Very Inappropriate Thoughts About This Computer
Marco:
I'm trying to avoid getting my heart broken again.
Marco:
So in various ways with the iOS beta situation and everything, I mentioned that I had ordered myself an iPhone 13 mini.
Marco:
I had the 12 mini last year as my only phone, and I loved it.
Marco:
And the 13 Pro came out and won me back to the mid-size, which is really quite a large size, with the big camera system and the big battery and everything, because the Mini's battery life sucked.
Marco:
Well, then it turned out the 13 Mini, while it didn't have any of the fancy camera stuff, it did improve the battery life a bit, and I was a little envious.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I thought, I don't need it.
Marco:
I already have my Pro phone.
Marco:
I'll stick with the Pro.
Marco:
I'll enjoy the camera, etc.
Marco:
And I have for most of the year.
Marco:
And it's this big, heavy brick in my pocket every time I carry it to wear.
Marco:
And as the summer has been kicking into high gear and I start wearing shorts as the default... Oh, here we go again.
Marco:
...the default leg covering...
Marco:
um i was i was even feeling i'm like you know maybe i should buy a 13 mini just for the summer you know and then i don't know just sell it then or whatever i don't know if even that like even though i can have 17 different computers and that feels okay for some reason having two iphones feels ridiculous like that feels like such an extravagance like such a waste so for i've never really phone and a shorts phone right
Marco:
So for whatever reason, that always felt like that was off limits.
Marco:
There's probably no good excuse why.
Marco:
It's like, well, if I can have a laptop and a desktop, why can't I have two phones?
Marco:
But it just felt wasteful.
Marco:
Anyway, as I mentioned, I think two episodes ago, I gave away my mini for a family member who needed a phone.
Marco:
And so I had only one phone left total that could run iOS 16.
Marco:
And I really, for my various testing figures, I really need two.
Marco:
And so my mini was that before and I, you know, I lost it.
Marco:
So I ordered a new like refurb, refurb, renewed, refurb iPhone 13 mini to be my test phone.
Marco:
And I thought, well, now that I have this, now that it's here, I'll put 15 on it and I'll put 16 on my carry phone.
Marco:
So that's that's what I've done.
Marco:
and i realized like well maybe i should just take this out just take this for a night i'll put i'll pop my sim card into it and just see just here we go maybe i can talk about it on the show you know just that's that famous excuse right that's that's how every podcaster excuses buying gear they don't need
Marco:
yeah i needed it for the show i need to be able to talk about it um so but i you know i legitimately need this device as a test device i just don't need to be using it as my as my carry phone so anyway so for a few days i'd say maybe three four or five days i use it as my main carry phone again and it was glorious
Marco:
It feels so good.
Marco:
And frankly, so I got the blue one.
Marco:
Frankly, I think it looks really good, too.
Marco:
Like the back, the back, I could care less about the blue aluminum on the sides, though, looks really nice in all different lighting conditions.
Marco:
It is way nicer looking than the pro phone.
Marco:
And I have that like baby blue version of the pro phone.
Marco:
same it's so much nicer looking and and i don't think the pro phone looks bad but that's just how good the non-pro aluminum looks like this this wonderful blue color it's so nice but i kept telling myself like i i can't i can't stick with this i can't because this is about to die like this whole product line is about to die and i even thought like do i really need the 14 when it comes out
Marco:
But the answer is I probably need to have one because it's going to have that low brightness widget mode on the home screen that I'm going to have to test with.
Marco:
I'm going to get on the train again in the fall for the midsize phone.
Marco:
So I'm like, I don't want to get my heart broken again.
Marco:
And so yesterday I switched back to the giant phone because I didn't want to get too used to the mini.
Marco:
And it's so big.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
It's so big and heavy.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And when you look at the specs, like the mini versus the midsize non-pro versus the midsize pro, it's like 140 grams, 175, and 200.
Marco:
So the mini is more than half the weight of the big one.
Marco:
But still, it just feels both the weight difference and the footprint size difference in your hand.
Marco:
It just feels so big.
Marco:
I still wish there was something between these two sizes.
Marco:
Now, maybe the answer is I just get like, you know, the big non-pro phone.
Marco:
But that's I mean, that's not going to solve my development needs for this fall with the always on screen and everything.
Marco:
But anyway, I just I miss having the small light phone so much.
Marco:
I'm so torn.
Marco:
I am so fortunate that I have a job and the means that I can actually own both of these phones and have to actually test on both of them and have a good reason to buy them, etc.
Marco:
Yes, I know.
Marco:
However, God, I wish they would make better small phones again.
Marco:
And it kind of crushes me that, you know, according to every rumor that at this point, usually iPhone size rumors are pretty well nailed in by a year before it launches, let alone like a few months.
Marco:
But
Marco:
at this point it's pretty clear you know the mini is going away and i just i i miss the days like it feels so good in the pocket it doesn't look ridiculous in pockets like you know i'm still a front pocket kind of person and it it doesn't look stupid like it's like with this giant lunch tray in my pocket the way that the big phone does
Marco:
The difference between the Mini and the Pro is way bigger than the difference between the Pro and the Max.
Marco:
So they really just made the Max and the Maxer right now.
Marco:
That's how it feels.
Marco:
Here we are.
Marco:
We have the normal-sized phone, which is the Mini, and then we have the Max and the Maxer.
Marco:
And it's so sad to me that this is going away and it'll probably never come back.
Marco:
We're never going to have a 3.5-inch phone again.
Marco:
And that's probably for good reasons.
Marco:
But it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger and heavier.
Marco:
And I hope...
Marco:
In the future, I hope maybe Apple does more advances with materials maybe.
Marco:
Maybe not using steel.
Marco:
Maybe reducing the use of glass on the back.
Marco:
Because steel and glass are very heavy.
Marco:
So I don't know what they could do.
Marco:
I just hope they do it.
John:
The Periscope cameras will, I hope, make it...
John:
feel not quite as onerous in the pocket those were rumored to be coming for the iphone 14 but turns out not we talked about that on a past show maybe for the 15 or 16 if imagine if it was a phone the size of the plain old 13 but a little bit thinner a little bit lighter and totally flat back that would feel less oppressive in your pocket i feel like
Marco:
yeah that that would be nice i mean and i still again i still think that if they can if they can find it in their hearts to make a pro quality phone without steel around the outside like use the aluminum it's lighter it looks better and it feels better i think i think the steel looks better and feels better it's not lighter but i think it looks better and feels but i would use a case so who cares but but it's i think it definitely looks better and feels better
Marco:
yeah disagree i will say though the one you know besides the size i was i was thinking like well if i if i just wish this for the summer like what am i gonna miss from the pro phone you know what i missed shockingly i would never have guessed this promotion
Marco:
Oh, interesting.
Marco:
I thought there was something wrong with my mini that everything was so like jaggy, like all the animations were seemed like very low frame rate.
Marco:
I never would have noticed this before using promotion for a year now.
Marco:
But now and I still, you know, I still use a 60 hertz monitor all the time.
Marco:
But for some reason, I noticed that instantly.
Marco:
And I thought, oh, maybe just because this is like a fresh boot, maybe it's indexing crap in the background and everything.
Marco:
But no, it never went away like that.
Marco:
It always felt like low frame rate animation.
Marco:
And that I would never have guessed that.
Marco:
By the time they do the mini again, it'll be 120 hertz.
Marco:
Don't worry.
Casey:
Three years.
Marco:
Three.
Marco:
That's optimistic.
Marco:
No, it won't be.
Marco:
It'll be the next SE probably.
Marco:
And it'll have all the lowest end components.
John:
No, I mean, I feel like the smaller phone thing comes in cycles.
John:
They, you know, people ask for it.
John:
They make one.
John:
They're disappointed in the sales.
John:
They forget about it for a while.
John:
Then people ask for one.
John:
They make it.
John:
They're disappointed in the sales.
John:
It'll come around.
John:
I give it five years.
Marco:
I don't think it will because the thing is like, you know, the rumors were like nobody's really buying it.
Marco:
And so my anecdotal experience, how many iPhone minis have you seen in the wild that weren't in the hands of an Apple nerd?
Marco:
I can tell you my number.
Marco:
It's one.
John:
I feel like the next mini, when the next mini comes around in five years or so, it's not going to be that small.
John:
It's going to be smaller than the current 13, but not as small as that little dinky thing.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
As I've said many times in the past, I would probably at least try for a year having a 13, or well, a 14 in this case, mini, if it had the same camera system as the big guys.
Casey:
But I will not, like that is my do or die.
Casey:
I will not compromise the camera system.
Casey:
Well, that's not entirely true, I suppose, because when the Max phones had a better camera, I wouldn't go that big.
Casey:
Like, I guess my first tier is no Max phones because I am not a genetic misfit.
Casey:
I have normal size hands.
Casey:
But my second tier is I will not compromise the camera system.
Casey:
And I actually do use all three cameras or all three lenses frequently.
Casey:
So for me...
Casey:
I don't want to give it up.
Casey:
If the 13 or 14 or 15 or 17 mini had the same camera system, I'd probably get one.
Casey:
But while it doesn't, it's a no-fly zone for me.
Marco:
So for whatever it's worth, I know we're a little early for our exit interview for the phone, but I don't like the 3X perspective as like the only thing you have between 1X and zoomed in.
Marco:
Like almost every time that I want something zoomed in, 3X is actually a little bit too much or it's way too little, in which case nothing would solve the problem.
Marco:
But like,
Marco:
2x i i would i often used 2x when that was a thing the 3x is oftentimes too much zoomed in so that i have to then zoom back out in which case it's the thing you're just going to use the 1x lens in which case i don't even need 3x lens you know and there is still that noticeable quality degraded you know degradation degrading degradation there we go that's the word there it is i couldn't i couldn't fix i couldn't fabricate it myself uh no i think i agree with you actually i i a year ago downgrade sorry
Casey:
A year ago, I think I would have been a 3X apologist because early on I did like it.
Casey:
But the more I've used it, and I do use it, but I concur with what you said.
Casey:
Either I want like a 20X or something like that, or like I'm just a little bit too far.
Casey:
Like, I don't know, I'm across a big table or something like that from a kid or Aaron or something like that.
Casey:
And I don't need 3X, but I need more than 1X.
Casey:
And if only there was something between 1 and 3 that would potentially work in this scenario.
Casey:
So yeah, I think I agree with you.
John:
If you get enough pixels in there, you can just digital zoom out to 2.
John:
I don't have a 3X camera, so I haven't experienced this.
John:
But one of the main places I use 2X is when I'm trying to take a picture of either...
John:
document or a piece of paper or something and yeah 1x will work but very often with 1x like the the phone puts a cast a shadow on the thing because the phone is too close to it or uh you know 1x is a little more kind of fish-eyed so the edges get a little bit you know wavy the lens compensation doesn't quite straighten everything out and if i just want the document to be straight quick switch to 2x move the phone up higher shadow goes off the item edges are a little bit straighter
John:
There you go.
John:
But I can imagine maybe if that was 3x, I would have to hold the phone uncomfortably high and I wouldn't be able to see what it was doing.
John:
Really, I should just use the document scanning feature and notes where it just fixes all that for you.
John:
But I kind of wish that was a part of the phone app because I don't want it to go into notes.
John:
I want it to be in my photos, but I want it to be square edge piece of paper.
John:
Anyway, I'll you know, my next phone will have a 3x camera, I assume.
John:
So I'll try it out.
Casey:
All right, let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
And we should talk about something we talked about, what, 250 episodes ago, something like that, which is BitCode.
Casey:
And I can take a stab at what BitCode is all about, but perhaps, John, you would be better suited to do this.
Casey:
So can you explain what BitCode is, and we'll talk about why we're talking about it?
John:
it's the thing where when you upload your application to apple instead of sending apple executable code you instead send them this bit code which is uh slightly more abstracted uh but it tells you what your program is going to do but it isn't made for any specific uh piece of hardware and then what apple does is at the time they distribute your application to someone who is downloading it they decide you know what architecture is the person downloading it on what kind of iphone do they have what kind of you know whatever ipad
John:
what processor does it have so on and so forth and then they will take the bit code and convert it to i mean they probably do this ahead of time but anyway convert it to the machine code that will run on your device so even though what you upload is bit code that will run on any device what you download is a thing that's made specifically for your architecture
John:
It's a way to give people slightly smaller downloads.
John:
It's a way to be able to take that thing that was uploaded and target hardware that might not have even been released at the time you built that bitcode, right?
John:
Because you're uploading the bitcode and maybe later that year, Apple releases a new piece of hardware that has a new instruction that, you know, you don't have to upload a new app.
John:
They can just convert the bitcode that you uploaded to use that new instruction if it will make some piece of your code faster while still keeping the functionality the same.
John:
That's the idea behind BitCode.
John:
And I believe BitCode was mandatory for watch apps.
John:
Marco, do you remember the details on this?
Marco:
It was always mandatory for watch apps and it was optional for iOS apps.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So anyway, that's BitCode.
John:
And the story is BitCode is deprecated now.
John:
So when BitCode came out, when?
John:
I got to click on this link to see how old this episode was.
John:
ATP episode 205 when we interviewed Chris Lattner.
John:
2017.
John:
So it's been around for a while.
John:
And I think Chris talked about it in our interview, like why it exists, what the advantages are.
John:
But now it's not going to be a thing anymore.
John:
So starting with Xcode 14, BitCode is no longer required for watchOS and tvOS applications and the App Store no longer accepts BitCode submissions from Xcode 14.
John:
So if you've got BitCode up there, it'll keep working, but it's no longer required and you can't even send it from Xcode 14.
John:
So BitCode is done and they're sort of phasing it out.
John:
And they suggest that you update your projects and, you know, change the build settings to disable bitcode and so on and so forth.
John:
And the compatibility to build with bitcode will be removed from a future Xcode release, Apple says.
John:
IPAs that contain bitcode will have their bitcode stripped before being submitted to the App Store.
John:
Debug symbols for past bitcode submissions are made available for download, right?
John:
So this is interesting just because BitCode, I think, was interesting.
John:
It's an interesting idea, and when I saw that it was being deprecated, obviously we don't know what goes on inside Apple, even on things that have a semi-public face, like we see Swift language evolution and stuff like that.
John:
But this smells to me entirely like a feature whose champions have left, right?
John:
That someone had this idea for BitCode, or some group of people had this idea for BitCode, and they pitched and they said, here's what we're going to do, here's what the advantages are,
John:
it's got advantages to our users it's got advantages to us it's a good idea in fact it's such a good idea let's make it mandatory on the watch and either the things that it promised to fulfill like the oh you know we can release new hardware with uh with that uh you know that we can retarget uh existing bit code to that new hardware and developers don't have to submit a new app right uh and smaller downloads and all that type of stuff
John:
that either those gains were not realized, like they never actually did that, or they were realized, but the benefits that they got for them did not match the downsides of having to deal with bitcode and all the machinery to, you know, churn out the right versions or whatever.
John:
But in general, someone had this idea at Apple and championed it and released it and promoted it.
John:
And it seems like one of the ways projects like this happen in big companies is the people who are super enthusiastic about it and who are promoting all those benefits left the company or moved on to do other things or they're on Project Titan now or whatever.
John:
And the remaining people, after a few years of shepherding BitCode and babysitting it and looking at it, the same questions would get asked, why are we doing BitCode again?
John:
What is this giving us?
John:
You know, especially if, like, say, it caused a problem once or twice, or, you know, it seems like running the whole Bitcoin thing was a problem.
John:
Like, what are these theoretical benefits?
John:
And the champions were no longer there to say, no, we have to do Bitcoin.
John:
Here's why, because it's going to be awesome for this and that other thing.
John:
And instead, it was just the people who were sort of shepherding it saying...
John:
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's okay.
John:
But like, you know, eventually someone has the guts to say, should we just stop doing this?
John:
And then it goes away.
John:
And I'm weaving this whole big story of what could be happening inside Apple have no information on this whatsoever.
John:
But that's what this smells like.
John:
And I think that's a natural thing to happen.
John:
especially in big companies, to get any idea from someone's head to become an actual project that goes out to the public, especially in a company like Apple, is so difficult and requires so many skills beyond doing the thing, having to do with promoting the thing, explaining why it's a good idea.
John:
You know, getting support from all the people who need to give you a thumbs up for this to go through.
John:
Right.
John:
And a lot of that is predicated on promises.
John:
I think this will do X, Y and Z for us.
John:
Right.
John:
And sometimes those things just don't turn out or sometimes they turn out.
John:
But the time where they had a big benefit has passed.
John:
And now it's not, you know, maybe during the 32 to 64 transition or whatever was a big deal.
John:
But now it's not that big a deal.
John:
But the costs remain.
John:
And so I think it is actually a good thing that.
John:
assuming this is the right call again i don't know inside apple but assuming this is the right call it is an important thing for companies to do to decide when a thing they decided to do many years ago has either not worked out or its time has passed and it's time to sort of put it to bed and i think this will mostly not impact developers too harshly there's going to be a long transition period and this was you know that the benefits to developers probably were minimal like do you know of a case where
John:
bitcode made your app run slightly faster than it would have without you resubmitting a new app.
John:
If that happened, developers probably wouldn't even know about it.
Casey:
Chris talked about it in the interview because I re-listened to that section of the interview to remind me.
Casey:
And this was actually one of my favorite things that he spoke about on that interview, or at least one of the few things I remember all these years later, which is, and he had a specific example, and I'm going to butcher the details, but the idea was there was a processor, I think the comically named Swift processor, I forget which one it was, it was like iPhone 5 or something like that,
Casey:
And it had as a hardware instruction integer, either multiplication or division or something like that.
Casey:
And so what you could do or what Apple could do is say, hey, you know, I built, let's say, Masquerade for the prior processor that does not have the special opcode for integer division or whatever it was.
Casey:
But because I'm submitting to them bitcode, they can do the appropriate conversions such that the version of my app that's downloaded does use this new hardware instruction.
Casey:
So I get the benefits of this really fancy-schmancy hardware instruction without having even known it existed when I compiled my code, which is pretty neat.
John:
Right.
John:
But do you notice that benefit as a developer?
John:
Do you even know that it happened?
Casey:
As a developer, no.
John:
Right.
John:
So in theory, it's benefiting you because your app runs faster or something, right?
Casey:
Right.
John:
Exactly.
John:
But is that a benefit that you would notice and care about if they took it away?
John:
Probably not.
John:
And how much faster would it make your app?
John:
And then the flip side of that is, okay, that's how it's supposed to go.
John:
But what if there's a problem?
John:
What if we're supposed to do it in such a way that
John:
it is functionally identical to the previous version.
John:
So when the new instruction comes out, we can just, you know, use the bit code to produce that thing.
John:
But maybe some part of this application relied on some, you know, unintended side effect of the previous instruction that it was using.
John:
And now all of a sudden this person's app behaves differently or has a bug or something like that.
John:
And they lose time on that.
John:
Right.
John:
Or like I said, just the cost to maintain the infrastructure that, you know, that processes the bit code for all the different architectures.
John:
And, you know, there's, there's definitely costs involved in this and the benefits of them.
John:
I think the reason we haven't talked about BitCode very much is like, it's not something that developers are like, oh, BitCode is a lifesaver.
John:
I'm so glad Apple did that.
John:
It makes my life as a developer so much better and it makes my apps better for my users.
John:
I mean, maybe it does a little bit, but not so much that, you know...
John:
i haven't seen anyone kick up a fuss about this deprecation right like no one is saying no don't take away bit code it's like huh all right i guess it's time has passed obviously we'd love to know what the real story is and obviously one person who did leave apple uh is chris latner who seemed to love bit code but i don't think it's the type of thing well once chris latner left it was just you know a few short years before they decided to deprecate it and turn it off it's obviously a lot more complicated than that
Casey:
All right, so apparently Marco got a belated birthday present because there is a new big HomePod rumor, Marco.
Casey:
Did we read this by chance?
Marco:
This literally could not have been better timed.
Marco:
I spent the first 10 minutes of last week's show basically begging, please, why aren't there HomePod rumors?
Marco:
Please, Apple, make a new big HomePod.
Marco:
I hope they still make HomePods.
Marco:
And sure enough, I mean, it must have been two hours after we released that show.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Mark Gurman in his newsletter for Bloomberg has, you know, one of these various like, you know, Gurman dumps of like, here's 17 new products we expect in the next year.
Marco:
And also one of them happens to be a new larger HomePod.
Marco:
It's a Gurman rumor.
Marco:
Usually he gets most of the hardware things right.
Marco:
The timing isn't always right.
Marco:
The marketing isn't always right.
Marco:
But he gets most of the existence of hardware products right.
Marco:
And so I'm inclined to believe that this is likely to happen.
Marco:
I don't know when it will happen.
Marco:
I don't know what exactly it will be.
Marco:
But what he says is the upcoming HomePod will run an S8 chip, which is the same one that's going to be in the watches this fall.
Marco:
And I looked it up.
Marco:
The HomePod mini is, I think, an S4.
Marco:
And so it's also a watch chip, but it's a few years older.
Marco:
The previous large HomePod ran the A8 chip from iPhones from a billion years ago.
Marco:
One of my complaints with the big HomePod, besides the fact that it dies and is unreliable, is that it's extremely slow to do anything.
Marco:
And that is something that, you know, when you use a big HomePod and then you use a HomePod mini, the difference is night and day.
Marco:
The HomePod mini is way more responsive, way faster.
Marco:
It's still not fast, mind you, in absolute terms, but it is way faster than the big HomePod with its crappy A8 chip.
Marco:
So for this to be a few generations ahead of where the HomePod mini is in the processor is probably a very good thing.
Marco:
And Gurman also says that it'll be, quote, closer to the original HomePod in terms of size and audio performance rather than a new HomePod mini.
Marco:
And it will apparently allegedly have an updated display on top, possibly with multi-touch.
Marco:
So that's all interesting.
Marco:
That all sounds like it solves problems that the HomePod had.
Marco:
You know, if it's going to have much more responsive performance, that's great.
Marco:
It's going to have better audio capabilities than the Mini.
Marco:
That's great because we need that in the market.
Marco:
And the display and touch interface to it also sucked.
Marco:
And so to have that be possibly improved or expanded upon, that's also great.
Marco:
So this sounds awesome.
Marco:
I really, really hope this is true.
Marco:
And I hope it pans out this way.
Marco:
And if so, it can't get here fast enough.
Marco:
He said, I believe it's going to be like 2023 sometime.
Marco:
So not soon.
Marco:
I'm happy to hear that this product line is most likely not dead and that the HomePod mini is most likely not intended to be the only thing in it.
John:
I kind of fear that based on this extremely vague rumor that the thing I'm picturing in my head, I mean, I guess you would take it, Marco, because, you know, beggars can't be choosers.
John:
But I'm picturing a HomePod mini that's bigger that still just has one speaker in it, as opposed to the umpteen speakers that are inside the big HomePod, like basically just a larger, a larger speaker, a larger speaker cone, but still just one.
John:
So yeah, that will be better than the Mini, but it's, I don't think, based on their past experience and this rumor, it doesn't seem like it's going to be something that is going to match the audio quality of your current big HomePods.
Marco:
Well, there's a lot of room between those.
Marco:
So when you only have one driver, like, you know, in a speaker, usually, you know, in...
Marco:
very tiny speakers you have one cone like one speaker cone and when you get larger speakers you typically have multiple speaker cones they're called drivers and they are different sizes to cover different frequency ranges the bigger the bigger the cone is the more it covers the bass the smaller the cone is the more it covers the treble or you get these little tiny tweeter things that aren't even cones anymore because they're so small anyway the more you can like separate out the rolls you get you get different benefits there and also the larger the driver is the harder it is to serve the full range of sound
Marco:
So, what I hope is happening here is, you know, there's a lot of room between the one driver and the, quote, passive radiators that the HomePod Mini has, and the, I believe, nine drivers or something like that, that the big HomePod had.
Marco:
I think it had seven mid-range and tweeters up in the ring, or down in the ring, and then it had one woofer, or were there two woofers in force-canceling configuration?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I forget.
Marco:
Anyway,
Marco:
There's a lot of room between those two.
Marco:
It wouldn't really make a lot of sense, I don't think, audio engineering-wise or mechanically or quality-wise, to have a significantly larger speaker than the HomePod Mini that only has one driver in it.
Marco:
That doesn't make a lot of sense.
Marco:
It's probably going to split out the woofer and the mid-range slash tweeter into at least two drivers.
Marco:
And that is great.
Marco:
That alone is, in many cases, enough.
Marco:
And one thing that was very impressive, what they did with the full-size HomePod, they were able to get surprisingly good bass in a surprisingly small space with the type of woofer they used.
Marco:
You don't need a ton of these things.
Marco:
You just need a little bit more than one.
Marco:
And the original HomePod, it had the seven mid-range drivers all in a circle, so it could fire in 360 degrees of sound.
Marco:
Most people don't need that in most spaces.
Marco:
Most people need sound to come out at most 180 degrees in front of it.
Marco:
And that's that's great.
Marco:
Like, you know, if it can be a wide soundstage, that's still only 180 degrees instead of 360.
Marco:
That's still awesome.
Marco:
That's still better than most passive, you know, non-smart speakers that only have a couple of drivers facing forward.
Marco:
That's nowhere near 180 degrees of coverage.
Marco:
So it's still better than that.
Marco:
I think they can really get away with maybe four drivers.
Marco:
Like I'd say one woofer and three mid-ring slash tweeters.
Marco:
Forward, left, and right on the tweeters.
Marco:
That's probably enough.
Marco:
So that's a huge component reduction from what they have now.
John:
You're going to have to fight the designers on that because they're going to say, wait a second, what you're describing is a product that is directional.
John:
so we can't make it symmetrical like if it fires in a circle there's no front to the home pod right whichever way you put it like it adapts to whatever but if you actually have something that even if you have something that has a forward facing driver and a backwards facing driver you have to know where forward and back is they have to put like an arrow on it or something like so you know how to face the 180 degrees into the room no but but you already know that though because you know where the cord goes in the back and you know where the buttons are aligned on top yeah the cord could probably do it although i feel like i mean not this is what apple will do but like
John:
Good product design would make that way more obvious than you just having to know that the cord goes to the sound.
John:
Yeah, it looks like it's a perfect cylinder.
John:
But keep in mind that the sound comes out opposite of the way the cord goes.
John:
And if you don't realize that and like put it sideways, you know, why is the sound so bad?
John:
And you don't know this, your symmetrical, you know, cylinder is firing into the wall to the side of you instead of into the room.
Marco:
I know this is probably a pipe dream that I don't think they will do this.
Marco:
I would love for them to do this.
Marco:
It would be great if the HomePod had a line in jack on the back.
Marco:
And so if they're going to do anything like that, or even if, God forbid, they would make the cable removable and replaceable, maybe you could replace it with a shorter one.
Marco:
That would be amazing.
Marco:
Suppose they were going to add a port to it.
Marco:
I know that's a lot to ask.
Marco:
Then there would probably be a little flattened area on the back where the cables come in.
Marco:
So that would be another thing to fix that symmetry problem.
Marco:
But also, I don't even think necessarily that they need to do a ton of cost-cutting here because they now have the HomePod Mini, which is the value product.
Marco:
When they launched the first HomePod...
Marco:
They were entering a market where everyone buys things for $50 to $100 from Amazon or Google or whatever.
Marco:
They came in with something that was $350 as their only entry to the market.
Marco:
Of course we all made fun of the price because it was ridiculously over-specced for that market.
Marco:
And that's not what people wanted out of a smart speaker most of the time.
Marco:
But now they have the value segment covered.
Marco:
So even if they come out with this next HomePod and it's $350 again...
Marco:
In that price range, for what it offers, it actually is, as I mentioned before, pretty competitive.
Marco:
It's just a much smaller market.
Marco:
So I hope they actually try to bridge the gap a little bit.
Marco:
I hope they go a little bit down market, get them something they could sell for $200 to $250.
Marco:
That I think they would do a decent amount of volume, and nobody would say, oh my god, that's way too expensive, if it's significantly improved from the HomePod Mini in terms of size and sound detail.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm curious to see what comes of this, because I feel like I'm starting to sniff about in the HomePod space.
Casey:
The Alexas that we have are getting obscenely chatty and constantly wanting to sell us stuff and tell us stuff, which, granted, this is not terribly surprising.
Casey:
But when we first got a couple of them a few years back, they were extremely quiet unless they were being spoken to.
Casey:
And now they're constantly needing attention.
Casey:
They're ridiculous.
Casey:
They're like toddlers now.
Marco:
No, as far as I'm concerned, Amazon had the lead in this area and threw it away.
Casey:
Yeah, agreed.
Marco:
Amazon could not have fumbled this worse than they have.
Marco:
I don't know a lot of people who have Amazon Echoes or their family of products who are super happy with them right now.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
John, tell me about passkey syncing.
Casey:
What's the story here?
John:
So a treat from Ricky, a tweet from Ricky.
John:
And it says in iOS 16 and macOS Ventura, there isn't any UI to disable syncing of credentials made via WebAuthn.
John:
Those are the passkey things.
John:
Passkeys, a replacement for passwords, sync across devices and are backed up with iCloud keychain.
John:
So this is just a statement of fact.
John:
We talked before about how you can airdrop passkeys to somebody or whatever.
John:
But just when you're using passkeys yourself, they will sync via iCloud Keychain to all your devices.
John:
And that is not an option because some people are asking, hey, what if I want to have a passkey and it's like only on my phone or something?
John:
Can I do that?
John:
And the answer is no.
John:
They sync everywhere.
John:
And it's obviously everyone makes different tradeoffs between security and convenience.
Yeah.
John:
In this first iteration, the choice Apple is making is a balance between security and convenience that is well-suited for most people.
John:
Because for most people, if you allowed them or if it didn't sync everywhere by default or if you allowed them to turn it off,
John:
They can end up in a situation where they have a passkey that gets into some account at some point in the future where people start using these things, and it's only on their phone, and the phone's not backed up because that is a thing that you can do.
John:
Oh, I ran out of iCloud space.
John:
I didn't want to pay for it.
John:
Who pays for iCloud space?
John:
And they drop their phone to the ocean, and that was the only place the passkey was to log into their account.
John:
And they try to log into their account, and they can't, and they're angry about it, right?
John:
Syncing everywhere is the thing that makes passkeys a viable replacement for passwords because then...
John:
If you lose any one of your devices or even all your devices, because iCloud Keychain is an iCloud, if you lose your devices or they break or your house burned down or whatever, you don't lose your ability to log into all your accounts.
John:
Kind of like in theory, you wouldn't lose it with passwords.
John:
If you knew your passwords, which probably you don't, but let's say you knew your passwords, which probably means they're bad passwords.
John:
Oh, my house burned down, but I have memorized these 97 high quality passwords.
John:
Probably not true, but in theory, it could be done.
John:
But with the pass keys, you never know what they are.
John:
They're just on your devices.
John:
So it has to sync because that is what will protect most people from themselves.
John:
But for people who want to have a different tradeoff between security and convenience, iOS 16 and macOS Ventura do not give that option, at least in the UI.
John:
This is a very specific tweet.
John:
It says there isn't any UI to disable the syncing of credentials.
John:
Is there a command line way to do it?
John:
Is there some secret key?
John:
Who knows?
John:
But I think this is the right call because if you made this optional or made people have to turn it on, people could really get themselves into trouble.
John:
Again, this all requires passkeys to become a thing because if you don't log in anywhere with passkeys, who cares what it does?
John:
But I think this is the right call.
John:
But for people who are very security conscious and want to have a thing where, like you do with hardware YubiKeys or whatever, where you know this is the one and only place where this thing is,
Casey:
uh that's not something pasky's going to do at least in this first iteration indeed uh we have incredibly important follow-up to cover this is with regard to cafe max and the meals there and we got some feedback uh and i will read it now pacific rim pangea etc are the different kitchens and not the name nor type of dishes that they're offering
Casey:
We were theorizing that, oh, the Pacific Rim entry for the WWDC meals, that means it's a meal from the Pacific Rim.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Apparently, that's the kitchen.
Casey:
Pangaea is a kitchen, etc.
Casey:
So anyway, going back to the feedback.
Casey:
Employees use an app to order everything.
Casey:
For all the restaurants, they do a daily special and have a couple of staples available every day.
Casey:
This person writes, I worked at Infinite Loop, but the kitchens are all the same at Apple Park and all the other Cafe Max and Cupertino.
Casey:
I worked there for a few months and ate everything.
Casey:
Everything's pretty good with the exception of the grill.
Casey:
Think Cruise Food Kitchen.
Casey:
Basic American stuff with no frills.
John:
A little bit of real-time feedback on the PASCY thing.
John:
Some people in the chat room are asking about this.
John:
One question was, hey, wait a second.
John:
I thought PASCYs weren't supposed to leave your device.
John:
There's a thing that Apple has done in a lot of their literature about PASCYs and their presentations that's easy to miss.
John:
But if you're thinking about it like, what are you talking about PASCYs syncing with iCloud Keychain?
John:
Because it's
John:
you know, it's supposed to stay on my device and never leave my device, right?
John:
But how does it sync if it doesn't leave my device?
John:
Doesn't make sense.
John:
What they always say in their presentations and documentation is your passkey does not leave your device when you log into something.
John:
Like, oh, I'm signing into my thing.
John:
Unlike your password, which you send over the internet to the website that you're logging into, your passkey does not leave your device when you log in, right?
John:
It's your data.
John:
You keep it in your secure enclave.
John:
It is yours to sync with as you want using the end-to-end encrypted iCloud keychain that even Apple can't get access to or whatever.
John:
So yes, it does leave your device when it syncs to your other devices and it leaves your device when you airdrop it to somebody else.
John:
But when you log in on a daily basis, log into the service, log into that service, it does not leave your device then, which means A, it doesn't leave your device most of the time when you're using it.
John:
And B, the things you're logging into never see it.
John:
You don't send it to them.
John:
They don't have to store it.
John:
They don't have to store a hash of it.
John:
They don't have any piece of it.
John:
They have your public key, which is totally public and anybody can have and it's fine.
John:
They don't get your private key when you log in.
John:
So there's that distinction.
John:
And then somebody asked, what if you only have one Apple device?
John:
Why would you still want syncing?
John:
That's because if you drop your one Apple device in a lake, you better hope someone's got a copy of that passkey.
John:
And who has a copy of it?
John:
It's in your iCloud keychain, which is on Apple server somewhere.
John:
But they can't decrypt it because it's end-to-end encrypted.
Casey:
All right, let's briefly talk about buy now, pay later.
Casey:
This is becoming more relevant in my world because Apple has announced that they're going to do a buy now, pay later thing via Apple Pay.
Casey:
And we got a bunch of feedback about this.
Casey:
And honestly, this could go on for hours.
Casey:
And so I just thought I'd cover a couple of quick things.
Casey:
I didn't really know how this worked and who made money and how.
Casey:
And the summary that I will offer up to you, the listener, is that apparently the way this works is
Casey:
When you go to buy something, generally speaking, you pay in four installments.
Casey:
You pay the first one immediately and then three more installments in two, four, and six weeks later.
Casey:
What happens is the merchant pays a little bit more money or a little bit higher percentage than they would for a straight-up credit card transaction.
Casey:
And the people that are doing buy now, pay later, like Affirm or one of the many other companies, Afterpay,
Casey:
They basically make their money by taking a little bit more fee than a credit card.
Casey:
Now, why would the merchant be interested in this?
Casey:
They do this because they're told and people believe that the conversion is way higher.
Casey:
So it is much more likely that the thing that was in your shopping cart actually gets purchased when you can do it in four installments instead of just one big lump sum.
Casey:
There was a pretty good episode of Planet Money about this that's only like 20, 25 minutes.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
But what's interesting about this is we don't know a whole lot about how Apple specifically is going to conquer this.
Casey:
From what we've gathered or from what people have dug up, it sounds like...
Casey:
Apple is going to be the one providing the financing.
Casey:
So, you know, if you're buying a hundred dollar item and you're doing that in four $25 installments, then, then Apple's floating you 75 bucks, right?
Casey:
Because you're paying 25 immediately and then 25 in two weeks, 25 in four weeks, 25 in six weeks.
John:
Where will Apple get all that money from?
Casey:
Jeez, I don't know.
Casey:
Since they're so cash strapped, it's going to be real hard.
John:
I like the idea of like people saying, oh, Apple's not using a bank for this.
John:
They're going to be their own bank.
John:
I assume Apple probably has more money than most banks.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Well put.
Casey:
So anyway, so Apple will float it.
Casey:
But what is interesting is apparently they're, and I'm a little fuzzy on the details here, but apparently they're using Goldman Sachs to...
Casey:
vend for lack of a better word and that's probably technically incorrect a master card such that it's a i guess like a fan again i'm way out of my comfort zone here but i guess it's like a phantom master card that the transaction is run up rung up against and that that they're using goldman sachs for but the floating of this hypothetical 75 dollars is is apple's money and they will hopefully make their money back by taking slightly higher fees and
John:
To use a software pattern, it's like the adapter pattern.
John:
Like the entire payment system doesn't know about these things.
John:
So it has to masquerade as if you paid with a slightly higher fee credit card.
John:
Because from the merchant's perspective, they get all the money at once.
John:
It doesn't look like buy now, pay later to them.
John:
It just looks like, oh, this is like a really high fee for this credit card or whatever.
John:
And like Casey said, the reason they're willing to pay the higher fee is... I'm assuming they don't just think, I'm sure it is actually true, that...
John:
People buy more stuff when you get all the money, but they are only paying part of that money.
John:
So they're more likely to purchase things.
John:
So they're willing, the vendors, the merchants, oh, there's too many stupid terms.
John:
The stores where you buy stuff, the store is willing to pay a higher fee to get that customer to buy the thing.
John:
And to them, it just looks like a high fee credit card.
Casey:
There are a bunch of catches and caveats with this.
Casey:
We're not going to go into all of them, but the short, short version is there's not a lot of protections around this because, you know, governments haven't really caught up to this being a thing yet.
Casey:
Additionally, there's not a lot of protections to make sure that there's no predatory lending, although this tends to be not as predatory a practice to begin with, which is good.
Marco:
Yeah, because it's like it's much shorter term than credit cards.
Marco:
Right.
Casey:
And it has an end point.
Casey:
Like it has a defined end rather than, oh, I'll just keep paying my $25 minimums until the end of time.
Casey:
Right.
John:
A lot of things don't actually even charge any interest.
John:
It's just like, look, you have to pay this off and this is the amount you have to pay and here's the schedule you have to pay it.
John:
And if you fail to pay on that schedule, you just can't use that buy now, pay later service anymore.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
and we'll send it to collections.
John:
So it can... Yeah, no, they'll get your money somehow, but the whole point is they're not willing to do what credit cards do, which is just make the minimum payment for the rest of your life.
John:
That's not an option.
John:
They're not trying to make money from you that way.
John:
Yes, they need you to pay back the money, and they will get it from you if they can, but the stopgap is, unlike a credit card where you can just keep paying the minimum and keep using that card, you can't use your buy now, pay later thing anymore if you have not made the payments on your existing thing.
John:
So it sort of kills your payment method.
John:
Until you pay it off.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And then the other interesting thing is what happens if you like, I don't know, buy something and it turns out you're getting totally ripped off.
Casey:
Well, there's no idea of like a chargeback or anything like that because you're not really doing, you're not really purchasing this through a credit card company that supports that sort of thing.
Casey:
You're purchasing it, purchasing it through Apple or Afterpay or what have you.
Casey:
And so there's a lot of ways that it's not as safe for a consumer.
Casey:
But the advantage is, especially for naive consumers, and I don't mean that dismissively, or inexperienced perhaps is a better word for it, is that you're not looking at a 20% credit card fee that could follow you, like you guys were saying, until the end of time.
Casey:
This has a defined stop date, and that's six weeks from whenever you purchase.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I find this very interesting as someone who has basically treated his credit card like a debit card for his entire life.
Casey:
I don't think this is necessarily for me, but it is a very interesting approach.
Casey:
And I am very I'm very curious to see what Apple does with this and how this works out for Apple.
John:
I feel like there is ample room for what they call innovation in the finance space to figure out, OK, but what if we did charge people fees and interest?
John:
You know, like it's very – the way the banking industry finds a way to make money off things that don't seem like they're – like most banks essentially make money off fees now.
John:
Like they don't –
John:
They don't, you know, the old model of like, oh, the bank takes your money and they hold it for you and they use it to give people loans.
John:
They charge interest in those loans.
John:
Like, no, they just charge you fees and that's how they make all their money.
John:
Right.
John:
And so there's there's so many places in the system where you can add a little fee.
John:
In fact, some of the chat room saying like, oh, if you miss a payment, they charge you a ten dollar penalty or something like that.
John:
just little fees like oh it's not interest but yeah if you miss a payment it's this fee or whatever but we'll let you use your card it's kind of like you know think of everything you used to gamify the casino games for children on the app store right oh you're you've missed a payment so a you get a ten dollar penalty but b do you still want to use this payment method because normally we would stop you but if you pay twenty dollars now we'll let you use it for another purchase pay thirty dollars for a boost in a loot box
John:
Exactly, right.
John:
It's like, do you want to use it for an extra 24 hours?
John:
You can have an extra week on this.
John:
We'll let you use it even though you haven't paid that off, but it's just a $50 fee.
John:
Okay, so it's not interest, but it's a way to make small amounts of money knowing that people will miss a payment or buy something that's a little bit more than they can afford and have to wait for the next paycheck to pay it off.
John:
The industry of finding a way to...
John:
Yeah.
John:
and now apple's in all these businesses great right well i mean in theory kind of like they did with apple card apple will try to do the slightly better version of that because like i said before i think the upside for apple for doing this is let's make more people you know use apple pay more transactions going through apple payment methods apple wants to drive more people to use its payment systems so that's the benefit it gets um but
John:
but kind of like services where it's like, okay, well, Apple's business, they make all their money from selling phones, but they want to have services to make their phones more valuable.
John:
Eventually, if something is successful, somebody wakes up and notices, you know what?
John:
Services actually make a lot of money too.
John:
And unlike phones now, it's growing.
John:
So that should become a profit center for us instead of just a way to make our phones more valuable.
John:
And that can easily happen with payment methods if they ever get to that point, because it may right now be a way to just drive more people to buy things on their phones and so on and so forth.
John:
But, and you know, we don't charge late fees and we don't do this, we don't have any interest, but
John:
Five years from now, a bean counter runs the numbers and says, you know what?
John:
Services have stopped growing, but this payment method stuff, this is a goldmine.
John:
If we add a 1% fee for, increase our fee for missed payments by one cent per year, we make an extra billion dollars.
John:
And then we're looking at the Apple payments graph go up and up in our old age.
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Casey:
All right, so apparently in the infinitely long list of reasons why the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M2 is a piece of... is because the SSDs are apparently way slower, which is cool.
John:
This is kind of disappointing for this computer, because honestly, I don't think it's really...
John:
of all the things that are wrong with this computer, this one of them is a thing that could have happened to any computer.
John:
It could have happened to the nicest computer.
John:
It didn't.
John:
It happened to this cruddy computer.
John:
It happens to every computer sometimes.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
It's true.
John:
So the thing that happens is when you put storage in a computer, whether it's RAM or SSDs or whatever, you can buy the little chips that make up either the RAM or the flash storage or whatever in various sizes,
John:
And sometimes the biggest size you can get is not big enough to do the thing that you want.
John:
So like, say you wanted to have, in this case, a 256 gigabyte SSD.
John:
Can I get a 256 gigabyte single chip?
John:
No, you got to buy two of them.
John:
You got to buy 128 and 128.
John:
So, all right, fine, because there's no 256 is available or they are available, but they're exorbitantly expensive.
John:
Right.
John:
And this is this is not our top end computer.
John:
Right.
John:
So we're going to buy two of those chips and that'll make, you know, two 128s will make 256.
John:
years go by the new model of this machine comes out it's like oh actually we can get single chip 256 gigabyte uh flash storage now so on the new computer we won't have to buy a 128 and 128 we'll just buy one 256 because it's not more expensive and i'll use less power and i'll take up less space and so on and so forth um and you know and in the case of the m2 macbook uh pro like uh we're not going to redesign the motherboard like we're just going to put one chip there like there used to be a place for two chips but now we'll just buy one of them for the base model because the base model has a 256 gig ssd
John:
Before we had to buy a 128 and 128.
John:
Now we can just buy a single 256.
John:
March of progress.
John:
Fine, right?
John:
The problem is the way SSDs work in that Mac and in many Macs is if you put two chips there, the little controller that reads the solid-state storage...
John:
can read from and write to both of those chips at the same time two chips at the same time yeah it's it's you know again it's not it's not like raid or anything it's all invisible to the operating system it looks like a single volume but practically speaking there's enough bandwidth and the controller knows how to talk to both of them at the same time so when they went from two 128 chips to a single 256 chip it cut the disc speed in half
John:
Because previously it could do you know both at once and it's just straight up parallel like oh you're writing stuff I'll write some here and some there and I'll do it both at the same time and with just one chip the speed gets cut in half.
John:
and that's not great so if you bought a base model m1 macbook pro the touch bar m1 macbook pro with a 256 gig ssd and it came with two 128 gig uh flash things that thing's ssd flash things that's what they're called twice as fast as the new m2 one only if you get the baseball now if you get the m2 if you get an m2 with a bigger uh ssd
John:
then they have to do two chips again, because they can't get them big enough, right?
John:
So I don't know about the size of that.
John:
I think if you just get a 512, they give you two 256 chips, and then you get your speed back.
John:
But this is one of those weird things that you'd have to be a nerd to know about, that some person's gonna go in, and they're gonna get this machine, and in addition to all the other things that are bad about this machine that we talked about before, they're gonna get the base model, because it's the cheapest, and not realize they're getting a slower SSD than if they had bought the M1 version of this.
John:
And that's a bummer, especially at the low end.
John:
So now you have to have a nerdy friend who tells you don't buy the 256 gig if you care about SSD speed.
John:
If you don't care about SSD speed, people won't notice it's like browsing the web and using Microsoft Word or whatever.
John:
But it just makes this machine more of a bummer with yet more reasons to be wary of it.
Marco:
as much as this sucks to be a regression, you know, because, because this was not true of the M one version, like the, the M one base model did not have this problem just because of, you know, different chip configuration, as John said, but it just, it sucks that like, this is yet another reason why people are getting a subpar experience with this machine because
Marco:
by a lack of information.
Marco:
They're going to go into an Apple store, they're going to see, oh, here's something that says Pro and is inexpensive relative to the other Pros.
Marco:
I must get this over the Air.
Marco:
And by the way, I fully expect the Air to have this exact same problem.
Marco:
This generation of these storage chips with this M2 generation of architecture or whatever, this generation of these chips is going to have this problem.
Marco:
So I expect all of the M2 products in the 256 configuration
Marco:
I expect them all to have this exact same problem this time around.
Marco:
And it just sucks.
Marco:
There's just more asterisks where you have to, as John said, consult your nerd friend.
Marco:
What's the right one to buy?
Marco:
And now it's more complicated.
Marco:
And the reality is...
Marco:
SSD speed, it's really fast either way.
Marco:
It's just much faster this other way.
Marco:
And sustained transfer rates from SSDs aren't that important of a performance characteristic of modern computers.
Marco:
What sucks more about this is that it's a regression and a significant one in a certain metric.
Marco:
Not necessarily that it's going to result in a very noticeably slow computer in most operations.
Marco:
It won't.
Marco:
And I would also argue if you're buying A, this computer at all, and B, the base model storage, performance might not be very important to you.
Marco:
There's a much higher chance than usual if you're buying the base SSD that you're not really in it for the disk performance.
John:
It's kind of a shame that it's on the model with pro suffix, though, you know, because maybe you would think it's going to be faster.
John:
I'm kind of afraid that when the M2 MacBook Air comes out, it won't have this problem because it will have like a redesigned motherboard or the base model will use two chips or something like that.
John:
And so the base model Air will have a faster SSD.
John:
But this whole issue has made all the people who have been testing this.
John:
you know, sort of look around a little bit more as they occasionally do and say, you know, Apple's SSDs used to be super fast in their Macs, but they haven't really kept up.
John:
If you look at the SSDs that are coming in a lot of PC laptops in similar classes, you can get much faster SSDs in a similar price range.
John:
They would look at like, oh, let's look at a...
John:
you know what is a microsoft laptop or a dell laptop in a similar price range and do tests on its ssds because there are you know faster ssds coming out all the time and apple hasn't really kept up in this area again not that they're slow and on the air like who cares i you know if the air has this problem if you're buying a base model air with 256 gigs your main problem is probably going to be that you bought a laptop with 256 gigs in it which is going to feel really tight to you i think
John:
um and your secondary problem is the performance but it's it's the apple's cheapest laptop it's the base model of apple's cheapest laptop so what do you expect but the one that has the pro in the name the whole point is oh you're stepping up to something that's a little bit better and it would be really disappointing to step up to something that has a quarter of the performance of a similarly priced ssd and a pc laptop again not that it's a spec race or whatever just feel like apple has to has to do some minimum amount to keep up here at various points apple's ssds were really fast
John:
And I think they're just a little bit behind in this generation.
John:
Maybe it's because the PCIe 4 stuff is coming out on the PC side and Apple hasn't revved to that.
John:
Maybe they'll catch up with the M3s and everything.
John:
But for most people, this doesn't matter because you're not running benchmarks all day.
John:
You're just browsing the web.
John:
It's perfectly fine.
John:
And what more people care about are things like
John:
reliability, uh, and maybe Apple's, uh, the ones they're choosing do better in that area.
John:
Who knows?
John:
But Apple does have to keep up here.
John:
And it's, it's kind of like the camera.
John:
It's like once, once it starts catching on and people start poking into it, it just becomes a thing.
John:
And hopefully now, uh,
John:
if apple is paying attention they will feel i don't think i don't think it's gonna be like the camera the camera they're gonna feel the need to do better with the camera because it was such a big story everywhere but with the ssds they'll probably be like a few people complain but no one really cares but i do hope they keep up because it is it is something that does impact your day-to-day experience whether you know it or not you might not notice from one computer to the next but if you skip like three computers uh
John:
And you're like, oh, they both have an SSD, but the SSDs are so much faster than they were like, you know, five, 10 years ago.
John:
And that needs to continue to be the case.
Casey:
Additionally, and unrelatedly, there's apparently going to be a 15-inch MacBook thing, according to Ming-Chi Kuo.
Casey:
A 15-inch MacBook could feature M.2 and M.2 Pro options without the Air brand.
Casey:
And there's been a lot of debates whether or not my beloved 12-inch would come back or not.
Casey:
Nobody seems to agree at this time.
Casey:
But apparently there may be a 15-inch that is not a Pro, which is interesting.
Casey:
And not an Air either, just a 15-inch MacBook.
Marco:
book studio i don't know i mean it's possible i don't think studio would be the name because studio is effectively like pro plus in their in their so far um or maybe i don't know it's it's like mid-range pro but this so take with a grain of salt anything from the rumor mill that's about pricing naming or marketing
Marco:
The Apple marketing team basically does not leak.
Marco:
The only times we've really gotten credible leaks for things like product names usually is when we have accidental inclusion in Apple's own software releases of references to a certain name or something like that.
Marco:
Apple leaks it.
John:
How did Mac Studio leak?
John:
Remember Mac Studio leak a few days before?
John:
I don't remember where they came from.
John:
Oh, that's true.
Marco:
Yeah, it was one of those Twitter people.
Marco:
Anyway, it's very unlikely that this product that is scheduled to come out not exactly soon, that the name of it would leak.
Marco:
So I wouldn't get too bogged down on the name.
Marco:
What does seem likely incredible here is that some kind of 15-inch non-pro MacBook is coming out.
Marco:
I think there's a big potential market for this.
Marco:
If you look at what Apple's doing with the iPhone, there is a similar rumor with the iPhone this fall.
John:
That's not a rumor.
John:
That's basically guaranteed.
John:
Yeah, at this point, yeah.
John:
Because the phone stuff does leak.
Marco:
Yeah, the phone stuff leaks like crazy.
Marco:
And so this fall, if this is correct, the non-pro phone is going to come in two sizes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Previously, it has not been possible to get the largest size class of phone in a non-pro line.
Marco:
But this fall, they are changing that because it turns out there's a big market for big phones, even if that market doesn't necessarily include everybody who's willing to spend like $1,200 on a phone.
Marco:
So that makes sense for them to cover that market.
Marco:
Well, the same thing applies to laptops.
Marco:
Size of the screen does not need to correlate with all of the Pro components inside.
Marco:
Many people want larger screen laptops.
Marco:
And Apple has covered the 13-inch range extremely well for years.
Marco:
And I'm pretty sure that is the number one range in terms of what volume sells across the whole industry.
Marco:
I think 13-inch is probably the most common one.
Marco:
But I would imagine second place is 15-inch.
Marco:
For years, Apple covered that very, very well.
Marco:
I think what's interesting, though, is that when you look at the recent products, and this applies across many Apple product lines, possibly all Apple product lines, the word pro used to just mean the bigger ones.
Marco:
But in recent years, Pro has actually been pushed further up market.
Marco:
In some ways, that's just Apple wanting to, you know, keep their extremely healthy profit margins and, you know, hey, that's how they got where they are, good for them.
Marco:
But in other ways, it allows them to use actually fancier and more expensive components and materials and stuff like that.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
What I think we're seeing is the bifurcation of more and more Apple product lines into much more distinguished pro versus non-pro than we used to have.
Marco:
If you look at the MacBook Pro, MacBook Pro now has these much larger, higher core count chips.
Marco:
We have things like the ProMotion displays, HDR being built on a display, stuff like that.
Marco:
Those are much higher end components and needs.
Marco:
Most people don't care about.
Marco:
Look at the phones.
Marco:
You have the three camera system, all like the pro raw stuff.
Marco:
You have the fancy materials that I hate, the promotion display again there too.
Marco:
Like this is a more expensive thing.
Marco:
So I think what they're doing is breaking this long held notion and in a much larger way, breaking this long held notion that pro just meant the biggest ones.
Marco:
and offering non-pro big options in their product lines because there's demand for that and letting pro actually mean the higher end of components most of which happen to be on the bigger scale but not just the biggest ones
John:
Yeah, I feel like this is long overdue, especially since, I mean, whether they call it an Air or not, a 15 inch MacBook Air-ish type computer with sort of MacBook Air internals is such a great machine for people who want a bigger screen.
John:
Because remember, it's still got the Air internals.
John:
It doesn't have pro internals, no super hot anything.
John:
It's just like the same little power sipping thing that's in the 13 inch.
John:
but so much more room for battery.
John:
And yes, you have a bigger screen to power too, but that screen's not gonna be a 1600 nit HDR, like whatever.
John:
It's a bigger screen, but I feel like the battery increase will more than make up for the screen increase.
John:
So what you get for the people who want it is a thing with a bigger screen, which people really want either for the real estate or so they can do a scale resolution to make everything bigger on their screen, right?
John:
And you get better battery life.
John:
And it's only a little bit bigger and only a little bit heavier.
John:
And that's a trade-off that tons of people are going to make.
John:
We're so used to it, but it must be so weird if you're shopping for a laptop in the traditional Apple world of the past decade or so and saying, I want a laptop.
John:
Oh, this screen's a little big.
John:
Can you show me something with a bigger screen?
John:
And you're like, it costs how much?
John:
You were just looking at the $999 MacBook Air with a 13-inch screen.
John:
You just saw something with a little bit bigger screen.
John:
It's like, yeah, that'll be, you know, add $2,500 to the price of your thing.
John:
It doesn't make any sense to the consumer.
John:
Like, but the screen is only a little bit bigger.
John:
And they're like, yeah, it's got this and that and the other thing in it.
John:
And they're like, but I don't know what any of that is.
John:
And I don't care about it.
John:
I just need a laptop that I can browse the web on and write things in Microsoft Word.
John:
I just want a little bit bigger screen.
John:
And you're telling me my only option is this monstrosity that I don't understand?
John:
This thing needs to be here.
John:
Now, Apple could be scared of doing it.
John:
Like, oh, no, it's going to cannibalize our 16-inch sales.
John:
But honestly, no one is cross-shopping.
John:
Like, I was looking at the bottom-of-the-line MacBook Air.
John:
But to get that bigger screen, I decided to pay a few thousand more dollars.
John:
Like, I don't think that's something that happens very often, right?
John:
So this machine has to exist.
John:
And that's what they're doing with the phones, too.
John:
You know, it's just so much more pleasing and symmetrical.
John:
It makes so much more sense for market segmentation.
John:
And it allows you to make this machine, which will have slightly different trade-offs than the base Air or than any of the larger Pros.
John:
And most of those trade-offs are going to be in favor of things that people want.
John:
More battery life, bigger things on the screen, or room for more stuff for not much bigger size.
John:
And that's why I really hope that this thing, like I'm rooting for basically a 15-inch MacBook Air.
John:
Again, whether they call it that or not, I'm rooting for it to stick to the lowest power components that Apple ships because the M1 is plenty good.
John:
The M2 is going to be plenty good.
John:
That's all people need.
John:
don't try to put a pro in there i mean i guess you could offer it if you wanted to but i feel like the the best version of this machine is macbook air guts 15 inch screen bigger battery that is the machine that really hits the sweet spot of people who don't care about pro stuff and they'll love that thing because like you know the airs get such great battery life as it is can you imagine an air with even more battery life and a bigger screen that's a crowd pleaser yeah definitely and i think this would sell a a lot
Casey:
I strongly agree.
Casey:
Although I do think that there is potentially an appetite for an in-betweener between, or I guess this would be bigger than the big pro.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
We've got 14 and 16 inch pros now.
Casey:
Gosh.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It lets the pros be like, well, it's not 15, it's 16.
John:
that little bit of differentiated oh and by the all by it's also promotion 1600 nit like the the gap between apple's pro laptop screens and it's non-pro laptop screens has never been bigger like those pro laptop screens are amazing and the macbook air screen it's fine but it's not even in the same league in terms of features that it's missing and things it can't do
Casey:
i don't know i still even though i don't think it has a place in my life anymore i still feel like i want a 12 inch macbook with apple silicon internals because again i loved that machine but it was a it was kind of a piece of trash when it was brand new it was slow it was it was delightful and it was also terrible
Marco:
What people loved about it, the physical side of it, is so achievable with Apple Silicon today.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
That's exactly what I was driving at.
Casey:
In the same way that my 14-inch MacBook Pro feels like, it's not literally, but it feels like my iMac Pro yet portable.
Casey:
Well, the Phantom 12-inch, you know, like M1 or M2 MacBook could be an Intel 12-inch MacBook, but not crappy.
Casey:
I'm a little concerned about the keyboard in terms of, you know, could they make a scissor switch keyboard that's super thin?
Casey:
Or maybe they just make it a little thicker than the old one was, but it's spiritually a successor.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I love that machine so much.
Casey:
And I really think it could be...
Casey:
a really, really great seller for someone who wants, like, a very small, very portable thing that isn't an iPad.
Casey:
And granted, you know, iPadOS is allegedly getting much better and is allegedly going to have more pro apps coming soon.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
When I bought the...
Casey:
The MacBook, I wanted an iPad that wasn't an iPad, basically.
Casey:
And in a lot of ways, that's what I got, except it was slow and couldn't do anything.
Casey:
So I guess in that way, it was like an iPad.
Casey:
Hey-oh!
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I miss that machine, and I kind of wish it would come back, even though I don't know that I would buy one.
John:
It's the same team that makes the iPhone mini, right?
John:
Because it's, you know, the smallest line, the smallest device in a line that has people who really want it but doesn't really sell that well.
John:
But people who want it, small, don't have any alternatives.
John:
I mean, obviously, if you, you know, I think they should just make it straight up.
John:
Like, I think it would be a perfectly fine, straightforward computer.
John:
And, yeah, it would sell fewer than the other models.
John:
But I think that's fine.
John:
I think.
John:
Apple can absorb that, right?
John:
But if they don't want to do that, if I had to motivate Apple to say, oh, you should really offer this product.
John:
And they say, yeah, we're not into the just plain old 12-inch laptop, even if we can make it really thin.
John:
We did that and we weren't into it.
John:
I would say this is a perfect opportunity to get over your reticence to make a touchscreen Mac because make it a convertible thing.
John:
It already runs iPad apps.
John:
We're crying out loud.
John:
Make it something that you can fold over backwards and turn into basically a 12-inch iPad when you need it to be an iPad and a touchscreen Mac when you need it to be a Mac.
John:
And it's running macOS the whole time, and you can just run iPad apps on it.
John:
I know Apple doesn't want to make this machine, but the 12-inch form factor is a perfect opportunity to do that because you wouldn't want to turn a 16-inch MacBook Pro into an iPad.
John:
That's a pretty heavy iPad.
John:
The 12-inch one, that's already in.
John:
We already make iPads that size.
John:
You can make it a similar thickness.
John:
Tons of other people in the industry are doing this.
John:
I know they don't want to make a macOS touchscreen or whatever, but I feel like Apple can't stay away from this forever, and the 12-inch size is the perfect place for them to dip their toe in.
John:
I'm not predicting this.
John:
There are no rumors of this.
John:
That's the way I would pitch it as, aren't you more interested in this product now if you weren't interested in a plain old 12-inch laptop?
John:
But according to the rumors, it seemed like they might just make a...
Marco:
potentially a 12 inch laptop which would be fine as well but i just feel like it's a less exciting machine than a convertible frankly i think people would love that thing convertible or not i think you know you said it's a less exciting machine and that's that's true in the sense of what we talk about on podcasts but in actual day-to-day use that machine it's just a a modern 11 or 12 inch macbook air with the you know apple architecture and the good current keyboard that we have
Marco:
That would be an incredibly fun, awesome computer that I think a ton of people would love.
Marco:
And yeah, granted, my speculation on the reason why the 12-inch didn't really sell that well once the 13-inch Air came out is simply that if you're looking for something for your only computer...
Marco:
you generally don't want to get the tiniest screen you can get.
Marco:
Usually you want something mid-sized.
Marco:
That's why 13-inch and 15-inch laptops sell so well.
Marco:
Because if you're only going to have one computer and one screen, a 13-inch or 15-inch laptop is probably what you want most of the time.
Marco:
So, I get that.
Marco:
To have this computer as an option in the lineup, what you capture with that is people who maybe have a desktop as their main computer and want something as small and light as possible for when they travel.
Marco:
Maybe people who fly a lot because using anything bigger on an airline tray table is cumbersome at best.
Marco:
If it's even possible, you know, once that person leans their chair back like a jerk, you can't do anything on any computer except something this size.
Marco:
Like this is your only option.
Marco:
But, you know, it's all the people who absolutely loved the old 11 inch MacBook Air.
Marco:
And then who tolerated the 12-inch when it came out.
Marco:
That is a market.
Marco:
That is a market worth serving.
Marco:
I would speculate that market is probably even bigger than the market for many of the Macs they do happily sell in the lineup.
Marco:
I'm guessing, for instance, that market is probably bigger than the market for, say, the Mac Studio.
Marco:
Uh, maybe even the Mac, you know, the Mac pro probably like the Mac mini, any, any Mac that doesn't have a screen on it.
Marco:
All the laptops sell more than that.
Marco:
I'm sure.
Marco:
Yeah, probably.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I think there is very much a market for this and yeah, it's not going to replace the, the volume that the 13 inch air does.
Marco:
It doesn't need to, it's a different computer for a different purpose for different people.
Marco:
But I really... I hope that someday they do find a way to offer that because I think that would be very well received by more people than you might expect unless they, you know, totally fumble it again and make something crappy again.
Marco:
But I don't think they would.
Marco:
I think they've shown their current direction is good.
Marco:
Their current team making product decisions is good.
Marco:
They really haven't had a lot of fumbles recently except maybe like the, you know, the studio display camera and the Mac Studio fan.
Marco:
Other than that, like...
Marco:
Oh, and this new M2 MacBook Pro.
Marco:
That's its own, you know, flat, thin box of worms.
Marco:
But I would trust them to do a really good job with making a new, modern 12 or 11-inch MacBook Air with their current sensibilities and current hardware abilities.
Marco:
I think they would do a really nice job, and I hope they do.
John:
I got another way to make this more exciting.
John:
Again, not that the regular 12-inch is boring or anything, but if someone was balking at a decision-making saying, ah, that doesn't seem like it.
John:
Another way to make it exciting, if you don't have a convertible, this machine is also the perfect opportunity to finally explore materials other than aluminum.
John:
Aluminum has been great, served us well.
John:
It has lots of strengths.
John:
It also has some weaknesses.
John:
Many, many years, there have been rumors about Apple experimenting with different materials to make their laptops out of.
John:
And obviously, those different materials have their own sets of trade-offs.
John:
But I think a 12-inch would be a great place to experiment with a material that shores up aluminum's two weaknesses.
John:
One, weight.
John:
Obviously, aluminum is really lightweight, but there are things that are lighter.
John:
And two, aluminum bends and dents and things like plastics and carbon fiber are more resistant to permanently bending or denting than aluminum is.
John:
So if one of those materials, if there are various many, many years of experimenting with different materials to make laptops out of it, if there's a top contender...
John:
uh it would be great to do that 12 inch because not only would it be so much smaller than everything else it would be so incredibly light and so incredibly durable and even if it's just a plain old straight up laptop with no convertibles and no touch screen or anything like that but it's a laptop that's lighter than you could ever imagine and look how durable it is you can put it in your backpack without a case and drop your backpack on the ground like my kids do all the time and it will just bend and flex and bounce back instead of denting or chipping or shattering
John:
um i'm always on the lookout for you know the next leap in laptop technology because glass and aluminum is great it's the best laptops i've ever been but there is a next step somewhere out there and i hope apple finds it also this would be a great opportunity to launch cellular max oh don't can you imagine they can do that at any time they don't need to i know i know it's not something that's like anytime now it's in ipads same stupid chip all right i'm
Casey:
can you imagine how much i would lose my mind if they came out with what is effectively a not crappy 12 inch macbook that actually had cellular i would i would i'm already having very inappropriate thoughts about this computer you have to wait for apple cell chips to come out for do that right that's that's the current rumors like oh the reason not doing it is because they they're waiting to do it with their own cell chips which they are making but they're making them for the phones but like yeah there's a
John:
why can't you the live pads have had them since day one that's 12 years ago they don't want to play qualcomm don't want to pick well they all whatever the excuses are there's not a big enough market nobody cares about i don't know what they're thinking but uh yeah we want cellular and our laptops apple get on that eventually can you imagine like that would be like casey it would be like when the mac pro came out and it was john christmas like this would be like casey christmas like yes a black carbon fiber 12 inch oh stop
Casey:
Oh, stop.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Oh, if it was black, too.
Casey:
Oh, this is like all my dreams come true.
Casey:
How many episodes of ATP did we have to go on about the stupid Mac Pro?
John:
Mac Pro is a real computer.
John:
These are things that aren't probably going to happen.
John:
Excuse me.
Casey:
You went on about the Mac Pro for 30 episodes before it was even real.
Casey:
Don't even start.
Casey:
You owe me at least 30.
John:
It was real.
John:
They pre-announced it in like April of 2014 or whatever the hell it was.
John:
Whatever.
John:
And even now, they even pre-announced the new one.
John:
They're like, the Mac Pro.
John:
We'll talk about that later.
Casey:
You owe me easily 30 episodes.
John:
Apple has not pre-announced the black 12-inch laptop.
Casey:
No, but you probably owe me 10 just on the theory, or not even theory, on the hope that such a thing would ever exist.
John:
Why don't you just draw some fan art?
John:
Maybe that'll make Apple make it.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They also now have a new managed database offering.
Marco:
They're doing MySQL is already out.
Marco:
MongoDB and Postgres, I believe, are out shortly.
Marco:
Redis is coming later this year.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Elijah Yup writes, I was fortunate to attend WWDC 22 as a Swift student challenger.
Casey:
And I just listened to your WWDC show.
Casey:
John quipped that for non-press folks, what happened was not WWDC, but Apple Park tourism.
Casey:
I'm curious what he felt had changed.
Casey:
I'd heard WWDC meant meeting the developer community and having direct conversations with Apple engineers.
Casey:
And I'm glad to say that both were abundant this year.
Casey:
So what the heck, John?
John:
So what actually happens at WWC in the old style is you go to sessions and you sit in a room and someone gets up on stage and does a live performance of kind of like those things you're seeing on video.
John:
And during that, you're sitting in an audience next to other developers, some of which you may know, some of which you may not.
John:
So there's an interaction you can have there with your neighbors talking about things that you're seeing.
John:
When the thing is over, it is possible in many cases to go up and talk to the person who just gave that presentation to ask them a question or two.
John:
And then you go out into the hall where other people who went to see other sessions are milling about and talk to them about what they saw on your way to your other session.
John:
All that experience isn't there when you're sitting around watching a video with somebody.
John:
You can't talk to the people in the video about it.
John:
everyone's watching the same thing there's not multiple tracks right you're not interacting you're not not forced but like you're not constantly bumping into other developers and talking to them about stuff and forming social groups and like going to lunch with them and talking about the sessions what sessions you do what sessions did you go to again i'm not saying that that's the reason this the current thing is bad it's just different right and so when i say you know what you got is you know you go there in person you kind of apple park tourism you're just physically not doing the same things that you do at normal wwc you're not going from session to session watching things talking to people
John:
You know, it's just different right now.
John:
You do get to interact with Apple people.
John:
There was no slack in the old one.
John:
So you couldn't ask questions.
John:
How many people could, you know, who are you actually sitting next to?
John:
How many people actually went to the front of the room?
John:
Like there's obviously limited bandwidth is the reason the new approach is better overall, but it is different.
John:
Uh, so when I say what happened wasn't WWDC, I mean, what happened wasn't what used to happen at the old in-person WWDC.
John:
It was very different that like, you know, one day or whatever it is, one or two days of touring the fitness center and seeing a big video on the screen with everybody.
John:
It's much more like going to the keynote, but less like going to a normal day of WWDC where you're picking which sessions you're going to go to and sitting next to people and talking with your friends who went to different sessions.
Casey:
And don't even forget, you know, all the community events.
Casey:
Like, you know, when we recorded live and the talk show live, which I guess, you know, happened to a degree this year.
John:
If you're one of the lucky 180 people that fit in that room.
Casey:
Well, still, I mean, it's still a thing.
Casey:
And then there was like layers that was across the street and alt-conf that was often nearby.
John:
I mean, like in the new thing, the theater, Gruber had to talk to 180 people as opposed to like 2,000 or whatever the old...
Casey:
theater help you know what i mean but that's my point right is that you know talk show is different but you know you didn't see us i almost said performing which i guess is true but uh recording live and you didn't see you know any of the relay shows recording live you know you typically would see connected uh having a live episode and so there's so much community stuff that happened around wwdc so even if you weren't going to wwdc proper it was still a fairly enjoyable time to just go and hang out with everyone especially in san jose because there were like two decent places to hang out so
Casey:
So it wasn't hard.
Casey:
Yeah, now there's just one.
Casey:
But anyways, no, that is very helpful.
Casey:
Thank you, John.
Casey:
Wade Trigaskis writes, I just listened to episode 50 of the Real AFM crossover podcast, the iMac Pro, with Marco Armit and Jason Snell, and was startled to hear Marco describe the then situation as, quote, an embarrassment of riches, quote, in light of the release of the iMac Pro and the promise of a real new second coming Mac Pro.
Casey:
It also reminded me that it's been over five years since Apple's little public come to Jesus moment with the trash can and the Mac Pros.
Casey:
I'm curious how Marco feels about all that.
Casey:
In hindsight, are we now living in a gilded age for Macintosh professionals, or was it more of a case of a reality distortion than reality?
Casey:
I suppose the timing is perfectly imperfect.
Casey:
Next week is WWDC week, as Wade wrote this, and it marks the climax of Apple's about two years promise for the ARM transition.
Casey:
Will we see a new Mac Pro?
Casey:
Will it be everything we hope for?
Casey:
Will we achieve the coveted three out of three HP hosts own it award?
Casey:
Please make your prediction.
Casey:
So I guess that's all unnecessary.
Casey:
So you can cut that, Marco.
John:
Hey, buddy.
John:
i left that in there on purpose because yeah this is an older question or whatever but this is what people were thinking before wwc obviously no mac pro at wwc so the question still stands yeah so i i predict at wwc that we will get the reveal of the mac pro they will definitely tell us what it is they'll detail it and it'll be available to order later this year whoops totally i think you already did say that on the episode and i said i said i was doubtful so i'll gather my being right points for that now
Marco:
Yeah, you've earned it.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So, you know, in this case, so, you know, looking at, you know, the question here, are we now living in a gilded age for Mac Pros?
Marco:
And pro here was lowercase.
Marco:
Or was it more of a case of reality distortion than reality back then?
Marco:
So this is, you know, at the time of the iMac Pros launch, when that, you know, that was out and it was great and I got one and so did Casey later and it was amazing.
Marco:
John should have gotten one but never did.
Marco:
Concur.
Marco:
And lots of our friends got them and they were great.
Marco:
At that time, I stand by that statement.
Marco:
Now, I think we have even more of an embarrassment of riches in the Mac Pro area and lowercase p there.
Marco:
But it's different and we're in a transitional period.
Marco:
So it's hard to say for sure just because we haven't seen the Apple Silicon Mac Pro yet.
Marco:
So we don't know how high these specs go.
Marco:
We don't know how well this thing scales.
Marco:
We don't know what we get with the highest end model.
Marco:
Like, are we going to get?
John:
Did they trash can it?
John:
We don't know if they trash canned it.
John:
What?
John:
Like, are we getting another Mac Pro where they totally miscalculate what they should be building, right?
John:
Right.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
So, you know, there's a lot of unknowns there, and this is a transitional period, so it's hard to say for sure at the very highest end, but I think we still do have a situation where we have an embarrassment of riches in the high-end Mac line, because
Marco:
Now you have so many different options that all give us really great performance.
Marco:
And what most pro Mac users want is now available in laptops and in desktops.
Marco:
And there's very few trade-offs between those two.
Marco:
I mean, my needs could really, honestly, if I got one of the new M2 MacBook Airs with 24 gigs of RAM, maxing that out to 24,
Marco:
I could get away with that most of the time.
Marco:
Now, granted, I want more RAM.
Marco:
I think I have, what do I have, 64 in this thing?
Marco:
I think that's right.
Marco:
Yeah, 64.
Marco:
So, you know, but when I had 16, when I was using the M1 MacBook Air and then later M1 Mac Mini as my main desktop,
Marco:
I had 16 for like a year, and I felt it, but the rest of it was good enough.
Marco:
It was compelling to keep using it that way.
Marco:
So going from 16 to 24 would certainly be welcome.
Marco:
Having more would be great, but honestly, with that one exception of more RAM being nicer to have...
Marco:
I could do all of my work on a MacBook Air plugged into a giant monitor, which is what I did, and it was great.
Marco:
And almost every person I know who used to buy the big tower Macs, usually Mac Pros or before that like G5s, almost everyone I know, almost every job that needed those or almost every hobbyist who wanted those,
Marco:
Almost all of them no longer need what is currently called the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Almost all those needs for most of those people are satisfied now by laptops, and in some cases, even the lowest-end laptops that they now sell.
John:
that's amazing and it's only the very very narrow niche of specialized needs and john who are still buying the mac pro i'm over here i just added another giant mpx uh card i put a the radeon pro vega 2 inside my mac pro so now i literally have every i have the giant w uh 5700x whatever that takes up like i don't
John:
four slots or whatever and then the second the pro vega 2 in there i was going to put the 580x in as well but i realized it doesn't fit like you can't put you can't put a third video card in there because there are slot there are pci slots for it but the brackets don't let you put it in there i guess it can't deliver the power to it so
John:
Yeah, here I am stuffing my gigantic tower computer with way more GPU they can ever possibly use.
John:
But that is not a market that Apple is targeting with any of its current computers except the 2019 Mac Pro that I'm using.
John:
When they come out with a new Mac Pro, we'll see what they've decided to target after that.
John:
But that's the beauty of everything you're saying, that the lineup is so great for pretty much everybody.
John:
And also Apple has said that they're also going to make a ridiculous computer that almost nobody should buy.
John:
Like they're not even saying, oh, we're not going to make that.
John:
They're saying you get all these great computers that fill all these needs.
John:
You get everything you ever want.
John:
And even if you're one of these ridiculous people who wants this big monster computer, we're going to make one of those too.
John:
And who knows what that's going to look like.
John:
And that'll be fun.
John:
Right.
John:
So I think there are.
John:
you know they're doing so much better than they were like they obviously from the outside it's hard for us to see this but when they made that promise we're going to do this thing we're going to turn everything around they have it's taken a long time it's taken longer than we wanted and we lost faith a lot because on the outside we can't see the progress but look at the machines they've been really they released they eventually figured out what they should be doing with their mac products from top to bottom not just the pro ones where they figured out they need more ports and everything but i think you know magsafe on the macbook m2 macbook air right
John:
this they're they're doing it right so you know again a few exceptions like the weird 13 inch m2 macbook pro the fans on the mac studio but like and the camera on the studio display but hey the fact that the studio display exists yeah right that's i would that's a big victory with one tiny step back with the camera and apple's camera has always been crap and it's a lesson they haven't quite learned yet but yeah this is the best the mac lineup has been in ages and so i think you know two thumbs up for me and we'll see again we'll see if they trash can the mac pro but
Marco:
At this point, though, the Mac Studio covers even more of the needs that were not already being met by the MacBook Pro and the Mac Mini and the MacBook Air.
Marco:
They cover so much of so many people's needs already with all of the other products that...
Marco:
pretty much the only needs that are still left at the top end for an Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
Marco:
So if you're throwing out Windows Gaming, because that's going to be Apple Silicon, so there's no more Windows Gaming, John.
Marco:
So if you're throwing that out, the needs that are left up there are basically cards, very high RAM needs, and very high GPU needs.
Marco:
And those aren't
Marco:
zero markets like you know those are markets with people in them but it's just getting more and more narrow and more and more specialized to people who actually need this product and so many more of us are being are now being served very well by all the other products i think it's also top-end uh video stuff right because we don't know what's going to be in the mac pro but presumably it will do everything that takes a long time in final cut pro faster than even a top-end mac studio right so right yeah that's like the high-end gpu performance basically
John:
if part of is apple wants to sell is if part of your job is every day waiting for crap to come out of final cut pro we get your computer that does that 50 faster you're willing to pay through the nose for that historically has been a big market for apple's ridiculous machines and so even if they even if they do trash can it and it looks like a slightly bigger mac studio and has no slots if it does final cut pro stuff faster than a mac studio with an ultra that's a valuable machine to a lot of people and i think they'll they will sell them for whatever ridiculous price they charge
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I think something that Marco said earlier is important in that at the time in which we were saying, or Marco was saying, you know, this is the golden age, I think that was true compared to the absolute slog that we were all going through the years prior with the crappy keyboards and the jump to USB-C before I think anyone was really ready for it.
Casey:
And at that point, the iMac Pro really was just amazing.
Casey:
And it was a cold glass of ice water when we were all in what seemed like hell.
Casey:
But looking at it with today's point of view, where things have gotten so much better since then, then yeah, it does look like a reality distortion field in retrospect.
Casey:
But when we were there, we could say on an infinite timeline, it would all be so much better than it is today.
Casey:
But look at how great it is now.
Casey:
and that infinite timeline turned out to be what?
Casey:
How many years ago was the iMac Pro?
Casey:
Like four or five years?
Casey:
It only took a handful of years for Apple to really get their story straight.
Casey:
So I think it was both the Gilded Age at the time and reality distortion in retrospect.
Casey:
Dave Aiton writes, John has sung the praises of ZFS many times in the past.
Casey:
How close is APFS to providing all the features he likes in ZFS, and what is APFS missing?
John:
I was missing so many things.
John:
We'll have a link in the show notes to the Wikipedia page listing the ZFS features, but so many of them I had forgotten about.
John:
ZFS does so much cool stuff.
John:
At a price, at a fairly high price, but I still kind of miss a bunch of them.
John:
So the big one that I was hammering on when APFS came out that I still think is important is data integrity.
John:
ZFS...
John:
can do checksums not just on metadata but also on every piece of data so you can know if you have any kind of bit rot or any kind of errors anyplace else in your system that are causing bits to be flipped when data is moved around which is great and that is super important if you care about your data there is a cost to doing that obviously
John:
But as computers get faster and faster, that cost becomes lower and lower percentage wise, given the total amount of compute available.
John:
And I really wish that APFS did that.
John:
And it could be added to APFS at some point in the future.
John:
I forget.
John:
I delved into this when APFS was released.
John:
I'm not sure if there's an option to do it or it could be done very easily, but they didn't do it.
John:
But
John:
um but anyway it's an important feature of zfs zfs has features on top of that uh in terms of data integrity where it can keep multiple copies of data around and then if it finds an error it's got multiple copies of the data that it found an area it could fix that error and it's sort of self-healing type of thing because you just tell it where is that feature listed on here um
John:
You could kind of say, like, how many copies do you want it to keep and where do you want it to keep them and do you want me to automatically self-heal?
John:
It's really great about sort of being the caretaker of your bits rather than just saying, well, I wrote the bits and I'm assuming they're going to be the same when I read them back later, right?
John:
There's a bunch of transactional stuff with, like,
John:
you know, rollbacks and everything.
John:
There's the smart snapshot diffs.
John:
So if you do a snapshot and just want to transfer the diffs of that snapshot efficiently to another thing, that would be great for Time Machine.
John:
Again, APFS has a similar feature, but the ZFS one is a little bit fancier.
John:
What else is on this list that's interesting?
John:
There's a bunch more of things that are tunable about it in terms of how it lays out data and how it uses caching that are mostly of interest to enterprise scenarios.
John:
Obviously, this is a big thing where it does essentially software RAID of just combining multiple disks into giant volumes.
John:
APFS does something like that on a smaller scale.
John:
apfs is more obviously more appropriate for apple's use case can remember apfs debuted not on the mac but on phones right and debuted without people even knowing where it converted all our phones to apfs and then rolled it back uh without us knowing and they told us about it later one of the greatest technical feats ever the team that did that should get some sort of reward and apple like what a dangerous thing to do how many billions of iphone users do we have so true
John:
And when they do a point update, we're going to do what?
John:
You're going to convert their volume to a different format and then roll it back.
John:
Okay.
John:
Are you going to tell anybody about this?
John:
No, the update will just take a little bit longer.
John:
So amazing.
John:
And yeah, and they did it on the phone first instead of doing it on the Mac first, which seemed like it would be easier if you do it on the Mac first.
John:
If you screw it up, who cares?
John:
You hose a bunch of Mac users, not the billions of iPhone users.
John:
so abfs has the features that apple needs it to have and not many more and it took a long time for them to build this thing in-house to do that but zfs has so many features and is so capable and it's probably not particularly well tuned to run on the phone given its ram requirements and its cpu requirements but it does have way more features uh one of the analogies i heard way back when was uh in terms of file systems that uh
John:
zfs is a little bit like a minivan it can carry a lot of people it can do a lot of things it has a lot of features the seats fold into the floor it's got 20 cup holders it's got seven screens like it you know it's got tons of stuff in it and what apple needs is a ferrari if it's two people it goes real fast all right thanks to our sponsors this week linode lock it and trade coffee thanks to our members who support us directly you can join at atp.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
you can follow them at c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s so that's casey list m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-n-t marco armen s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a syracusa it's accidental they didn't
Casey:
There is an item in the document that said, Casey Impulse bought a computer.
Marco:
I have to know what this is.
Casey:
I have known you since we were 10 or something like that.
Casey:
So it's been literally 30 years or thereabouts.
Casey:
This is, I think, the closest to pulling a Marco I've been in a while.
Casey:
It only took 30 years.
Marco:
Wait, in all fairness, I have very rarely impulse bought a computer.
John:
I don't think Marco could identify his impulses anymore.
LAUGHTER
John:
You know what an impulse is, Marco?
John:
I don't impulse buy a computer.
John:
I just decide to buy one and buy it.
John:
That's not an impulse.
John:
Wait.
John:
What is an impulse?
John:
What do you mean?
Casey:
I don't even know.
Casey:
I don't even know where to go from here.
Casey:
Anyways, yeah, so this was... Let me see.
Casey:
It was Thursday.
Casey:
So it was last Thursday.
Casey:
I noticed that... I forget what genesis of this issue was, but...
Casey:
What I ended up noticing, however, one way or another, was that my Mac Mini wasn't responding to incoming network requests.
Casey:
Now, to back up a half step, so I have a Mac Mini.
Casey:
It's a 2012, I don't know, sometime in 2012.
Casey:
So at this point, it is literally 10 years old.
Casey:
It was gifted to me by our friends at Mac Mini Colo, or what is it, Mac Stadium now, I believe.
Casey:
No, is that right?
Casey:
Yes, that's right.
Casey:
I believe they merged.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
Maybe that's what it is.
Casey:
But anyways, uh, they're great people.
Casey:
I think they've sponsored in the past.
Casey:
I don't believe they're sponsoring the future, but genuinely they're great people there.
Casey:
And they gave me, uh, they, they sent me this for free.
Casey:
Um, it was, it's a 10 year old one that had a 256 gig SSD that they had put in it.
Casey:
Uh, and they, they had, you know, retired it and somehow or another it ended up in my hands.
Casey:
And I was using this, uh,
Casey:
pretty much exclusively as a plex and channels server uh channels is the thing that sponsored probably a year or two back that lets you use uh an hd home run and a over-the-air antenna to record things or tv everywhere to record things look into it at getchannels.com if uh if you're interested they are they have not sponsored this but it's great stuff and and one of the founders is a friend of mine
Casey:
so anyway so i use it for plex and channels and a handful of other small things i did use it actually for xcode bots when that was still a thing but that just got deprecated as well um but one way or another i i do use it and in my world and you can snicker and laugh all you want but in my world plex and to a lesser degree channels are an important part of my world i think all of us have understood this at this point like plex is important to me maybe it shouldn't be but it is
Casey:
And it's important to the rest of the family, too, because that's how, you know, on the rare occasions it said, Erin is watching TV without me.
Casey:
She'll watch TV typically via Plex.
Casey:
The kids would get a little bit of TV time in the afternoons, and they'll do that on Plex.
Casey:
So it's important to all of us, not just me.
Casey:
And I found that the Mac Mini was not responding to incoming network requests.
Casey:
I could still do anything I wanted on the Internet if I can get onto the Mini or if I actually hook up a display and hook up a keyboard and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But I couldn't get any incoming network requests.
Casey:
And I'm just troubleshooting.
Casey:
I'm rebooting.
Casey:
I'm doing this, that, and the other thing.
Casey:
I couldn't figure it out, couldn't figure it out, couldn't figure it out.
Casey:
And I realized that on Wi-Fi, everything was working.
Casey:
Incoming network requests were working fine.
Casey:
But if I use the Ethernet IP, it wasn't working.
Casey:
Very long story.
Casey:
Well, already very long story, slightly shortened.
Casey:
It was one of two things that seemed to have fixed it.
Casey:
It was either an NVRAM reset or it was a new version of Tailscale, which might be a future sponsor.
Casey:
I don't remember.
Casey:
But something might have gotten misconfigured on my end.
Casey:
User error, I mean.
Casey:
And something might have gotten hosed up there.
Casey:
But one way or another, I did eventually get it fixed.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I have, you know, it's like a hard drive that has started ticking.
Casey:
You know, I have now lost confidence in the machine.
Casey:
And even beyond that, I'm starting to occasionally acquire 4K content from time to time.
Casey:
And a 10-year-old Mac mini does not do well with even direct playing 4K content.
Casey:
Like, even that didn't always go well, much less trying to transcode it on the fly.
Yeah.
Casey:
So, on Thursday evening, within about a half an hour of the cutoff, in order to receive a Mini with $8 fast shipping Friday evening, I ordered a refurb Mac Mini.
Casey:
An M1 Mac Mini.
Casey:
And I did this for a handful of reasons.
Casey:
First of all, because at the time in which I ordered it, the Intel one was not yet repaired, and so I wanted as little downtime as possible.
Casey:
And I was able to find a refurb that had the exact configuration I wanted, which was extremely surprising and pretty awesome.
Casey:
And I wanted to get it the next day, and Fast Shipping said I could do that.
Casey:
But also, it occurred to me, I thought buying a Mac Mini was going to be in my future, but eventually, like maybe when the M2 Mac Minis come out.
Casey:
But it occurred to me there's not that much different, leaving aside what will inevitably be like a radical hardware change, like a radical industrial design change.
Marco:
Does that ever happen to the Mac Mini?
Casey:
Well, no, but they're saying maybe this is the time.
Casey:
It's the year of Linux on the desktop and a new industrial design for Mac Mini.
John:
And by radical, you mean it gets slightly thinner again.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
John:
Now available in starlight.
Casey:
I'd rock a blue Mac Mini or something like that.
Casey:
Anyways, so it occurred to me that looking at the M2 that is now freshly out, it's not really that different than the M1.
Casey:
There are differences for sure, but it's not night and day different.
Casey:
And yes, I am aware that there's a little bit more with regard to transcoding that actually would have been helpful in this particular use case.
Casey:
But I figured, you know what?
Casey:
Let me just order it.
Casey:
In worst case, I'll just not open it and return it.
Casey:
Who am I kidding?
Casey:
Of course I opened it.
Marco:
Yeah, you can still return it.
Casey:
I know, but I'm not going to.
Marco:
Yeah, that's fine.
Marco:
That's a different conversation.
Casey:
I ordered it on a Thursday night.
Casey:
It was supposed to come Friday.
Casey:
I paid the $8 shipping, so it would come Friday.
Casey:
It came Monday, which I really want to complain and moan about.
Casey:
But in these unprecedented times, I'm trying to bite my tongue.
Casey:
Um, and so I set it up, uh, I guess it was Monday night and it took me a few tries to get Plex migrated over properly.
Casey:
Um, but channels went immediately.
Casey:
It took absolutely no effort to get channels working, but Plex was considerably more fiddly because Plex.
Casey:
And so I eventually did get it working and now it is up and running and I have a new M1 Mac mini home server and I'm extremely pleased with this so far.
Casey:
It's gone real well.
Marco:
You did a very exciting upgrade to the most boring computer you have in your house.
Casey:
That's pretty accurate.
Casey:
That's not entirely true.
Casey:
I do have a Raspberry Pi 4 that couldn't really be upgraded in any reasonable way.
Casey:
But that is arguably the most boring.
Casey:
Or maybe the two Raspberry Pi Ws that are serving as my garage door notification system.
Casey:
Those might be more boring.
Casey:
But I take your point.
Casey:
I'm arguing to be a turd, but I take your point, and you are correct.
John:
The Mac mini is also the perfect computer in your house to buy refurb, right?
John:
Cause it's just, it sits there.
John:
It just does a very simple task.
John:
The number of things it's ever asked to do is very small.
John:
And as long as it can do them, it's fine.
John:
Uh, you know, so, and you, and they cost so much money when you buy them new relative to, uh, relative sort of the excitement.
John:
Like it's a type, it's kind of like your synology, well, not your synology, like most people's synologies and that you don't expect to even see or hear it.
John:
It just exists ambiently as infrastructure in your house and it just needs to be there.
John:
Right.
John:
So that, you know, the,
John:
The Mac mini is not the type of machine that you would get in Starlight and be excited about it because you're just using it to serve your needs.
John:
And your main interface with it is not even in the same room as it.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And the Mac mini is actually sitting physically on top of the Synology right now.
John:
You do have some problems about computer placement in your house.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Well, there's that.
Casey:
You should run some wire.
Casey:
You know, it's funny you bring that up.
Marco:
What's going on with that project?
Casey:
He did the project.
Casey:
I put that aside for the time being because I can't decide what I want to do is what it really boils down to.
John:
I thought there was a problem with the historical commission.
Casey:
No, not really.
Casey:
So what I really need to do is I need to price out both fiber, which I'm still thinking about, and Cat6 or what have you.
John:
The new project is thinking about planning the project.
Casey:
Right, yes, yes.
Marco:
We got past the talking stage.
Marco:
Now we're at the thinking stage.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly right.
Casey:
No, all kidding aside, what I really want to do is I want to get the price list or the parts list and the pricing because if fiber really is similar money, which I spent a lot of time in the show saying it was just because I put my thumb in the air and that's what it felt like.
Casey:
But once I start getting down to brass tacks, I'm not so sure that I'm correct about that.
Casey:
So what I want to do is I want to price out, you know, is fiber really similar money?
Casey:
And if it is, I'll probably go that route.
Casey:
But if it's like, you know,
Casey:
2X or something like that, which it could be, then I'll probably just go to Cat 6 and be done with it.
Casey:
To go back just very quickly, I suppose people will potentially ask.
Casey:
The Reefer by Gott is a M1 Mac Mini with 16 gigs RAM, a half terabyte hard drive,
Casey:
But I really wanted to, because of this very project, actually, see, here's your tie-in, I really wanted the 10 gig Ethernet.
Casey:
I have literally, this is the only 10 gig Ethernet device in the entire house right now, but I wanted to future-proof.
Casey:
And my thought is, it might be nice for communication with the Synology, because I could hypothetically put a 10 gig card in the Synology, or realistically, that's on the list of things I really need to upgrade, because it's also a decade old.
Casey:
Anyways, I wanted to future-proof myself in that regard.
Casey:
So it's
Casey:
you know 16 gigs ram half terabyte hard drive because i really don't put much on this hard drive and the 10 gig ethernet and surprisingly that existed in refurb and so it was with apple care and taxes and everything else i want to say it was like 1100 bucks or something like that it really wasn't terrible like it was a lot of money don't get me wrong but all things considered it wasn't terrible so
Casey:
So yeah, that's the story.
Marco:
We really got to get you to coordinate with my trade-in schedule.
Casey:
I know, that's true.
Casey:
We really do.
Casey:
Didn't I tell you I'd take that Mac Mini off your hands, actually?
Casey:
I thought I did.
John:
You both have the same problem, is when you decide that you want something, you want it now, and coordination means that one or both of you would have to wait.
John:
That's very true.
John:
Casey couldn't even make it past the weekend.
John:
It was like, oh, it's supposed to come on a Friday, and it came on a Monday.
John:
Forget about waiting for you to be ready to give up your Mac Mini.
Casey:
Yeah, you're not wrong.
Casey:
Plus, the thing of it is, all kidding aside, I don't know that I would have bought Marco's Mac Mini at the time he was looking to sell it because I was kicking the can down the road and didn't know what the M2 was going to look like.
Casey:
I take your point, and you are right, that we should have orchestrated this better, but I don't think at the time I would have taken it.
John:
Plus, wasn't his Mac Mini in the closet with the water?
John:
Yes.
John:
That's true.
John:
Yes, it was.
John:
What do you call it?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
flood title yeah that's exactly right I will say Apple they made their trading process a little bit worse I just traded in the two iPads I was talking about a couple weeks ago the two old ones so I could fund the new one and the two so the trading process now is by default they don't mail you a box anymore
Marco:
You have to bring it to a FedEx store.
Marco:
Oh, interesting.
Marco:
You can call up Apple and request a box now, but you have to call them on the phone to do that.
Casey:
Oh, like an animal.
Marco:
So rather than call them on the phone, I decided, well, I had this couple of days of errands to do driving in America the last few days.
Marco:
And so I'm like, all right, well, I'll wait until then and I'll bring the iPads on that trip and I'll drop them off.
John:
You can use the iPads as packing material for shipping something else.
Yeah.
Marco:
right wow so and and like you know so you know the fedex store is a good 15 minutes from my house so you know it's like a half hour trip round trip you know to get from you know there and back to from where i was based and i get all the stupid fedex store and you know the people behind the counter start clicking a few buttons oh the computer's being slow
Marco:
okay, all right.
Marco:
He keeps clicking, calls someone else over.
Marco:
Hey, is this right to you?
Marco:
The various employees eventually conclude, quote, the system is down.
Casey:
Oh, cool.
Marco:
This is not a particularly actionable statement, nor is it probably accurate.
Marco:
I mean, I think, you know, it could just be like, you know, some kind of weird error message that they didn't even read, but it's, you know, oh, it's down.
Marco:
I was like, all right, well, is this kind of thing that takes usually like a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days to come back up?
Marco:
i need to know this and oh uh it should be it should be good tomorrow great so like whatever the reason i had to go go home go back again the next day another half hour of driving just to drop off these stupid things i did all that to avoid making a phone call to apple which probably would have been much easier to say please send me the box that you used to send automatically um anyway so for anybody out there this process is now worse than it used to be
Casey:
I'm sorry to hear that.
Marco:
That's frustrating.
Marco:
But it's still easier than like selling to people on eBay.
Casey:
Yeah, that's very true.
Casey:
If you'll permit me just a very brief side topic, I've received my Playdate and it's adorable and I really enjoy it.
Casey:
Oh, awesome.
Casey:
It's a stupid frivolous purchase that I probably wasted my money on, but I don't care because I love it.
Marco:
that is exactly what it's supposed to be like nothing you don't buy the play date because you need it for work i mean you might oh hey i'm talking about it now so can i write it off is that how this i meant i meant like you know you in general like one does not buy the play date because they need it for their work you know no one no one needs a play date the play date serves no like major utility it's a fun thing made for fun so i'm curious so you're still do you have anything more than the first two games yet
Casey:
Yeah, so I got it, I don't know, like when?
Casey:
No, it was after we recorded.
Casey:
So it must have been like Thursday or Friday of last week.
Casey:
It's been Casey Christmas right now, I'll tell you what.
Casey:
But anyways, so I got it late last week.
Casey:
And then I guess, is it Monday is the turnover day or something like that?
Casey:
I think that's right.
Casey:
But so it starts with Casual Birder and Whitewater Wipeout.
Casey:
And then I also have Boogie Loops.
Casey:
And what is the thing with the Back to the Future looking screen on it?
Casey:
What is this thing called?
Casey:
I don't even remember.
Casey:
It is called Time Travel Adventure.
Casey:
There we go.
Casey:
And I also sideloaded a handful of games.
Casey:
I sideloaded Retro Derby, which is kind of sort of a racing game, which is kind of enjoyable.
Casey:
Playtris, which is basically Tetris.
Casey:
The Drawing Board, which is kind of an etch-a-sketch.
Casey:
And Dr. Niario.
Casey:
Which is basically Dr. Mario.
Casey:
I really enjoy this thing.
Casey:
It is very small.
Casey:
Like, I've seen them in person, that one dub dub, and I've forgotten how freaking tiny it is.
Casey:
It is on the limit of comfortable with my crappy eyesight, even with my contacts in, when my eyesight is actually pretty decent.
Casey:
But nevertheless, this thing is so fun.
Casey:
Of course, Declan is taking quite a liking to it.
Casey:
Of the four games, Casual Bird or Whitewater Wipeout, Time Travel Adventure, and Boogie Loops.
Casey:
Boogie Loops does absolutely nothing for me, but I'm horribly not musically inclined.
Casey:
Time Travel Adventure is fun.
Casey:
It's the thing with the stick figure that uses the crank seemingly exclusively.
Casey:
Uh, whitewater wipeout is okay.
Casey:
I really enjoyed casual burger though.
Casey:
More than I thought I would.
Casey:
That was, that one was a lot of fun.
Casey:
Uh, it's kind of, it's, it's kind of sort of a, um, I don't want to say open world, but like a little adventure game.
Casey:
Yeah, it's like a little adventure game, but with very low stakes in the good way, and it was a lot of fun.
Casey:
And, you know, the can full of things that have sideloaded I've really enjoyed as well.
Casey:
I really like this thing.
Casey:
It is so cute.
Casey:
The screen, it really should have a light on it, but nevertheless, it is so crisp.
Casey:
It is so, so crisp.
Casey:
I love the feel of the crank.
Casey:
Like, it's such a stupid, stupid thing, and yet I love it.
Casey:
Like...
Casey:
Everything about this thing is so cute.
Casey:
Like it's so thin and small and it's just fun.
Casey:
And it's, you know, bright yellow, which in some ways you, you know, it's a little bit ostentatious, but it's cool because, you know, in the handful of times I've had it in public and been messing with it, you know, a couple of times people have been like, what is that?
Casey:
You know, especially kids actually are like, what in the crap is that thing?
Casey:
So yeah, so I, I really like it.
Casey:
It's super fun.
Casey:
John, I presume yours is not even with it.
Casey:
You haven't even gotten a shipping notice yet.
John:
No, there was some email about like, oh, group two is something, whatever.
John:
But like, I think I'm in group two, but I haven't really been thinking about it.
John:
What I'm hoping is it'll just show up at my door one day and I'll be like, oh, pleasant surprise.
John:
Have I made a group W bench joke about that yet?
Marco:
I don't think so.
Marco:
So I think ultimately like so I actually I haven't actually even touched it since that group of games came out because I've just been busy with a lot of other stuff right now.
Marco:
So it's like over there waiting for me.
Marco:
But I will say that I think the the non backlit screen was a mistake.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree with that.
Marco:
Because it looks amazing at one angle of the light, but then at pretty much any other angle, it's kind of eye-strainy, and you kind of wish there was more light.
Marco:
And I understand why they did it, because it is a really cool screen, and it's not available backlit, and putting front lights in front of it is difficult to do well.
Marco:
I understand all that.
Marco:
But in practice, you really want a lit screen, because it is very tricky to get that angle right where it looks amazing.
Casey:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
Casey:
And plus, you know, I don't know how other people and couples are, but for Aaron and me, we'll typically climb into bed a solid half an hour, in some cases an hour before we fall asleep.
Casey:
And we'll, you know, be reading, you know, reading on our Kindles, reading a physical book, or just messing about on our phones or what have you.
Casey:
And, you know, the last handful of nights I've wanted to...
Casey:
play the play date for a little bit and there is not a light on my nightstand.
Casey:
And so she will keep her nightstand light on as she's getting sleepy and getting ready to pass out.
Casey:
But I have to hold the play date at like an extremely specific angle.
Casey:
And at this point my contacts are out.
Casey:
So I need to have this thing like literally six inches from my face.
Casey:
Otherwise it's blurry as hell.
Casey:
And so it's just like untenable.
Casey:
Like it really just does not work.
John:
You need the Game Boy front lights.
John:
That's what you need.
John:
yeah or the original kindle but the original kindle it was a reflective screen though like to people that are confused about this it's not an e-ink screen it is not reflective it is transmissive so shining a huge amount of light on this screen i would imagine is not going to be the same as shining a huge amount of like on an e-ink screen
Marco:
I would say it looks a lot closer to e-ink than old LCDs.
Marco:
Yes, it does.
Casey:
It really does.
Marco:
In a sense, the pixels look like they're super right on top.
Marco:
It is a nice matte finish.
Marco:
In general, though, I do think it is this wonderful, cute thing.
Marco:
In many ways, the hardware is a home run.
Marco:
However, I think in this particular decision, I think this was probably the wrong decision.
Marco:
But that being said, I'm still delighted by the thing.
Marco:
It's still very fun.
Marco:
I haven't found yet one absolutely must-have killer app, but I will say in that first group of games so far that I played out of those four, certainly the casual birder stands out as the best one.
Marco:
But that being said, these are not games you're going to keep playing for years.
Marco:
These are games you're going to play through once and have fun, and it's going to take you a few hours maybe for some of the more adventure-y ones like that.
Marco:
And then you'll move on.
Marco:
So, you know, we'll see how it goes over time.
Marco:
But it is a very fun thing.
Casey:
Yeah, it's just it's so cute and so innocent.
Casey:
Like, that's an odd thing to say about a physical device.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know how else to describe it, but it's so cute and innocent.
Casey:
And I just really like it.
Casey:
And like.
Casey:
In order to start it up, you click the little lock button or press the little lock button twice, and it looks like it's opening its eyes.
Casey:
You press it once, and one eye opens.
Casey:
You press it again, the other eye opens.
Casey:
It's just so adorable and fun.
Casey:
It reminds me of, I guess maybe what it is is that it's nostalgic in a way, even though it's a brand new device and it has a crank.
Casey:
But it's nostalgic of the time when I got my original Game Boy, right?
Casey:
And I was talking to Declan about this just last night.
Casey:
The original Game Boy, my recollection of it, was that the screen was utter trash, even for the time.
Casey:
Oh, it was terrible.
Casey:
It was, you know, it was a tremendous brick of a device.
Casey:
It blew through batteries ridiculously fast.
Casey:
Not as fast as the Game Gear, mind you, which would last a measure of minutes.
Casey:
True.
Casey:
But ridiculously fast nonetheless.
Casey:
And yet I loved it.
Casey:
that device like i loved my original game boy more than almost anything in the world because that one was mine it was all mine it wasn't the shared family nes that was casey's game boy and so i love that thing so much and in the play date reminds me in many ways of that in insofar as it's it isn't just mine because declan is trying to steal it every
Casey:
chance he can get but it's just that innocent fun like everything about it is just so cute and adorable and I know that's such an odd way to describe hardware or describe a console but I really do enjoy it