A VCR for the Internet
John:
I don't want to talk about politics today.
Casey:
I'm going to tell you that the way that you can celebrate this theoretical hopeful maybe win for things that the three of us consider good and right in the world and democracy in general, the way you can celebrate that obviously is with capitalism.
Casey:
So we should tell you that the ATP store is back, baby.
Casey:
ATP.fm slash store.
Marco:
You're the master of self-serving transitions.
Marco:
That's what I'm here for.
Casey:
So anyway, ATP store is back.
Casey:
ATP.fm slash store.
Casey:
It will be back until the 14th of November ATP time.
Casey:
That is not this upcoming Saturday, if you're listening to this in your real time, but it is a week from Saturday, the 14th of November.
Casey:
The reason we did this is because we hope but do not guarantee that those in the U.S.
Casey:
will get this stuff before the holidays.
Casey:
Hope but not guarantee.
Casey:
So what do we got going on here?
Casey:
We've got an update to the Monochrome Pro Max shirts.
Casey:
John, would you do me the pleasure, please, of explaining what these are and what's different?
John:
Sure.
John:
This is the shirt we have that has silhouettes of all the different Pro Max over the years.
John:
Not all of them, but some of the different Pro Max over the years.
John:
The original one was a six-color, well, originally a five-color design with the Apple colors that eventually became a six-color design when the 2019 Mac Pro was released.
John:
And we also had, back when it was a 5 Mac design, a line art version of that, where instead of them being colored silhouettes, they're little line drawings of them, and they're actually also a little bit more to scale.
John:
So we updated the monochrome version of that shirt with line art that features the new Mac Pro.
John:
So now both of our Pro Max shirts have six Macs on them, and the monochrome one is for sale for the first time, so check that out.
Casey:
And as with before, you can do with or without wheels as they should run you an extra $4.
Casey:
So I'm sorry about that.
Casey:
So we've got the Monochrome Pro Max shirt with or without wheels.
Casey:
We've got the standard six colors ATP shirt.
Casey:
We've got the ATP hat.
Casey:
We've got the ATP embroidered zip hoodie, which is excellent in particular.
Casey:
I very much like that.
Casey:
So you've got about 10 more days as we record this to go and get your merch.
Casey:
ATP.fm slash store.
Casey:
You will hear this one more time.
Casey:
And I have to.
Casey:
It's required by the contract between the three of us.
Casey:
I have to tell you, every single time we have a sale, I make the same speech.
Casey:
Listeners.
Casey:
Please go and do the order now.
Casey:
Visualize where you're going to be if you're driving, which nobody is because we can't leave.
Casey:
Or if you're walking, which not many people do because we can't leave.
Casey:
Or if you're doing anything, just visualize where you will be at that future time and visualize yourself going to ATP.fm slash store.
Casey:
And so you're not the person that tweets at me two minutes after the store closes saying, oh, when does the store close?
Casey:
I think I might have missed it.
Casey:
So, don't be that person.
Casey:
Please.
Casey:
If you're going to buy stuff, do it now.
Casey:
If you don't want to buy stuff, that's fine.
Casey:
That's totally fine.
Casey:
But if you're going to buy stuff, do it now.
Casey:
Celebrate capitalism, because that's the American way.
Casey:
ATP.FM.
Casey:
And speaking of capitalism, let's start some follow-up.
Casey:
So, it's so funny being a host on the show, because...
Casey:
There are times that I genuinely just miss the plot on something and I don't even consider something.
Casey:
And then there's times that I think, well, what about this thing?
Casey:
No, that can't be it.
Casey:
And I don't say anything.
Casey:
And then the entire internet comes to say, hey, hey, hey, did you know about that thing?
Casey:
So, listeners, yes, I am aware of the National Radio Quiet Zone.
Casey:
Thank you for reminding me.
Casey:
I am well aware of it.
Casey:
And actually, anyone who told me, hey, have you heard of the National Radio Quiet Zone?
Casey:
You have now received demerits.
Casey:
You want to know why?
Casey:
Because if you really were a Casey completionist, you would have known that months ago, I was on the Delightful Fun Fact podcast with our friends, and I was...
Casey:
The whole premise of the show is to talk about fun facts.
Casey:
And if memory serves, I was with Alan filling in for Arik.
Casey:
And guess what my fun fact was?
Casey:
The National Radio Quiet Zone.
Casey:
So, yes, I'm aware of it.
Casey:
If you're not aware of it, however, it is very funny and very interesting.
Casey:
It's this big swath of land, basically, on the West Virginia-Virginia border that...
Casey:
ostensibly in certain well in the entire swath of land ostensibly you're not really allowed to have like cell phone coverage but realistically there's like a town or a section or something like that it's been a while since i've spoken about it um where it's really really locked down you can't have portable phones you can't have cell phones you can't have radios and that's because they have these extremely large and complicated um radio telescopes on these mountaintops over in west virginia so
Casey:
So that's why some people have said, well, maybe that's why Verizon has this huge dead area in between West Virginia and Virginia.
Casey:
And yeah, I buy that in principle.
Casey:
But if you look at the two maps, which I put links in the show notes, maybe if Marco is kind, he'll put them in the chapter art.
Casey:
But if you look at the two maps side by side...
Casey:
The difference between the AT&T map and the Verizon map is still pretty stark in my personal opinion.
Casey:
So I do agree that that might be the national radio quiet zone might be the difference or might be that might be the issue there.
Casey:
But geez, it still seems like there's a big difference between AT&T and Verizon.
Casey:
Also, you should all be Casey completionists.
Casey:
What the hell's wrong with you?
Casey:
John, I'm sorry about your bottom.
John:
Yeah, as I feared and as I expected, the Apple leather case for the new line of iPhones does indeed cover the bottom of the phone.
John:
So that's not going to help me with my...
John:
bottom covering issues um the good news for marco maybe is that uh there is a apple leather case available for the mini as well uh something they hadn't done in the past for their for the se and the other small phones so if marco doesn't mind the bottom cover he can try out the apple leather case as for me i have ordered a couple of third-party leather cases that don't cover the bottom of the phone and i will report back in when they show up and i try them out
Casey:
Okay, just to get ahead of all the feedback, are you willing to put links in the show notes, or would you rather wait until you have received them before you even link to them?
Casey:
Because you know that we're going to get asked.
John:
Yeah, no, I'm intentionally not telling you which ones.
John:
You know why?
John:
Because why would you buy a case that I haven't even told you was any good yet?
John:
Like, if you care about my opinion, then wait to hear my opinion.
John:
If you don't care about my opinion, just buy the leather case you want to buy.
John:
Like, there's a million of them, right?
John:
So, no links, no names.
John:
In fact, I don't even remember which two I bought.
John:
There was like seven of them that I had open in tabs.
John:
What I can tell you about it is... You?
John:
No.
John:
Yeah.
John:
i left that window open so when they arrive i'll remember which one i bought i guess i guess i look through my receipts anyway my criteria was leather mostly kind of like the apple leather case so no real textured leather that looks like rumply ostrich skin or whatever like just you know if you've seen what the apple leather case look like especially the black ones they're very sort of uniform grain so as close as that as i can get
John:
open on the bottom you know thin like apple's leather cases are uh lays looks like it lets the phone lay flat on the table so it evens out the camera bump um fits the 12 pro obviously and uh metal buttons or plastic metal or plastic buttons that stick out from the leather like what i didn't want were the leather lump buttons and so many really good looking cases had leather lumps where
John:
It's a leather case, and then the buttons for volume and power are just like lumps in the leather, but aren't themselves.
John:
Like there's no cutout for the buttons or anything.
John:
It's just kind of like a lumpy part.
John:
And I've had Apple's leather case used to be like that.
John:
I had Apple's leather case that was like that.
John:
Do not like the leather lumps.
John:
So I ordered two cases with metal and or plastic buttons, both of them black, both of them leather, both of them open on the bottom.
John:
I will report back.
John:
And then when I report back, I will give you links, including even if I don't like them, then I'll give you links.
John:
Then you just know what I'm talking about.
Marco:
I'm curious to see how this ends up because I've been an Apple leather case user ever since they made the phones unholdable with the iPhone 6 forward.
Marco:
The Apple leather cases now, the current ones, and even the old leather bump ones back then, they've always been the best available that I have been able to find.
Marco:
I've never found a third-party leather case for an iPhone that was as good as Apple's.
Marco:
And Apple's aren't even amazing.
Marco:
They're just decent.
Marco:
And it seems like no one else is able to make better ones.
Marco:
It seems like the best thing anybody has ever been able to say about other cases is they're cheaper.
Marco:
But I've rarely, if ever, found one that was like
Marco:
really nice and apple's cases i i have i've yet to find anything that is as nice as theirs that being said i decided uh back john when you were tweeting a couple weeks ago looking at cases and getting suggestions from people one of them caught my eye i thought it looked all right and so i pre-ordered that one for the mini which i don't i haven't even been able to pre-order yet but
Marco:
I figured I plan to try the mini caseless, but I actually occasionally will probably want a case anyway.
Marco:
And that was before I knew Apple was going to make their own leather ones for it.
Marco:
So I decided to preorder that one.
Marco:
And so we'll see.
Marco:
I'll be able to compare because I'll probably also end up getting apples because apples are probably going to come in better colors.
Marco:
The one I ordered only came like in black and brown.
Marco:
And so I couldn't get like a red one.
Marco:
So I'm going to, if apples comes in red, I'm going to get apples and then I'll have both and I'll be able to compare.
Marco:
I'll let you know.
Marco:
But I honestly, I would be very surprised if any other cases are as nice as apples in, in just how nice the leather feels, how good the buttons are, how well and how closely it hugs the phone without being too bulky or too thick.
Marco:
That's what I really want to see.
Marco:
And so many of them,
Marco:
also are just incredibly tasteless with their logo placement.
Marco:
And, and the one I ordered, uh, doesn't seem to have a logo visible on the back.
Marco:
And I'm, I'm very happy about that.
Marco:
So we'll see too.
Marco:
Like this, this one looks like the best third party one I have seen, but I also know this is the kind of thing you kind of just have to like put it on your phone and feel it to really know how good it is.
John:
So we'll see.
John:
You can bleep this out in the episode marker, but which one did you order?
Marco:
I don't remember.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, I have the same trepidations about it because I've never bought a third party leather case.
John:
And the problem with all these is like, you know, the product photos can can be like far distant from the product you get.
John:
It's almost like like food photos on like menus of fast food places like, OK, right.
John:
So that's the picture.
John:
But then if I take the thing that I ordered and hold it up next to the picture, it's like now.
John:
Right.
John:
So I don't know how much to trust these pictures.
John:
i you know that's why i ordered multiple cases because i'm like well you know these multiple cases still add up to less than apple's one case at least with apple's one expensive case you're like well at least i know what i'm getting like because i've got the leather cases before i kind of know what i'm in for and i'll just bite the bullet on the uh on the cost so yeah we will both report back real time confirmation it was the uh case that one
John:
You've got to bleep that out now.
Marco:
Yeah, well.
Marco:
Yeah, I guess because all I can say is that's the one that made me want to order it and try it.
Marco:
But we'll see when it gets here.
Marco:
I don't even know how long it'll be before I have a phone.
Marco:
We're going to be able to start ordering the iPhone 12 mini this Friday morning.
Marco:
oh yeah who know and the max too but who knows when i'll be able to actually get one to arrive here that's a big question mark you know if if apple is as supply constrained as they appear to be um and if the mini has a whole ton of orders as i think it probably will uh this could be one of those things where like i get in there on minute two and it's backordered by six weeks so we'll figure it out i'll try to get one somehow
Casey:
You know, if you would like to hear what Marco said, you can always go to atp.fm slash join and listen to the bootleg where it will not be bleeped.
Casey:
I'm just saying.
Marco:
The bell happens live, but the bleeps are put in editing.
Marco:
So the bootleg never has bleeps.
Casey:
Yep, there you go.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
John, can you tell me about two-factor authentication and moving it between devices, please?
John:
Your cursor is blocking the letter of this person's name.
John:
Whose cursor is that?
Casey:
Oh, I guess that was mine.
Casey:
Who's the blue cursor?
John:
Isn't it weird that the cursor was blocking the eye?
John:
Anyway.
John:
They call it the eye beam.
John:
Michael Kozarski wrote in to tell us that the Google Auth app that I was complaining about the other day about my phone setup changed its method of storing items.
John:
It used to do it in the keychain, but now it doesn't anymore.
John:
But old keys that were created before the change are grandfathered in.
John:
So every time I upgrade to a new phone and some subset of my two-factor stuff is still in the Google Auth app, it's because they're the ones that were created before this app changed from storing things in the keychain to storing things just locally.
John:
So it's not a random set.
John:
It's the oldest ones.
John:
And that kind of makes sense now that I think about it.
John:
It just seemed random because I changed the order around, right?
John:
So it wasn't actually the top whatever.
John:
It was just a subset of that.
John:
So anyway, yeah.
John:
and uh two-factor stuff uh i got a lot of advice about what i can do to make my setup less painful aside from the dozens and dozens of people who had to tell me that i should use authy or one password which i predicted on the show but it did not stop them i know you said on the show that you don't want to hear about one password but have you considered one password i've considered it um welcome to 80 of all feedback ever right uh
John:
This was by far the most popular suggestion.
John:
And all these people are right, but also kind of not helpful.
John:
Everybody said, hey, if you print out the QR codes when you set up your stuff for the second time, then when you get a new phone, you can just rescan all those same QR codes.
John:
True, but to implement that strategy to save myself trouble next time, I need a time machine because I didn't do that.
John:
So yes, you're right.
John:
I could have done that and it would have been smart, but telling me now just makes me feel bad because...
John:
I know I'm in for the next time, which I'm resigned to.
John:
Like I said, I've decided by not using a Cloud Sync thing, I'm signing up to do this all over again.
John:
Maybe next time I will print out all the QR codes, but honestly, that makes that process even worse because now I have to take little screenshots and do printouts and make sure I write down what thing that belongs to.
John:
Actually, I didn't even do that because the QR codes usually embed that information.
John:
But anyway...
John:
Uh, tune in two years from now when I set up a next phone to hear me complain about this again.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
Uh, goodness.
Casey:
Uh, can you tell me about what's going on with reminders and your Mac?
John:
Yeah, this is some good news for me.
John:
Uh, I'm told by a reliable source that reminders will no longer wake my Mac up from sleep.
John:
In Mac OS.
John:
Hooray!
John:
Yep.
John:
I haven't experienced this for myself, but I am, again, told reliably that this was a bug that has been fixed.
John:
If you recall, my complaint was my computer would be dead asleep and then reminders would pop up a notification and it would wake my Mac up just so I could see the reminder on the screen.
John:
Even when I wasn't in the room with it, so on and so forth, and I do not want my big...
John:
hot, noisy, expensive 2019 Mac Pro to wake up just because a reminder came up.
John:
And I also didn't want to disable notifications for reminders on my Mac because when I'm on my Mac, I do want reminders notifications to pop up.
John:
I just don't want them to wake my Mac from sleep.
John:
And now reportedly they won't.
Casey:
Well, that's very exciting for you.
Casey:
I'm actually kind of excited that you can actually upgrade your OS in a timely fashion or at all.
John:
I mean, can and will are two different things.
John:
You know, let's take it easy here.
Casey:
Yeah, fair enough.
John:
Considering all of our audio software won't work on Big Sur on day one probably anyway.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, not that I'm grumbling about that at all.
Casey:
Anyway, moving on.
Casey:
Can you tell me about what's going on with Amazon and the name of their tube?
Casey:
Or I guess not the name of their tube, but their hail name.
John:
Yeah, this feedback is from David Kenny, who tells us that he is one of those families that has a child whose name sounds a little bit like Siri, and in fact is Siri.
John:
So we're talking about this with Alexa, where it's good that you can rename Alexa, Alexa's hail word to be like computer, Amazon, where I forget what the choices are.
John:
But you have some number of choices.
John:
we're saying wouldn't it be great if apple's dingus had different names that you could call it too just in case someone has a child named siri so david says my niece's name is sheersa which is pronounced which is spelled s-a-o-i-r-s-e a name that you would never know the pronunciation of except that it's also the name of a famous actress who's in a bunch of really good movies that you should definitely see um i enjoy her work uh
John:
Shearser Ronan is her name.
John:
Anyway, she goes by Siri for short.
John:
And he says, not infrequently in their house, my phone will give me confusing food recommendations when someone has yelled at my niece to come for dinner.
John:
Everyone who lives in that house has disabled Hay Dingus on all their devices just to avoid this problem.
John:
But if you enter this home, beware, because the name will be yelled into the air and your devices will activate.
John:
So there you go, Apple.
John:
Please save David Kinney's family.
John:
uh fair enough uh can you tell me john about your favorite lens on your camera it's not my favorite lens but i did beat marco's percentage we were uh you two were discussing how often you use the telephoto uh lens the third lens on your uh iphones and i thought i had used it a lot and i did the little search in apple photos this is on my iphone 10s i use the 2x camera almost exactly 25 of the time 25.01 of the time
Marco:
That's way higher.
Marco:
I was like 16 or something, right?
John:
Yep.
John:
I got to crop out that background.
John:
It's all about cropping out the background.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
And can iPhones do USB-C speeds or not?
Casey:
What's the story there?
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
I screwed this one up.
Marco:
I had mentioned in passing the other day when John was talking about how slow an iTunes slash Finder backup was of an iOS device.
Marco:
because you're using a USB-A to lightning cable.
Marco:
And I said, hey, you should have used USB-C to lightning cable because those have USB 3.0 transfer speeds.
Marco:
And it turns out this was correct for the two iPad Pros that actually had lightning and were iPad Pros, but not even all of them.
Marco:
I think the original 9.7, I think, was 2.0 still, but the 12.9 was 3.0, and then the 10.5 was also USB 3.0.
Marco:
And then they went to USB-C.
Marco:
And apparently iPhones have never had the extra data pins required to actually give USB 3 speeds over the lightning cable, even with USB-C cable.
Marco:
So it turns out that was not a thing.
Casey:
Whoopsies.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then we enter the ancient follow-up section, but stuff that's been pushed down in the document for sometimes months.
Casey:
We are happy to report two months late that Apple has decided to extend Apple TV Plus free year trials through February of this upcoming year.
Casey:
Ostensibly, this is because COVID delayed shooting second seasons of some of the early shows.
Casey:
I think I'd heard rumblings probably on Upgrade that For All Mankind was close to done, I think.
Casey:
And I think the morning show is starting up now, if I recall correctly.
Casey:
You should listen to Upgrade for that stuff.
Casey:
They cover it way better than we do.
Casey:
But anyways, they're going to extend the trial for those of us who bought phones or other devices late last year through February 2021, which is great.
John:
I got the extension, too.
John:
I was excited about that.
John:
I'm just saying for people, if you don't know this is happening, check in your devices.
John:
You might have a couple months free of Apple TV+.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And also, I know this is very old news.
Casey:
If you fly in the same circles as the three of us or pay attention to what we are saying and our friends are saying, but Ted Lasso, get on that.
Casey:
It's what you need right now.
Casey:
It's happy TV.
Casey:
It's good times.
Casey:
I don't care if you like sports or not, which I was listening to a certain top four episode earlier today because I'm a bit behind.
Casey:
But anyways, if you like sports or not, please, please, please give Ted Lasso a try.
Casey:
It's very good.
John:
Very wholesome.
John:
He skipped an item earlier.
Casey:
Did I?
Casey:
I'm sorry.
John:
Maybe I should number them.
Casey:
Oh, no, you're right.
Casey:
I did.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
You're absolutely right.
Casey:
Not that it really matters, but it's cool.
Casey:
John, tell me about your two long Apple Maps directions, please.
John:
This was many shows ago.
John:
As Casey said, this is an ancient fall.
John:
It's just bubbling up to the top now.
John:
Yeah.
John:
instead of driving directions, which would kind of explain the time difference, I suppose, although I'm kind of surprised that it thinks I could even walk it in an hour and 45 minutes.
John:
It's for the environment, John.
John:
Right.
John:
At the time, I didn't check to see whether it was giving me walking direction, but that is a plausible explanation to me.
John:
It doesn't make Apple Maps any better, considering Apple Maps should know that I drove there unless it thinks I can walk very fast.
John:
And it probably even did the you park your car in this location thing, but then it gives me walking directions back.
John:
Come on, Apple.
Casey:
So we have this next piece of follow-up from Zev Eisenberg.
Casey:
But to give you a hint as to how old it is, it was listed in our show notes as Zev Eisenboo because presumably this person had put in one of those god-awful Halloween themed... I'm following the instructions, which is you must use the Halloween name if people use it on Twitter.
John:
It's to shame slash honor them.
John:
If you use the Halloween name on Twitter and you give us feedback, your Halloween name will be in the show, Zev Eisenboo.
Casey:
So tell me what Zev Eisenboo had to say.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
It's like the same rule where if somebody has a typo, you have to read it as it was typed.
John:
This is about the Xcode zip files.
John:
XIP, not ZIP.
John:
We were talking about them and how they take a really long time to decompress.
John:
Actually, after that show, a bunch of people were like, oh, if you don't want to spend all that time, do it from the command line with this thing and it won't take so long because then it won't have to do all the signature verification crap.
John:
The command line way is not worth describing because, yeah, it skips the signature verification, but then it does it when you launch the app anyway.
John:
You cannot avoid the signature verification.
John:
It's going to happen.
John:
You can split up into two pieces.
John:
One, decompress.
John:
Two, verify when you launch or do them both at once.
John:
And that's what Zev was writing to say.
John:
He was saying that the zip file is Apple proprietary signed compressed file.
John:
I'm not sure if it's the same compression scheme as zip, but once it's unzipped, the app is also unquarantined, so you don't have to then have Gatekeeper look at it.
John:
So the quarantine attribute, it's also removed.
John:
You know when you download something from the internet and the first time you launch it, it's like, oh, this file was downloaded from the internet.
John:
Are you sure you want to launch it?
John:
uncompressing a zip file by double clicking it in the finder does the compression and the signature verification and once it does all that it also removes the quarantine attribute so it's good to launch after that and you can't avoid as far as i know either one of those steps unless you disable gatekeeper you can just choose whether you want them to all happen at once or split them up into two pieces and then john i presume would love to tell me about the xbox elite 2 controller speaking of cotton bureau isn't that what cotton bureau sent you for their ad spot a while back
John:
Yep, this was part of their sponsorship they gave us was Xbox Elite 2 controller to try out, and I reviewed it in an ad read slash product review in the tradition of our toaster stuff a while back.
John:
And I noted that some of my friends who had Xbox Elite controllers of various vintages had complained about reliability issues, which is kind of...
John:
depressing when you buy like a you know i forget it was 180 controller or something very expensive controller you wouldn't expect that one to have reliability concerns and i was speculating that maybe it's because it was such low volume that it doesn't get the same testing anyway microsoft has apparently addressed this and they've it's amazing it's like the same language here's here's the quote from their document we've received claims that a small percentage of our customers it's always a small percentage a small percentage of our customers are experiencing mechanical issues
John:
I mean, what percentage does it have to be for a small not to apply?
John:
Like, is 80% a sign?
John:
I don't know what the reliability are, but apparently this is a legally approved message for every reliability problem, including Apple's AirPod Pros, which also have a repair extension program now, in case you weren't aware.
John:
Small percentage of Apple's AirPod Pros.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Did I tell you that that actually happened to me?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
And it happened.
Marco:
I literally... So this is the thing.
Marco:
We never actually talked about it on the show, but there has been a widespread problem for AirPod Pros
John:
I think you mean a small percentage, Marco?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Where it seems like they develop like a rattle or like a static noise that often is correlated to motion or noise cancellation.
Marco:
Basically, it kind of sounds like something has come unglued inside and it rattles around, especially during bass frequencies or during movement.
Marco:
We've heard from so many people who have AirPod Pros who have not only gotten them replaced for this, but have gotten multiple replacements for
Marco:
because this seems to just kill them after some amount of time or some amount of usage and it's funny it's just like the butterfly keyboard responses like you get a replacement airpod pro but it seems like the replacements end up getting the same problem uh they so so what you're saying is this just actually came out that they just um launched a service program where they say that a small percentage well of course it is
Marco:
A small percentage of AirPod Pros have a potential issue if they're manufactured before October of 2020.
Marco:
And so there's a service program that if you're having this issue with one or both of your AirPod Pros, you can get them replaced for up to two years after purchase, which is nice because we're about to reach the one-year anniversary of their launch, if we haven't already.
Marco:
And so the first ones are going to be falling out of warranty soon otherwise.
Marco:
But it's good that they're basically giving a two-year extended warranty on any of them purchased through or until October of 2020, which was last week.
John:
So it makes it sound like they figured out the problem, though, because they're cutting it off as saying, okay, from this point on, we figured it out.
John:
And if you got one that was manufactured before this point, you get a two-year warranty.
John:
But after this point, you don't get a two-year warranty because presumably we figured out the problem and now we're gluing that thing in better or whatever the problem was.
John:
So...
John:
Unlike the butterfly keyboard, I have some confidence that they've actually figured this problem out.
Marco:
I hope so, but they also said the same thing about the butterfly keyboard.
Marco:
How many times did they, quote, improve that thing for service or reliability issues?
Marco:
I think only the very last generation one has seemingly not had massive major scale problems.
Marco:
This is one of those things where I'm pretty sure when Apple says a small percentage...
Marco:
Most of the time, when Apple says something, you can usually believe it.
Marco:
There might be some lawyering in some of the wording or some tricks with making things sound better than they are, but for the most part, you can usually believe it.
Marco:
When they say a small percentage of their hardware of a certain type has a flaw...
Marco:
That is usually BS.
Marco:
And I don't know if they intend it.
Marco:
Maybe they're like, well, you know, we only hear about this books percent through the service channel or anything.
Marco:
But like, usually that means all of them have this flaw.
Marco:
And, you know, maybe just maybe most people don't hit it.
Marco:
But like there are some kind of flaw that caused this and they just have this flaw with the way they made them.
John:
You've got to invoke Merlin's credo that if you don't use a product, it usually works pretty well.
John:
To give an example, my wife has AirPod Pros, and as soon as this repair program, I'm like, have you had this problem?
John:
Because what I wanted to say is you should really, really use your AirPod Pros more so that you can induce this problem so that we can get a free replacement within the two years.
John:
Because if you really lightly use them and the problem appears in year three because you barely use them, that's not great.
John:
So just use them now.
John:
So if you...
John:
Like Apple may be hearing from, you know, Apple says it as if a small percentage have the problem, but Apple hears about a small percentage.
John:
And again, what is small?
John:
Is small 1%, 5%, 10%, 20%, whatever.
John:
But how many people have AirPod Pros and just don't use them that much?
John:
And so this problem never occurs because maybe it only occurs after the first, you know, X hundred hours of use or something like that.
John:
Or maybe it only occurs if you have the gooby earwax instead of the dry earwax.
John:
That's the thing to look up.
John:
Wow.
John:
Anyway, who knows?
John:
This is quite a sidetrack on my Xbox Elite 2 story, which is, hey, guess what?
John:
If you have an Elite Series 2, your warranty has been extended.
John:
It's been extended from the terrible default warranty on this product.
John:
90 days.
John:
Come on, Microsoft.
John:
Is that even legal?
John:
$180 controller has a 90-day warranty?
John:
Come on.
John:
Anyway, it's been extended to one year.
John:
So that's not great, but it's better than nothing.
John:
So if you have an Xbox Elite Series 2 controller, use it a lot in the first year.
John:
So if it's going to break, you will break it, and then you'll get a fresh one.
Marco:
Oh, and one more thing on the AirPod Pro thing.
Marco:
So I actually, I had to send mine in.
Marco:
Coincidentally, I didn't know there was a service program coming.
Marco:
I literally sent my first one in for repair like two days before they announced the service program.
Marco:
Nice.
Marco:
It is a really kind of like...
Marco:
overwrought and adorable way when you have to send in or exchange or get a replacement AirPod, that it comes in the same size box as a replacement iPhone would.
Marco:
You open it up, and then there's a little inner box, and inside the inner box is a little tiny...
Marco:
cardboard flap that holds the single air pod like in this nice little presentation thing and there's a little card that comes with it that tell you unfold the card and it depicts for you how you're supposed to take out this air pod from its package and put your old air pod back into it and retape it and send it back it's like the most like cool apple thing it's just one of those things like you don't usually see unless you've done it yourself you don't usually see like apple service side of things
Marco:
And it's it's it's pretty fun, like because it is as Apple as you could possibly imagine, like super overdesigned, amazing packaging.
Marco:
It's a pretty fun thing to see.
Marco:
And the AirPod one is is truly something that's not at all surprising.
John:
I had to go look through, find a link for this earwax thing, and I found what I thought was a reasonable page.
John:
But then I was like, oh, no, I've given bad information because the top of the page is earwax type colon the myth.
John:
And then it describes what I just said about the sticky versus dry earwax.
John:
I'm like, is it a myth?
John:
Is this like a Snopes thing where it's like, here's the myth and then here's the reality?
John:
And so I scrolled down quickly to the conclusion.
John:
And the conclusion is...
John:
Unlike most of the human characters that are used to demonstrate simple genetics principles, wet versus dry earwax really is controlled by one gene with two alleles.
John:
Well, then why did you say it was a myth at the top of the document?
John:
Anyway, we'll put the link in the show notes if you want to learn about earwax.
John:
This is the only tech podcast that will give you earwax links.
John:
Just let it be known.
Casey:
I'm so, so excited.
Casey:
Did you guys get caught up?
Casey:
I'm going to regret this, but here we go.
Casey:
Did you get caught up in the ear candling thing that went around in like the early to middle aughts?
John:
What do you think?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I'm guessing.
John:
I'll give you one guess.
Yeah.
Casey:
Did you?
Marco:
and we sold those and this was like 1997 and they like we sold them in the store and they were just look like these giant cones and i i it took me a while of working there to even know what they were but eventually like i had i had to you know restock the shelf at some point and i had to put some up there i'm like oh my god like that's what this is it's it's a weird thing but anyway it's older than you think and you are correct that it does come from the like you know hippie uh region of things but sorry continue
Casey:
Yeah, so I don't, this was brought to me by my then girlfriend, and she wasn't particularly granola, so I don't know where she got this, although the area in which she grew up was super granola from what I gather.
Casey:
But anyway, this was a super, super hippie area of very rural Southwest Virginia, which seems like they would not meld, but sure enough.
Casey:
Anyways, the idea is you take this, I don't know, like six or eight inch thing that's like, it seems like it's almost like rolled up and dried up gauze from my recollection.
Casey:
I'm trying to remember something that happened 15 years ago.
Casey:
So, you know, my facts may be wrong here.
Casey:
But suffice to say, you stick this thing in your ear and light it like a candle.
Casey:
So you've got one inside your ear.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And the other end is literally on fire.
Casey:
And then if you're smart, you'll stick this quote-unquote candle, again, not like wax.
Casey:
It's more like paper, if you will.
Casey:
But anyways, you will stick this candle through a paper plastic plate or something to catch any of the flaming drippings, if you will, that are...
Casey:
that are coming off of this candle as it's burning down.
Casey:
And the theory is you burn it down, you know, as close as you can get to your ear before it starts to burn you.
Casey:
And then if you unroll what's left, you can look inside and see the little bits of earwax that have been sucked out by the candle burning.
Casey:
And I tried this at the time because I was...
Casey:
really dumb now i'm just only now i'm only a little dumb then i was really dumb anyways i tried it and i was like holy crap look at all the earwax that came out of here uh but as it turns out when i thought about this many years later and did like two seconds of research on it it turns out that yeah well that earwax is just the candle itself crumbling and and so oh i can't believe marco's just figuring this out it's like every kid magic trick but like you're right
John:
That came from your body, dude.
Casey:
Yep, yep, yep.
Casey:
Anyway, so we'll put a link in the show notes that shows.
Casey:
On Wikipedia, you can see not only the remnants, which is their first image, and then you can also see somebody doing the candling if you scroll a little more.
Casey:
My recollection, having not read this Wikipedia page in 15 years, is that it's complete and utter BS.
John:
Do not stick things into your orifices and set them on fire.
John:
This includes cigarettes.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, and also, medical note here, you're not supposed to actually remove your earwax.
Marco:
I don't know the details, but yeah, do some research if you care.
Marco:
But yeah, that's a thing.
Marco:
God, we're going nowhere good.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
That's awaytravel.com slash accidentaltech.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Away for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I know what's next in the show notes.
Casey:
Can we, I would like to pitch a quick rearrangement, which I know is going to drive John nuts.
Casey:
Can we just get the YouTube DL thing out of the way real quick?
Casey:
Cause I don't think it's going to take very long.
John:
You're so, you're so angry about your toy.
John:
You should be.
John:
Can you actually make it quick?
Casey:
I think I can.
Casey:
Cause I actually don't have that much to say about it.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Let's see.
Casey:
All right, so a week or two ago, I forget exactly when, YouTube DL was punted off of GitHub because of a DMCA request by the RIAA.
Casey:
So that was a whole bunch of stuff that may or may not have made sense to you.
Casey:
So let me back up a smidge.
Casey:
YouTube DL is a thing I've been espousing for years, and it's a command line tool
Casey:
that you can use to download videos off of YouTube.
Casey:
But it also does way more than that.
Casey:
Way, way, way more.
Casey:
And you can point YouTube DL at almost any URL, and you can get it to download...
Casey:
whatever video is being played at that URL.
Casey:
And this can be used for nefarious purposes.
Casey:
Like, you know, you could, I don't know, download a TV show or something like that if it's presented in such a way that YouTube DL can download it.
Casey:
But you can also use it for a ton of legitimate uses.
Casey:
And as an example, one of the things I'd heard, and I don't know if this is accurate or not, but
Casey:
I'd read that a lot of news organizations will use it to capture footage to then rebroadcast later, which presumably they get the rights for and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But it's easiest for them.
Casey:
They don't usually.
Casey:
Fair.
Casey:
It's easiest for them to just say, hey, we're going to download this ourselves.
Casey:
And that'll give you, you know, basically the source video.
Casey:
It's not like it's taking a screen capture or anything like that.
Casey:
It's actually going and getting the source, you know, MP4 or what have you.
Casey:
And it was punted from GitHub because of a DMCA, what is that, Digital Millennium Copyright Act?
Casey:
So that was an act that basically said that if you are a, please correct me, gentlemen, but if you're a copyright holder and you see your copyrighted material somewhere, you can tell the people hosting it to pull that off their servers.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Among other things.
John:
I mean, I think what you've given is like a functional definition, but my recollection of the actual law is that basically it's illegal to try to circumvent copy protection.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The thing you need to know is that it created a mechanism and a justification by which copyright holders could file claims against websites or web hosts or anybody involved in the web hosting chain called DMCA takedown notices that basically say like,
Marco:
I assert that I'm the holder of these copyrights, and this person at this URL is infringing upon my copyrights, and therefore you, the host, are required to take that down, or I can sue you.
Marco:
This takedown procedure is very problematic and very vulnerable to issues.
Marco:
That's a story for maybe another day, but it's a horrible system, but we haven't come up with anything better yet.
Marco:
But it's horrible.
Casey:
So, you know, GitHub decides to punt YouTube DL, and I didn't really dig that much into the why, but I think what had happened, and it really doesn't matter, but I think what had happened is somewhere in like a unit test or something like that, they had a link to a YouTube video that was like a music video or something like that.
Casey:
So the RIAA, which is the Recording Industry Artists of America.
Marco:
Association of America.
Marco:
The same people who sued for Napster and all the other things back in the day.
Casey:
So the RIAA said, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Casey:
We see this URL to something that one of our member companies has rights to.
Casey:
So this is BS.
Casey:
Take it down, man.
Casey:
And GitHub, because as much as I do love GitHub, it has a host of problems.
Casey:
And this is not even the biggest.
Casey:
GitHub, of course, doesn't really have a whole lot of choice.
Casey:
I don't think it doesn't matter, but immediately just said it.
Marco:
They don't.
Marco:
They have literally no choice.
Marco:
They have to take it down or they will get sued.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
This is one of the reasons why the DMCA is so...
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
you can you if you get if you get a claim and you don't think that claim is valid you generally still have to take the thing down while you argue it out if you are going to argue it out you have to take it down in the meantime and if you don't then they will go up the chain and they will go to your host or they will go to your domain registrar or like they'll just they'll keep going up the chain until someone takes it down and for enforce you because like
Marco:
The thing is, imagine, and obviously things are a little bit different for GitHub, which is known by Microsoft.
Marco:
This is the big company here.
Marco:
But if I get a claim, if something is on overcast.fm slash something, and somebody has a problem with it, if I'm lucky, they'll first send the claim to me.
Marco:
And I'll be able to either comply and take it down, or I might argue with them, hey, no, this is legit.
Marco:
But then if they don't get the answer they want, they'll go to Linode, my host.
Marco:
and if they don't get the answer they want from and lenoble come to me and basically be like look we don't want to deal with this you deal with this and let us know when it's dealt with everyone up the chain will do that same thing they'll go to the domain registrar they'll go to isps like they'll go to anybody who's involved in the transmission of that content to the world until it's taken down basically at no point do you have an opportunity to say like in any way that really matters uh this is fair use
Marco:
Or this is not actually a valid claim.
Marco:
Or I don't even know if you have the right to make this claim.
Marco:
At no point does any argument have any room to be heard or any time to be considered.
Marco:
There is no arbiter of any of this.
Marco:
It is just like you file a DMCA claim against a thing and it will be gone from the internet within days.
Marco:
The worst that can happen is if you are filing that fraudulently,
Marco:
And if you put in your actual content information, somebody could theoretically sue you for making a false claim.
Marco:
But in practice, like so much about copyright disputes on the internet, if any claim is made,
Marco:
It's going to be taken down.
Marco:
It's gone.
Marco:
It's not going to go to a court.
Marco:
It's not going to go to a judge while it gets hashed out.
Marco:
It's going to hit somebody, either an ISP or a host or something, who is like, I don't want the liability of dealing with this if you're wrong, so just take it down.
Marco:
So it's forced to be taken down.
Marco:
So anyway, things do work differently when you're somebody the size of GitHub slash Microsoft.
Marco:
Like obviously, you know, things are a little bit more complicated.
Marco:
But if somebody as big as the RAA sends in a DMCA claim, which is implicitly a legal threat, and the RAA is pretty litigious, that's basically its entire role in the world.
Marco:
So like when you get that letter,
Marco:
No one's going to argue.
Marco:
No one's going to give anyone a time to be like, hey, do you think this is fair use?
Marco:
Explain to us why and we'll consider your claim.
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
It's gone.
Marco:
No matter what it is, it's gone.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So GitHub takes down not only the official YouTube DL repository, meaning it takes down all the source code for YouTube DL, but apparently the RIAA just conveniently decided to look at a whole bunch of forks.
Casey:
A fork in this context, if you're not familiar, means basically a copy of the source code.
Casey:
And so YouTube took down a whole bunch of forks.
Casey:
Floaty Potatoes in the chat, which is a great username, by the way, pointed out, we'll put in the show notes, that apparently GitHub is threatening to ban anyone who re-hosts the source for YouTube DL on GitHub, which I had not seen until it was mentioned in the chat room.
Casey:
So basically, the source disappeared from GitHub.
Casey:
Now, the good news is that source still exists on thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of computers all over the internet and all over the world.
Casey:
Uh, as last I'd looked about a week ago, the website was back up, although it was at a different URL downloads are still up.
Casey:
Um, but the source I'd, I'd heard something about it having been moved to like Bitbucket or some other, you know, GitHub equivalent.
Casey:
I forget exactly where it was.
Casey:
But one way or another, it is still apparently a thing.
Casey:
There was a release just a couple days ago.
Casey:
But it just really bums me out that this tool, which certainly can be used for nefarious purposes.
Casey:
I'm not arguing that it can be used for nefarious purposes.
Casey:
But it also can very well be used for honest and good purposes.
Casey:
And I use this thing constantly.
Casey:
And it's just really sad to me that it's been taken down forever.
Casey:
by a bunch of people who seem to be acting like jerks.
Casey:
And it's funny because just today I was listening to the, I think it's today's episode of 99PI about GeoCities.
Casey:
And one of the things that they talked about briefly was archiving all of GeoCities prior to it being shut down by Yahoo!,
Casey:
And YouTube DL is like a great tool for doing exactly that.
Casey:
You know, I've talked, I don't know if I've talked about that in this show, but I think I've talked on analog about how, um, when the God awful things happened in Charlottesville, um, shortly after Trump got elected, arguably because of Trump, uh, if you, like a few weeks later, uh, Dave Matthews had organized this like six or seven hour, like free concert as a way to like raise money and just do a nice thing for Charlottesville.
Casey:
Cause Dave Matthews was originally from there.
Casey:
and it was broadcast live, and I recorded it using YouTube DL.
Casey:
I didn't have to pay to get access to it, but I recorded it.
Casey:
And that six and a half hours, whatever it is, A, to the best of my knowledge, exists on no other computer on the internet.
Casey:
Now, that may not be true, but to the best of my knowledge, it doesn't exist anywhere else.
Casey:
And B, it's a phenomenal freaking concert.
Casey:
And it's like, it would be a real shame if a tool like YouTube DL didn't exist anymore because it would make it either...
Casey:
impossible or intolerably inconvenient for me to be able to do that sort of thing.
Casey:
And this isn't just about me.
Casey:
It's about thousands and hundreds of thousands maybe of people who use this tool for doing legitimately useful and good things.
Casey:
And so I don't really have that much to say about it other than that I'm super bummed that it got taken down off GitHub.
Casey:
And I hope that this doesn't last forever.
Casey:
I hope that they find a new home for it or resolve whatever the issue is with the RAAA so it can be put back on GitHub.
Casey:
Just because a tool can be used for bad doesn't necessarily mean that the tool itself is bad.
Casey:
No, just don't ask me about guns.
Casey:
Anyway, that's my thoughts about that.
Marco:
I have so much I could say about this.
Marco:
I love that you told John that we'd be doing this quickly because that's not going to happen.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
There's so many angles that we can take with this.
Marco:
I'm not surprised this happened.
Marco:
And I don't think it was an unjust thing.
Marco:
I use YouTube DL all the time for many of the reasons you just said.
Marco:
It's totally an incredibly useful tool.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
It's one of those tools that...
Marco:
almost every nerd should have and know about and and you know they aren't the only ones who who provide this kind of thing like if you it turns out wanting to download videos off of youtube is a very common request and so there's all sorts of like websites and tools and and apps and stuff that will like generate a download url for you or will download the file for you if you like paste in a youtube url or browser extensions it'll do it like
Marco:
Because ultimately, your browser has to download the video to play it.
Marco:
So it's not that hard to make apps or things to extract these video files for standalone downloads.
Marco:
And all YouTube DL is is an engine that...
Marco:
As Casey mentioned, it's an engine with rules that will be able to extract videos out of webpages and download them in various formats and then merge them into different ways and combine the best audio codec with the best video codec or things like that.
Marco:
It is a tool that has lots of legitimate uses.
Marco:
It is also a tool that is primarily used, I think, for personal fair use uses.
Casey:
Yeah, well put.
Marco:
Copyright law is pretty poorly understood by most people who comment on the internet.
Marco:
But generally speaking – and fair use is not well codified.
Marco:
It's more of a set of precedents and kind of vague guidelines that are open to lots of interpretation.
Marco:
But generally it is considered fair use to make a copy of something that is copyrighted by somebody else for yourself.
Marco:
If you had it in some way and you are saving it for yourself, generally that is considered fair use.
Marco:
There's lots of exceptions to this, but that's been a reasonably established principle.
Marco:
Things like taping a video off of TV.
John:
This is where I come in with my old man story.
Marco:
Yeah, because there was a court case.
Marco:
It was a big deal.
John:
So this is from my childhood, something I remember about this exact situation.
John:
This is YouTube DL for the old, right?
John:
It's a combination of what you both just said.
John:
Casey, it was a live concert that you wanted to take in what we call in the old days time shift, which is you wanted to save that thing for later.
John:
Marco, thank fair use having a personal copy for yourself.
John:
Here is Jack Valenti talking to the House of Representatives in 1982.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I quote, I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman at home.
John:
He says in typical 80s sexist analogy ways.
John:
That the VCR was like the Boston Strangler.
John:
Jack Valenti was representing the MPAA, which is the movie version of the RAA, right?
John:
We can't let people at home have a device that allows them to make a local copy of things that are broadcast on television.
John:
It will destroy the movie industry.
John:
People being able to rent movies and watch them in their house.
John:
Movies will be dead.
John:
And as we know, after the 1980s, we never had movies again.
John:
And the movie industry never made any more money.
John:
Yep, that's right.
John:
YouTube DL is 100% a VCR for the internet.
John:
And it's so dumb that we have to fight these same things over again just because computers are involved now.
John:
yeah well and and the dmca makes this more complicated um because the dmca made it illegal to circumvent uh encryption schemes or copyright protection schemes and or anything that stops you from getting it which as marco pointed out you have to have the video already like this is the whole uh the thing i talked about on the show ages ago where i forget it maybe it was lessig or whatever it's talking about uh
John:
DRM in general is like going through the whole public key encryption thing with Alice and Bob, you know, and there's someone in the middle trying to eavesdrop and how they use encryption to stop that from happening.
John:
And you go through the whole big thing so people understand what public key encryption is at a basic level.
John:
And then you say, the problem is what we're actually trying to do is stop Bob from getting it.
John:
And you're like, but wait, I'm giving it to Bob.
John:
Like the whole point is Bob has to get it.
John:
Alice and Bob are using encryption to exchange information.
John:
The video was coming to me so I can see it with my eyeballs and hear it with my ears.
John:
But you want to stop me from having the video?
John:
You just sent me the video.
John:
You can't stop me from having the video if you just sent me the video.
John:
Because if you stop me from having the video, I can never see it.
John:
It's like, well, we want you to see it.
John:
but you can't actually have it like don't take it after we give it to you that's what youtube dl is doing okay because youtube dl cannot give you video as far as i know i don't know if there's any nefarious things but i'm pretty sure youtube dl cannot give you video that you can't already see right so like if it was if there was some password protected site that you can't get into no you can't point youtube dl at it and it will crack the password for you and get the video it only records again as far as i know video that you can already see it's just time shifting it's just the vcr
Marco:
Literally, all it is doing is it's an engine that has a bunch of, like, built-in heuristics and rules.
Marco:
Like, all right, well, if you're looking at a page on this domain name, extract this element, follow this script, and take this URL that's in this element.
Marco:
Like, it's that kind of thing.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So, yeah, obviously, in 1982, the DMCA didn't exist.
John:
Once computers came, our lawmakers...
John:
had even less of a grasp on them and the lobbying groups were even more powerful and they managed to get this terrible law passed because otherwise computers would be the boston strangler for insert whatever industry you know like it was this exact same argument like you can't let people be copying stuff willy-nilly napster will destroy the music industry yada yada yada and you know so now we have things like streaming which definitely didn't destroy the music industry and are totally illegal
John:
Anyway, this law is dumb, and this YouTube BL takedown is dumb, and YouTube BL is the VCR for the computer age, and the VCR should not be illegal, and neither should YouTube BL.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And that being said, it would be better for them if they renamed their project and made it, like, although it is kind of funny, like, YouTube wasn't the one filing this claim.
Marco:
Right, right.
John:
They'll just call it YouTube VCR.
John:
It'll be fine.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
If anything, they have a trademark claim.
Marco:
But anyway, YouTube doesn't seem to have much of a problem with this.
Marco:
I think because they probably know it would be a losing battle to try to fight these tools.
John:
And YouTube has a local download option on iOS.
Marco:
Yes, but it's only premium accounts and it's protected.
Marco:
Anyway, it's a whole thing.
Marco:
But there are lots of...
Marco:
tools that are used mostly for piracy that have legitimate uses and if you want them to survive out there in the world you have to not play up the piracy angle too much in your names or your marketing material you know people will figure it out like everyone's going to know like if they rename it to some generic name media dl who knows who cares rename it to something that isn't youtube dl and
Marco:
and remove any really incriminating comments or test cases from the source code, and you can put it back up somewhere, and it would be okay, I think.
John:
I was surprised to learn that the complaint was that it had a link to a video, because I just assumed that what had happened was it was like, I don't know, there's lots of examples, but like...
John:
So the DMCA is written so broadly that if you do literally anything to discourage people from, like, getting your content after you gave it to them, essentially, like, if you put, like, a piece of string on the door and tie a little knot in it, it said, now, if you cut that string with a scissor, DMCA takedown, because that was there to prevent you from going through the door that you just went through, but you cut it with scissors, so you can't do that, right?
John:
So DVD encryption, the CSS encryption on DVDs, right?
Marco:
Yeah, DCSS, oh.
John:
Right.
John:
DCSS, cracking that would fit in a couple lines of Perl code that would fit on a T-shirt, making that T-shirt essentially illegal because it's now allowing people to circumvent.
John:
Well, I don't know if the T-shirt was legal.
John:
That was the joke.
John:
Anyway, the whole point is, but it's so easy to break.
John:
Like, it's so, you know, your encryption is so bad.
John:
And me cracking it is just so I can make my own fair use personal backup copy of this DVD that I bought, yada, yada, yada.
John:
And it's like, I don't care.
John:
The law says if you do anything to circumvent something that's stopping you from getting the thing that we gave you already, DMCA.
John:
Doesn't say, you know, I think there is an exception there for like, well...
John:
I think there is some exception for, you know, I don't know if it's personal use or fair use or whatever, but it's, it's always been interpreted so broadly and no one can afford to fight with these legal battles anyway, that as Marco was saying, it's like, well, even if you're right, do you really want to spend time fighting this giant corporation going through the courts and all this other crap?
John:
And most people in the end don't.
John:
A couple of people tried in the beginning and it was, you know, anyway.
John:
Um,
John:
I thought the YouTube DL must have had somewhere in it, one of its sources, the equivalent of DCSS, which is like some trivial code to break something that's been broken for years and years that everybody knows is not really stopping anybody.
John:
It's like that piece of string on the door that's like, well, you just get a scissor and you cut it and then you can get the thing.
John:
But if there really is no code like that anywhere in YouTube DL, that makes it even worse.
John:
Because I think things that, like, let you decrypt DVDs, ooh, are, you know, should be legal, even though the DMCA says that they're not.
John:
But if this thing doesn't have any of that and it's just simply, hey...
John:
don't figure out which element of the, of an HTML page to extract the URL from, or don't watch network traffic to figure out what URL to that's, that's even worse.
John:
And I think the, the interpretation would be like, well, you know, all those like redirects and the webpage and all that, those mechanisms are there to stop you from downloading it.
John:
It's like, well, are they really, or is that just the way a web app works?
John:
It's like, well, it's, it's to stop you from having it after we gave it to you.
John:
Just, we say it is, so you can't have it.
John:
DMCA takedown.
John:
Super dumb.
Marco:
The smart way to do this kind of thing is to have tools that are more discreetly named, to not put anything too incriminating in your source code about, you know, specific cases like, oh, this is made to rip off this one version of this YouTube video that has a password on it.
Marco:
Maybe not accommodating those cases.
Marco:
And to accept the fact that when you're in the piracy tool business, and again, I know I've said already there's lots of legitimate use cases for most of these tools, including YouTube DL, and I use it all the time.
Marco:
Uh, but when you're in that business, you have to be pretty careful.
Marco:
It's a lot like if you were doing, if you were in some kind of like illicit business in real life, if you're like, you know, selling drugs, I would imagine, or, you know, God knows, you know, selling bootleg VHS tapes on the corner, who knows?
Marco:
Uh, but like, if you're doing something that's like in a gray area of the law, you kind of have to be on the run all the time.
Marco:
It kind of surprises me.
Marco:
how long YouTube DL was able to get away with what it does right there in public on a large, big company-owned site.
Marco:
You have to either be really careful to always appear 100% legitimate if you're going to do this kind of thing, or you have to be prepared to be on the move and just be prepared for a game of whack-a-mole with whoever your stuff is dealing from.
John:
I should just look this up, but isn't there like a security researcher exception to DMCA as well?
John:
Some crap like that.
Marco:
It's such a sloppy law.
Marco:
Like it's very, it's weirdly broad and.
John:
They just claim to be security researchers.
John:
Here's a tool for security researchers.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Like every definition in the DMCA is extremely vague.
Marco:
So it's very hard to like.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
So the practical definition is even if you're 100 percent right, if you have to prove that in a court of law, it takes a lot of money and time that most people don't have or want to deal with, especially when the on the other side is, you know, industry group or whatever with essentially comparatively infinite money and time.
John:
Everything's stacked against you.
Casey:
Yeah, so looking at the Wikipedia page for YouTube DL,
Casey:
the door.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Thereby preventing or inhibiting, excuse me, the downloading, copying, or distribution of the video files.
Casey:
Now, that's funny because I don't know how YouTube DL works when we looked into it, but my very limited understanding was the way it works is it basically, as you guys described, downloads, you know, whatever web page.
Casey:
And oftentimes when it comes to YouTube, you'll see it say like it's grabbing the JavaScript from YouTube to presumably execute to do whatever it needs to do to get the actual video file URL.
Casey:
So,
Casey:
So I think you're right, John.
Casey:
It is the string on the door thing.
Casey:
But I don't know, man.
Casey:
It just seems it seems really, really thin to me, which, of course, doesn't matter because of all the reasons Marco described.
Casey:
But it just seems like a really thin claim to me.
John:
That's how the web works.
John:
They send you the code and then your browser runs it.
John:
So it's like they send you the JavaScript.
John:
It comes to your browser.
John:
It is received by your computer.
John:
Your computer executes it.
John:
And then, you know, it's again, they can't.
John:
How can they stop you from having the video they're giving you?
John:
They have to give you the video.
John:
You can't see it and hear it.
John:
But that's it.
John:
You can just see it and hear it in the context that we let you.
John:
Which was exactly the same way with broadcast television until the advent of the VCR, which, as we know, ended television.
Casey:
Well, that took longer than I expected.
Casey:
I'm sorry, but...
Casey:
It bums me out that this happened, but I'm not too worried about it in the grand scheme of things because this code is everywhere.
Casey:
It may not be as easy for me to find either the code or an executable, but I'm pretty confident that I will still, probably forevermore, be able to find this code and or executable because there's so many people that use it for so many varying and different reasons.
Casey:
It's a bummer, but I don't view this as the end of YouTube DL.
Casey:
And honestly, at least for now, until YouTube changes the way their site works or whatever the case may be, it still works.
Casey:
Even the one or two month old version still works for almost everything.
Casey:
So I'm not too worried about it right now.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it does bum me out that this is a thing.
Marco:
Yeah, well, I mean, it even still works to the point where, like, the other day, like, it has a little way to update its definitions, you know, YouTube DL dash capital U as the command line argument.
Marco:
And you occasionally have to do that if, like, if you haven't updated it in a while, and you go to download something, and it's like, oh, sorry, we can't parse this page, try running this update thing.
Marco:
That still works.
Marco:
Like, wherever it's pointing to in the version of the binary I have, that server is still up.
Marco:
And so I was able to even update the definitions.
Marco:
Like, I think it was yesterday or the day before.
Marco:
It was sometime in the last few days, very recent, when I did this and it worked just fine.
Marco:
So, you know, I think it'll be fine.
Marco:
It just probably won't be on GitHub or any, you know, major big name, you know, source repository site.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The good thing is that GitHub is not the world.
Marco:
This is yet another benefit.
Marco:
This is one of the things I was thinking of earlier when I said we could take this in a lot of different directions.
Marco:
Sorry, Sean.
Marco:
This is one of the things where the more diversity we have in the infrastructure of the web and the companies that you can use in certain ways, how many companies are there to upload type of content X, Y, or Z, the more diversity we have, the better.
Marco:
If the prohibited content in question was, say, a video and YouTube prohibited you from uploading that video to YouTube, that's a pretty big hit if you need that video to be seen by a lot of people.
Marco:
If you need a popular video to be seen that can't be on YouTube, unless it has naked people in it, it's not going to get a lot of views.
Marco:
We're lucky that source code is pretty easy to host.
Marco:
Git itself can be hosted anywhere you want.
Marco:
It takes some work to set up, and GitHub offers niceties like the pull request system that are prohibitive probably to set up on your own.
Marco:
But source code existed before GitHub.
Marco:
Collaborative editing of source repositories and change requests and branch editing, this all existed before GitHub.
Marco:
Even today, there are other places that you can do it.
Marco:
Granted, not a lot of them, but there are other places you can do it.
Marco:
And you can still set up your own server to do it.
Marco:
And that is possible only because the world of hosting code somewhere for collaboration is not super locked down.
Marco:
GitHub is big, and for the social aspect of the collaboration and stuff like the pull request system, it is a pretty big hit to lose GitHub for that.
Marco:
But we are lucky that in this instance, you know, the open web is still able to host this stuff and is still able to serve this role for this so that there is no one place you can go to block something from existing on the open web.
Marco:
And so, you know, good for diversity here.
Marco:
And this is yet another reason why we should defend this kind of diversity whenever it is threatened.
Marco:
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Casey:
I think that's basically all we have to talk about today, right?
Casey:
So, ask ATP.
Casey:
None of you are going to jump on me about this.
Casey:
Not a one.
Marco:
Oh, are we supposed to talk about the Apple event coming up?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh.
Casey:
There's going to be Macs, and they'll be fast.
Casey:
I mean, I'm supposing that that's basically the story.
Casey:
I don't mean to sound negative or anything.
Casey:
It's just, I don't know.
Casey:
I just...
Casey:
I'm not sure what's going to happen, but I'm sure there's going to be some new Macs.
Casey:
I bet they're going to look pretty similar to the Macs we got today.
Casey:
And I bet they're going to be really fast.
Casey:
So John, I presume you as the resident old man of the three of us have plenty of thoughts and opinions.
Casey:
So please take it away.
John:
Why aren't you excited about this Casey?
John:
I'm excited.
John:
I mean, I'm excited.
John:
It's not about Mac pros.
John:
This is, this is the, this is the event.
John:
I mean, Apple's been having an event a month for the past couple of months, right?
John:
I can't wait to see what the December event is going to be.
John:
Haha.
John:
Um,
John:
Oh, uh, our max, uh, we've been talking about them for a long time.
John:
It's the, it's my most anticipated Apple hardware product of the year.
John:
It's coming last.
John:
Uh, and I'm super excited.
John:
Yeah, you're right.
John:
They're probably going to just be, you know, laptops.
John:
Like, so the rumor is it's going to be a 13 inch.
John:
Well, this is from Bloomberg.
John:
They say, they say a 13 inch and 16 inch MacBook Pro and a 13 inch MacBook Air.
John:
That seems like a lot, but sure.
John:
Why not?
John:
Um, though all those machines are plausible machines.
John:
They're all going to go arm eventually.
John:
Um,
John:
Obviously, I want an ARM laptop so I can buy one and stop being nagged by my family about getting an extra computer.
John:
Well, at this point, my daughter has really gotten addicted to the 5K iMac, so I'm not sure I'll be able to kick her out of this room, but I think it will.
John:
But anyway, I'm excited about ARM Macs.
John:
I'm excited about these Macs.
John:
I'm much more excited about these than I was for the phone, certainly than for the HomePod Mini or anything like that.
John:
So, yeah, this is what I've been looking forward to.
John:
This is going to be my reward slash dessert after the stress bath that this week has been so far.
Yeah.
John:
Next week, the invitation has an Apple logo with six colors shining from behind it.
John:
It says one more thing, which is, you know, like a joke on the fact that they've already had two more two events.
John:
And oh, by the way, there's one more event in 2020.
John:
And I'm glad there is because this is what I've been waiting for, you know, for a long time now.
John:
The other thing related to this, I think it's in the same Bloomberg story.
John:
This is not about the Apple event next week, but just, hey, let's just throw in all the things that we think we know.
John:
It's a quote from the article.
John:
Apple engineers are currently developing a new Mac Pro that looks like the current design at about half the size.
John:
And they have one of these nonsense lines.
John:
It's unclear if the Mac will replace the current Mac Pro or if it's an additional model, right?
John:
Covering your butt.
John:
Yeah, it's like, well, it could be this or it could be... Yeah, you're right.
John:
You've outlined the possibilities.
John:
Good job.
John:
A smaller Mac Pro that looks like the current design,
John:
than presumably an ARM one.
John:
We've been talking about, you know, what it's going to take to replace the Mac Pro with an ARM computer in relation to like GPUs and slots and all this other stuff.
John:
And can they or will they make an ARM computer that uses a discrete GPU?
John:
Can you replace the Mac Pro if you don't do that?
John:
Because how big of a GPU can you shove on a system on a chip?
John:
We talked about the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X that have a system on a chip with the CPU and the GPU all jammed into one and how powerful they can be.
John:
The short answer is that don't worry about the 16-inch MacBook Pro with a quote-unquote integrated GPU.
John:
If that sounds crappy to you, do not worry.
John:
It is technically possible to fit a fairly amazing GPU on an ARM system on a chip using Apple's tech stack now.
John:
Will they put an amazing one in there or just put a so-so one?
John:
We'll see.
John:
We have to see what they release.
John:
But I'm saying there's no technical barrier in a 16-inch power envelope and form factor to having a really good GPU on the system on a chip that rivals or exceeds any discrete GPU that Apple has used in its laptops, right?
John:
So don't worry about that.
John:
But when it comes to the Mac Pro, oh, well, you know, I can have, you know, these giant, extremely hot, you know, 400 watt GPUs inside there.
John:
You're not going to put that on a system on a chip.
John:
So this has to support discrete GPUs.
John:
And if it does, what?
John:
brands will they be and will it have slots and yada yada yada and now his rumors of a smaller one i think the bloomberg story spun this into okay well then maybe it's like a mac pro but a mac pro that has an integrated gpu because it's so much smaller and it's like what the hell it's not a mac pro if it doesn't have any slots because the whole point of the mac pro is to be a computer with slots you know and it's just like a really big mac mini at that point which fine if you want to make a really big mac mini cool people would like that computer but
John:
Anyway, this is a very confused rumor.
John:
The only reason I include it here is because there was this tweet that I saw from Hishnash.
John:
I can't tell if that's a nickname.
John:
Or maybe it's a scary Halloween name.
John:
Apparently, there are already ARM64 Afterburner PCIe card drivers in the betas.
John:
And the driver kit APIs make it clear that there will be ARM max with PCIe slots.
John:
So...
John:
If you're wondering, will any ARM Macs ever have slots, it seems like, based on drivers that are in beta versions of the OS, that that will be the case.
John:
Now, it doesn't mean, like, just because you see PCIe drivers, I think a lot of things in the current Macs are actually on PCIe buses, but maybe they aren't slots.
John:
But the fact that there are drivers for Afterburner, ARM64 drivers for Afterburner, and Afterburner is that card that you can stick in the Mac Pro that does this FPGA card that does all that 8K video stream decoding, whatever, makes it seem like some point, a year or two from now, there will be a computer with an ARM processor that's a Mac that has PCI slots, one of which at least takes the Afterburner card, right?
John:
So...
John:
I'm not holding my breath for an ARM-based Mac Pro this year, or not even next year, but the year after that, it would be cool to see them.
John:
And in the meantime, if Apple wants to release a little miniature computer with a bunch of holes in the front for a huge price that has maybe one or two slots, that'd be cool too, an integrated GPU.
John:
I don't know quite what that machine would be, but I'm intrigued by the half-size Mac Pro rumor.
Marco:
If you look at the Mac Pro and you look at how the space in the case is used, if you are going to still have a computer that supports large PCI slots, which is what you need for big GPUs and stuff, if you still want to support those and you want to have maybe support for more than one large PCI GPU, which seems to be one of the biggest reasons the Mac Pro exists,
Marco:
But if that's still a requirement, I don't see how you make it half the size.
Marco:
Because, again, if you look at how the space is used, most of the space in there is to accommodate large PCI cards.
Marco:
The only way they can make it meaningfully smaller is either to stop accommodating those, which I don't see them doing.
Marco:
They were pretty clear...
Marco:
When they made the new Mac Pro, they were very clear in both public statements they gave and in statements they made to various press and in little mumblings from the people who were in the demo room and everything.
Marco:
They were very clear that they really are in this, and they're in this for the expandability, the modularity, and they love...
Marco:
supporting multiple GPUs and all these PCI cards and stuff.
Marco:
They learned.
Marco:
They learned from the trash can Mac Pro that people didn't want something super integrated and small for that product.
Marco:
They want something big and expandable that can take a bunch of cards.
Marco:
And Thunderbolt wasn't going to save them.
Marco:
They learned that too.
Marco:
They learned, okay, you know what cards it is.
Marco:
That's what pros actually need and use in this market.
Marco:
So that's what we'll give them.
Marco:
So I can't see them abandoning that.
Marco:
Even though I also...
Marco:
have a hard time understanding like how will the arm cpus work with third-party gpus because i don't i don't know enough about the like hardware engineering behind that and like i assume they figured it out but but like you know that's certainly a big question mark and it would not surprise me if none of the laptops have non-apple gpus in them
John:
Yeah, there's no reason.
John:
Like I said, if you're just looking to match or exceed the discrete GPU power of Apple's current laptop line, there's no reason you need discrete, right?
John:
So unless they really want to, you know, go big and have some fancy new AMD GPU that's so much more powerful than what they could fit in the system on a chip.
John:
But honestly, I don't see that because in a laptop form factor, you have your power envelope.
John:
And if you have to spend it somewhere, right, and you have some sort of minimum CPU that you have to include just for it to be considered a good laptop, right, you get more bang for your buck by putting the rest of your power spend on that GPU inside the system on a chip.
John:
As soon as you put it in a discrete package somewhere else on the board, that's more power that you're bleeding on the interconnects and everything, right?
John:
So why would they ever go discrete?
Marco:
And do we know, I mean, I assume, are the ARM Macs all going to have unified memory?
Marco:
Oh, interesting.
John:
I mean, that's what we've been talking about, like, you know, what does that mean in this context?
John:
We were talking about it in terms of, like, the discrete GPU, right?
John:
Because, yeah, no, all the ARM Macs will have, quote-unquote, unified memory, which means there's not a separate bank of RAM.
John:
only used by the gpu right that that all it'll be it'll be like it is on the phones and the ipads where it's just one big pool of ram some of it's used for video crap some of it's used for just regular programs and stuff but it's not like when you get a video a gaming video card and on the card itself is
John:
gddr 6 ram with some huge bandwidth directly connected to the gpu and that's what the gpu uses but then because that introduces a problem of okay well how the hell does anything get in the quote-unquote video ram well has to be sent there from elsewhere so it probably read from disk or something into regular ram and sent over the pci bus or you've done some dma thing where it travels over some bus and gets into the card then the card uses it but oh actually you need some more textures now so you have these textures and replace those old textures and there's a lot of traffic back and forth in the
John:
One of the advantages of unified memory architecture is you don't have to bring the textures from storage into one place and then send it to another place to be used.
John:
It's just like you just put it into memory and then it's available to both the CPU and the GPU.
John:
So if they both need to reference it, you don't need to have two copies, right?
John:
And there's a bunch of memory syncing parameters and crap like that.
John:
But in general, there are some speed advantages to having unified.
John:
The advantage to having discrete is you can make a RAM that is tailor-made to the use case of a video card, which means lots of, you know, high bandwidth.
John:
You know what you're going to be reading.
John:
You're reading, like, textures and geometry data and crap like that, right?
John:
You know what purpose the RAM is going to be used for.
John:
So you can make RAM that has higher bandwidth or, you know,
John:
a lower latency because it's closer to the gpu and stuff like that right so there are trade-offs there but i don't think that's a technical barrier and for laptops i would put money on the fact that they're going to be essentially like big ipads where it's the same architecture but more
Marco:
Yeah, and I'm pretty confident.
Marco:
I think we all are 100% confident Apple's probably going to kick butt in the CPU performance department.
Marco:
They'll be very competitive.
Marco:
They have CPU performance pretty well covered, I bet.
Marco:
GPU performance is a question mark, I think, for a lot of it, especially at the high end.
Marco:
We know Apple can make great GPUs for iPad-class devices, because they have been.
Marco:
So we know that we're pretty well covered for...
Marco:
the laptop category that used to use integrated graphics.
Marco:
That would be the 13-inch category, also even the cheap iMacs that use integrated graphics, the Mac Mini.
Marco:
We know things that used only integrated graphics before, Apple will be able to cover that need pretty well, we think, with their GPUs.
Marco:
We don't know if they could make GPUs that are competitive with that high-end yet.
Marco:
I was initially guessing that...
Marco:
the GPU development might actually slow down the high-end product release cycle in the ARM transition such that I was expecting the first few ARM Macs to only be the ones that have had an integrated GPU so far.
Marco:
So to only be the 12-slash-13-inch size category there in the laptops, plus the cheap iMac and the Mac Mini.
Marco:
That's what I was guessing.
Marco:
If they are actually, if this report is correct, which, I mean, it's Bloomberg.
Marco:
This is a big if, let's be honest.
Marco:
But if this report is correct and a 16-inch MacBook Pro is going to be included in the first batch, that's a significant move because that product does use high-end GPUs.
Marco:
So if they can actually be competitive already with high-end GPUs with their own design and not use discrete in that product, that's going to be significantly notable beyond all the other stuff that's going to be notable about this.
Marco:
So I'm very curious to see that because I hate the discrete GPUs in the big laptops.
Marco:
They are hot.
Marco:
They are buggy.
Marco:
They burn up the battery like crazy.
Marco:
And the whole system is buggy with switching between GPUs.
Marco:
It's a big pile of hacks.
Marco:
And if we can get away from needing that, that'll be much better.
Marco:
So I'm very interested to see that product.
Marco:
And then I'm also interested with this report here.
Marco:
It doesn't mention the 12-inch coming back.
Marco:
And that surprises me as well.
Marco:
Again, I would have and previously did guess...
Marco:
that the 12-inch would return as one of the first ARM Macs that would launch with... I never thought it would be the only one, but I predicted that would probably return because I think they're going to want to show off...
Marco:
how awesome it is they're saving all this power and yet have this great performance and i think they're going to want some kind of like statement mac that they couldn't make before but maybe that isn't ready yet well maybe the 13 inch macbook air will be fanless uh maybe i mean that yeah that actually you know from a practical point of view
Marco:
that's probably what they should do because that's such a popular computer already.
Marco:
So to make it probably significantly faster and fanless and possibly get a boost in GPU performance, which usually has been historically pretty rough on that computer, that could be significant for that.
John:
I mean, just think of it like an iPad Pro that's a laptop.
John:
Right.
John:
Because iPad Pro has 10 hours of battery life.
John:
No one complains about the CPU speed and the GPU is pretty darn good, too.
John:
So there you go.
John:
That's a fanless MacBook Air.
John:
All you have to do is the form factor stuff.
John:
And maybe you could have even longer battery life, depending on how big the battery you can fit in is.
John:
So, you know, we'll see.
John:
Like, I don't the reason I thought this rumor was optimistic is it was saying there's going to be three new Macs.
John:
Right.
John:
Your concerns about the 16 inch MacBook Pro.
John:
Like I said, technically speaking, Apple absolutely can put out a 16 inch MacBook Pro.
John:
using its a14 system on a chip derived mac chip because the gpu is easy to scale up you just add more execution units right they've already got an architecture that works it works great it supports all the features they need you would just need to scale it up which means you need to make a bigger chip you know more power so on and so forth but like think of again think of the power envelope the power envelope of a 16 inch macbook pro with a fan in it is so much higher than the power envelope of an ipad pro with no fan in it right so
John:
They have the room to do that.
John:
The only question, and again, it's like, well, how big can you make a quote-unquote integrated GPU?
John:
Look at the PlayStation 5.
John:
You can make it pretty darn big.
John:
Look at the Xbox Series X, right?
John:
Obviously, those are bigger power envelopes than MacBook Pro, but still, I'm saying like it's not integrated.
John:
It doesn't mean you can't make it that big.
John:
The only question is, will Apple make it that big?
John:
because scaling up the integrated gpu that much in your first go is aggressive right maybe the first line of them will be okay well on the 16 inch we put a bigger gpu in it but it's more like the a14z you know what i mean uh like it's not we didn't go whole hog right on the first go out we didn't want to knock it out of the park with the gigantic you know 16 execution units use apple's parlance or whatever they're calling execution unit right or 16 core or whatever they said like the uh
John:
The A12Z was an 8-core GPU, and I think that's the biggest one they've ever shipped.
John:
The A12X was a 7-core, but only because they allowed one of the cores to be disabled if it was bad, right?
John:
So it's really the same chip, but just an 8-core chip.
John:
If they put out a 16-core chip and you just scale that up linearly for doubling the execution units in it or doubling the cores or whatever...
John:
That is a very competitive MacBook Pro GPU.
John:
Because remember, MacBook Pros are not gaming laptops.
John:
They have never come with the GPU that's setting the world on fire in terms of laptop performance.
John:
PC gaming laptops come with much more powerful GPUs.
John:
Apple doesn't have to match that.
John:
They just have to match their previously shipped top-of-the-line 16-inch MacBook Pro discrete GPU performance, match or exceed.
John:
I think it's plausible that they can do that with a modest, conservative iteration expansion of their current design.
John:
I think they can knock it out of the park with a very aggressive, much larger system on a chip for a laptop and have something that is, if not competitive with PC gaming laptops, at least faster than any MacBook Pro Apple has ever shipped.
John:
So I think what I'm looking for, if there is an exchange at all,
John:
is it's a question of will what does you know as in like does apple want to do this is this something apple is trying to do or are they just taking it easy on the first round and then you know the 13 inch and all those things that's no problem like i could they get to ship what they have and everyone will be happy with it and it's not a big deal it's only we only care about the gpu stuff in the high end so
John:
I'm not looking for it to be a technical marvel.
John:
I'm looking to see what is Apple willing to do?
John:
What does Apple actually consider performance?
John:
Maybe the Pro Workflow group has had an influence on this.
John:
We're saying like, look, don't even bother making a 16-inch MacBook Pro on ARM if you can't, you know, totally thrash your current GPU performance in your 16-inch MacBook Pro.
John:
We'll see.
We'll see.
Marco:
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Casey:
So what do you think is going to be first?
Casey:
Because I agree that the adorable, you know, the original 12-inch MacBook, I think that is the one that strikes me as most obvious as being a good candidate for an ARM Mac.
Casey:
And certainly the part of me that still misses that computer, because I do, I don't want to have to plug in more than one thing at a time, but I still miss it.
Casey:
You know, I would love to see that gain a port or two or three and get, you know, about 800% more power.
Casey:
So that does seem like a really obvious first candidate, but yeah,
Casey:
I mean, I would be very surprised, as you guys have mentioned, if a 16-inch gets it first.
Casey:
Do you really think that's a possibility?
Casey:
Let's start with Marco.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
The 16-inch, to me, is a big stretch for this.
Marco:
I agree.
Marco:
I hope they do it.
Marco:
I think that would be awesome.
Marco:
And keep in mind, Tim did say at the announcement that they plan to complete the entire transition in two years.
Marco:
So I was assuming, as I said, I was assuming that the large GPU, high-performance things would be the second half of the transition.
Marco:
But if they can plant the 16-inch now...
Marco:
that's a huge move.
Marco:
And that would be very interesting to me.
John:
Someone in the chat room is yelling 16-inch MacBook Air.
John:
So that's the real question that we don't know, right?
John:
Because these are the first ARM Macs, right?
John:
And although it is a safe assumption that they will use A14-ish system on a chip, as in whatever that core is and whatever that GPU design is, it'll be some...
John:
evolution of that right that's a reasonable safe assumption uh further uh enforced by the fact that all of apple's iphones just use the a14 like it's great to be able to just manufacture one thing and design one thing and you have it be multi-purpose so whether or not they call this the m something or the x something or
John:
whatever naming scheme they come up with, whatever the code name is, I don't know the current one, but whatever the code name is for these cores, they have code names for all these things like Cyclone, Typhoon, I think they're all storm based names.
John:
And whatever the code name is for this GPU design, those are their building blocks.
John:
So you can take those high efficiency cores, those power cores and those GPU cores.
John:
And you can and you know, and all the IO,
John:
plus whatever else you need to make it a mac right with the thunderbolt stuff and or whatever and build your mac gpu from those parts right it doesn't make sense for them to make an entirely new core an entirely new gpu or whatever but given those parts you can build lots of differently sized things and the real question is what appetite does apple have to really use those building blocks to make very different things
John:
If they have a big appetite, they're like, great, we're going to do like four high efficiency cores and six, you know, or, you know, six high efficiency cores and four power cores plus a 16 core GPU.
John:
And we're going to launch the 16 inch MacBook Pro, this thing, and it's going to kick butt because that system on its ship,
John:
would look nothing like anything in any of their phones or iPads.
John:
If you looked at the die, you'd be like, oh, I recognize those high-efficiency cores and those power cores, and I recognize those GPU cores, right?
John:
But what a monster this is.
John:
Like, this is a heck of a, you know, new design job to make this whole new chip, right?
John:
And it's like, boy, that's...
John:
That's a big investment for something that's going to sell relatively nothing compared to the iPhone, right?
John:
And they use the same A14 across all their iPhones, so they have this one chip that they make for their best-selling product, and then the Macs are going to get these bespoke, like the 16-inch is going to have one chip, and then the 13-inch is going to have another, and maybe the Air will have another.
John:
That seems unlikely to me, at least on a first go.
John:
What seems more likely to me is every single one of these Macs will have a very similar looking chip that looks an awful lot like the same chip they're putting in their iPhones that will soon be in their iPads that's already in one of their iPads.
John:
It'll look very A14-ish and there won't be a huge diversity.
John:
They'll look different than the A14.
John:
Maybe some of them will like literally be A14s under a different name.
John:
Don't look like on the, you know, the 13-ish thing or whatever.
John:
That just seems like so much more of a smart sort of Tim Cook style parts sharing.
John:
Let's not rock the boat too much.
John:
Let's not have to do something totally new because it just seems weird to me that...
John:
that they would not try you know on the on the very first set of computers that they would not try to reuse as much as possible from their iphone which is part of the benefit of bringing the max to arm is like we'll just get we'll get more bang for our buck out of this but the mac is i'm gonna say a sideshow compared to the iphone and they did have 30 year-over-year growth because everyone's got to be working from home and everything so that's great for the mac but boy that would really be shocking and pleasantly surprising to me if they said you know what
John:
We have three totally new chips for our Macs, and none of them are exactly like the A14, and one of them is very unlike the A14.
John:
I didn't even believe this rumor that they're going to have three laptops.
John:
I just want one laptop.
John:
I'm happy with one laptop.
John:
Are you getting it?
John:
Yeah, I mean, yeah.
John:
The thing is, if it's the 16-inch, I'm going to be like, oh, come on.
John:
because i don't i don't want to buy my this is like a homework lap not a homework laptop a school laptop because all school is remote now for my kids i don't need to buy a two thousand dollar computer so they can run zoom although based on how much the fans spin up when they use zoom who knows but i would prefer that apple release a 13 inch macbook air type of laptop and it would be fine if that thing had just a straight up a14 in it
John:
perfectly fine give me a macbook air with an a14 and 10 hours of battery life sold day one if they release a 16 inch macbook pro with weird compromises because it's got a 14 it's got an a14 chip in it with not beefy enough gpu and they want two grand for it i'm gonna be a little yeah so this is this is the test how much when we see this event
John:
How much investment does Apple want to put into the system on its chips for Mac?
John:
We have no idea because Apple has never made its own processors ever for the Mac, unless you kind of count the PowerPC because they were part of the AIM alliance.
John:
What does AIM stand for?
John:
Do you guys remember?
John:
Apple Intel Motorola?
John:
So close.
Marco:
AIM Instant Messenger?
Casey:
Oh, IBM, IBM.
Casey:
God, how did I get that wrong?
Casey:
I'm an idiot.
Casey:
Good grief, I'm a moron.
John:
Apple, IBM, and Motorola teamed up to make the PowerPC processor, and it was really cool, but those are...
John:
This reminds me of those days only Motorola and IBM are gone.
John:
Not gone, but you know what I mean.
Casey:
I can't believe I got that wrong.
Casey:
My dad worked for IBM for 30 years.
Casey:
How did I get that wrong?
John:
Well, it's because IBM's already an abbreviation or acronym or whatever.
John:
Abbreviation, sorry, not acronym.
Marco:
Initialism, I believe.
John:
Yeah, there you go.
Marco:
Anyway, so I'm curious, do either of you think that this event, not Arm, Max in general down the road, but do you think this event we will see...
Marco:
other changes to the lineup, significant changes to, you know, externally visible factors or not.
Marco:
Because, like, when you look at the Intel switch, the earlier Intel machines didn't look significantly different than the PowerPC machines they replaced.
Marco:
Like, the differences became more obvious over time and, like, you know, there were, like, more physical changes, more exterior visible changes over time.
Marco:
But the first batch didn't look that different.
Marco:
I'm wondering, like...
Marco:
Are they going to take this chance now to make big statements with the hardware changes beyond just changing the guts?
Marco:
Or might that come down the road?
Marco:
And I'm thinking specifically about –
Marco:
significant form factor changes you know like not only taking the existing cases and stuffing them with new guts that are faster and cooler and get better battery life but maybe making things thinner and lighter as they tend to do um or changing major things about ports which hopefully not because that would probably result in fewer of them sorry apple silicon can only have one port we've seen that yeah yeah
Marco:
Or, you know, or other things like one little ray of hope, multicolored ray of hope I have is on the event invitation.
Marco:
It shows a not quite rainbow, but a multicolored light behind the Apple logo.
Marco:
And I was thinking there was that rumor two years ago or last year that they were considering bringing back a rainbow Apple logo online.
Marco:
And what if they did something with these colors as some kind of light-up logo on it?
Marco:
I understand this is a stretch.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't think this is likely.
Marco:
But wouldn't that be fun?
Marco:
Wouldn't it be cool if the ARM Macs
Marco:
had some kind of like notable visible hardware change about them right from day one.
Marco:
And this is ignoring other possibilities like them being touch screens or, you know, things like that, which are also big possibilities.
Marco:
But like, do you think we'll see anything like that?
Marco:
Or do you think that might come down the road if ever?
John:
Yeah, the touchscreen Mac thing, I think, is looming out there and will be, if it's not announced on these first set of Macs, we're all just waiting for the iMac shoe to drop, like that whole, you know, iMac is due for a redesign, the Surface Studio is out there, so touch is a thing to watch for, but setting that aside...
John:
I mentioned a fanless 13-inch MacBook Air.
John:
I think if Apple's going to release an ARM-based Mac to replace the MacBook Air, there's no reason that it has to be any faster than the iPad Pro.
John:
I don't think.
John:
For that price class and for the MacBook Air, their cheap, small laptop, right?
John:
It's not for pros.
John:
It's supposed to be thin and light, blah, blah, blah.
John:
why would you use the same four factor as the current macbook air like because you don't need a fan like it you don't need it to be faster than the ipad pro the ipad pro is plenty fast maybe the ram is putting you over maybe i'm underestimating how much heat is put out by the ram because you do need more ram for a mac but uh if there is a form factor change at all and and it's laptops that are introduced i think the only form factor change you're
John:
a mac in the lineup that was previously not fanless becomes fanless because it can and that may be minor form factor change as in they just cover up the fan holes and it's the same case or it could be a more major one as in they slim it down because they can right i don't anticipate for this first round that the 16 inch macbook pro will change significantly just because these computers are already so elemental and
John:
Like, especially the 16-inch MacBook Pro, it's like, well, it's a rectangle with the stuff inside it and with no room for anything else.
John:
And it's going to be the same stuff.
John:
It's going to be a motherboard and a bunch of batteries and a trackpad, right?
John:
And maybe the touchscreen will change the form factor a little bit.
John:
But beyond that, I don't see them redesigning that case for the very first line of Pros.
John:
But I would not be shocked if we saw a slightly redesigned case for the 13-inch.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I keep arguing with myself about it as I'm listening to you guys.
Casey:
And my gut tells me they will not change the form factor in any significant way.
Casey:
And I think the most likely change is what John just said, that things that once had fans will have fans no more.
Casey:
But I can make some pretty passionate arguments for them to change the form factor, for them to make a big splash and try to take away any reluctance anyone has in upgrading.
Casey:
And by saying, you know, hey, you're going to get this new chip and this sweet new design.
Casey:
And so people who maybe don't care about the chip will want that sweet new look.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I think if it were me, what I would rather do is reincarnate, you know, the adorable and say, not only can you get a 13-inch MacBook Pro with our chip that runs better, cooler, et cetera, but remember that old thing, which, of course, I would never say that old piece of garbage slow thing, but effectively, remember that old thing that, you know, had trade-offs?
Marco:
Don't forget the keyboard everyone loved.
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
yeah so do you remember the old thing that had trade-offs that had a different keyboard in it it wasn't really as fast you're so kind trade-offs different well no i'm saying that's what apple would say oh yeah if it were me remember this piece of that we made all of you buy especially that casey guy who loved it even though he shouldn't anyway that guy's an idiot but moving on uh you know but yeah they would say oh remember that machine with all those trade-offs um and now because of apple silicon you don't have to have any trade-offs anymore except it only has one port
Casey:
But you don't have to have tradeoffs in power.
Casey:
You don't have to have the old keyboard.
Casey:
You have this beautiful machine and it has only one port, but it's so fast now.
Casey:
And the screen is better for reasons and so on and so forth.
Casey:
Like I could totally see them doing that.
Casey:
And so I think if I were to wager a guess, my number one guess is the aesthetically little to nothing changes.
Casey:
Number two, aesthetically, little to nothing changes, but they add like a 12 inch or 11 inch or something like that, you know, something that is not currently in their lineup.
Casey:
And then my final, my least likely guess is that, yeah, they just rip the Band-Aid off right now and make everything look different.
John:
What about in colors?
John:
The 12-inch – what are the 12-inch coming?
John:
Gold, silver, and space gray?
John:
I think that's right.
John:
Pink.
John:
There was a pink.
Casey:
Yeah, there was a pink one.
Casey:
I was going to say pink, and then I thought I was wrong.
John:
So I was thinking of the new iPad Airs that come in colors.
John:
It's totally a thing they could do with their – they have done before with their smaller laptops.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's an easy way to make a little bit of extra sale.
John:
The fact that they were willing to do it on a relatively low volume, again, compared to the iPhone product, shows that they're not afraid of the inventory management difficulties of having a bunch of different color choices.
John:
So yeah, if you want to spice things up a little bit cheaply, you don't require a whole new redesign.
John:
Just whatever this process they have of anodizing or coloring their aluminum...
John:
Make a pink one, make a gold one, make a blue one and make a green one, whatever.
John:
Like that's people like that.
Marco:
Why not do it?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I would love more fun color options for the laptops, especially like all the fun color options were only ever for their smallest and lowest end models.
Marco:
Like do pros not have the ability to have fun?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, as discussed, apparently not because look at the phones.
Casey:
I mean, I agree with you.
John:
But the phones at least got a midnight, whatever.
John:
What is it?
John:
Was it midnight green and then Pacific blue?
Marco:
So those two tints.
Marco:
Space green and space blue.
John:
That's exactly what we're talking about on the Macs, where it was like whatever was rose gold or, you know, space gray.
John:
Those are just as subtle as the current pro phone college.
John:
That's all we're asking for.
John:
We're not asking for the product red MacBook Air, which would be awesome.
John:
But it's not what we're asking for.
John:
Why aren't we asking for that?
John:
Well, I mean, because laptops are so big, putting a very saturated color is quite a statement, and it may be difficult to sell those in large enough volumes to make it worthwhile.
John:
I feel like a subtle tint on something as big as laptop is reasonable.
John:
Although black one would be cool.
John:
We're all open to color choices.
John:
That thing you're talking about, Marco, with the rainbow Apple logo, did somebody do a mock-up where it was like...
John:
It was like a black Apple logo on the back of the screen of the laptop, but then coming from behind it and shining out around the edges was rainbow colors, right?
John:
I mean, it doesn't really make much sense if you think about it, because one of the reasons they got rid of the light up Apple logo on the back of their things is because the screens got so thin.
John:
there really is not enough room to have the, you know, the light shining out in both directions there.
John:
Cause like, and you're not going to sacrifice sickness to do that.
John:
Uh, but who knows, you know, as the kids love their RGBs, right.
John:
Uh, and you can chuck a bunch of those inside a computer and make it cool looking, but Johnny's not there anymore.
John:
No one's going to stop you.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So my final question on this, uh, Marco, are you and I, especially you getting a cellular Mac tomorrow or the next week?
Marco:
Oh, I hope so.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't think so.
Marco:
I think if cellular was coming to Macs, we would probably have seen people noticing bits and pieces of the support for it in the software betas that we're having these days.
Marco:
And I don't think I've heard anything about that.
Marco:
So probably not.
Marco:
But I wish we would.
John:
What about the fact that Mac OS 11.0...
John:
we don't see anymore and now the new betas are 1101 and everyone assumes 11.0 is the arm only build maybe we just never saw that build maybe it was never distributed to developers and maybe that's the one that has the face id support for the for the face id on the apple laptops and the the cellular support you know what i mean
Marco:
I mean, I would love that, but Apple has not been good about that kind of thing recently, like keeping 100%, you know, hiding things from the betas.
John:
They did it with the iPhone.
John:
They did the same thing with iOS, right?
John:
Where like the builds jumped for developers and then like 14, right?
John:
So in 14, not that there was a lot of new hardware on the iPhones, but things about like the Dolby Vision or whatever didn't leak because we never got the build.
John:
with the support for the Dolby Vision stuff, because the only devices that supported that were the phones that hadn't yet been released.
John:
And they branched off the tree and said, okay, this is going forward.
John:
This is the tree that's going to go manufacture.
John:
What was it?
John:
14.1 is going to be released on the iPhone 12s, right?
John:
And then developers are going to start on 14.2 beta.
John:
I don't know.
John:
You could be right that they're just bad about hiding these things.
John:
But it seems that that strategy, that new strategy of, hey, cut the build for the dedicated hardware and then jump the developers to the next one that still lacks that stuff and merge it in later...
John:
may be helping them hide stuff from us.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, it's possible, but ultimately, I don't think it's likely.
Marco:
I think it's much more likely that they are as good as they've been recently with that kind of thing, which is to say, they...
Marco:
tend to hide most stuff but regularly slip up and let little trickles of things out so I'm guessing we don't have a cellular yet but I would love to be wrong on this I hope I'm wrong about this overall though what I mostly hope is I know this is kind of a tall order given the year that everyone's had maybe they had to hold certain things back or push certain things until version 2 or whatever but what I really hope ultimately is that
Marco:
there is something else besides the guts are much better about whatever the new lineup is and i know that that's like you know the guts are getting a lot better like it's it's not a small thing so that itself is going to be exciting but i hope there's also just something else some some other like wow factor that makes the products
Marco:
cooler looking or cooler feeling and makes you even happier to use them and gut upgrades can do that to a large degree you know like and in certain special ways like as John mentioned like if they go fanless where they weren't before or if they're much cooler to type on your hands don't get hot you don't have to run utilities like like turbo boost switcher you know to make them not suck like that's all nice and that's all big stuff
Marco:
But I hope there's something else that we can do that we couldn't do before or some new physical thing about them that looks or feels great or something like that beyond just they're faster and run cooler.
John:
I give them a little bit of leeway, like I said, for this first round of things.
John:
But come after this transition is done and it's the second round of our Macs, they'd better have Face ID, right?
John:
They'd better have cellular.
John:
Like, there's no more excuses for any of this stuff.
John:
Oh, we can't do Face ID.
John:
Like, figure it out.
John:
Like, everything you're using, your phones can do it.
John:
Your iPads can do it.
John:
Like...
John:
They can do cellular.
John:
It's the same system on a chip.
John:
You've got all the stuff.
John:
You've got the cell modems.
John:
It's like, just make it happen.
John:
This is supposed to be, as far as I'm concerned, one of the payoffs of this should be that all those features that we haven't been getting on Macs for a long time finally comes to Macs.
John:
Like, it's going to be very frustrating to me if we're like five years into the ARM transition and not a single Mac has Face ID.
John:
I'm warning you now, ATP listeners, you're going to hear me get increasingly angry about this over a long time scale.
John:
Us?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I give them some leeway for the first few years.
John:
But at a certain point, you need to put Face ID in a Mac for crying out loud.
John:
And I'm not going to be screaming about the touch thing, right?
John:
Because you mentioned like I want it to be cooler in some way.
John:
Touch is, we haven't been talking that much about that one, but we talked about it a lot more about Big Sur and how it is
John:
so getting the mac ready to have touch as a piece of input i'm ready any time for that but i'm also willing to say if you don't want to do that in the first round because it's too confusing and you want them to seem familiar like whatever i'm not going to be screaming about touch in five years i will be screaming about face id in five years because please apple please
Marco:
Very effective argument.
Marco:
All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Away.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can go to atp.fm slash join if you'd like to become a member.
Marco:
You get all sorts of cool benefits.
Marco:
Thank you, everybody, and we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
It was accidental.
John:
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-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
I would like to suggest an after show and I would like to talk about video games.
Marco:
I am in for this because not not because I'm especially super into them, but I just want to know why you want to talk about them, because you're not usually super into them.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So very, very brief recap of my video game history.
Casey:
I grew up on Nintendo's for pretty much my entire life.
Casey:
I think every system except the GameCube through adolescence and then adulthood didn't pay attention for a long time around the GameCube era.
Casey:
I had a Wii, which we used mostly casually for the sorts of games that the Wii was really good at.
Casey:
and then we got a Switch not too long after it was brand new, and I play it occasionally.
Casey:
I really enjoy the Switch quite a bit.
Casey:
I don't play it that often, and usually if I am playing it, I'm playing something with Declan, but I do think it's a really great system.
Casey:
As someone who is no longer a connoisseur, I think it's a really great system, and I think it's a very clever system.
Casey:
So Declan has been slowly getting into video games.
Casey:
Well, left to his own devices, he would just play video games nonstop, but we are still in the perspective and he's still of the age that we pretty severely limit his video game playing.
Casey:
And he really likes Mario Karts and to a lesser degree, other Mario properties.
Casey:
And as it turns out, his birthday was a week after Mario Kart, what is it?
Casey:
Mario Kart Live Home Circuit came out.
Casey:
I think that's the right name.
Casey:
Oh, that's out?
Casey:
I want to hear about that.
Casey:
So if you're not familiar, I will try to put a link in the show notes to the trailer that came out a few months ago.
Casey:
And it is worth very quickly, if you're in a position that you can do so, it is worth very quickly pausing the podcast and watching this two-minute trailer.
Casey:
But I will describe for you, I will paint a word picture of what this is all about.
Casey:
So this is a game for the Switch.
Casey:
And it's something, I think it was like $100 or something like that.
Casey:
Because it's not only a game.
Casey:
It's also a physical remote-controlled car, like an actual, real-live, you-hold-it-in-your-hands remote-controlled car.
Casey:
And it also has a series of cardboard gates, for lack of a better term, basically little, like, kind of sort of arches.
Casey:
And the premise is that you set up, there are four of these gates,
Casey:
And you set these gates up around your home.
Casey:
And then you put the cart on the ground after you've paired it with the Switch.
Casey:
And as you're driving in the game, you're driving the remote-controlled car in real life.
Casey:
And the remote-controlled car has a little camera on it.
Casey:
So you're seeing the perspective of the remote-controlled car as you're racing through your own house on the Switch, on the TV.
Casey:
It is the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life.
Casey:
It is phenomenally cool.
Casey:
Will it last more than 20 minutes?
Casey:
Is this going to be like a flash in the pan?
Casey:
You know, oh, that was really clever, but I don't care anymore.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
It is Mario Kart in real life.
Casey:
Now, if we wanted to, if we had a second Switch, which we do not yet, we could get a second Switch and we could get another $100 setup for Luigi, if you will.
Casey:
And we could race two physical karts against each other in real life.
Casey:
It is the coolest thing.
Casey:
So Declan and I started playing it.
Casey:
Well, really, he started playing it, but I helped him set up the course.
Casey:
The distance that the cart can work is less than I would have hoped.
Casey:
I understand why.
Casey:
It's broadcasting video at hopefully at least 20, 30 frames a second, maybe as much as 60 frames a second.
Casey:
And it's doing this through the air.
Casey:
And I think it's actually doing this via like a peer to peer airdrop style Wi-Fi network.
Casey:
I think I am not confident about this, but I read somewhere something about Wi-Fi reception, but it also says you have to be within like five meters of the switch.
Casey:
So, so our downstairs, which Marco has seen, but, but John hasn't, although it's been a long time for Marco.
Casey:
Um, basically our, our living room is adjacent to our playroom, you know, the kids playroom.
Casey:
And then if you were to go and go out the playroom, you're at the front door.
Casey:
And then if you, you know, do a UE, you're going down a hallway and then you can come back to the living room.
Casey:
So what we did was we made a big like circle.
Casey:
If you're oval, I guess you should say, I should say of the downstairs and
Casey:
And it worked okay at that distance, but when you were at the extreme edge of that oval away from the switch, it complained pretty much every single time about, oh, the connection's poor, the video got real choppy, the latency on the commands to the RC unit was definitely really bad.
Casey:
But when you limit it to being slightly closer and not through several walls, it turns out it works really well.
Casey:
So it is...
Casey:
It is the first time that I can remember...
Casey:
seeing augmented reality, which I consider this to be a flavor of AR.
Casey:
It's the first time I've seen this and gone, holy smokes, that's amazing.
Casey:
It is such a cool game.
Casey:
It is such a cool technical demo.
Casey:
I mean, the game is fun.
Casey:
Don't get me wrong.
Casey:
I've only played it a couple times because Declan, unsurprisingly, has been kind of bogarting it.
Casey:
But it is a very fun game.
Casey:
But just as a technical demo, it is so incredibly cool.
Casey:
And I cannot recommend it enough.
Casey:
And I just wanted to bring it up because it's very unusual, as Marco said, for me, of all people, to want to talk about video games.
Casey:
And I just think this is such a well-executed, awesome, awesome toy and video game that I just couldn't help but bring it up.
Marco:
I will point out also that, like many things for the Nintendo Switch, including the Switch itself, it is currently seemingly backordered everywhere.
Marco:
And if you actually want to order it from somewhere like Amazon right now, you're going to have to pay like $500.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But the actual price of it is $100.
Marco:
You're right, Casey.
Marco:
So keep an eye out if you want this.
Marco:
Keep an eye on things.
Marco:
If you're thinking, maybe they should get this for my kids for Christmas or something, you might want to get that sooner rather than later if you can.
Marco:
Because I think it's just going to only get harder to get.
John:
One of the fun things about this game, or this is kind of like the old saying of like, you know, 20 miles an hour on the water feels like 60 miles an hour on land, right?
Casey:
Yes.
John:
Well, so these cars, when you're looking through the camera and driving them, it feels a lot faster than it actually is.
John:
If you look at the actual car driving on the ground, you're like...
John:
Is this a racing game?
John:
Because they seem like they're going pretty slow.
John:
And Casey can correct me wrong, but I believe the 50cc, 100cc, and so on and so forth translates into the speed of the physical car as well.
John:
Is that true?
Casey:
Yeah, I've only tried it very briefly, but yes, that's correct.
Casey:
And while I'm thinking of it just very quickly, if you get hit by like a banana peel or something, you don't spin like you would in the traditional Mario Kart game.
Casey:
But your kart stops.
Casey:
You can drift using the kart.
Casey:
Now, what that really means is it's like altering the steering angle that it's asking the...
John:
that it's asking the cart to execute but it's still doing a drift it well a quote-unquote drift in the real world and in the game like it's it is extremely extremely well done yeah and i feel like when you're looking through a little camera you feel like you're going way faster because things are coming up on you it's like when you just get low to the ground you move at a slow speed so it's taking advantage of that um and that that's pretty cool some of the limitations i've seen lots of the video reviews on youtube it's like
John:
It does not deal with hills well.
John:
So if you construct a course in your house that involves hills, the game is not particularly, the game doesn't understand them and the game doesn't really like them.
John:
It'll work okay as long as you get something you have traction on.
John:
If you're used to playing Mario Kart and shooting people with mushrooms and in case you're wondering, yes, like all that stuff is still there.
John:
Obviously the mushrooms and, you know, turtle shells and all that other stuff, those are virtual.
John:
Like that's the AR aspect of it.
John:
The car is real.
John:
The arches are real.
John:
Your house is real.
John:
The turtle shells are not real.
John:
The mushrooms are not real.
John:
You know, all that stuff.
John:
But in the real game, if you hit someone with the shell, you can't... I mean, I don't know if it's no clipping whatsoever, but you can go past them slash through them on your way to victory.
John:
Whereas in real life, these cards are actually fairly big.
John:
And if you hit someone with a turtle shell and they come to a dead stop in front of you...
John:
you've got to steer around them if you don't you will hit them because they are a physical thing and so are you and so clunk right so you may have to adjust your mario kart uh strategy and skills like there are limitations like that that you can understand there's only four gates you can't set them that far apart um if you play against computers i believe the computers take a perhaps a more direct route between carts than you had intended because you made a cool serpentine course but they just know where the gates are so the computer cars will
Casey:
Well, that's slightly that's slightly true.
Casey:
So the way it works is when you set up these gates, then what they have you do is in on the screen.
Casey:
I forget the name of the character, but like the little floaty guy, little floaty toad like person.
Casey:
will come down and put paint on your tires on screen.
Casey:
And then what you're supposed to do is drive the course.
Casey:
Well, if you make it like super serpentine and whatnot, it records that and it factors that into the course.
Casey:
So it's not just going through the gates.
Casey:
The gates are the guideposts for sure.
Casey:
But it's also, what was the route that you took as you were driving?
Casey:
And that also allows it to do things like
Casey:
have figure eight or, you know, courses that loop back on themselves or what have you.
Casey:
So it to some degree takes into account, you know, those serpentine motions, but you're still not wrong that it's not going to be perfect.
Casey:
And the other thing that where it falls down a lot is, you know, so we set up a couple of courses where there were obstacles off to the side.
Casey:
So maybe there were like cardboard building blocks or there was like one of the kids' chairs, you know, one of those poofy chairs that everyone has for their kids.
Casey:
And a lot of times you would see a player, a computer player in the game, like inside the chair.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Like it didn't do a good enough job of figuring out that's an obstruction that it shouldn't be driving in front of.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it is extremely well executed.
Casey:
And I cannot believe how cool this is.
Casey:
And apparently, if I read it right, it was all done by Velen Studios or something like that, which I think is some video game maker somewhere in upstate New York, if I'm not mistaken, Albany and Troy, New York.
Casey:
And I've never heard of them before, but it looks like they did pretty much all the work on this.
Casey:
And I went poking about their website, and it looks like they really, really like C and C++ people.
Casey:
But it strikes me as the same as your early job, Marco, where it's like, see if we can C++ if we have to.
Casey:
which is fine, but was very, very surprising to read for a video game, or at least it was surprising to me anyway.
John:
I was surprised they didn't get the Anki Drive people to do this, right?
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
It's kind of like, I mean, Pokemon Go was the same way.
John:
I forget what company that was, but like Nintendo's on the lookout for companies that have cool gaming ideas, and then they say, you know, join with us, and you get to use our incredibly valuable properties, and then you get to have
John:
Lakitu as your little paint person.
John:
Is that who it was?
John:
They're not a toad person.
Casey:
You know, you took my joke from me.
Casey:
You took my joke from me.
Casey:
I was going to say real-time follow-up from Jay Siracusa in the chat.
Casey:
It is indeed Lakitu.
Casey:
I couldn't think of the name.
John:
He's not a toad person.
John:
He's a little turtle.
John:
I'm sorry.
John:
I'm old.
John:
Forgive me.
John:
Anyway, yeah, like taking a game property, taking a game idea and putting Nintendo properties on top of it and then allowing Nintendo to manage your creation of that game to make sure it's fun and be able to use their hardware and, you know, have access to their customer base that's willing to shell out 100 bucks for this game thing.
John:
I don't know if you ever use the Labo stuff.
John:
Did you ever try that?
Casey:
I know of what you're talking about, but no, I did not use it.
John:
Is that that cardboard thing?
John:
It's like physical.
John:
It's another same idea.
John:
So you have a Switch, and you can also buy these physical toys, essentially, that interact with the Switch in some way.
John:
It's not as impressive as an AR type thing, but you could build these little moving things that work with the Switch.
John:
They looked fun and interesting, and I always just imagine kids destroying that cardboard, that very, very expensive cardboard, but
John:
This is what Nintendo is the best at.
John:
Find things that might be fun and try them out.
Casey:
I cannot recommend this enough.
Casey:
It is super cool and everyone should try this at some point.
Marco:
Is it fun if you just get one or do you think you really will need two?
Casey:
It is fun with one.
Casey:
It would absolutely at least double the fun, if not more so if we had a second.
Casey:
But the problem is for us, we only have one switch in the house.
Casey:
And I think that there's probably going to come a time that a second switch will enter the house.
Casey:
But sitting here today, there's only one switch.
Casey:
And it's understandable, but unfortunate that it's a one-to-one pairing, like I said earlier, between Switch and cart.
Casey:
So we would have to get Declan either a Switch or Mini Switch Lite, whatever it's called, in a second car to pair with it.
Casey:
But again, it's super cool.
Casey:
I haven't had enough time with it to be able to talk about some of the other features it has, but I know...
Casey:
that it has some amount of progression, both in terms of stuff that the character can wear, but also in terms of the things that you can do.
Casey:
So as an example, right now, the only thing we can do is have sunshine or basically the existing atmosphere in the house.
Casey:
But in the game, you can make it rain or you can have your house underwater and so on and so forth.
Casey:
So I'm looking forward to trying stuff like that.
Casey:
uh but either way i i really thought it was a super cool game and you should at least even if you're not interested in video games at all you should really really really seek out that um that trailer which i've put in the show notes it's only a couple minutes and it is it is it gives you a really good idea of what it's like and it is crazy super cool
John:
This is interesting that you were just talking about Mario Kart because just last night, as a way to distract myself from everything, I watched a lot of speedrunning videos and a lot of these retro gaming dissection videos, and I watched what I think is the sort of...
John:
giant bloated monster version of a particular genre uh where it describes a sub subsection of the speed running world and it usually these this genre videos it describes like person a got record this record then person b came back and beat their record and person c was you know like it's the kind of like the the horse race for who's going to beat whose record on you know in a speed running thing this is a 47 minute video
John:
entirely entirely in that format entirely about speed runners and mario kart 64 wow and like i've watched the shorter videos on similar things of like here's the person who was trying to do a thing with the speed run and we thought this speed run would never be broken and look at this speed running golden eye there's a lot of nintendo speed runs i watch but anyway i was like how can you sustain this for 47 minutes and
John:
There you go.
John:
47 minutes of speed running.
John:
It's it is a fascinating video.
John:
It takes you on a journey.
John:
Is it too long?
John:
Yes, it's too long.
John:
Right.
John:
But that's why I felt like it's a fun version of this.
John:
It's like extended to the maximum like there's plenty of data there.
John:
It's just I don't know if it's going to hold your attention to 47 minutes.
John:
But last night, again, I was looking for something to distract myself.
John:
I recommend watching it.
John:
I'm not going to spoil anything about the video.
John:
I recommend watching it because I feel like you have to go on the full 47-minute journey to be emotionally in the place where this video is trying to take you by the end.
John:
But if you just want to watch a bunch of people doing ridiculous things in Mario Kart 64, check it out.