Are My Instructions Not Clear?
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
What's happening?
Casey:
Oh, again.
John:
Fix it.
Casey:
What is happening?
John:
Plug and unplug.
Casey:
Not the iMac Pro mic.
Casey:
Oh, what do you mean?
Casey:
Are you not plugged in?
John:
I don't know.
John:
What did you do last time?
John:
Did you unplug it and then plug it back in?
Casey:
Oh, this is not good.
Marco:
Hold on.
Marco:
What do you think goes on over there?
John:
What do you get for adding a follow-up at one minute before recording time, Casey?
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Not on the backside.
John:
Okay.
Casey:
All right.
John:
This is extremely not... I just unplugged this Ethernet cable.
John:
Keep feeling around back there.
John:
Something that feels like audio.
John:
That's better.
Casey:
I don't know what the hell happened.
Casey:
That was weird.
Casey:
I had to unplug it and plug it back in.
Casey:
And I just rebooted my Mac.
John:
That's what I just told you to do.
John:
All right.
John:
Stop adding follow up.
John:
The window for that is closed.
Casey:
No, it's happening.
Casey:
It's happening.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Let me hit record.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Should be recording now.
Casey:
A lot going on.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, you know, the holidays.
Marco:
It's always a busy time.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And we have a lot to get through, so we should probably start.
Casey:
But I feel like we haven't had any witty banter yet so far.
Casey:
Do we have any witty banter?
John:
I can't have any witty banter until you include a cyst diagnose.
Casey:
So my MMS bug that I am so in love with, it had struck me during the very last episode, like literally as we were recording the very last episode of the show.
Casey:
And I talked to a couple people on the inside about it and basically was told both gently and not so gently, look, if you don't get a cyst diagnosed, there's nothing we can do.
Casey:
So what's a cyst diagnosed?
Casey:
So
Casey:
My extremely limited understanding is that basically there's a log file or like buffer, ring buffer, or something that exists on iOS devices.
Casey:
And if you hold all three buttons on a modern iPhone, so the volume up, volume down, and lock buttons, if you hold them for about a second, then it will trigger a sysdiagnose.
Casey:
And what that basically does is it takes...
Casey:
uh all of the logs that are in memory or on disk or what have you i would presume in memory but i don't know for sure and it will dump those to the iphone's file system and you can get to them in settings and my phone is locked up that's cool uh settings i think it's privacy uh app data something seriously settings is just freaking locked what the heck
Casey:
um we can get to it somewhere in settings and you can airdrop that to your computer and then you can attach that to a feedback once you know for the thing formerly known the artist formerly known as radar uh settings privacy analytics and improvements analytics data and then you can search for sys and these things are usually multiple hundreds of megabytes and
Casey:
And I can understand the conundrum, right?
Casey:
You know, Apple needs to be able to find something to dig through other than just looking through code to figure out what's going on.
Casey:
And they're not exactly going to have me drive my iPhone over to Craig's house.
Casey:
So what are you going to do?
Casey:
But I had one bug.
Casey:
I'll put the bug numbers in the show notes.
Casey:
I had one bug that Apple closed and then reopened, probably because of all my catching and whining.
Casey:
And then I made another bug.
Casey:
Both of these have cyst diagnosis.
Casey:
So Apple people...
Casey:
I love you.
Casey:
Wouldn't you mind just going ahead and taking a look at this for me, please?
Casey:
Now, I'm going to do the cardinal sin of being a person on the internet, and I'm going to bring up something that I got in trouble for in a different place, because apparently I really like punishment.
Casey:
And at the same time this was all going on, this was literally Christmas Eve and Christmas Day that I was finally grabbing cyst diagnosis right when it was happening, I also noticed that my beloved Synology Drive client
Casey:
which is the Synology version of Dropbox, their icon on Big Sur, if you use their quote-unquote minimalist icon, which is to say their monochrome icon, their icon on Big Sur in dark mode is super-duper bright white, which is like the world's most ridiculously silly aesthetic bug that affects nothing functionally.
Casey:
But it's really annoying on my laptop.
Casey:
And so I filed a bug, I think it was like the 23rd or something like that,
Casey:
saying, hey, you know, can we fix this icon in this certain setting on this certain OS on this certain machine?
Casey:
That'd be great.
Casey:
And I was expecting them to be like, whatever, dude, leave us alone.
Casey:
I was getting replies from them, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, the day after...
Casey:
constant replies about something that is the dumbest bug in the world.
Casey:
It does not matter.
Casey:
And I'm getting all these replies from Synology like it's their job to keep their customers happy.
Casey:
Imagine that.
Casey:
They value customer sat.
Casey:
And so it was startling to me because A, I didn't actually expect a response from Synology at all, but
Casey:
B, certainly not on a time that most companies, not all, but most companies are probably on a skeleton staff or perhaps off entirely as Apple is.
Casey:
And sure enough, I'm getting replies nonstop.
Casey:
And it's just so striking how quietly hostile bug reporting is within Apple and how actively great it can be in a company who really cares.
Casey:
And so with that bad mouthing aside, hey, fix my bug, please.
Casey:
That'd be great.
John:
You've invoked my time-delayed rage by putting the word sysdiagnose in follow-up, and I must now add my most recent complaint about it.
John:
So there's a bug that I've been tracking.
John:
It's a bug that I saw in one of my apps, but it's not a bug in my app as far as I can tell.
John:
I saw it in the Big Sur beta.
John:
I made a sample project that just puts a window on a screen and just demonstrates the bug, right?
John:
I even put a cute little bug icon on it, right?
John:
So here's a sample project with
John:
with very little code, like, you know, 20 lines of code reproducing this bug.
John:
And I sent it to Apple during the Big Sur beta.
John:
Of course, they sent it back after like a week saying, we need a cyst diagnose.
John:
Sure, whatever.
John:
They did also ask him, by the way, you know, upload the cyst diagnose and also tell us what time you captured it.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
I'm like, seriously?
John:
I mean, like, surely the time is in the sysdiagnose, right?
John:
Isn't it a giant log?
John:
Yep.
John:
Right.
John:
And not only that, but I think the file name might have a date in it.
John:
And then, of course, the metadata for the file itself has the date in it.
John:
But whatever.
John:
Fine.
John:
Here you go, Apple.
John:
Here's sysdiagnose.
John:
I ran my sample project, which is attached to the bug report.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And sure enough, when you follow the instructions and run my sample, build and run my sample project, it triggers the bug.
John:
And then I capture a cyst diagnose.
John:
And then I noted the time.
John:
And here it is.
John:
And then it sat there for like a week or two.
John:
And, you know, new betas came out and it didn't get fixed.
John:
And then they send another thing on that bug that says, can you please capture a cyst diagnose and tell us the time that it came out?
John:
And this is like a month in.
John:
I'm like, oh my God, listen.
John:
And I did the cardinal sin, which is like,
John:
I tried to communicate to whatever this is that's replying to me as if it's a human, because I don't know that it's a human, right?
John:
And I said, listen, here's another... I did it again.
John:
I did.
John:
I said, here's another cyst diagnosed.
John:
Here's the time I captured it.
John:
And then I said, like, why are you asking me the time that it was captured?
John:
Can you not reproduce it?
John:
Does the sample project I included...
John:
not work for you?
John:
Like, that's valuable data.
John:
We say, hey, guess what?
John:
We can't reproduce this, right?
John:
And I said, I'm running it on the DTK, because at this point, I had sworn off Big Sur on my main computer.
John:
I was able to reproduce it on both, but by this point, there's no more Big Sur on my Mac Pro.
John:
So I said, like, what's the problem?
John:
Can you not reproduce it?
John:
Like, are you having trouble reproducing it?
John:
Are my instructions not clear?
John:
Should I capture, like, a screen capture video of me showing what it looks like?
John:
In fact, I took photos of my screen in the original report, and I said...
John:
Because when I try to take a screenshot, it triggers like a refresh effect, which fixes, it's a cosmetic bug.
John:
It fixes the cosmetic bug if you take a screenshot of it for whatever reason.
John:
And I included that info in the original bug report.
John:
And I took photos of my screen.
John:
And I said, here's why I'm sending you photos of my screen, not screenshots.
John:
Like I was so helpful.
John:
And it's like a month in.
John:
I'm like, what's going on?
John:
No reply.
John:
And anyway, Big Star came out and my bug is not fixed.
John:
Still no reply on this bug.
John:
That's all.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
It's so frustrating.
Casey:
It's so incredibly infuriating.
Casey:
And then to have me at the same time get responses from Synology on Christmas Day.
Casey:
I'm not advocating that Apple should be working on Christmas Day.
Casey:
That's not my point.
Casey:
My point is, of all the days in the entire calendar that you would have expected nothing, it was Christmas Day.
Casey:
And here it is, I'm having like almost an active conversation on their bug tracker on Christmas Day.
Casey:
It's preposterous.
John:
Just to give a most likely reason that you're having that experience is it's not an excuse, but it is an explanation.
John:
It's one of scale.
John:
Synology has far, far, far, far, far fewer customers than Apple.
John:
Apple has a tremendous volume of feedbacks coming in.
John:
um apple also has a tremendous amount of money you know so on and so forth but like when you're a smaller company you can afford one of your advantages is that you can afford to have better customer service it's part of what lets you grow into a bigger company so i'm not excusing the fact that apple is slower on responses in some ways it's explicable even though it seems like it shouldn't be because they have all the money in the world but as we talked about in the past it's not actually as easy as you think it is to convert money into a
John:
human resources and productivity if it was if it was that easy like you know business would be a lot easier and there'd be a lot more of them they'd be a lot more successful anyway uh we all attached our cyst diagnosis apple so please communicate about our bugs sometimes i mean i'm saying within six months or a year you know i'm not in a hurry it's a cosmetic bug that's all
Marco:
The same story plays out over and over again.
Marco:
We hear from Apple people or we talk to Apple people at WBC or whatever and they always tell us the same story.
Marco:
Your bug reports really matter.
Marco:
Please file bug reports.
Marco:
It really helps.
Marco:
It really does get things fixed or helps us vote on things or whatever.
Marco:
But the experience of being an external developer reporting bugs to Apple has always been and continues to be horrendous.
Marco:
In fact, it seems like it's getting worse as the company is getting bigger and scaling.
Marco:
It's
Marco:
It is so often apparent that whatever screening process the bugs are going through at the first levels, it doesn't seem to work much, if at all, at actually communicating to developers properly.
Marco:
We've seen this, we've taken this seriously, we've paid attention to it, and your time creating this bug report, writing it all up, creating sample code, etc., that time was well spent.
Marco:
The process does not communicate that at all.
Marco:
It communicates the opposite.
Marco:
It clearly communicates over and over again to the vast majority of developers that I know, myself included, with all my experiences,
Marco:
you are wasting your time by doing this.
Marco:
And you're better off if you just wait around for other people to do it.
Marco:
And that way you don't have to waste your time doing it.
Marco:
Because that is what their actions actually show.
Marco:
And I know their words say differently.
Marco:
And I bet they truly believe that we should be doing this.
Marco:
And I bet they truly intend for this to be good.
Marco:
Just like I always intend to do all my homework.
Marco:
I always intend.
Marco:
I have the best intentions.
Marco:
And answer email.
Marco:
Yeah, I have the best intentions to be productive and to do all my homework, answer all my email, floss every day, lose weight.
Marco:
And you know what?
Marco:
About two-thirds of those things happen.
Marco:
And usually the homework and the email aren't very high on the list.
Marco:
The experience of filing bugs with Apple just has shown me over and over and over again for years and years and years
Marco:
This is not worth my time to do.
Marco:
And not only that, but it almost seems actively hostile.
Marco:
Very few of the bugs I report ever get any response at all.
Marco:
They just sit there open forever with no comments ever put on them.
Marco:
They just sit there open.
Marco:
I'm like, well, why did I even file that at all?
Marco:
Some of them eventually get assigned as a duplicate, but that's actually very rare.
Marco:
Almost everything that I file just sits there forever.
Marco:
If I'm lucky, I'll get a response.
Marco:
And the response, the vast majority of the time, is, you didn't report a cyst, or you didn't have a cyst diagnosed, therefore we're closing this bug, or please check it to see if this is fixed in the latest version.
John:
Another thing they don't do themselves, checking whether it's closed, you know.
John:
That's something you have to do.
John:
I mean, in most ticketing systems, you want the person who opened the ticket to agree that it's closed.
John:
But in the Apple system, you have to actually check whether it's closed.
John:
They don't tell you, we think this is fixed.
John:
I mean, they do eventually.
John:
If they actually fix it, they say, we think this is fixed, please confirm.
John:
But what they also do is, we have no idea if this is fixed, but could you just test it on the latest beta to tell me if it's fixed or not?
John:
And I did that for every single Big Sur beta that came out, every single one.
John:
I tried it and said, yep, still can reproduce it.
John:
But they weren't even communicating to me at that point.
John:
uh recommend a way to make the system better that's easier to apply money to is you just need someone who's an actual human being communicating more so for example um with with a bug like mine where i you know i found it in my program but then i made a sample project or whatever it is entirely possible that it's still my bug because my sample program is still code that i wrote and so if i'm doing something fundamentally stupid because i'm an experienced mac developer
John:
The possibility is that I'm wasting Apple's time where they're going to go reproduce it and say, oh, yeah, I reproduced it, but it's not actually our bug.
John:
It's your bug because here's here's a problem in your program.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's me wasting their time.
John:
And that's the problem of being Apple's.
John:
You have tons of developers and they send you reports and you have to.
John:
I got to deal with this.
John:
This isn't a bug.
John:
This isn't a bug either.
John:
This is just someone complaining or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's going to be low priority and it takes work to do that and it's costly or whatever.
John:
But the problem with silence is.
John:
I don't know if that's actually happened already.
John:
For all I know, they reproduced the bug with my sample program, looked at my sample program for two seconds and said, oh, this dummy has a bug in their program.
John:
And they're just never going to tell that to me, ever, right?
John:
You need to communicate, over-communicate, Apple.
John:
Say, okay, we've accepted your thing.
John:
Okay, we're looking at it.
John:
Okay, this human looked at it at this time.
John:
Okay, we have reproduced it.
John:
We haven't.
John:
We could build your sample program.
John:
We couldn't.
John:
Where, you know, what number are you in the queue?
John:
Like at the deli counter?
John:
Like literally anything, any kind of communication.
John:
that is convincingly human that communicates the status of your bug in the system and in the absence of that our minds just spin off and say i'm being ignored i feel like it's a you know passive aggressive or whatever or they don't care which may not be true but we're just not privy to what is actually going on behind the scenes
Casey:
It's extremely frustrating.
Casey:
And I feel completely handcuffed because this is a bug, just to quickly reiterate, where myself or Aaron are just straight up not receiving text messages.
Casey:
My internet communicator is not consistently communicating with the internet, which is very frustrating.
Casey:
And I feel like this is a pretty critical bug.
Casey:
I'm not saying that people have to be working on Christmas or whatever.
Casey:
I'm just saying it's a pretty critical bug.
Casey:
And as far as I'm concerned, I'm just throwing things over the wall for them to laugh and incinerate them.
Casey:
And it's very, very frustrating.
John:
I mean, on your book, Casey, I'm pretty sure they know about it.
John:
Like they already did that one thing where they said, oh, we think we're help.
John:
You know, it was in the release notes for an iOS release.
John:
Now, the fact that it didn't fix all the problems is bad, but I don't think they're unaware that this is a problem.
John:
Like your report is surely one of thousands that complained about this.
John:
And that's the other problem where it's like, OK, we've got a team working on this.
John:
Would you rather that team spend its time writing the same thing in a thousand bugs or would you rather than just fix it?
John:
We all just want it to be fixed.
John:
Right.
John:
But it feels like when you're the one who submitted the bug and they come back and say we need a cyst diagnosis like.
John:
Like if, for example, a human communication could be, hey, we've got a lot of reports of this problem and the team is working on it.
John:
And then, oh, and by the way, if you can give a sysdiagnose, it might help.
John:
But honestly, we have 5,000 bug reports of this exact bug and they're probably never going to look at your sysdiagnose.
John:
Maybe don't put the last part, but just say like, hey, we know this is a serious bug and the team is working on it, which I think is almost certainly the case, you know, in the case of this bug.
John:
But you don't know that because they didn't write it in the bug report.
Casey:
Well, and it says on the top of Feedback Assistant for this particular bug, recent similar reports, none.
John:
And here again, I'm not saying – Well, that doesn't mean anything.
John:
Just doing that task of identifying the 5,000 reports of this one bug and grouping them is a big task to do.
John:
Agreed.
John:
You know, anyway, and it's also not like the people who are fixing the bug are the same people who are triaging all the things for people, yada, yada.
John:
It's just all saying is on the outside, it feels very frustrating.
John:
And in the end, especially with like a serious bug like Casey's, we all just want it fixed.
John:
And so it's like, you know, if you can just shut us up entirely by just fixing the bug and then we'll go away.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Alright, so now that I've besmirched Apple and guaranteed that this bug will never get fixed, let me tell you something nice about Apple, mostly.
Casey:
I have done a little bit more with Fitness Plus.
Casey:
Still really like it.
Casey:
A couple of quick thoughts that I had since our discussion last episode.
Casey:
One of the things that I both like and don't like about it is that there doesn't seem to be any real, like, continuity between workouts.
Casey:
One of the things, and again, I'm comparing to Beachbody because that's what I'm familiar with.
Casey:
With Beachbody, you have like a program.
Casey:
So I had done this boxing program called 10 Rounds.
Casey:
And basically the idea is they take you from never having boxed before in your life.
Casey:
Hello.
Casey:
And teach you the very basics of how to box, like, you know, different punches and different moves you can do and stuff like that.
Casey:
And that was, I think, a six-week program with five workouts per week, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
And you go over the course of the program from not knowing anything to knowing a little bit.
Casey:
And it's nice to have that kind of continuity.
Casey:
And one thing I've noticed about Fitness Plus is, as yet, there's none of that real continuity.
Casey:
Now, on the flip side, that's actually kind of nice in a way because it's very easy to just drop into any trainers, any workout, and just do it.
Casey:
And that's that.
Casey:
And again, I like that there are workouts of varying lengths.
Casey:
So there's 10-minute workouts, 20-minute workouts, 30-minute workouts, et cetera.
Casey:
And I like that a lot too.
Casey:
But I also wouldn't mind to have a little more continuity and be like, hey, you know, Greg is going to –
Casey:
take you from not being able to lift a one-pound weight to deadlifting 350 pounds or whatever.
Casey:
It would be neat to be able to have that kind of continuity.
Casey:
That being said, one of the things I do like is that it seems that they're constantly updating the app or the workouts with new workouts, which is super awesome.
Casey:
And in Beachbody, you know, by comparison, it's like an iOS release, right?
Casey:
Like they have an entire program that lands all at once, generally speaking, and that's that.
Casey:
And then that particular trainer will come back in six months to a year with another program that they just drop all at once.
Casey:
And it's really nice to have Apple Fitness Plus having, you know, regular updates.
Casey:
And it seems like this is still going on as we speak, which is great.
Casey:
I still think the information architecture is kind of janky.
Casey:
And it's not terribly easy, and maybe it's just me, but it's not terribly easy to find the workout you want.
Casey:
And, for example, I wanted to do a strength training workout yesterday or the day before, and I wanted to do it, and I wanted to focus on my upper body.
Casey:
And it seemed like there wasn't really – it either wasn't accurately telling me what these workouts do or basically all of them were total body workouts, which is –
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
But I would have liked to do something concentrating more on my like arms and chest and back and stuff in this particular day.
Casey:
And it didn't seem that that was available.
Casey:
But again, maybe that's Casey problem.
Casey:
Finally, I did do a workout with Aaron simultaneously with Aaron on our Apple TV.
Casey:
This is the first of the app enabled Apple TVs, you know, the first with the sweet remote that we all love so much.
Casey:
And perhaps I did something wrong.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But when I started it, it basically said, okay, who's doing this workout?
Casey:
Is it Casey's Apple Watch?
Casey:
And I said, yeah.
Casey:
And then started the workout, and that was that.
Casey:
So there was no integration whatsoever with Erin's watch.
Casey:
Now, she does not have a user on the Apple TV.
Casey:
The Fitness Plus trial is associated with my Apple ID.
Casey:
So I can explain away why this would be a thousand different ways.
Casey:
And it's not...
Casey:
It's not unreasonable, but it would have been really nice if it could just detect, oh, there's another Apple Watch nearby and there's only one other.
Casey:
It's not like we're in a gymnasium where there's 500 in the before times.
Casey:
You know, there's like one other Apple Watch nearby.
Casey:
Shall I offer it to that person?
Casey:
And that just did not happen.
Casey:
And that's kind of too bad.
Casey:
Maybe we need an M1 or whatever it is.
Casey:
Or not the M1.
Casey:
What's the U1?
Casey:
What's the proximity one?
Marco:
U is the ultra-wideband that is mysterious and seemingly unused.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
It's the airdrop animation chip.
Casey:
Maybe the next Apple TV that's coming in five years, maybe that'll enable this sort of feature.
Casey:
But that kind of bummed me out that basically what she had to do was just start a workout, and she couldn't see any of her stuff on the screen, which, again, I don't necessarily take issue with.
Casey:
I mean, I'd like it if she showed up as well, but I don't begrudge them for...
Casey:
for only concentrating on one person but even just starting the workout automatically and pausing it automatically would have been really nice uh before we move on from this very quickly marco have you had a chance to do any of these yet not yet um for various boring reasons but i do intend to do with them soon yeah i really really am interested to hear what you have to say particularly about the rowing stuff so because i haven't tried any of that
Marco:
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Marco:
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So guests for this have included M.G.
Marco:
Siegler talking about phones, A16Z's Connie Chan on Super Apps, Mark Gurman on Apple, Federico Vatici and John Voorhees breaking down WWDC, Casey Newton on Facebook, the great Taylor Lorenz on All Things Influencer, Nick Kwa on podcasting,
Marco:
multiple Jay and Farad show reunions with Jay Yarrow of CNBC and Farad Manju of the New York Times.
Marco:
So it's a great podcast.
Marco:
Check it out today in your podcast app of choice by simply searching for Tech Meme Right Home.
Marco:
And in fact, if you use Overcast, not only can you just type in ride and it appears right there in the autocomplete, but it also, I've been looking and it is almost always in the top handful in the most recommended podcast category.
Marco:
And I don't edit that.
Marco:
That isn't, you know, purchasable or editorial or anything.
Marco:
That's just the most recommended podcast among Overcast users.
Marco:
And it's always right up there.
Marco:
Check it out.
Marco:
Tech Meme Ride Home.
Marco:
Please subscribe in your podcast app today.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Tech Meme Ride Home for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
An anonymous Apple employee writes, you're absolutely correct that Photos UI in an iPhone 12 applies an HDR boost to captures that were captured in HDR-capturing hardware, like iPhone 12 captures.
Casey:
On the technical side, this is achieved by storing a 2D 8-bit single-channel grayscale image within each HEIC file.
Casey:
This auxiliary file dictates how much HDR boost, and that's in quotes, should be applied to each pixel when an SDR source is viewed full screen in the UI.
Casey:
This ensures that the original file is always SDR and remains compatible with the outside world while also allowing in-ecosystem devices and displays to apply a, quote, HDR boost, quote, over them if they are capable of doing so.
Casey:
And you can see this in settings, photos, view full HDR.
Casey:
That's pretty cool.
Casey:
I didn't know that.
John:
And that also explains that we were wondering, like, do they look blown out or weird on other devices?
John:
And they do it in this, you know, fairly clever way of, like, if the device doesn't know about that boost file, it just ignores it and just looks like a normal photo.
Casey:
Yeah, that's super cool.
Casey:
With regard to iPhone 12 and 12 Pro screen brightness, Apple says that the 12 has 625 nits max brightness in typical modes and normal modes in 1,200 nits.
Casey:
Oh, boy.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
in max brightness for HDR.
Casey:
That was the iPhone 12.
Casey:
The iPhone 12 Pro, by comparison, is 800 instead of 625 for typical use and the same 1200 for HDR.
Casey:
And DisplayMate.com indicates that it's 825 nits when it's full screen with a white image.
John:
Yeah, I wish DisplayMate had a little bit more info, but basically like we were wondering how how high do the phones go?
John:
So Apple has this info.
John:
They don't go up to 1600.
John:
And the next question was, can they do that 1200s on the full screen?
John:
And DisplayMate says no.
John:
If it's full screen white, it's update 25.
John:
So they're pretty they're pretty darn good.
John:
Like there was a couple of reviews on YouTube of like if your iPhone was a television, it would be like the best television ever made in terms of color fidelity and HDR and so on and so forth.
John:
Unfortunately, it's, you know, six inches.
John:
So it's not really great as a TV.
John:
Unless you put it really close to your face and then it's fine.
Casey:
Well, that's me when I don't have my contacts in.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then Matthew Smith writes in, in episode 410, there was a question about backing up iCloud Photos when you don't have disk space to accommodate your entire library.
Casey:
My problem is that I no longer have a Mac at all.
Casey:
This led me to a project called iCloud Photos Downloader.
Casey:
Ah, yes, this has been recommended to me several times.
Casey:
It's written in Python and uses Py iCloud to call the iCloud APIs to download photos.
Casey:
It supports two-factor auth and only needs to re-authenticate on the interval that Apple sets.
Casey:
And Matthew writes, I believe it's currently two months.
Casey:
So it can be set up as a cron job or to run as a given interval.
Casey:
I recently did a fresh pull of my entire photo library, which is over 30,000 photos and videos, and I completed in under a day.
Casey:
Subsequent jobs complete very quickly using the hyphen hyphen until hyphen found option.
Casey:
I don't think it preserves any library database information, but it does preserve EXIF data.
Casey:
So it is useful as a raw file level cloud, level cloud to local backup that can be backed up to anywhere you want.
John:
yeah like i put this in here because this this is a solution for people who don't want to deal with the mac stuff but just want their data down somehow but i would caution people that stuff like this where it's like oh someone made a python script that uses apis to get my photos that can break in any time because apple is not trying to make sure this maintains compatibility and the second thing is if it doesn't do like database information which is like hey if you edit your picture crop it adjust it
John:
rotate it, add keywords to it, any of that stuff.
John:
It seems like this has no idea that that happened because it doesn't pull any of the database info.
John:
So what you're just getting is the original raw captures.
John:
If that's what you want and you don't mind it maybe breaking sometime in the future, this is a cool option to look into.
John:
But don't think of it as just a complete solution to the idea that I just want a separate download of my full iPhoto library somewhere.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Can you tell me about information that I missed from a friend of the show, Jonathan Dietz?
Casey:
You should never skip the paragraphs I put.
John:
No, it's not true.
John:
Sometimes you do have to skip them.
John:
I put a lot of stuff in the show notes in case he usually wisely condenses them as needed.
John:
But there was one bit of info that did get skipped over, which I think was important.
John:
We were talking about the OWC Thunderbolt stuff last time, the hub and the doc.
John:
Marco ordered the doc.
John:
One key piece of information which you may miss if you go to the website looking at is that it requires not just Big Sur, but it requires Big Sur 11.1.
John:
I don't know why it requires it.
John:
It just does.
John:
But if you're not updated to Big Sur, or even if you have Big Sur, but you don't have the very latest, you can't use that ODBC stuff.
Marco:
So be aware.
Marco:
Yeah, my understanding is that 11.1 added support for whatever new Thunderbolt controllers or chipsets are used in a lot of these.
Marco:
Goshen Ridge.
Marco:
Oh, God, really?
Marco:
Is that what it's called?
John:
It was called Goshen.
John:
Yeah, that's my memory.
John:
Goshen, is everything a ridge?
John:
Goshen something.
Marco:
I guess.
Marco:
Yeah, so anyway, macOS did not support this until 11.1.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We talked last week about now is the time to do the big, big Sur update.
Casey:
Man, I wish I thought that one through before I started.
Casey:
That's all right.
Casey:
The big, big Sur update.
Marco:
So how the turntables.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I have not done any big Sur updates to recap.
Casey:
My MacBook Pro has been on it for a while now, but the iMac Pro I haven't touched.
Casey:
I will soon, but I just haven't gotten to it.
Casey:
Marco, what have you done?
Marco:
Well, I have solved this problem in a different way, but suffice to say, I am now running Big Sur on all of my Macs.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I am very, very curious to hear about this later.
Casey:
John, what's your situation?
John:
I did what I said.
John:
I picked this week-long gap in my podcasting schedule aside now is the time to bite the bullet and do the update after doing many, many backups.
John:
I did.
John:
Update for the most part went well, except for, I mean, this would have been an update where it would be disastrous to a non-computer nerdy person who doesn't want to deal with this stuff.
John:
I did the update.
John:
Everything seemed to go fine.
John:
And then I went in to give some app permissions because some app needed some permissions that it didn't have, whatever.
John:
And I go into the security and privacy thing.
John:
I guess this is already off into computer nerd land because who else knows to do that?
John:
i'm in there and it's like oh okay give this app access to whatever uh enter your password and enter my password and it's like no sorry it does a little dialogue shake i'm like did i mistype it enter my password no sorry i'm like look i just logged in with this password right so i try all the things all all the mac os 10 lore of like well i don't know if you guys remember this occasionally still does it it'll bring up a dialogue that asks you to enter your password and it's it wants your account password like your mac account password right
John:
um for a while apple would let you have it synced with your iCloud one but i don't think they even let you do that anymore anyway it would put in the name field sometimes it would put your full name and not your username right and sometimes that dialogue would reject your your username or password if you didn't delete your full name john space saracusa delete that and put in your username then it would let you through so i tried that trick and that didn't work logged out back
John:
Back in, restart, so on and so forth.
John:
Again, logging out and back in with the password that it's asking me.
John:
Like, look, I'm logging in with this password.
John:
I know it's my password.
John:
I changed my password because, hey, you know, sometimes maybe you just need to change my password.
John:
Nope, still wouldn't take it.
John:
So that's not a good start.
John:
Like, you just do an OS update and, you know, nothing would accept it.
John:
Like, sudo wouldn't accept it from the command line.
John:
Like, anything that wanted to elevate my permissions thought that I just did not know my user account password, the one I just logged in with.
John:
Um, and it's always scary because I'm always afraid like I'll log out or restart and it just won't let me back in period.
John:
And that's a really bad situation.
John:
Um, but then I did some Googling, uh, and then Googling says, oh yeah, this happens all the time.
John:
Of course.
John:
It's been, it's been a problem since the Big Sur beta and the solution is an SMC reset.
John:
Why is it an SMC?
John:
I don't know.
John:
And by the way, SMC Reset, I don't have the link for the show notes, maybe Casey can find it, but SMC Reset used to be simpler, but now that there are so many different Macs, there are, you know, Intel Macs before the T2, after the T2, then the ARM Macs.
John:
And then there's desktop versus portable.
John:
You may think you know how to do an SMC reset, but it actually varies a lot based on what kind of computer you have.
John:
So I would recommend not trying to memorize how to do an SMC reset, but always going to the most recent Apple support document that takes you to this like, you know, phone tree of it's like, what kind of computer do you have?
John:
A desktop or a laptop?
John:
Does it have an ARM processor or an Intel processor?
John:
Does it have a T2 or does it not have a T2?
John:
And then finally you get the instructions on how to do an SMC reset on your computer.
John:
So anyway, I did an SMC reset on my computer and suddenly it took my admin password.
John:
Not a great start, but in the grand scheme of things, not fatal.
John:
As for the update, we talked about there wasn't any software that I was missing.
John:
One I was forgetting was SuperDuper.
John:
I knew that SuperDuper wasn't updated for it, but I had already sort of resigned myself to it and hadn't thought about it for a while.
John:
Partially because I'm leaving my SuperDuper update on Catalina for now.
John:
just as my like ultimate ultimate backup because i've already replaced all my other time machine backups so i want to have one catalina backup in there and partially because i do have carbon copy cloner as well and that can do an update albeit i think it does a full update every time which is kind of crappy right so i'm still waiting for super duper to update but uh big sur does not make it easy for super duper to do the stuff that it does due to all of the changes
John:
And then the big feature I wanted out of Big Sur, which is faster incremental time machine backups on APFS.
John:
I think I talked about this when I tried it on the betas.
John:
It is just as fast in the release version.
John:
An incremental time machine backup to a spinning disk running APFS was done in under six minutes, 345 seconds total, which sounds super slow until you know how slow it was before.
John:
Before we measured like half an hour or an hour just to figure out that it didn't really have much to do.
Casey:
uh six minutes is glorious so i am very satisfied with the increased speed of my time machine backups and otherwise i'm just hanging out in big sir and everything's fine nice i did not peg me as the slacker of the three of us i'm very surprised but here we are all right matthew taylor writes with some airpods max audio settings marco you did return them is that correct
Marco:
No, I have simply transferred them to another member of my household.
Marco:
Now, Hops has a really expensive pair of headphones.
Marco:
No, Tiff likes them, so she's keeping them.
Marco:
Good deal.
Casey:
All right, so Matthew writes, while this will certainly not solve Marco's AirPods Max discomfort problems, I wanted to share a set of off-the-beaten-path tweaks that, in my experience, dramatically improve sound quality.
Casey:
So Matthew writes, go into settings, accessibility, audio slash visual, headphone accommodations.
Casey:
And lo and behold, there are a number of AirPods max sound settings.
Casey:
I personally, says Matthew, prefer tune audio for brightness, strong.
Casey:
This is utterly transformative for my favorite new order tracks and it's easy to hear the difference by rapidly toggling headphone accommodations on and off once the tune audio mode is set.
Casey:
Only Marco could tell us how this affects Fish.
Marco:
I can indeed tell you how it affects Phish because I actually tested these settings.
Marco:
Oh, good.
Marco:
They're designed for people who are hard of hearing in certain frequency ranges, want to be able to hear their environment better.
Marco:
Say, if they want to hear people speaking nearby more clearly than they would hear with unmodified sound input, then this can help that because there's basically settings to boost the midrange and stuff like that.
Marco:
I tried these settings and I found them to be...
Marco:
probably very useful for that purpose but the settings are fairly aggressive I think a little too aggressive to be used for general music listening like I think if you're expecting this to sound to make music sound nicer I think it'll be a little bit harsh to do for that so feel free you know anyone out there you want to try this feel free but I wouldn't count on this if you're kind of on the fence about whether these are for you I wouldn't count on this as something that would make or break that decision unless you have a specific accessibility need that these would solve
John:
Quick real-time follow-up on that previous item someone in the chat room asked.
John:
Applejuice says, I thought APFS wasn't recommended for spinning disks.
John:
I know we talked about this before, but just a quick repetition.
John:
APFS is slower than HFS Plus on spinning disks.
John:
So that's why you hear it not recommended.
John:
But the new time machine uses, as far as I know, special features of APFS to be faster.
John:
And I think actually I think so that may be your only choice for a time machine backup destination.
John:
Uh, so that's why, even though it's a spinning disc, I'm going with APFS.
John:
And the second thing is when people ask me, Hey, I've got a new spinning disc attached to my Mac.
John:
Should I format it as HFS plus or APFS?
John:
Even though I know it will be slower.
John:
I usually tell people to format it as APFS just because it has more features like snapshots and so on.
John:
And I,
John:
In my experience, it is more reliable than HFS+.
John:
Now, granted, that experience is not very long because APFS hasn't been out of the Mac for very long, but that's why I'm recommending that.
John:
I usually preface it by saying, are you doing something high performance or whatever?
John:
But even though it's slower, I still in general recommend using APFS on spinning hard drives unless you really, really need the extra performance.
Casey:
Tell me about the AirPods Max fat lightning connector.
Casey:
What is this about?
John:
I don't know what it actually is.
John:
I linked to the iFixit teardown, but they didn't go to this level of detail.
John:
So this is from a tweet that somebody posted.
John:
We were talking about how electricity is sent through the yoke, the little metal thing that goes over your head to the other ear cup.
John:
And it's like some kind of brushes or something, according to that snazzy video that touched the metal thing or whatever.
John:
Someone yanked the little yoke out of the ear cup.
John:
And what you see in the end of it is something that looks like a tiny fat lightning connector with two contacts.
John:
It's super weird looking.
John:
I mean, it's not really a connector.
John:
This is just the internals of the device.
John:
But I just think it's funny that the DNA of Apple's products penetrates so deeply to parts that you will never see unless you literally tear it apart.
John:
You've got the...
John:
the digital crown in the same photo is like, Oh, that's from the watch.
John:
And then when it comes time to make some kind of connector that you're never going to see, this is part of the internal structure of a thing.
John:
It ends up, they end up making something.
John:
It's like, well, we've done connectors like this before.
John:
Why not just make it the same way we make lightning, but fatter.
John:
So there it is, this cute little two prong fat lightning thing that is inside all of your earphones.
John:
Check out the picture in the show notes and or show art chapter art.
John:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then somebody has stepped up to the plate to make the case we always wanted.
John:
Yeah, it was the first third party AirPods Max case I've seen.
John:
And lo and behold, it is just a regular case.
John:
Now, obviously, the case maker can't change how the AirPods Max fold, but it's just a hard case.
John:
They just took a hard case and wrapped it around that shape.
John:
uh they put in the little magnets to make it go into super low power mode right that wasn't apparently too hard to do uh you know and it's it zippers around the entire thing it's got a little handle it's got storage on the inside and it's got a little pocket on the outside so look at that apple it wasn't so hard for 500 and something dollars you too could have included a case that actually encases your headphones instead of whatever that weird thing is that you included
John:
and this is only 100 bucks i mean yeah it's an expensive case like you know and it's fancy or whatever but like it doesn't have to be you know just look at the sony case or the bose cases they're not the fanciest things in the world but it's just a plastic shell with a zipper around it it's not rocket science
Marco:
and i've already ordered this because even though i'm giving the headphones to tiff she needs a good case too everyone deserves a good case and yeah this is and this is from waterfield designs you know sfbags.com they've been around forever making products for pretty much everything apple sells and they're pretty high quality uh i've had a few other things before and they've been very good so a hundred bucks for something from them is actually pretty reasonable
John:
And speaking of cases, my final iPhone 12 case finally came.
John:
I ordered this over a month and a half ago, and it just came in the mail.
John:
It was from overseas.
John:
And, you know, shipping is all weird and COVID and yada yada.
John:
So I don't blame it if you've missed, but that's what I've been waiting for.
John:
So previously, I had the Apple silicone case that I talked about in a past episode, and then the Senna leather case that I talked about in a past episode.
John:
And now finally, this is the, let me look up the name of this thing.
John:
uh the olixar leather iphone 12 case and it's just like the other cases that i ordered it's got a open bottom so you can see the entire bottom of the phone and so you can swipe up from that edge it is black it is leather it has buttons that are made of metal that poke out they're not little leather lumps uh doesn't have any markings other than the brand at the bottom
John:
what i did was i i looked at it before i decided to put it over on my phone and said am i going to take off the senate case and put this one on in general i tried to only put a case on my phone once just because i feel like they get they get loose as you take the phone in and out of them right uh and this one looked good it looked the buttons we're gonna let that go by okay
John:
all right go ahead it's fine um the buttons were more recessed than the senate case and they were not textured like the rough texture that i complained about in them um so it's more like the apple leather case like if you look at the apple other cases actually like look if you look at the volume buttons there's actually a little trough in the side of the case where the volume buttons are so they don't it's not like there's a case and then buttons stick out from that there's a divot and in the divot are the volume buttons the volume buttons still stick out farther than the case itself
John:
but not as far as you would think.
John:
And then, you know, the power button on the other side.
John:
So I put it on.
John:
The leather is nowhere near as tacky as the Senna case.
John:
The Senna case is the tackiest leather case I've ever seen in my life.
John:
Like, out of the box, it's already super grippy.
John:
Like I said, it also, the Senna case seemed like it scratched easily.
John:
It was very soft.
John:
That's part of what made it tacky.
John:
But I did like that feel.
John:
This one feels a lot more like...
John:
not the apple leather cases but it's it feels i was like is this leather or is it plastic it feels very hard so this is the type of leather case it's going to take a while to break in i smelled it and looked at the label says is this actually leather or they just send me a plastic case that you know i just got ripped off pretty sure it is some kind of leather or it's plastic with a leathery smell on it i don't know i don't know if they're fooling me but anyway the price is suspicious
John:
yeah yeah it is it's super cheap like it was like 30 bucks or something 17 17 yeah whatever it was like i don't know i i don't think it's plastic because it's too soft to be plastic it smells like leather it feels like leather it's i don't anyway i put it on the phone it is not as slippery as the phone by itself it's not as tacky as the senate case the volume buttons are in fact metal and the power button are metal and they're black
John:
fit and finish is what you would expect from a was it 17 euros or 17 bucks 17 us dollars all right the volume button fit and finish was not that great the lower volume button stuck out way more than the the higher volume button and it was like on an angle
John:
And I was like, can I live with this?
John:
Can I live with one of my volume buttons poking out more than the other?
John:
The answer is no, I couldn't.
John:
So I took the phone out of the case and then I slowly scratched away at the underside of the volume button that stuck out more.
John:
And this is another reason I think it's leather because as I'm scratching away at it, like if you can imagine taking a little metal thing and scraping away at leather, you know how like leather like resists, like it doesn't, it's not like plastic, but it felt like leather on the inside too.
John:
So I scraped away a whole bunch, put it back in and now the volume down button sticks out only slightly more than the volume up button no one but me would ever be able to tell.
John:
Anyway, so this is the case I'm using now.
John:
It is by far the cheapest case that I got, but it is also the closest to what I'm looking for.
John:
It is the most like the Apple case, but with no bottom on it.
John:
So for now, I'm sticking with this case.
John:
And I already knocked the phone off of my nightstand onto the floor with this case on it, and it seemed to protect it pretty well.
John:
So...
John:
I'm doing pretty well.
John:
I went back and looked at all my iPhone case tabs to see what other alternatives that are out there that I might be interested in buying, and none of them really stood out to me.
John:
I know there are lots of other options, but all of them had something about them that I like worse than this case that I have on it now.
John:
So, so I guess this is it until, until unless this case totally fails or something terrible happens to it.
John:
Um, I'm sticking with the super cheap Olixar case and I'm not really loving it.
John:
Oh, and one more thing about it is it has like a little plastic ring around the camera.
John:
It's almost entirely flushed.
John:
but not 100% entirely flush.
John:
So when you lay it down flat on a hard surface, again, no human could tell this, but if you lay it down flat on a hard surface, you can move it like a half a millimeter at one of the corners.
John:
I'll deal with it.
John:
It's fine.
Marco:
I feel like that's going on your gravestone.
Marco:
I'll deal with it.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
Boxcryptor is cloud encryption software made in Germany to add an extra layer of security to your cloud storage.
Marco:
With Boxcryptor, you can continue storing your data in the cloud, but the software encrypts your files and folders in iCloud, OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, and numerous other cloud providers.
Marco:
And they do this encryption directly on your device before the files leave your device.
Marco:
So Boxcryptor keeps the convenience of your cloud storage provider of choice and makes it more secure and private for you.
Marco:
Boxcryptor is also great for businesses since teams can work together securely in the cloud.
Marco:
They also have an integration for Microsoft Teams made by the Boxcryptor team directly.
Marco:
And there are also special offers available for public schools.
Marco:
Corporate customers and schools can email sales at boxcryptor.com for a quote and please mention ATP in your email.
Marco:
Now, the basic version of Boxcryptor, which is probably what most of you need, is completely free.
Marco:
With a Boxcryptor free plan, one cloud service can be used on up to two devices for free.
Marco:
If you need more than that, the Boxcryptor personal plan can use as many cloud services and devices as you want for just $48 a year.
Marco:
And as a special offer to our listeners, from now through the end of January 2021, you can get a 40% discount on that personal plan with promo code ATP40.
Marco:
Once again, that's 40% off the Boxcryptor personal plan through January 2021 with promo code ATP40.
Marco:
And the basic Boxcryptor free plan is, of course, totally free if you only need one cloud service on up to two devices.
Marco:
You can learn more about Boxcryptor's cloud encryption made in Germany at boxcryptor.com.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Boxcryptor for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Earlier tonight, I read a fascinating tweet, and it was as follows.
Casey:
Selling my iMac Pro, 10 core, 64 gigs RAM, 4 terabyte SSD, Vega 56.
Casey:
Apple just replaced the screen and logic board.
Casey:
There's a 90-day warranty.
Casey:
Similar use config, sell for such and such, and I want such and such.
Casey:
This tweet, this fascinating tweet, written by Marco Armand.
Casey:
What's going on, man?
Marco:
Like it says on the tin, my iMac Pro is sold, boxed up, will be shipped out tomorrow.
Marco:
I got it back from Apple tonight.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
It's perfectly working order as far as I can tell.
Marco:
They did indeed replace the logic board.
Casey:
You got it back tonight.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And within an hour and a half, two hours, you have boxed it up and prepared it to be sold.
Casey:
Correct.
Casey:
Oh, boy.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
What's going on?
Marco:
Well, you know, without boring listeners with too much of the past details, you already know that I had my iMac Pro in for service because of, you know, dramatically increased fan noise recently.
Marco:
Apple indeed diagnosed the problem as something with the fan controller on the motherboard probably.
Marco:
And so they replaced the entire logic board and the display as well for unrelated reasons.
Marco:
They said there was a small chip in the corner and it wasn't noted on the way in.
Marco:
And so they weren't sure if it was my fault or their fault.
Marco:
So they replaced the display.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Well, that's kind of nice.
Marco:
Yeah, that's really nice.
Marco:
So anyway, you know, when you go without an Apple desktop for a while, you know, I've been without it for about, I don't know, a week and a half, two weeks, something like that.
Marco:
And so, you know, I had to get used to life without it.
Marco:
You know, I'm not going to just stop needing a desktop.
Marco:
So I basically moved in to my MacBook Air, my new M1 MacBook Air.
Marco:
And not fully, I didn't transfer everything over because there's, first of all, not enough space to transfer everything over.
Marco:
because I don't have four terabytes in this MacBook Air because it doesn't exist yet.
Marco:
And so I have a small minimal setup here, but I can get along with it just fine.
Marco:
And I've really gotten used to, as I mentioned I think last week, just how fast a lot of things are on this machine.
Marco:
It is so good.
Marco:
And before, I've been kind of away from my main desktop situation for about a week.
Marco:
But before that, I was doing all my work on this for about another week.
Marco:
And so I've done all the heavy lifting.
Marco:
I've had it connected to the ultra fine screen for big desktop work.
Marco:
I've had it run it in clamshell mode for there.
Marco:
In the entire time I've had it working there so far, which admittedly was only a week or so, clamshell mode was 100% reliable.
Casey:
That's impossible.
Marco:
I didn't have a single problem entering or leaving clamshell mode, connecting or disconnecting the cable, and having anything wake up correctly.
Marco:
Never had an issue with sleep and wake for just regular wake up when I get there in the morning.
Marco:
There were zero problems with clamshell mode.
Marco:
Never had a problem with heat or thermal because, well, it's already pretty low heat, and there's no fan to go crazy anyway in the MacBook Air.
Marco:
I realized in this week of using it there and now this week of using it separately, you know, away from a desk, I'm fine with this.
Marco:
This is what I need.
Marco:
I just need more screen space and a keyboard and mouse.
Marco:
And I have that there.
Marco:
And, you know, I have the ultra fine.
Marco:
I don't love that part of it.
Marco:
But otherwise, like, I love this setup.
Marco:
When you send in an Apple desktop for a repair these days that requires a logic board replacement, you're going to get it back blank.
Marco:
And sure enough, I did.
Marco:
I expected that.
Marco:
I expected that would probably happen.
Marco:
I made a backup and everything, but...
Marco:
resetting up a computer is a lot of work and it's a lot of time you know i've already had to set up this new one that's enough time right there and then if i want to reset up the old one or any other desktop i have to then clone everything back i'm going to lose probably a day to the cloning process or the you know the reverse cloning process itself followed by all the apps they're going to break to
Marco:
because this is now a new motherboard with a new serial number and it's going everything that uses drm is going to break and have to be reauthorized reinstalled like it's so it's just it's a big pain to do all this and you know this is why again like when when people whenever i have problems that you know every three years i have problems with my desktop that that that you know i want to get it serviced and everyone's just bring it into apple just bring it in what's the big deal i said no
Marco:
It's a big deal.
Marco:
This is a huge pain in the butt.
Marco:
It's a lot of time that you lose.
Marco:
Not only do you have to be without your computer for two weeks, maybe, but you have the transfer process there and back of not only physically bringing it to the store and everything, which itself is time and hassle and effort, but also having to move your data off of it and then move your data back into it when it's over.
Marco:
That's a big pain in the butt.
Marco:
It's a huge cost and time.
Marco:
Frankly, I'm busy.
Marco:
I don't have time to be doing that very often.
Marco:
I really don't want to take that burden on unnecessarily.
Marco:
And this is why, like, as much as I've loved using iMacs as my main desktops for these last six years...
Marco:
It's really frustrating whenever I have to bring it in and the screen and the computer are one piece and I have to bring the entire thing in for a problem with one or the other, but probably not both in these cases so far.
Marco:
And then I have to be without my main computer.
Marco:
And when my screen is my desktop,
Marco:
I also have less flexibility with, like, what can I do in the meantime if I have to bring this thing in for repair?
Marco:
You know, if I had a separate screen, like the Ultra, fine, then I can plug my laptop into that and basically just resume my setup, like, change almost nothing else, which is what I did here.
Marco:
Like, I basically changed nothing else, kept the same keyboard, mouse, desk, speakers, everything else, just moved this monitor into that setup, moved the iMac away, and...
Marco:
And it's really nice to be able to just plug in a laptop.
Marco:
You know, if Tiff has to come into my office to record a podcast, she can just plug her laptop into it.
Marco:
And I can take mine out and bring it upstairs.
Marco:
So there's lots of nice little bonuses to having a more flexible setup where those components are separated.
Marco:
That was always the whole appeal for me of a Mac Pro.
Marco:
In addition to having the super fast performance and everything...
Marco:
Having the monitor be separate from the computer, whatever form that takes, whether it's like a Mac Mini or a Mac Pro or a laptop, having those things be separate has significant benefits sometimes.
Marco:
And for you, it might not be all the time.
Marco:
For me, it wasn't all the time.
Marco:
But sometimes that has massive benefits.
Marco:
And it's during those times that I always curse myself for getting these iMacs because they're great at all other times.
Marco:
But when you run into a problem with one of these parts and you have to have the whole thing sent in for service, that's really cumbersome.
John:
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but your laptop has a screen attached to it.
John:
Yes.
John:
I'm using it right now, actually.
John:
If something goes wrong with that screen, you will have to actually bring the whole laptop in.
John:
Obviously, that's easier than bringing...
John:
your iMac in.
John:
But I'll also say that if you're getting a Mac Pro because you think it'll be easier to bring in just the computer part, I have bad news for you there too.
John:
That's fair.
Marco:
So I got an email from listener Matthew Taylor almost a month ago.
Marco:
Dear Marco and ATP, you guys got this too, but I've been talking with Matthew here and there a little bit.
Marco:
But anyway, they say, here's what I suggest for Marco.
Marco:
Buy a second M1 MacBook Air and
Marco:
as your main work machine and use your existing MacBook Air as your lightweight, fun Mac.
Marco:
Number two, buy the Pro Display XDR.
Marco:
If you need more ports, buy the CalDigit TS3 Plus dock.
Marco:
Sell the LG 5K.
Marco:
After repair, sell the iMac Pro.
Marco:
Then wait until all the dust shakes out over the next six to 18 months on new high-end MacBook Pros, iMacs, and Mac Pros and buy whatever you want then.
Marco:
Matthew is using this setup, the MacBook Air with the Pro Display XDR.
Marco:
And it's apparently phenomenal.
Marco:
The best Mac experience imaginable.
Marco:
Zero noise, ultra-fast, gorgeous, tons of screen real estate, and plenty of expansion.
Marco:
And then later, this other thing that stuck out to me.
Marco:
All Intel Macs are rapidly depreciating assets.
Marco:
We're experiencing a once-in-a-generation quantum leap in speed and capabilities.
Marco:
And that kind of infected my brain.
Marco:
And I've been thinking, you know...
Marco:
this is this is correct this is this is all like on the level like this is totally correct as soon as you use the m1 stuff if it fits your need profile it is amazing and i understand there's a lot of people for whom the m1 stuff does not fit their need profile yet i totally get that you know if you need more than 32 or more than 16 gigs of ram you're out of luck for now with this stuff and
Marco:
If you need super high-end GPU performance, maybe if you're a video editor or something, this is not going to be great for you.
Marco:
If you need more than two terabytes, this is not great for you.
Marco:
If you need a laptop with a bigger screen than 13 inches, again, not great for you.
Marco:
Or more than two ports.
Marco:
There's huge holes in this lineup that are not filled yet.
Marco:
If you need to run Intel stuff, if you need to run Windows, the needs for Intel machines are still going to be best served by Intel machines for a while.
Marco:
But my needs are none of those things for the most part.
Marco:
Like, yeah, I would like more RAM.
Marco:
I would like more disk space.
Marco:
But I'm getting by just fine for now on 16 gigs.
Marco:
And it's faster in lots of things I do.
Marco:
In the worst case, you know, a few things are slightly slower.
Marco:
Like when I have to launch a Rosetta application that's fairly large, like Adobe Audition or Photoshop.
Marco:
Yeah, it takes a couple extra bounces on the dock before it launches.
Marco:
Once it's open, it's fine.
Marco:
It's fast.
Marco:
This isn't that big of a deal.
Marco:
And in every other way, this machine is actually either the same or way better for me and for what I do.
Marco:
Again, as I mentioned in the past, I love desktops.
Marco:
And I will probably return to desktops fairly soon.
Marco:
But for right now, I feel like this really is a once-in-a-generation kind of time where right now, the best computer Apple makes for most people, unless you have one of those special needs...
Marco:
is the MacBook Air, which has almost no downsides at all.
Marco:
Like, there's not even a fan.
Marco:
And I hate fans.
Marco:
By the way, we've had a couple of people write in to say that not only does, yes, the LG definitely have a fan, but also apparently, like, the previous Apple Cinema display also had a fan.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
Apparently, it's fairly common for monitors to have for big monitors to have fans.
John:
The Thunderbolt display at a fan.
John:
I think it's funny describing the ideal setup of a fanless MacBook Air connected to a monitor with multiple fans.
Casey:
Yes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But anyway, I've always hated fan noise.
Marco:
And in recent years, I've been spoiled by computers that didn't make much fan noise for the most part.
Marco:
And so I've loved that.
Marco:
And I don't ever really want to go back.
Marco:
But when I've tried going laptop only or laptop primary in the past,
Marco:
things were different clamshell mode sucked and like all intel max clamshell mode still sucks because it as many of you out there know because you do it it works most of the time but working most of the time is very different from working every time and so far with the m1 it works every time and it's glorious and you know also in the past laptops were significant compromises in performance and
Marco:
Or if you push them at all, they would sound like jet engines next to your desk.
Marco:
And those things aren't true with this laptop.
Marco:
And before, you know, there would be like significant downsides with things like ports and other expansion.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Well, if the Thunderbolt stuff ends up being reliable, which so far early reviews of the new OWC thing are very positive, and even the CalDigit thing that I have, people say the Ethernet port and sound ports are apparently a little bit buggy for some people, myself included, but everything else about it, which is most of what I'd be using it for, everyone says it's rock solid.
Marco:
So it does seem like it's possible to get good Thunderbolt stuff these days, especially if the Ethernet on the new OWC one is solid.
Marco:
And so it seems like most of the reasons why I've not liked laptop-only setups or laptop-primary setups in the past, most of those reasons are not there anymore, or at least are significantly reduced.
Marco:
and it might only be for the next six months you know this is this is a unique time maybe in six months when you know new maybe new m1 max or maybe new you know m whatever based imax will be out by then or the 16 inch macbook pro will be out by then or i i don't expect whatever you know whatever the new rumored mac pro is that maybe that's going to be a significant later than that but
Marco:
In a couple years, maybe I won't want to be using a MacBook Air.
Marco:
In six months, maybe in six months, I'll say, oh man, this new M1X-based iMac or whatever is so good, I'm going to relegate the laptop back to secondary status.
Marco:
But right now, during this period, this is the only computer I want to use.
Marco:
It's that good.
Marco:
And I totally love using it.
Marco:
And when I have used it with the monitor and the keyboard and mouse, it's been just as good as a desktop for my needs.
Marco:
You know, I could use more storage space.
Marco:
And that's about it.
Marco:
I also looked up the trade-in value.
Marco:
of the Mac mini that I bought earlier.
Marco:
I think this, I think early 2020, uh, for studio B upstairs, which we're not using anymore because of our, you know, different situation.
Marco:
Now we're not using studio B anymore.
Marco:
So this Mac mini has been sitting there.
Marco:
This is where the LG five K came from.
Marco:
It used to be the monitor for this Mac mini.
Marco:
Uh, and, uh,
Marco:
the trade-in value for it on Apple's trade-in thing is like $650.
Marco:
And I can get a new one.
Marco:
It's low.
Marco:
It's only 8 gigs and 512 gigs storage.
Marco:
I can get a new M1 Mac Mini that is also 8 gigs and is also 512 storage for like $200 more than that or something.
Marco:
It's not much more than that.
Marco:
So I'm going to trade this in too.
Marco:
I already filled out their form earlier tonight.
Marco:
I'm trading this into Apple.
Marco:
I'm going to trade it in.
Marco:
And I order myself an M1 Mac Mini to serve as a home server.
Marco:
And that's going to solve my large storage needs for now.
Marco:
I'm going to do, you know, my laptop only has one terabyte, and it's too late to return it, and two terabyte ones are backordered until February anyway.
Marco:
I'm going to do exactly what I told the ASKTP writer last week to do about large photo storage.
Marco:
Right now, I don't have any Macs that are signed into my iCloud account that have all the photos on them, but I'm going to use the new Mac Mini to do exactly that with an external hard drive.
Marco:
It's totally fine.
Marco:
So now I will make my primary computer not have all the photos on it, but that's fine.
Marco:
As long as I have something with all the photos on it, I'm fine.
Marco:
I'm going to try to live on one terabyte as my primary computer, which is not going to be incredibly simple, but with some discipline, I think it'll be totally reasonable to do.
Marco:
Many people out there do it.
Marco:
I've lived on that before on my primary, so it's been a while, but I have a bit more fish since then.
Marco:
But I think it'll be fine.
Marco:
And, uh, and that's going to be, that's going to be what I use for now.
Marco:
And I'll say, you know, again, I'm not going to make any promises.
Marco:
I know myself well enough to know that as soon as Apple releases something better and faster, I'm going to rationalize getting it.
Marco:
But for now, I'm going to do this exact setup.
Marco:
I'm going to have this MacBook air and I'm going to bring the LG five K back from the beach because I hate it.
Marco:
And that will be my non beach monitor at my alternate setup here.
Um,
Marco:
And at the beach, I'm going to buy another LG 5K.
Marco:
Just kidding.
Marco:
I ordered the XDR.
Casey:
I was going to say, I just lost a tremendous bet with myself.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Casey:
All's right in the world.
Casey:
Because the thought of you not setting money aflame for the fun of it is just so foreign to me.
Casey:
So, okay.
Casey:
The Pro Display XDR.
Casey:
Now, I am a little surprised, though.
Casey:
Can you tell me why...
Casey:
I'm trying to figure out a way to phrase this question.
Casey:
I don't actually take any particular issue with anything you've said.
Casey:
It's obviously your right to do whatever you want.
Casey:
I think it makes sense.
Casey:
But if you like desktops so darn much, first of all, why don't you marry them?
Casey:
But why not use the Mac mini as the primary and use the Air as a satellite?
Marco:
I might do that.
Marco:
So the Mac Mini, the M1 Mac Mini is not going to arrive because I ordered it with the storage I should have ordered on the first one.
Marco:
It's not going to arrive until like mid-February.
Casey:
Oh, that's a bummer.
Marco:
Basically, I ordered it with the maxed out configuration.
Marco:
First of all, because it wasn't that much money because this M1 stuff is fantastic.
Marco:
Second of all, I want to leave that option open.
Marco:
So I got a configuration that leaves that door open so that if I want to, when the Mac Mini arrives, I can make it my desktop.
Marco:
I do like having two computers.
Marco:
It is nice for another raise.
Marco:
As much as I was talking last week, how nice it is to just have one.
Marco:
There are advantages to having two as well.
Marco:
There are advantages to having a desktop that's always plugged in, always set up, always has all your windows and your SSH connections open, and all the windows are in the right places.
Marco:
There are certainly advantages to that, and I'm going to see how that goes over time.
Marco:
For now, my plan is to keep the laptop as primary, but I'll reevaluate that decision when the Mac Mini arrives in February.
Marco:
But until then, I'm fine with it.
Marco:
And either way,
Marco:
I'm going all M1 and external monitors, and that's going to be it.
Marco:
Because it's such a nice setup, and I'm more mobile this year than in the past.
Marco:
Looking forward at how our family plans to live for the next few years, we are probably going to stay fairly mobile for a while.
Marco:
And so I have a need for more mobile setup than I had before.
Marco:
And this is just working so darn well in so many ways.
Marco:
I'm really enjoying it.
Marco:
And so that's it.
Marco:
And we'll see what happens down the road.
Marco:
Maybe I'll get the mini Mac Pro that Mark Ehrman thinks exists.
Marco:
But until then, I'm going to have a laptop and a Mac Mini serving all of my needs.
John:
I have two sets of questions for you.
John:
One, how did you not manage to find a way to get a non-gold MacBook Air in this equation?
John:
Like you give that one to TIFF, you order the non-gold one with two terabytes.
John:
Like is that not in the mix somewhere?
John:
What's happening on that front?
Marco:
If my gold one terabyte model was still under the holiday return thing, I might have considered doing some kind of a swap like that, but it's not.
John:
Not a swap, like an additional non-gold MacBook Air.
Marco:
Honestly, the gold's not really that big of a problem for me.
Marco:
Like, it's a weird color.
Marco:
I knew that going into it.
Marco:
In certain lights, it looks a little more pink than what I would prefer.
Marco:
In certain lights, it looks weirdly orange, which is kind of cool.
Marco:
Like, it's a weird color.
Marco:
But I still like that because I don't get excited at all about the silver or the gray at all.
Marco:
Like, I look at those and I think, this is the same old computer that I've seen a million times, that I've owned a million times.
Marco:
And so having it be this weird orange-pink-gold thing
Marco:
makes it seem new even though it's kind of an odd color and in certain lights i don't like how it looks it at least looks fresh and new which it is on the inside and it's kind of nice to have the outside you know convey that to me all right and second set of questions nano non-nano and did you get the stand
Marco:
I got the stand and I got non-nano because I was a little concerned about the cleaning aspect of it, of the nano.
Marco:
And I've been using a glass fronted monitor in this exact position for six months and it's been totally fine.
Marco:
So I don't expect to need the nano texture where it's going.
John:
All right, so this is the law of conservation of fans in your office.
John:
You get a computer without them, you get a monitor with some, we'll maintain the same amount.
John:
Yep.
John:
Well, this all sounds good because I feel like as you change computers six months or whatever from now, you'll be able to pass things on.
John:
So the laptop that, say you decide you want to get something else, whatever that something else may be, that laptop can get passed down very easily to be useful as a small light laptop for anyone else in the household who wants to use or even just for you to use as your lightweight computer.
John:
And then you can rotate in, you know, a beefier Mac Mini or a half-sized Mac Pro or whatever.
John:
Or even if you get an iMac, right?
John:
You could still have the iMac and still have this big screen and use the big screen to hook up to one of the laptops that's floating around, right?
John:
So you have a lot of options now with these modular components.
John:
I still think you have a little bit of a risk area in the...
John:
the hub zone i mean i know you're working on that you got the odwc one coming um we'll see how that goes and the cal digit and everything in the mix uh which is why maybe an imac will be attractive because maybe by the time that comes down the pike you're sick of dealing with thunderbolt and hubs and stuff and you're just like i'm just gonna get the new imac because it it's a touch screen and it's really cool new design or whatever but uh but we'll see i think you have a reasonable path forward for all your weird computing needs now that you've
John:
Now that you've finally gotten over the hump, it took me a while to get over as well to buy the horrendously expensive monitor that is very big.
Marco:
Yeah, and I've heard from other people who have it since last week as well, and everyone who I've heard from says the same thing.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
Just do it.
Marco:
Just buy the thing.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
So I still don't feel good about how much it costs, but...
Marco:
I will move past that as I do with every Apple price.
John:
It'll be painful.
John:
And the good thing is when Apple comes out with a better monitor, it will be like six years from now.
John:
Like when the OLED Apple display comes out, it'll be so long from now, right?
John:
Because they have proven they do not update.
John:
Remember we were waiting for them to come out with new monitors?
John:
Like what was the biggest one?
John:
I think the...
John:
the 30 inch went away.
John:
I don't know if you guys were in the, in the scene at this time, but the 30 inch went away and we're like, well, when are they going to replace the 30 inch and just years would pass and nothing would happen.
John:
Then eventually we just forgot the 30 inch ever existed.
John:
And it was like, well, the 27 inches are out.
John:
Uh, but I think they're probably going to have new displays.
John:
This was in our time where they're probably going to have a new 27 inch soon.
John:
That just never materialized.
John:
It was just, or when it came, it was just like the Thunderbolt one, but it was the same exact display with just weird pigtail stuff.
John:
Like the, the,
John:
the the good and bad thing about the 6k is i feel like it is a product line that apple that when apple obsoletes it they're going to take their sweet time because they're just going to keep selling this thing for the same exact price long after all the technology in it is outdated and then finally at some point after the next round table in 2027 they'll be like oh here's the new you know micro led whatever not not micro what is the
John:
I get confused.
John:
What's the one where every individual pixel is an LED?
John:
That's micro, I think, or nano or something.
John:
I got it right then.
John:
Okay, yeah.
John:
But here's the new micro LED 8K display, and that'll be like 2030.
John:
So despite this monitor being ridiculously overpriced, at least you will have a long period of time to let that overpricedness soak in.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The only thing that will really annoy me is if they really do release a 5K 27-inch monitor for like $2,000.
Casey:
I was just thinking that.
John:
In like, you know, six months.
John:
Well, here's the thing.
John:
The odds of that happening are actually much higher than them replacing the 6K with an 8K or something.
John:
But if that happens, I think you'll be fine because you'd be like, yeah, but now I'm used to 6K.
John:
And if I go back to 5K, it'll feel small.
John:
Because like I said, when I first got my monitor, at first it felt so big I didn't know where to look.
John:
And then like a half an hour later, it's just normal.
John:
And now if I look at it, I go back to my wife's 5K.
John:
I'm like, how do you get by with the small screen?
John:
You just get used to having the extra real estate.
John:
And so when they come up with the 5K, you're going to feel bad that it's like less than half the price or whatever.
John:
And you would have been perfectly happy with it.
John:
But now you're not going to be happy.
John:
It's like, why would I get a smaller screen?
Marco:
yeah yeah probably well well because i will be coming back periodically to this the place where i'll have the lg 5k and also i'll have to do some work on that periodically so that'll that'll remind me every like you know every every month or two like oh crap this look look at how small this is and that's gonna be worse in other ways like i i i can tell you that your your uh pro display xdr will not shake when you type it better not with its thousand dollar stand on it i know
John:
Okay, see, as someone in the chat room pointed out, I got an XDR last year, Marco, and this year, 2021 is your year, so start saving now.
Casey:
I'm thinking to myself, man, in so many ways, what Marco is describing is very appealing.
Casey:
Like, leaving the money aside just for a second.
Casey:
I think a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro, I think for either reasonable or unreasonable reasons that I would prefer a 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
I'd really like four ports, and I don't mind the touch bar.
Casey:
I don't actively like it, but I don't actively dislike it either.
Casey:
And so I've already been kind of planning that when the direct replacement for my current laptop comes out, which would be a 13-inch four-port MacBook Pro, I'll probably go ahead and upgrade it.
Casey:
Um, but I'm hearing you talk about the pro display XDR and I'm hearing you talk about the one computer lifestyle, which was my lifestyle for a long time.
Casey:
And I just keep thinking, man, that does sound good, but I cannot imagine being able to justify to myself that.
Casey:
spending, what, $7,000 on a computer monitor, much less sending it through the family CFO, who would have very strong opinions about this particular idea.
Casey:
So, yeah, I just don't see it happening.
Casey:
But if you would like it to happen, listeners, ATP.fm slash join.
Casey:
May I strongly recommend?
Casey:
It would be a great idea.
Marco:
No, seriously, Casey, for you, I would say suck up your pride, sell the new 13-inch, and get this air instead.
Casey:
I don't think it's about pride.
Casey:
It's just that I don't mind being wrong about having gotten the laptop.
Casey:
I think the laptop was a good purchase, and I made it at the right time, and I needed to make it.
Casey:
I have convinced myself for right, wrong, or indifferent that I don't want to lose the four ports.
Casey:
Now, if you start quizzing me about how often do I use all four ports, is this really a problem?
Casey:
The answer is almost never, no.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
I really don't love the idea of losing what I've got.
Casey:
In the same way you were talking about not loving the idea of going from 6K to 5K.
Casey:
Like, could you go from 6K to 5K one day?
Casey:
Oh, yeah, absolutely you could.
Casey:
But do you want to?
Casey:
Eh, maybe not.
Marco:
I would love to have four ports on this thing.
Marco:
That is something that I do miss.
Marco:
I would love to have four ports.
Marco:
And if...
Marco:
there is ever a 13-inch 4-port model that I hear is totally silent in practice, maybe I would switch to that.
Marco:
Or maybe I will go back up to the 16 someday.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I do like the big size frequently.
Marco:
So, you know, we'll see how that goes.
Marco:
And I think it is important to clarify, and for you and for anybody else who's bought an Intel Mac recently and kind of now regrets it,
Marco:
Like we had no idea.
Marco:
First of all, we had no idea when each product line would be updated and we had no idea how much faster things would be even on the low end machines.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like we knew that we knew the arm chips were, were fast, but,
Marco:
We knew they were fast in the context of a phone or an iPad, and we could see the GeekBank scores, and we could say, wow, these things are pretty competitive with desktops and single-threaded stuff.
Marco:
But I don't think anybody had any idea in the public, as buyers or as commenters like us on podcasts, we didn't have any idea that when you were buying your 13-inch, what, six months ago?
Casey:
Yeah, it was late May, early June.
Marco:
So seven or eight months ago, we had no idea that in seven months from then, there would be this radical improvement in the lineup that would be so massive to that exact product line or to a very similar product line as that one.
Marco:
You couldn't have known.
Marco:
The good thing is right now, these things are all still worth money at resale because a lot of people still need Intel stuff.
Marco:
And if you don't, you can take advantage of this time and get like a whoopsie undo.
Marco:
Like, let me undo like my Mac mini.
Marco:
Like this purchase that I made earlier this year, I am literally trading it in for almost the entire price of a new one that's way better than it.
Marco:
This is a good time to have some recent Intel Mac hardware to sell and to not need anything that the current M1s can't do or don't address very well.
Marco:
Again, if I was doing video stuff where I need not only big screens but also tons of multi-threaded GPU performance, these are not great for that kind of thing if you have a Mac Pro or iMac Pro at your disposal instead.
Marco:
Those are better for that.
Marco:
But I don't do that.
Marco:
I did briefly once, but I don't do that now.
Marco:
And for what I do, this is fantastic.
Marco:
And for what many people do, this is fantastic.
Marco:
So this really is, as Matthew Taylor's email said, this is a once-in-a-generation jump.
Marco:
This is a really massive shift in the industry.
Marco:
I do agree that Intel Macs are rapidly depreciating assets, or they will be soon.
Marco:
So much is better on the M1 already.
Marco:
And I also think that Apple, you know, Apple has the best of intentions.
Marco:
They're going to keep supporting the Intel Macs for a while.
Marco:
But whether your Mac is on Apple Silicon or Intel is going to be a line in the sand for software updates and compatibility down the road.
Marco:
We don't know when, how far down the road that's going to happen, but a Mac bought today that has an Apple chip in it will get software updates and will probably be useful to people for a longer period of time than an Intel machine bought today.
Marco:
So it is a distinction that I think has great value over time in addition to just how much nicer they are and things like heat and noise and stuff like that.
Marco:
I do think this is worth taking advantage of if your needs can be met with these.
Casey:
Yeah, I hear you.
Casey:
And it makes a lot of sense to unload one or both of my computers now when they're still worth a lot more.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I don't change computers like I change underwear, unlike some of us.
Casey:
So I'm reluctant to do anything at the moment, especially since...
Casey:
I would be getting something that is sufficient but not what I really and truly want.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
I'm the kind of person that I'd rather wait for what I really and truly want even if that ends up costing me a little bit in a loss of resale value in the thing that I've currently got.
Marco:
Yeah, fair enough.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We got to move on because we've been told that dad is going to be real upset at us if he doesn't get a chance to talk about his new toys.
Casey:
So, John, the time has finally come.
Casey:
We cannot procrastinate anymore because you said you were going to do it this year.
Casey:
Tell me about your PlayStation 5, please.
John:
I forget if I talked about that I wanted to do the PlayStation 5 review before the end of the year in the bootleg or the regular show, but it is a thing I wanted to do.
John:
I've had a PlayStation 5 since launch.
John:
Yes, I'm very lucky to get one.
John:
Thank you very much to a listener who helped me out in this endeavor.
John:
And I wanted to talk about it.
John:
I can't give you a super comprehensive review for a couple of reasons.
John:
One, when consoles launch, there's not always a lot of games that take advantage of them or not a lot of games, period.
John:
And two, even if there were, I wouldn't be playing those games.
John:
But I will tell you what my experience has been and why I got it to begin with.
John:
Why did I even want a launch PlayStation 5?
John:
I wanted it for one main reason a I play destiny all the time talked about that before I got my fancy Mac and this big fancy screen and my big fancy video card Partly so that I could play destiny in a way that I hadn't played it before play the PC version of destiny The PC version of destiny has two things that my old PlayStation 4 Pro did not have a couple things
John:
one uh uncapped frame rate uh the playstation 4 versions of destinies have been capped at 30 frames per second um and i you know the pc version has not been so the pc version will play it as fast as you can possibly play it and two uh hdr the playstation 4 version of destiny i believe did support hdr but i don't have an hdr monitor connected to my
John:
uh playstation 4 and my ridiculously expensive aforementioned pro display xdr turns out to be an hdr display so i spent a lot of time and energy getting windows 10 to run destiny through steam on my hdr monitor uh at high frame rates at high resolution and we talked about this on past shows i couldn't get it to run well at 6k because my video card is just not strong enough but at 4k i could get
John:
comfortably over 60 frames per second with hdr and it was pretty super cool the other thing that the pc version of destiny has that the console version does not is an adjustable field of view and that's basically like uh how wide you can see like if you had a 360 degree field of view you could see everything in front of you and in back of you all on your flat screen right um and if you had a very narrow field of view you could just see the stuff that's right in front of you
John:
So if you kind of think of it as like a fisheye lens, the wider the field of view, the more things look kind of fisheye, right?
John:
Where this becomes relevant for console versus PC is the narrower the field of view, the fewer triangles are in view, and the fewer things need to be drawn by the GPU.
John:
So a higher field of view, all other things being equal, takes more computing power to display.
John:
And just like the uncapped frame rates on PC, the PC platform, you have variable hardware.
John:
And if you have really beefy hardware, you can do things like have more pixels and higher frame rate.
John:
And yes, a bigger field of view.
John:
So up until, you know, the PlayStation 5, my choice was like a planned console at 30 frames per second with the whatever the default field of view was.
John:
like 75 degrees or something like that um or i could play on my quote-unquote pc at 4k 60 frames per second and up to a field of view of 105 um and the reason by the way the reason you want a wilder wider field of view is if you're playing pvp which is what i play a lot of a wider field of view basically gives you better peripheral vision so you can see more you have a better situational awareness of what's going on around me what's to my left what's to my right because it is giving you a literally a wider view of the world in the same
John:
monitor right so uh i wanted a playstation 5 because i knew based on bundy's announcement that the playstation 5 version of destiny was going to offer higher frame rates than 30 frames per second minimum of 60 frames per second up to 120 frames per second in the pvp mode for a slight downgrading graphical quality and adjustable field of view and also hdr um so
John:
And what do I do with my console all the time?
John:
I play Destiny.
John:
I do it all the time, right?
John:
So I got my PlayStation 5 basically so I could continue playing the exact same game that I'd been playing in PlayStation 4, but now I get to play it at 60 frames per second at 105 degree field of view.
John:
And if I had an HDR monitor, I could be playing an HDR.
John:
I don't have an HDR monitor.
John:
I didn't buy one because as far as I'm aware, there are no monitors available right now that support HDMI 2.1, which is what the PlayStation 5 outputs at.
John:
and our hdr ips and support 120 frames per second from the ps5 you can get an oled tv that does that but the smallest they come in is 48 inches and that is way too big for the place where i play this i have a 27 inch display here right so i'm still waiting for someone to put out a 27 inch ips hdr panel with a nice stand that's not ugly that does 120 frames per second so right now i'm just playing at 60 good luck with that
John:
No, they're coming.
John:
They're absolutely coming.
John:
There's a market for this.
John:
It's just because HDMI 2.1 is so new that only the new Xbox console and the PS5 support it.
John:
All the other consoles didn't because they were previous generation, right?
John:
So these monitors are coming.
John:
They're probably going to be expensive, but whatever.
John:
But for now, I'm dealing without the HDR.
John:
So that's what I did when I got a PlayStation 5.
John:
I was like, great, I have a, you know, I had to wait actually for another Destiny update.
John:
And there was a recent expansion to Destiny, right?
John:
So this is my new Destiny playing machine, which is a boring way to use a new console.
John:
But it wasn't boring to me because this is what I've been waiting for.
John:
And it doesn't mean that my Mac has retired from doing this because my Mac can also crank up the graphics a little bit higher than the PS5 can.
John:
And there are other games I play on it.
John:
And the Mac is still the only thing with HDR display.
John:
But in general, I get to play Destiny better.
John:
That said, the PlayStation 5 comes with a game already installed on it.
John:
I don't know if it comes with the game disc if you buy the disc one, but I got the digital one, so there's no disc drive in it.
John:
And it came with Astro's Playroom installed, which is more of like a tech demo, if you think kind of well.
John:
People have been comparing it to Nintendo Land, but I think it's even more slight than that.
John:
Nintendo Land came with the Wii U to sort of demonstrate the new capabilities.
John:
Astros Playroom is a cute little platformer from Sony where you just, you know, make this little robot guy hop around and do platforming things.
John:
And all the levels are filled with Sony nostalgia.
John:
Like, there's lots of little robots that are acting out scenes from famous PlayStation games in the background and everything.
John:
And what you collect at the end are these shiny, high-fidelity models of Sony hardware.
John:
And then you get to put, you know, it's a very Sony-type thing.
John:
But the whole point of this is to demonstrate...
John:
The capabilities of your new console, and in particular, the capabilities of the new controller, the DualSense controller.
John:
They're really stuck on the DualShock.
John:
What was the DualShock 2, 3, 4?
John:
Was it always DualShock?
John:
I forget what they call it.
John:
Anyway, now it's DualSense.
John:
And I'm sure you've seen reviews of this controller if you keep up with the the console space You may think okay, so it's a controller with different motorized little thingies inside it So what right?
John:
That's why Astro's Playroom is here because I'm not sure how much third-party games are going to take advantage of all the features of this controller certainly destiny 2 Doesn't take full advantage of it.
John:
And in fact they have rumble turn off and destiny because that messes with my aim and PvP and
John:
But Astro's Playroom is a, first of all, it's a fun little game to play.
John:
And if you're a Sony fan, the nostalgia thing really works.
John:
But it is an amazing demo of the controller.
John:
The controller, basically the things that it has in it that it didn't have before are fancier vibration motors, bigger, fancier vibration motors.
John:
If you think about it as the difference between the vibration motor and maybe the iPhone 3G,
John:
I think that was the last one to have the little motor that turns with a semicircle weight attached to the axle.
John:
That's what used to be in most controllers, right?
John:
And of course, in modern iPhones, we have the haptic engine, which is that linear, whatever the hell it's called.
Marco:
It's more like a speaker driver.
Marco:
Right.
John:
I'm pretty sure that's what's in the dual sense.
John:
But either way, it's a more sophisticated kind of vibration thing that you can programmatically control to a much finer degree.
John:
So it's got that.
John:
And then it's also got...
John:
motors that are able to resist you pulling the triggers which sounds like something you would think would like break or like well you know you can't stop me from pulling the triggers with these tiny little motors like what how is that even going to work like it's basically like when you pull the trigger it turns a little through a series of gears it turns a little corkscrew gear on the axle of the motor and that's it and you control electricity to the motor to oppose that force right um
John:
And that's, and it's also, what is it, it's got a touchpad on and it's got a bunch of little things, it's got a microphone built in, it's got a bunch of other features, but those vibration and trigger haptics are the main additions.
John:
But because both of them are able to be controlled so precisely by the game, Astro's Playroom demos this very well.
John:
You can...
John:
make experiences that feel different than they did with previous generation consoles.
John:
So Astro's Playroom has you run across sand and ice and rocks and jump off of things and land on things.
John:
And all of that is just like, okay, well, we'll make the vibration motor vibrate a different amount.
John:
How can you make vibrating a different mount feel like ice versus feel like sand versus feel like mud?
John:
They managed to do it.
John:
Obviously, you're still holding a controller.
John:
You don't feel mud on the bottom of your feet.
John:
This is not VR, right?
John:
But it is way better than the old haptics, and it is fun.
John:
It adds an element of immersion to the game.
John:
And then the trigger resistance I thought would be annoying, but it's kind of amazing how much it feels like
John:
like it's a hardware feature, like, oh, suddenly my controller has a stop midway through, where you have to press real hard, and then you go through the stop, and it gets easy, right?
John:
You can do things like that, where they're not, you know, they haven't mechanically changed your controller, but it feels like now it's a two-step controller, or a three-step controller.
John:
Now it's hard to press, and now it's easy to press, like...
John:
You know, they have a thing where you have to control the triggers to control these paws of a robotic monkey.
John:
And every time you reach and grasp or something and click onto it, it becomes easy once you grab it, right?
John:
Very cool features that are basically, it reminds me of the Wii U. And it's like, all right, technologically, it's not that amazing.
John:
It's just a controller with motors in it.
John:
But it's an experience you haven't had before while playing a console game.
John:
The Wii U had way more of these.
John:
It's a console that almost nobody used.
John:
And it's a shame because I think Nintendo Land on the Wii U was an amazing demonstration
John:
ton of different fun mechanics and games that had never been seen before and haven't been seen since um so i don't know how many games are going to take advantage of this but astro's playroom demonstrates the potential for it to be super cool uh like to give a recent example if uh if the last of us part three was a thing that ever existed like that type of game i can imagine benefiting immensely from this type of controls i
John:
Not in such a gimmicky, you know, fun way as Astro's Playroom, but just sort of woven into the way the game plays.
John:
It would be super cool.
John:
And speaking of the controller, iOS 14.3 beta is how old the story was.
John:
According to iMore, the beta had added support for the PS5 controller to iOS.
John:
I haven't tested it with 14.3 release, but I assume that it's in there.
John:
So you could always use the...
John:
Not always, but in the past versions of iOS, you could use the PlayStation 4 controller with your iPad or iPhone.
John:
And I've done that several times.
John:
And now you can use the PS5 controller.
John:
Those are the only games I've played on the PlayStation 5 is Astro's Playroom, which I finished and it was fun.
John:
and uh tons and tons of destiny so the only other thing i have to add to this review of the ps5 is to talk about the controller my favorite thing in the world uh not the parts that i talked about but like the controller as a controller right so aesthetically it's like the rest of the playstation 5 where they try to do like a two-tone thing where it's like a white shell wrapped around a black interior i was worried about that because that's entirely an aesthetic thing there's nothing mechanically about like it's not actually a white shell wrapped around a black interior that's a design element uh
John:
And I don't want additional seams or gaps or like, here's the shell and here's the interior on the controller, because that's not, it's just going to make it uncomfortable, right?
John:
So I was worried about that.
John:
And also they changed the shape subtly from the DualShock 4 or whatever the PlayStation 4 controller was.
John:
And I love the PlayStation 4 controller shape-wise.
John:
I thought they did a good job.
John:
This is a different shape, but this shape is also good.
John:
They managed to keep the seams away from where my hands go on the controller, so the fact that they have a black interior and white exterior, that is...
John:
Not relevant to how I hold the controller, which was a relief.
John:
They did something clever with the buttons.
John:
If you're wondering if the layout's changed, it's the same layout as the DualShock 4, as all the DualShock.
John:
So the D-pad is where the analog stick should be, but whatever, you know.
John:
it's it's the way it's always been the buttons are still in an exact diamond shape the two analog sticks are the same place like everything is the same so no real movement of the major control elements but the buttons again i think they did this for aesthetics but it's smart design wise as well the buttons are clear which looks cool uh the reason it's smart design wise is because each of the buttons has particularly the the buttons on the right side there's triangle circle x and square right
John:
those symbols are underneath a clear piece of plastic.
John:
So the symbols are not printed on the top of the clear piece.
John:
You can see them by looking through the, you know, four millimeter thick piece of clear plastic, which means that no matter how much you press these buttons, you're never going to wear the symbols off.
John:
And that's a problem with lots of controllers.
John:
Now, most people who use the controllers don't need to see the symbols, but your controller looks crappy if, after a long time, the X is slowly wearing off because you have, you know, that alien acid stuff coming out of your fingers.
John:
And we all know people like this, and something that you can't help, like...
John:
How acidic is the ooze that comes out of your fingers?
John:
Just look at someone's laptop keyboard and look to see if the E key is slowly disappearing, right?
John:
Or even just the keys being polished or whatever.
John:
Same thing with game controllers.
John:
If you are unlucky and have that type of hand secretions, you'll wear the symbols off your controller.
John:
That doesn't look good.
John:
They solved the problem.
John:
You're never going to wear these off.
John:
They're under a really thick layer of clear plastic.
Yeah.
John:
the actual plastic of the controller the bottom half i didn't realize this until i got it in real life the bottom half of the controller is textured plastic it is textured in this a little bit too cute way that sony textured the playstation 5 console itself in that you know it's white plastic and it feels a little bit rough but if you zoom way way in you see the roughness is not just a random stippling pattern it is
John:
Those symbols, which have become part of the PlayStation brand, triangle, circle, X, and square.
John:
There are, you know, thousands and millions of triangles, circles, X's, and squares.
John:
Tiny, tiny ones making up the texture of the plastic.
John:
It's very clever.
John:
It's very cool.
John:
But you can't see it unless you zoom way, way in.
John:
Texturing just the bottom half is nice because...
John:
Texturing for grip is good, but like it is rougher, right?
John:
And so I'm kind of glad that the part where I'm pressing the buttons, I'm not scraping my finger against a rougher plastic on the top surface, but the top surface is not textured.
John:
So that's a nice touch.
John:
The only problem with the texturing is, and the fact that the controller is white, is that where my fingers contact the textured bottom, it is slowly removing dirt and grime.
John:
from my fingers and depositing it onto the white controller uh so this started out as a white controller and now it's a white controller with some slowly darkening smudge marks from my human fingers rubbing against the bottom of the controller they do make a black version of the controller now too and this will be far less visible there i think the white controller looks cooler maybe i'll have to actually wash it
John:
And believe me, I'm washing my hands before I use my PlayStation 5.
John:
I'm not going in super dirty.
John:
It's just that the texture is rough enough to slowly exfoliate, let's say.
John:
Gently exfoliate your under-controller fingers, adding a little darkening mark there.
John:
The fact that the controller has a microphone built into it and a mute button on it is great for people.
John:
It lowers a barrier to entry of, like, I don't want to have a headset.
John:
I don't want to use a little earbud.
John:
those little earbud that came with the ps4 was always so delicate and so easy to break you just want to be able to play right out of the box if you don't care about audio quality or whatever it's got a microphone there already the the astros playroom does the same thing from the who did this first the switch no i don't know so whatever nintendo console first did the thing where you blow into the controller and like a fan spins on the screen do you guys remember that no
John:
i'm sorry to ruin this i've never heard of this so sorry maybe it was the ds summer sorry to ruin the surprise and delight but there's there's like a bunch of party games i think maybe it was on nintendo ds and it's at one point you're confronted with like a pinwheel like those little kitty pinwheels you know and to progress you have to blow
John:
And it's because the DS or whatever it was has a microphone on it.
John:
And once you figure out you have to blow in real life and the microphone picks up like the static of you blowing.
John:
Right.
John:
It's amazing.
John:
Right.
John:
Because it's a very simple trick, a simple gag with very simple hardware.
John:
But.
John:
The first time you figure that out and it works, you're like, wow, this is magic.
John:
And then, you know, you eventually figure out how they did it.
John:
But I can't remember who did it first.
John:
There's lots of examples from later Nintendo history.
John:
I'm thinking it was probably the DS.
John:
But anyway, Sony does it on the PS5, too, in the Astros Playroom.
John:
Only they kind of ruin the surprise by telling you, blow, blow into the controller.
John:
It's a little bit better with a handheld because the handheld has to be in front of you, whereas the controller is in your lap.
John:
So they do kind of have to tell you to pick the controller up.
John:
um having a mute button on the controller is nice too uh it's got built-in rechargeable batteries instead of replaceable which i like i like it to be built in and sealed it's got little recharging nubbins so you can put it in this little recharging dock or you can just plug it in it's usbc yay finally um
John:
And the console itself has USB-C ports and USB-A ports, including USB-A ports in the back, which is nice because Sony's wireless headphones still require a USB-A port, but you don't want to see it sticking out the front.
John:
The USB-C port is faster.
John:
I bought a new USB-C thumb drive to transfer my Destiny recordings that I make videos out of.
John:
Why?
John:
Because for some reason, Sony thinks the only way to get data off a PlayStation is through a thumb drive.
John:
It's connecting to the network.
John:
What year is this?
John:
Where's my computer?
John:
These are full-fledged computers.
John:
Please let me transfer data from my PlayStation 5 directly to my Mac.
John:
They're like, nope.
John:
Would you like to write it to a USB thumb drive?
John:
So that's why I have to get the fastest possible USB thumb drive to max out the speed available on the fastest USB port on the PlayStation 5.
John:
But these videos are huge.
John:
And you can record in 4K now, which is nice.
John:
i don't think you can record it over 30 frames per second i have to look at the captures to see what frame rate i'm getting from but that's another potential advantage of the new console if you manually initiate recording you can record it 4k if you don't manually initiate it it's just always recording right it's always recording like a 30 minute buffer or whatever
John:
which is a great feature that debuted in the PlayStation 4 and I still use.
John:
Like, you don't have to think about recording.
John:
It's just after something cool happens in the game, you just say, great.
John:
And you say, let me capture that.
John:
The PlayStation 5 has more granularity of how much you can record.
John:
It'll say, like, do you want me to capture the last five minutes, last 30 seconds, last 30 minutes, whatever.
John:
So you don't have to constantly make these videos that are...
John:
a fixed length long like i always used to make 15 minute long videos even if i just wanted the last 30 seconds because that was the only option available unless you went to the preferences or whatever um so yeah uh playstation 5 my review is thumbs up uh if you want to play destiny and play it better than you were playing it before the playstation 5 does an amazing job oh i guess one more thing fan noise
John:
playstation 5 is huge lol uh what you get for that hugeness is the fan noise is less than it's less than the original playstation 4 it's less than the playstation 4 pro it is both quieter and less annoying it is not silent you can hear it it's got a humongous fan in there but the humongous fan makes a more pleasant noise at a lower volume um
John:
And I never see my PS5 because it is hidden away underneath the desk that I'm playing on.
John:
But it is massive.
John:
So measure whether you have room for this stupid thing in your life.
John:
It's massive and it's not particularly attractive, but I don't really care.
John:
It does the job.
John:
So anyway, PlayStation 5, you should go out and buy one.
John:
I think they're available in stores everywhere.
John:
No, they're not.
John:
Well, good.
John:
I'm glad we covered that.
John:
Yep.
John:
And you guys should pick up some PlayStation 5s as soon as you can because they'll be very important for when we do the ATP Plays Destiny Together member special sometime in the distant future.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
When that happens, I'll pick one up.
Marco:
yep you can get the playstation 5 slim which will be uh slightly smaller maybe it'll be a 1u rack mount case it's slim
Casey:
Marco, you have gotten some Christmas gifts that you'd like to discuss with us.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So one gift that I got ostensibly for my kid, but it's kind of like a family gift in practice.
Marco:
I have a family of gamers.
Marco:
I did not get a PS5 for anybody or have one given to me because we don't really want one yet.
Marco:
But we've been kind of curious about VR for a little while.
Marco:
We are a family of me plus gamers.
Marco:
And we tried VR back years ago at XOXO in Portland.
Marco:
We went to somebody's office who had the, I believe it was the HTC Vive.
Marco:
It was one of the very first mainstream VR headsets that was available.
Marco:
And we tried it for like five minutes and just punched some boxes around in some kind of demo room or something.
Marco:
And it was interesting.
Marco:
But that was the only experience I had with it, really.
Marco:
Our family was curious about it.
Marco:
And again, Adam and Tiff are pretty heavy gamers.
Marco:
I'm kind of a casual, sometimes gamer.
Marco:
And so I decided... I had heard amazing things about VR, but...
Marco:
The thing that always turned me off about it was the need for a gaming PC.
Marco:
Like, you know, some PC that you either had a long wire that was wired to that you had to, like, make sure you don't trip over the wire or get it tangled up in your arms or whatever, which doesn't sound like a lot of fun.
Marco:
Or I know people have tried things like building backpacks that have, like, the PC in the backpack so you don't have to have the long wire.
Marco:
That sounds safe.
John:
Yeah.
John:
People never fall down when they're using VR, right?
Yeah.
John:
that's yeah that that seemed like a solution that you know if that works for you great but that's that wasn't going to work for us it's like those backpack vacuum cleaners you know yeah use if you have to vacuum a large place but you don't want to be lugging behind like the canister you just put it on your back but the same amount of noise too yeah exactly wow
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And I figured also that wouldn't have a good chance of working on our eight-year-old kid very well either.
Marco:
So yeah, we ruled that option out for now.
Marco:
And we weren't going to build an entire gaming PC desktop just to try to see if we like VR or not.
Marco:
Because I didn't know...
Marco:
our family is sometimes sensitive to motion sickness so like are we i'm not going to invest in a giant desktop pc gaming rig only to find out five seconds into gaming oh none of us can do this because it makes us all motion sick anyway uh so i decided i had heard about the uh oculus um not the go what's the other one the the other wireless oculus thing they their names i keep forgetting is that the quest and the quest 2 is that the one
Marco:
Yeah, Quest, okay.
Marco:
So I heard about the Oculus Quest earlier this year.
Marco:
Our friend CGP Grey got one and was raving about how good it was.
Marco:
And I looked into what that was, and I learned that it's a VR headset that is self-contained, that there's no wire that runs to a PC.
Marco:
It is just self-contained, and it runs lower-end but usable hardware in the helmet.
Marco:
And that sounded great to me.
Marco:
That sounded exactly like what we were looking for, for we want an entry into the world of VR,
Marco:
but we don't want the big full-sized rig, and we don't really care that much about the hardware trade-offs required to get that.
Marco:
So, great.
Marco:
There was a downside in that Facebook owns Oculus, and they made this decision that I'm still not sure why they made it, but Facebook decided to basically end Oculus,
Marco:
oculus accounts sometime soon and require all new purchasers of these vr headsets to use facebook accounts to manage you know the headset itself to log into the headset to use it to manage all your purchases and all your online gameplay and to require a facebook account for a vr headset
Marco:
is as baffling as it sounds and has angered many people to the point where if you look at any review of the oculus quest or quest 2 it's filled with people who are super angry about this and are refusing to use their oculus hardware or refusing to buy new oculus hardware as a result so
Marco:
Frankly, I don't know why it's worth it for Facebook to continue and not relent on this front, but they are continuing and not relenting on this front so far.
Marco:
So anyway, again, I don't know why.
Marco:
It seems to make no sense to me why Facebook would continue to push this for seemingly very little gain and for a gain they don't really need.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
They are.
Marco:
And so if you don't have a Facebook account or you don't want to tie your Facebook activity to this piece of hardware that needs to know it for no reason, then this is not for you.
Marco:
And I understand that.
Marco:
I didn't have a Facebook account for a while, but I did keep using Instagram.
Marco:
And
Marco:
There's no difference there.
Marco:
I tweeted about this the other day.
Marco:
I've decided that I recently needed to recreate a Facebook account for various real-life purposes that are not interesting to the show, but I had to make a Facebook account.
Marco:
I realized I'm being stupid here.
Marco:
I've continued to use Instagram this entire time.
Marco:
And I've been like, I don't have a Facebook account, but that makes no difference if I'm using Instagram.
Marco:
I wasn't achieving anything by not having a Facebook account.
Marco:
I wasn't making any kind of real stand about my politics or my privacy by not having Facebook, but having Instagram.
Marco:
So I decided, well, I needed a Facebook account for some real life reasons.
Marco:
So I'm like, fine, I'll just create a stupid Facebook account and I'll put nothing in it except for the bare minimum that I need to get this stuff done.
Marco:
And so I had one and so I could connect it to the Oculus hardware.
Marco:
So that was not a problem for me.
Marco:
But if it's a problem for you, I understand completely.
Marco:
Anyway, so I decided to get the Quest 2, which was released a few months back and had great reviews.
Marco:
And besides the Facebook thing, I couldn't find anything wrong with it in the reviews.
Marco:
So we got it, gave it to Adam on Christmas morning.
Marco:
He absolutely flipped his mind.
Marco:
Like, he was so happy.
Marco:
Like, he basically exploded.
Marco:
And so it went very well as a gift.
Marco:
And then the family gets to play it.
Marco:
And I've had...
Marco:
you know, maybe four days of playing with it so far between various members of the family.
Marco:
And I have some very early impressions I'll go through fairly quickly.
Marco:
Number one, motion is a bit of a problem.
Marco:
Like the motion sickness or motion nausea is a bit of a problem for at least me and Tiff and a couple other people who have tried it in the household, like, you know, family who have tried it.
Marco:
And I don't think it's going to be a huge problem in that I can still use it, but I can't find any settings between the little eyepiece moving bits or the head strap or anything.
Marco:
I can't find any way where everything on screen is sharp.
Marco:
I can get some things sharp some of the time, but I can't get it so that everything is sharp.
Marco:
And it seems to just be like maybe just a fit issue.
Marco:
Like the little like eye spready spacing things.
Marco:
It's not a continuous setting where you can set exactly how spaced apart your eyes are.
Marco:
It's like just three notches, like just three fixed settings.
Marco:
And so maybe my setting is between them.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But for whatever it is, I can't get it to a point where it is sharp.
Marco:
And that makes it so that sometimes when I use it, even just doing simple things like looking around the menus makes me feel a little bit sick and I have to stop.
Marco:
But sometimes I can play it for a half hour straight and have no problems at all.
Marco:
So I haven't quite figured out how to manage that well yet, but I just might not be compatible very well with either VR as a whole or this particular hardware.
John:
Well, one of the problems with motion sickness in VR is that the hardware is not yet fast enough, and certainly is the case for a mobile thing like the Quest, right?
John:
Because any time there is a mismatch between what your eyes see and what your inner ear feels, that's where you get motion sickness.
John:
So if the images on the screen lag even by a frame or two when you move your head just like a half an inch, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
that's a mismatch that your brain can detect.
John:
If you have faster hardware at a higher frame rate that's more reactive with better, you know, alignment with, you know, whatever it's using, whether it uses the accelerometers or cameras or there's all sorts of different ways to try to orient yourself.
John:
But, like, there's...
John:
In any VR hardware that's available now, there is some lag between you moving your head and the image changing on the screen.
John:
They try to make that lag as small as possible, but any lag at all has the potential to introduce motion sickness.
John:
So even if you had perfectly in-focus stuff, the fact that what you're seeing in front of you is a couple milliseconds behind what your head is doing and may not exactly match what your head is doing, depending on how the orientation detection works,
John:
that's that's your formula for motion sickness so i don't expect that to go away for a long time because you need very very fiendishly fast hardware and very accurate head tracking to you know eliminate that essentially yeah and and i think that you know that's probably part of the problem i think another part of the problem is just like the design of some of the games i've tried is such that like you just keep like it keeps like popping you to different places you're moving to different places because you can't walk there
John:
I mean, there's a reason for that.
John:
In general, keeping your body still, they're actually trying to help you.
John:
I mean, yes, you're right that you can't physically walk because you'll hit the wall of your house, right?
John:
But they're trying to help you not be as motion sick because if you're standing still, but what you see in front of your eyes is like a roller coaster ride, that's a huge mismatch between like, I'm not walking anywhere, I'm standing still.
John:
Why am I suddenly gliding forward really fast?
John:
So they teleport you to a different place or whatever.
John:
They're trying to get you so that
Marco:
you're you know in the game your virtual avatar is also standing still just like you are to just try to do a better match between what's on screen and what's happening right and so like that's why the games that work really well are things like beat saber you know everyone recommended beat saber um i'm okay at it tiff is like amazingly good at it she's really enjoying it um i i'm okay at it but it's fun but what's good about beat saber is like you
Marco:
Your virtual character is standing still and stuff is coming at you that you have to like deflect or whatever.
Marco:
So that kind of thing makes sense.
Marco:
Another one of the games that I've really surprisingly enjoyed is Eleven Table Tennis, which is just a really well done ping pong table simulator.
Marco:
And it's and you're so in ping pong, you are standing in a small square area making small movements while stuff happens in front of you.
Marco:
and it replicates that perfectly like you don't have to move your body that very far in ping pong you can just move within that small you know few square foot area on the floor that you're standing in behind the virtual ping pong table and it works and like that by the way the game is so delightful like you like wake up and you're just in some guy's apartment and there's a ping pong table and that's it's just it's such a fun world and it's so well done like the the sound of the ball hitting things it's perfect
Marco:
perfect like it the way the ball is like it's an incredibly well done game highly recommend 11 table tennis if you're a vr person and i haven't played anything multiplayer yet i can imagine it would be even more fun if you were playing against a real human instead of like the ai torso that you
John:
play against normally that was one of the most fun motion control games i played not vr but like for the playstation 3 sony had motion control stuff the ones that look like a glowing lollipop it's like a black stick with a glowing ball on top of it and i think was it rockstar that made the ping pong game some big name game company made a motion control ping pong game that used those motion control things as the paddles and it was perfect for the same reason you said that you're standing in front of the tv and
John:
And the thing you're holding might as well be a ping pong paddle.
John:
Like, instead of a paddle on the top, it has a glowing ball.
John:
And it just worked so well.
John:
Like, even though it wasn't VR, it might as well have been VR because on the screen is the table, and the ball's coming out of the screen at you, and you wave this controller, and it was amazing.
John:
It was the best simulation I'd ever seen.
John:
I'm sure VR is even better, but I remember that being impressed, the good match between what can you do while standing in front of your TV holding a stick and that kind of game.
Marco:
yeah it is kind of i was highly amused the fact i was sitting there thinking like you know the first video game was pong right and then i think like what what did we do back then and with the hardware we had then now we've made this incredible these incredible advances and we've come to the point now where we now have pong again just way better in all these different ways but it's still we're still playing the same game
Marco:
everything's a remix so anyway so ping pong is awesome um mini golf putt putt we have this we've got walkabout mini golf that's been pretty fun too um that that does have the issue where you keep having to like teleport to your ball but you like you pull the trigger and it teleports you to be right in front of your ball and you can walk around within that spot but you know it's a mini golf course so you hit the ball and it's going to move more than a few feet away so you're going to have to keep teleporting like after every stroke
Marco:
And so you teleport to your ball, and then you've got to kind of reorient yourself.
Marco:
Where am I?
Marco:
Oh, here I am.
Marco:
You look around.
Marco:
Oh, the water's behind me now, or whatever.
Marco:
So it's a little bit jarring to move around like that.
Marco:
We haven't yet tried any driving or flying games, because I fear the motion component of those.
Marco:
I did try there was like a like a nature film thing.
Marco:
It's like, you know, view this cool nature documentary in 3D.
Marco:
So it seems like you're underwater and looking at all these fish swimming by.
Marco:
And I couldn't get through that because it wasn't like the I think the screen resolution wasn't good enough or it wasn't sharp enough or the motion of the camera moving was too weird.
Marco:
That one made me feel sick.
Marco:
So I had to stop that.
Marco:
But the games where you're just like standing still and stuff is happening around you, those seem OK for me so far.
Marco:
I can't play it for that long but I will say like between Beat Saber and ping pong and mini golf so far that have been kind of the hits among the family they've been really well received not only by the gamers but also by the non gamers like we had parents play and they enjoyed them too because
Marco:
And it wasn't weird for them.
Marco:
It was like, oh yeah, I just put this thing, oh, I'm in a golf course.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And just start playing.
Marco:
And it reminded me a lot of when the Nintendo Wii came out in, what was it, 2006?
Marco:
Like that Thanksgiving and holiday season, I saw much of the same effect of like, you brought the brand new Wii over to your family's house and you had like your parents and your grandparents playing these games.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
you know having the similar kind of experiences where you're kind of like semi-virtual with the with the we motes and moving you know having motion control of these virtual worlds on screen and they had broad appeal but i think it was also largely a novelty and it wore off quickly and i think so far
Marco:
I think that's probably what's going to happen with us and VR.
Marco:
I think this is really fun, but I haven't yet found the killer thing that I think we're going to be doing for a long time.
Marco:
It seems like it's really good for certain kinds of games.
Marco:
And not that good for a broad variety of games, at least not yet, or maybe not with this hardware, or maybe just the software hasn't caught up yet.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But it's really good for the small segment of games.
Marco:
We have our Wii Sports.
Marco:
That is covered.
Marco:
But I don't yet know if we're going to really be able to move past that anytime soon.
Marco:
And so I think what's going to happen is I think we're going to play with it a lot for like a month.
Marco:
And then it's not going to get a lot of use.
Marco:
But I could be wrong.
Marco:
But I kind of get that feeling so far that this is really fun.
Marco:
This is a great, new, cool experience to have right now.
Marco:
But I don't see a lot of lasting power in the software library, at least what's available for the Quest.
Marco:
This is a subset of PC VR stuff because it's not running on Windows, it's not running on Intel hardware, it's running on the embedded hardware in the Quest helmet on the Quest platform.
Marco:
So this is not all VR.
Marco:
But I have a feeling this is much of... This is probably a decent representative sample of the kind of things that are out there.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
i'm not seeing a lot of that depth yet maybe i just haven't looked hard enough or you know it's only been a few days i also when i was asking for recommendations i did not i specifically said please no like shooting games because i don't want to get to it now but i'm not into shooting games you should try super hot it's not the same type of shooting game and speaking of shooting games though has using this made tiff more interested in playing half-life alex like getting beefier vr hardware to do that
Marco:
We haven't talked about it yet.
Marco:
I mean, we've always been mildly interested because we're such big Half-Life fans.
Marco:
I was looking at it just yesterday morning.
Marco:
I was like, hey, how easy is a Valve Index to get these days?
Marco:
And I noticed it did have a little finger adjuster thing to adjust the eye spacing in a variable manner instead of these three fixed spaces that the Quest has.
Marco:
So I thought maybe the Quest might be better with me because I think...
Marco:
If I can get VR gear that fits me better, where I can have a full field of vision that's sharp across the whole thing every time, I think I would have fewer motion issues.
Marco:
But I don't think I like it enough to necessarily make that jump right now and get the PC for it and everything else.
Marco:
Because ultimately, one thing I love about the Quest 2 is...
Marco:
is even though it's Facebook behind the scenes and that's really gross, it is a really nice experience to have this thing be all in one.
Marco:
The hardware is well designed.
Marco:
The software is all integrated.
Marco:
Their storefront's all integrated with it and all the games work really well with their boundary detection and stuff like that.
Marco:
There's no...
Marco:
hardware to put around the room like you don't have to have like little like you know emitters around the room or sensors around the room like you just put the helmet on and put the controllers in your hand and that's it it senses the room for you you draw where you want to stay and it makes you stay there there's no other wires like that's all really nice the experience of using that is very very good and i think if i went into any of the more powerful pc based solutions for this
Marco:
I think all of the rough edges of the experience that aren't that nice would irritate me, possibly more than the value I would get out of the additional hardware of the PC stuff.
John:
Real-time follow-up asked Tiff, do you want to play Half-Life Alyx more now that you've played on the Quest?
John:
Her answer was absolutely exclamation point.
John:
So I think you know what you have to do.
Marco:
Well, so one thing I did order, they sell a cable that's basically just a fiber optic 16-foot USB 3 cable.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
with active transmitters on both sides.
Marco:
But yeah, they sell a link cable that you can actually use this headset as a PC headset for compatible software, whatever that means.
Marco:
And so I bought the cable to try that out to see if we want to go down that route.
Marco:
And if it ends up being really cool, maybe then I'd order the Valve Index if it needs to be better.
Marco:
But I'm going to explore that avenue, but I don't know necessarily how that's going to go or how much of a priority that is with current hardware.
Marco:
because tiff wants a new gaming laptop but ideally like it would have the new rtx generation of gpus that isn't seemingly available on laptops yet so we'll see how that goes anyway thank you to our sponsors this week boxcryptor and techmeme ride home
Marco:
And thank you to our wonderful members who support us directly.
Marco:
We want to thank you very much for your support this year.
Marco:
We just launched a membership program this summer.
Marco:
You've been wonderful to us so far.
Marco:
Thank you for your support.
Marco:
If you want to join as a member, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you, everybody, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
John:
minor uh controller follow-up of things i forgot uh there are two tiny buttons on the playstation 4 controller one of them is the share button and one of them is like the options menu button they're like the tiniest buttons you could possibly imagine which is
John:
A good idea because they're not important buttons for gameplay.
John:
They're just for, like, menu functionality.
John:
They're in exactly the same place as they were before.
John:
But previously, they were tiny sort of lozenge-shaped buttons that had dents in them, like little swimming pool dents, right?
John:
And now they are just, you know, straight-sided lozenges that are flat-topped.
John:
And it's a downgrade.
John:
The little dimples that they had before felt good.
John:
You'd feel for the little dimple.
John:
You'd press the little dimple.
John:
It was a great tiny little button.
John:
Now, they're just little, tiny, sharp-edged, flat-sided pill-shaped plateaus.
John:
Downgrade.
John:
Why would you do that?
John:
I mean, again, I think it's aesthetics.
John:
These are more sort of regular geometric shapes.
John:
It's not bad.
John:
They're fine.
John:
You feel them.
John:
They work.
John:
They're not hard to press.
John:
Nothing like that.
John:
But it's like a...
John:
a minor downgrade on a on a button and it is a button that you hit a lot especially in destiny you hit the options button a lot and i hit the share button a lot to capture things or whatever so that's that's kind of a shame and then one more software thing that i forgot to talk about uh
John:
I don't know how to describe this, but the PlayStation 5 software UI is a lot like the PlayStation 4 one, only with more, not with more ads, but with more promotion.
John:
Like when you turn the thing on, when like it boots in or whatever, there is always this line of squares.
John:
by default that is where your cursor is active, which is fine, except that line of squares is filled with crap that I don't care about.
John:
Here's the latest game that's available on the PlayStation Store.
John:
I don't care.
John:
Here's a bunch of stuff that happened recently in the games you're playing.
John:
I don't care.
John:
I don't want to see any of that stuff.
John:
Now it's one tap away from going away and doing what you're doing, but I do not need, and it's not, they're not actual, I guess the game thinks are actual ads.
John:
It's not like it's advertising Viagra or something.
John:
It's all PlayStation related and it is relevant to what I'm doing and what I'm playing for the most part, but I don't need to see that in my face.
John:
I wish there was a way to get rid of that.
John:
People have mostly been complaining that it takes now more taps to put your PlayStation 5 to sleep because you have to first get off of that menu onto another menu.
John:
In general, the menus are better than they were on the PlayStation 4.
John:
They're more logical.
John:
They're better organized.
John:
They're graphically better.
John:
But whatever that stupid bar is that has your default input focus that is constantly filled with stuff that it thinks is relevant to you, plus some advertisement for a game you're not interested in, that gets a big thumbs down for me.
Marco:
Yeah, the whole direction that so much of our hardware has gone and software has gone in recent years of just turning everything into a promo fest and a vending machine.
Marco:
It really runs me the wrong way, but it seems like the cat's out of the barn door on that one so badly that there's just no going back.
John:
In the Sony's case, I understand what they're doing.
John:
It's stuff relevant to games that I'm playing and even just the one square they put for a recent game that came out, it makes sense.
John:
It is a game console and you would want to see that stuff on the screen.
John:
It's just that there's just no way...
John:
to get it get rid of it like you should be able to say okay fine but don't show me that like kind of like you can with apple stuff like don't show me serious suggestions don't show me results from the web don't you know like to control sort of the default sort of quick complete stuff because that's what they're trying to do is like we think these are the three things you're most likely to do and sometimes they're right like sometimes if i just did a capture like the square to the right is the capture that i just made that's probably what i'm going to go for anyway if i want to trim it or look at it or whatever like that makes sense it's it's a lot like auto-completing
John:
But the other ones, there's just a lack of control.
John:
I think they just need more settings to trim that down.
John:
In other places, they expanded.
John:
Like I said, when you do share, you have a menu where you can pick how long you want to share.
John:
It's kind of like the opposite of what they did in Big Sur, where you can't snooze the notifications for different amounts of time.
John:
They added that in the PlayStation 5.
John:
That's the direction it could go.
John:
Before, it was like, pick a length, and every time you save a clip, it'll be that length.
John:
And PlayStation 5's like, but why not, just in time, give them a list of seven different preset lengths?
John:
Why not?
John:
It's a tiny little menu.
John:
Put it there.
John:
It's like, oh, so nice.
John:
Look, I don't have to go change the setting.
John:
It's just in real time.
John:
I can say snooze for five minutes.
John:
People don't know what we're talking about.
John:
In Big Sur, when notifications come up, calendar notifications, you used to be able to snooze them for a certain period of time in a pop-up menu.
John:
And now, what does it do?
John:
Now you can just say later and you don't get to pick the length?
Marco:
Yeah, it used to be you'd have like, you know, 15 minutes, one hour, tomorrow, something like that.
Marco:
And now it just snooze or not snooze.
Marco:
And I think it's something like 15 minutes and that's it.
John:
yeah and and you can imagine complaining like well but i don't like those three choices i don't like 15 minutes an hour in a day i wish i could have 90 minutes or whatever and maybe the next version you think they'd expand it and make it customizable but instead they said nope how about no options how do you like that right the playstation 5 so that in general is going in the right direction but like i think they need a little bit more flexibility and
John:
And I don't mind, I don't even mind being like, not advertised to, but sometimes you do want to know like, oh, there's a new update available or whatever, like that type of information just in time.
John:
It's just zero flexibility that I found so far to change that.
John:
And they're usually good about this.
John:
Like Sony has tons of options for everything.
John:
They even have an option of like, by default, do you want the microphone to be muted when you start playing?
John:
or not muted and the default is not muted but i changed it because like i want the default to be muted so i'm not accidentally on microphone if somehow i connect through audio and i didn't mean to like they're pretty good with options it's just that the ui is a little bit getting a little bit pushy well because none of those options make them less money i i don't even think that's what it is like i understand the advertising of the game thing but like in general sony tries to give you like it
John:
Not allowing you to mute the microphone by default would be like, oh, more engagement and get people involved.
John:
But they don't.
John:
They understand it's a privacy thing.
John:
They're actually pretty good about that stuff.
John:
There's a huge list of privacy settings about who can see what you're doing, whether you're online, what games that you play, your triumphs.
John:
And you could for all those different things.
John:
It's very grainy.
John:
You could say nobody can see this.
John:
Only my friends can see this.
John:
Only my close friends can see this.
John:
Friends of friends.
John:
It's a lot like Facebook in that regard.
John:
But the defaults are actually pretty locked down.
John:
So much so that you usually have to dive in there and sort of open things up if you want people to be able to find you to play with you online.
John:
Anyway, you should definitely get a PlayStation 5.
John:
But before that, you should get something that can play Half-Life Alyx because Tiff wants to play it.