John:
get the cheaper ones that aren't whatever it is continuous power supplies don't worry about the fact that they have a fan because if you get a good one like this is hyper power one the fan will only come on when it switches to battery and it starts to get a little bit warm and then you won't care about the fan because you'll be too busy panic shutting down your computer or it will be too busy shutting it down for you uh through its usb connection that hopefully isn't causing your computer to flake out
Marco:
Yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes to the one I got just last year, and it's probably the same one.
Marco:
It's the CyberPower, and the feature that we're talking about with the continuous power draw, I think, is what they call AVR for automatic voltage regulation, presumably, but something like that.
Marco:
What I get is whatever CyberPower tower-shaped one is around 1,000 VA and supports AVR.
Marco:
That's how I select the UPS, and for my desktop purposes, that's great.
John:
yeah i think i got whatever like the slightly bigger one because i didn't i was so tired of undersizing my ups's for my giant tower computers i went a little bit bigger um so i think maybe i have this they step up model of like 200 and change or whatever but i have no regrets it is you know i like the fact that it's a tower form factor because it actually fits in the you know it's under my my tower computer is on a little table and under the tower computer is my tower ups so it all fits in a nice big vertical stack is it on a smaller table
John:
It should be, but it isn't.
John:
No, it's just on the carpet, which is fine.
John:
Again, I was worried about it being on the carpet and having fans and overheating.
John:
Nope, no problem.
John:
It sits there.
John:
It's dead silent.
John:
It does its job.
John:
Even when it ticks on, sometimes I barely notice because it's kind of a quiet ticking on, unlike the ones that don't have sine waves.
John:
You hear them making a ticking noise because they're sort of...
John:
they're simulating a sine wave with a series of steps like they'll always scare you in the the ups uh advertising material like look at this power signal from this non-pure sine wave isn't it ugly it's fine your power supply computer will handle that but yes it is ugly and it and it manifests in a noise when you are on battery power on a cheaper ups but don't worry about that if you want to put your nasa on one of those things it's fine that's what my nasa's on it works fine ticks on it ticks off your battery will still last a long time
Marco:
oh one of the things speaking of noise if you have frequent power outages that aren't super like alerting for you like if you don't really need to know when the power's out you just have to continue your work for a few minutes almost every ups by default beeps loudly when it's running on battery to tell you hey oh my god your power's out beep beep beep it's out oh my god
Marco:
And on the low-end ones, usually you can't disable the beep.
Marco:
On the higher-end ones, you usually can.
Marco:
And one of the reasons I selected this line is that I can and did disable the beep on it.
Marco:
So if that's something that you want to be able to do, make sure the one that you're looking at can do that.
John:
When my battery died and the UPS connected to my Synology, it's like screeching, like just a continuous, the top of its lung screech.
John:
Not as loud as a smoke detector, but not quite either.
John:
Neither one of my children noticed this at all.
John:
I come into the house, I'm like, the two kids are just sitting there, like they got their headphones in, they're staring at their iPads.
John:
I'm like, do you not notice the screeching noise?
John:
I'm like, what?
John:
I'm like, I'm the old person who's supposed to not be able to hear this terrible screeching noise.
John:
They're like, I don't hear anything.
John:
I'm like, come with me.
John:
Let's go follow the sound.
John:
Where is it coming from?
John:
Oh, it seems to be down in the basement.
John:
I mean, not that they could do anything about it, but I would expect them to have texted me and said, Dad, there's a terrible screeching noise in the house.
John:
What's going on?
John:
Instead, they just ignored it and continued to do whatever they were doing.
John:
Kids these days.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Squarespace, ExpressVPN, and Flatfile.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join us at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental, they didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech Podcast.
Casey:
So long.
John:
I said grave danger?
John:
You said, is there any other kind?
Casey:
Oh, no, no, stop.
Casey:
Don't say it.
Casey:
Don't say it.
Casey:
Is that clear and present?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Patriot Games?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
It's some Tom Clancy one, isn't it?
John:
No, I'm drawing a blank on it.
John:
It's the Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson courtroom movie.
Casey:
Oh, a few good men, of course.
John:
Yeah, there you go.
John:
That's right.
John:
Yeah, but the unfair advantage moat, is there any other kind of moat?
John:
It's always an unfair moat.
John:
Fair enough.
John:
That's what makes it a moat.
John:
A few good men holds up last I saw it.
John:
It's a good one.
John:
I mean, the courtroom stuff is good.
John:
As usual, I haven't seen it.
John:
You haven't?
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Marco.
John:
Yeah, you should.
John:
If you like courtroom, you like My Cousin Vinny, right?
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
I've never seen that one.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
We've been over this like five times.
John:
You haven't seen that?
John:
There's a bunch of other random surrounding stuff that's going to look dated to you, but the courtroom stuff and A Few Good Men.
John:
If you like My Cousin Vinny and you want a non-comedy angle on that, try A Few Good Men.
John:
Why would I want a non-comedy angle?
John:
Because you like the courtroom part of it.
John:
It's most of, you know, trust me, it's good courtroom stuff.
John:
You like it.
Marco:
I like Joe Pesci in the courtroom.
John:
Right, but... You like that movie, and a lot of it takes place in a courtroom, and a lot of the drama is about witnesses and trying to get out of them what really happened and stuff like that, and there you go.
Marco:
Every Halloween, I search to see if anybody will sell me the Velour Tux from My Cousin Vinny.
John:
You can just have that made for you, you know?
Marco:
You would think... It's surprisingly complicated.
Marco:
Like, that is probably eventually what I'm going to have to do.
Marco:
But, like, all I want is the My Cousin Vinny Tux and...
Marco:
I'm shocked that like nobody like no one on Etsy or anything like no one seems to sell it you know how hot that would be to wear though yeah well not I mean Halloween is often freezing you know it's often pretty cold but that's that's what that's the only I've never wanted to wear a Halloween costume really I've never been that into Halloween that is the only costume I actually want to wear I want that one year and I can't find it anywhere
Casey:
When I was a kid, I was in like middle school or high school, maybe.
Casey:
I guess it must have been high school because I was big enough to wear or at least not look utterly ridiculous in clothes that my dad had.
Casey:
And I wore, he had bought way back when a David Byrne big suit for like some party or something like that just to goof off.
Casey:
Maybe it was Halloween.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
And maybe it was Halloween that I wore it.
Casey:
But for one reason or another, I wore a David Byrne big suit in high school and nobody understood it.
Casey:
But I thought I was cool as hell.
Casey:
I was not.
John:
I mean, depending on when you're in the high school, like if I had worn a tried to wear that in the 80s, people would just think it's an 80s suit because the shoulders are pretty big back then.
John:
It's like you can't tell if you're intentionally doing a talking heads thing or you're just wearing it.
John:
You're a kid who's wearing a suit that's a little bit too big and it also happens to be the 80s.
Marco:
so true i was thinking i was i was just looking up the dumb and dumber suits to see if those would hold up oh solid choice the problem with the dumb and dumber suits is that you'd need both of them for it to be identifiable so you would need a friend to do it with you because the suits themselves are not super remarkable like by themselves but yeah you would yeah that you would definitely i know you do with me oh i absolutely would i would not even bat an eye