The Notch is Young
Let me show you how I had to pick up my MacBook Pro today.
Here, I'm going to put this image.
Why would you wait until we're live to do something with the visual aid?
First, I was like, how you picked it up off the desk?
I'm like, oh, no, I get it.
Okay.
So, it's been a bit of a storm.
Mm-hmm.
All right, so listeners, what I'm looking at is what appears to be some sort of ferry terminal, and that's taking up the majority of the center of the image.
There's a lot of water.
Water in places that it doesn't really appear that there should be water, including to the left-hand side of the image, there's a different building with steps leading down from what appear to be storefronts or something like that.
And some or all of the steps—well, not all of the steps, but either the steps are landing in water, which clearly is not intended—
Or like the last couple of steps are underwater.
So I'm going to go with this is not by design.
There was a large storm coming through the northeast.
And whenever there's a very large storm, our little beach town here, the downtown area floods like this.
But to get my MacBook Pro...
I had to wait, first of all, for the freight boat to arrive two hours late because the Great South Bay was not in good shape with 50 mile an hour winds.
When it somehow actually did arrive, I had to ride my bike with very, very tall boots through this water.
Now...
The water is tall enough that the entire, whatever the wheel that turns that is on the pedal side of the chain, like not the back side, like the pedal wheel that is turning, that was totally submerged underwater.
Oh, cool.
So that's roughly the depth of the water.
It was maybe, I don't know, a foot deep, something like that.
So I had to ride my bike through that.
Now, unfortunately, I did not bring a backpack to put the box in.
So on the way home, I rode through this water while carrying the laptop box under one arm, riding a bike through foot deep water thinking, oh my God, don't drop it.
Don't drop it.
Don't drop it.
Well, it's shrink wrapped.
It'll be fine, right?
Yeah.
Is it?
I don't know.
I guess it is.
Yeah.
But I wish I knew, Marco.
I wish I knew.
We'll get to that later.
At least it would float if you dropped it.
So you'd have a second to snatch it up.
I guess.
Yeah.
It would be trickier if I wanted to return it later.
What happened to the box?
Don't worry about it.
Like the little pink, like the little things that turn pink and water.
Did they put them?
I guess they probably are in laptops now as well.
Oh, I'm sure.
Yeah.
But yeah.
Anyway, so I got it here safe and sound.
I did not actually.
So people in the chat are asking why I don't have a basket on my bike.
Many people here have baskets on their bikes.
I'm not a basket fan.
I see the appeal from a practical perspective.
I don't like what it does to the weight of the steering column or whatever they're called on bikes.
because it basically puts all the weight up front.
And so not only does it make it steer poorly when you have stuff in the basket, but it also makes it steer poorly when you don't have stuff in the basket because there's just like this big metal weight on the front, you know, swingy thing, whatever it's called.
The handlebar, it doesn't need to be in there.
You can put baskets on the back of your bike too, you know.
You know, I've tried those.
I had like the, oh God, the Penny A or however that word is pronounced.
I've had those bags before.
That's great because then when you put stuff in them, the bike falls over.
It's wonderful.
So my strategy normally is I have a giant, I think it's from Ice Mule, cooler backpack.
And I honestly don't use it for its cooler function.
I use it because it's a giant tube that fits on my back.
And so whenever I go grocery shopping, I bring that on the bike and it holds roughly one heaping grocery basket worth of items.
Backpacks are my far preferred way to carry stuff on the bike.
Anyway, I didn't bring a backpack this time.
So I should have and didn't.
But I got it home safe and sound.
And there you go.
Marco, for the record, I would bike underwater both ways to get my MacBook Pro, which honestly wasn't due to come in today anyway, but at the rate we're going may never show up.
And we'll leave that teaser for now and talk about it more later.
Unfortunately, the downside of this teaser is that because of the aforementioned storm conditions and all the logistics of getting this laptop here today, I've only had it for like two hours.
I've not had it for a very long time.
So my impressions will be extremely first impressions.
The ATP store is back, baby.
This is our holiday sale and it's happening right now.
So this is where we do the same thing every year.
And I'm going to do it again.
If you're listening to this right now and you are interested in having merchandise to wear or to gift...
Between now and the end of the year, now is the time to do it.
If you're driving, pull over.
If you're biking in water, maybe think about your life choices and then pull over.
And go to atp.fm slash store and you can get all sorts of sweet, sweet, sweet new merchandise.
So let's talk about what we've got.
John, I'm going to start, but feel free to interrupt whenever you're ready.
We've got an M1 Pro shirt.
Which, thanks to the intrepid work of Mr. John Syracuse, we now have an updated chip diagram on the back.
But it's not just that.
We also have an M1 Max shirt.
And again, if you're listening, maybe Marco can make this the chapter art.
We'll see what happens.
But you should see the rendering of the back of this t-shirt.
We almost needed to extend the length of the t-shirt to fit the M1 Max on the shirt.
It is kind of preposterous, and I freaking love it.
I don't think we're going to be able to do it for the Mac Pro chips because we're really pushing the limit of what kind of diagram can fit on the back of this chart.
Can we put it like on a raincoat?
Yeah.
People were joking about that.
I said, oh, just shrink it.
Get it like silicon shrink, you know.
But the thing is, you can't actually shrink these diagrams.
And these, you know, these are fanciful diagrams with just rectangles and stuff.
They don't really look like the real chips, but they're.
They're representative, but you can't just keep shrinking it because there's a minimum line width and a minimal sort of gap between lines.
And we were really pushing up against it here.
So, yeah, and some and, you know, we used to be selling the on demand M1 shirt is off sale for now, just so there's no confusion about what these like the real ones, the.
The highest quality printing, the most expensive, as you'll see.
Really selling it, John.
You're our best salesman.
Seriously.
So the front of these ones, the front says M1 Pro and M1 Max.
I had made a design that said M1X that turned out not to be the name on the chip.
So...
forget about that shirt sorry everybody um but this one we're trying to figure out how to incorporate pro and max and so we did it with like a badge the badges are colored the pro badge is blue and the max badge is purple because those are the colors that apple uses and it's sort of you know in their event and marketing materials like the pro is always glowing blue or whatever but of course it's the sort of bmw style font or whatever anyway
So yeah, they have the printing on the front with the pro or the max badge.
And on the back, you get a different chip depending on which shirt you got.
So people can tell if you're pro or max by looking at the front or the back.
And as we described, I did this quote unquote sales pitch last time.
These are extremely expensive t-shirts because they have too many freaking colors on them.
Plus they have printing on the back.
So every single color is another printing pass.
Plus there's also a printing pass on the back.
That's, by the way, why the blue Pro badge is the same color blue as the blue in the M1 logo, and the purple Max badge is the same color purple as the purple in the M1 logo.
Because if we didn't do that, we'd have to do even another printing pass that would cost even more money.
See, you didn't realize how well-engineered our shirts are, but these are the engineering trade-offs that the three of us made.
Well, and I joke about, like, I made this picture last time.
I'm like, we're sorry these shirts are so expensive, but they're expensive for us to make because there's lots of printing passes.
And it was, like, our best-selling shirt we've ever made.
So I don't know what that means.
Is it a Veblen good where the more expensive it is, the more desirable it becomes?
But just so you know, these shirts are super-duper expensive.
We did the usual joke that we normally do, which is the Max shirt is more expensive because, of course, it is.
Honestly, I think the Pro one looks better because the blue looks better than the purple, but the Max one is the fanciest one.
So those are the Rainbow M1 Pro and M1 Max shirts.
But just like last year, we have cheaper options.
that only have one color on them, which requires one printing pass, front and back.
You've got the chip on the back, you've got the thing on the front, but it's just one color.
And those shirts, the shirts themselves, come in like nine different colors, right?
So it's just like it was last year, if you remember, or last sale.
If you remember the M1 shirts, we've got the rainbow ones that are ridiculously expensive.
that are our best-selling shirt we've ever made for some reason.
And then we have the monochrome ones, which come in all sorts of fun colors, and I think they're really neat.
You should check them out if you don't want to spend the money you need to spend to get a fully kitted out Max shirt.
Indeed.
So what kind of prices are we talking about here?
So this is all obviously American dollars.
The M1 Pro Rainbow Edition, so this is a black shirt with, you know, all the different inks on the front.
That is $39.
The M1 Max, you know, otherwise the same, $42, because, hey, it's Max.
It's got to be more expensive.
By comparison, the monochrome versions are, what did we say, $32 for the Pro and $35 for the Max.
So, yeah.
Again, a little bit more expensive for the Macs because if you're going to flex, let's flex.
You've earned that flex, so show it off.
So we've got several different options for you.
Those are all available.
As with a couple other things we'll get to in a second, they're available until the end of the day on the 12th of November.
Now, what else do we have?
I have...
I don't have a lot of regrets when it comes to this show.
I regret that one episode where I had a little too much to drink while they were talking about the Mac Pro.
That was many years ago, and I haven't drank on the show since.
But other than that, I don't have a lot of regrets.
I do, however, regret asking John about his winter hat situation just an episode or two ago.
And I believe this one is my fault.
I don't think this is anyone's fault on my own, but I regret it.
Because...
We had already thought about doing an ATP winter hat, which we are.
However, we're not doing a chicken hat.
So we are really firing on all cylinders over here at ATP HQ.
But we do have an ATP winter hat with an embroidered logo on it, which I'm really excited about.
And that should look really good.
I have no idea how much that is, actually.
How much did we say that was going to be?
That is $32 as well.
Again, it's not cheap for us to make because it's embroidered.
Similarly, an ATP hoodie.
This is the same situation as before, an embroidered ATP hoodie.
I freaking live in this thing for like half the year.
That is $49.
And then finally, the classic ATP logo shirt.
This is black only on the material, but then the rainbow front.
Similar in spirit to the M1.
This is where the M1 shirt came from.
That is also available as it almost always will be, I suspect.
And that is $32 since there's nothing on the back or anything like that.
So
quite the spread for you to choose between.
And again, this is where I say every time somebody says to me, Oh, I forgot.
I should have done.
I should have pulled over.
I should have listened to you, Casey.
And I didn't.
And now, can you please open the store?
Please, please, please, please.
No, no, we can't.
This is your, this is your warning.
This is your chance until the end of the day on the 12th of November.
We will remind you twice more the end of the day on the 12th of November, uh, ATP time.
That is.
So please check it out.
Also, I don't have the details in front of me because I completely forgot to add it to the show notes.
However, Cotton Bureau, who is our vendor and t-shirt maker and all that, they've made some changes for international people.
I know a lot of you have unfortunately gotten kind of burned by value-added tax or whatever crazy taxes that they do overseas.
And I'm told that both for the UK and Europe...
all the taxes and fees should, in most circumstances, be calculated and billed right up front.
So you're not going to have a $30 or $40 t-shirt and then like $10 or $20 in fees or whatever your local currency is in fees once it hits your shores.
So...
No promises.
I'm still a little fuzzy on what this means because I'm a dumb American.
But hopefully you should see that be a lot better this time.
And if not, then please reach out to us or to Cotton Bureau and they'll square you away.
So check it out.
A few more items before we move on.
Mugs and pint glasses.
Oh, yes.
Thank you.
I completely forgot.
We know people want mugs and pint glasses.
We wanted to sell them, especially mugs, because it's the wintertime.
But unfortunately, our supplier for mugs and pint glasses is not able to...
guarantee us any kind of order fulfillment in time for the holidays so no mugs and pint glasses we know people want to replace them we know some people have broken them we will put them on sale again as soon as we can get them in stock we also looked at like alternate mugs from different makers and we didn't find any that we really liked uh but mugs and pint glasses will be back someday we're sorry we don't have them for the holidays but you know we do have a bunch of other new stuff
I would even consider doing a run of just mugs and glasses if and when the time comes that we can.
But yes, I would not plan on that being available for the holidays, which is not what we intended.
It's not what Cotton Bureau intended.
It's just in these unprecedented times.
Sometimes things don't show up when you want.
Not that I know anything about that.
And one more thing to remind everybody.
If you are an ATP member, check your member page because you will find your own discount code there for 15% off everything in the store.
And if you want to get 15% off because, you know, you think you're going to buy a bunch of stuff and it's expensive.
become a member, atp.fm slash join, become a member for one month, get the 15% discount, and then just cancel your membership.
And then forget, and then forget.
Or forget, then forget.
Either one.
The whole point is, it's pretty easy to save whatever the membership costs.
It's like $8.
You can save $8 buying a couple of t-shirts.
Easy, right?
And I'm always amazed people don't do this, because I look at the membership numbers, and I think...
surely everybody who bought from the store like no i nobody would buy anything from the store without first getting the easy 15 off and then canceling but no it never happens like we don't see a big bump in members it's just the members get the discount and nobody else does everybody get the discount do the math beforehand figure out i'm gonna order this this and this and this is how much membership costs and this is how much 15 like maybe we should put a calculator in to say hey you shouldn't we should do that you should become a member anyway
Members, don't forget it's on your member page at ATP.fm.
What is the member page?
It is ATP.fm slash member.
That's where you go.
If you're logged in on the site, you will see your member code, copy and paste it into the store site during checkout to get your discount.
Now, John, if you weren't a member, and this sounds just too good to be true because it kind of is, where would you go to become a member?
I said it already.
ATP.fm slash join.
We are sponsored this week by Memberful, help you monetize your passion with membership.
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John, what's up with fast directory sizing?
It was the last episode, or maybe an episode or two ago, we were talking about keeping track of how big the stuff inside a directory tree is.
And I mentioned that APFS apparently has a feature that does that.
It's called APFS Fast Directory Sizing, but I didn't know if it was in use.
Like, it was touted when APFS was introduced all those years ago, and it seemed like a cool idea, and it's like, this solves a problem we all have.
Like, you have this problem on your Mac, you have it on your phone, very often you just want to
look at a folder and say, how much stuff is in this folder and all of its subfolders?
Just tell me immediately.
But instead, you have to see the little things that's calculating, or when you go to the storage screen on your iPhone, you wait a year and a day for it to figure out how much room is taken up by your movies and your apps or whatever, and then that giant gray bar of other that we don't understand.
Anyway.
So that was the open question.
What's the deal with APS fast directory sizing?
Is that still a thing?
Was it removed?
Is it active?
Are they using it?
This is the best answer I've been able to get so far.
So this is an answer on the Apple Stack Exchange site from someone named Chris, and I have it on good authority that this answer is accurate.
So here's, this is reading from Chris's answer.
Fast directory sizing is enabled on a per directory basis and this could be checked by the user, albeit not easily.
It can only be enabled when a directory is empty and must also be turned on for every new subdirectory.
So that's quite a wrinkle.
So you can't just like take a folder on your hard drive or whatever and say, I wanna enable fast directory sizing.
has to be empty and then every single new subdirectory that's made also has to have that thing turned on when the directory is made because at that point it's empty so this is the type of thing that would be very difficult to do manually unless you're very careful it would really have to be done by the operating system
For it to be consistent, we'll put a link to the APFS reference PDF from Apple's website so you can read more of it.
Here's a relevant quote from that PDF.
You cannot enable fast directory sizing on directories containing files or other directories.
You must instead first create a new directory, enable fast directory sizing on it, and then move the contents of the existing directory into the new directory.
So I suppose a utility or something can do that if it wanted to, but I don't know of any of it does.
To do this, you have to enable this flag.
It's called inode maintain dir stats, all caps underscore.
And that tells it to track everything that's underneath it.
This is again from Chris.
Though still unclear to me if macOS is turning this flag on automatically or appropriately or not, but some initial experimentation makes me think it isn't being used.
I agree, Chris, because it doesn't seem like anything about directory sizing is fast on macOS or on iOS.
And from an anonymous source that would know about this, I have this quote, I know stat maintenance is expensive and opt in.
So what I said before about like keeping track of the size of the stuff on your directory is expensive because you have a lot of contention to keep updating that one count, you know, every time anything gets created or destroyed underneath that directory.
whatever did that thing wants to update this number and you sort of have to they all have to get into a big line and fight with each other i want to update the number no i do know i can really slow things down yeah it's expensive apparently there's no magic that's why it's not enabled by default i still feel like i might want to pay that price especially for like sub trees of my hard drive that i check the size on but apparently mac os is not doing it for me
That's a lot of work for something that isn't used, but yeah, stuff happens.
All right, so there's a non-tech, I think I have that right.
Oh God, I really got to learn that pronunciation.
There's a article over there about the performance of the M1 Pro and Max.
I read through this and I don't know if I just wasn't in the right frame of mind, but my eyes kind of glazed over.
So I'm going to have to ask you, John, to step in as the chief summarizer in chief and tell me what's going on here.
We get a backdoor ask ATP, because Dom asked this question, and I was going to put an ask ATP, but it's very relevant to this article.
Dom asked, do you think non-pro users will notice the extra memory bandwidth in the M1 Max, or do you need to run pro workloads to feel the benefit over the M1 Pro?
We talked about that on the past shows.
The M1 Max has, you know, double, lots of stuff has double the GPU cores, has double, like, the video encoder decoders.
It also has double the memory bandwidth.
But as I said on that show...
Do you know what workloads you do that stress the memory bandwidth?
And that's a question that people will be asking.
Will I notice that?
Is a memory bandwidth a thing I would feel at all?
Or how do I know whether I should bother, you know, going up to the max if I'm not sure that any of those GPU cores?
So this Anantek article tries to answer that question.
So here are some choice quotes from it.
All right.
Using the CPU alone, meaning the power cores and the efficiency cores together, doesn't seem to be able to use more than 243 gigabytes per second of RAM bandwidth in the M1 Max.
So recall that the M1 Max has up to 400 gigabytes of memory bandwidth.
And it seems like just using the CPU, not the GPU or anything else on the system on a chip, you can only use a little bit more than half of that.
While 243 gigabyte per second is massive and overshadows any other design in the industry, it's still quite far from the 409 gigabytes per second the chip is capable of.
More importantly, for the M1 Max, it's only slightly higher than the 204 gigabyte per second limit of the M1 Pro.
So from a CPU-only workload perspective, it just doesn't appear to make sense to get the max if one is focused just on CPU bandwidth.
I don't know if this helps people make a decision, but you might know, okay, what do you, do you see your CPU cores maxed out?
If that's the case, the Max is not going to, even though it has theoretically double the memory bandwidth, it's not going to help you if you're just using the CPU.
So the article says, I imagine that workloads that stress the CPU, GPU, and media engines all at the same time would be able to take advantage of the full system memory bandwidth and allow the M1 Max to stretch its legs and differentiate itself from the M1 Pro and other systems.
So right away, if you're not planning on using like almost all the chip at the same time, the memory bandwidth advantage of the M1 Max is probably not important to you.
So the article goes on to compare the M1 Max and Pro with the ostensible competition in the marketplace.
It says the workloads that put the most memory pressure and stress DRAM the most all have multiple factors of performance advantage compared to the best Intel and AMD you have to offer.
So there's that qualifier of saying...
If you find a workload, synthetic or real, that uses a lot of memory bandwidth, the M1 Pro slash Max, I wish we had a name for that pair of them.
The better M1s stomp all over the competition.
This is quoting from the article.
The performance differences here are just insane and really showcase how far ahead Apple's memory system is in its ability to allow the CPUs to scale to such a degree in memory-bound workloads.
We noted how the M1 Mac CPUs are not fully able to take advantage of the DRAM bandwidth of the chip.
We can't help but ask ourselves how much better the CPUs would score if the cluster and fabric would allow them to fully utilize the memory.
So this is another unknown.
Like why can't just the CPUs use the bandwidth themselves?
What are the limitations of what they call the on-chip fabric that sort of weaves all these pieces together?
Because if you look at the chip diagram, you'll see like there's four independent memory interfaces as the ears on the Macs.
And you can see kind of what they're plumbed into.
And if you look at the, read the article, you'll see the description of like, it's like the plumbing, those pipes don't all go to the CPU, which is why the CPU alone can't use all the memory bandwidth because it doesn't really have a direct line to that.
So theoretically, if the fabric that weaves together all these pieces had more routes between the pieces,
Perhaps it could go better do better.
Maybe that's we'll see that in the larger chips.
We'll see So let's talk about the spec fp suite which is the the spec floating point benchmark In the spec fp suite the m1 max is in its own category of silicon with no comparison in the market It completely demolishes any laptop contender showcasing 2.2 times the performance of the second best laptop chip
The M1 Max even manages to outperform the 16-core 5950X, a chip whose package power is 142 watts, with the rest of the system quite above that.
It's absolutely absurd comparison and a situation we haven't seen the likes of.
So in particular aspects where these chips are strong, memory bandwidth in particular, but also like floating point stuff and benchmarks that use that memory bandwidth, these chips are absolutely amazing.
And the article goes on to describe like,
But how could that be?
Why, you know, what is it?
Is there something magic in these chips?
It's more about what Apple has decided to focus on when making its designs.
Again, quoting from the article, Apple's stark advantage in specific workloads here do make us ask the question how this translates into application use cases.
We'd never seen such a design before, so it's not exactly clear where things would land.
I think Apple has been rather clear that their focus with these designs is catering to content creation crowd, the power users who use large productivity applications, and
be it video editing, audio mastering, or code compiling.
These are all areas where the microarchitectural characteristics of the M1 Pro slash Max would shine and are likely vastly outperform any other systems out there.
So Apple has made these chips with specific strengths, and it's hard to know where those strengths, what those would do for you, but it's pretty clear that they're focused on the types of things that Apple thinks its customers will do with its chips.
Did I put the thing about gaming in here?
Maybe I didn't.
All right.
So this is a good time to mention that they benchmark a bunch of games, too.
You will be shocked to learn that is not where these ships do well.
But yeah, you can play games on a Mac.
And yeah, you saw that diagram where it's like, wow, it's as fast as the, you know, the NVIDIA 3080 laptop chip.
Like, that's all true.
But if you, first of all, there's not a lot of games that are even native to ARM.
So they're running all these games in Rosetta.
And second of all, they're not even very good ports.
Like they're Mac ports of older games that don't run very well on the Mac.
So it's very clear that Apple was not concentrating on making sure that PC games from five years ago are able to take advantage of all this computing power.
Because they're not.
It's there, and a really good sort of M1 native, well-done port or implementation of a game could absolutely take advantage of all this stuff.
But it's not what Apple concentrated on, mostly because there's just aren't a lot of good games for the Mac, which is a shame, but it's true.
So here's an example scenario from the folks who make Affinity Photo.
Affinity makes a bunch of apps.
In fact, I make all the designs for the shirts.
I make an Affinity, what are they called?
Affinity Designer?
affinity yeah affinity designer it's like an illustrator type thing um so there's a bunch of affinity apps i think they're really great uh they make mac and ios native versions of those and everything here are here's some support reports from andy summerfield who is the affinity photo lead that's just what his bio says lead what lead developer maybe anyway um first he had a twitter thread before the new laptops came out uh describing how affinity photo was originally created to deal with gpu stuff
And he said, in Affinity Photo, an ideal GPU would do three different things well.
High compute performance, fast on-chip bandwidth, and fast transfer on and off the GPU.
Back in 2009, when we made this plan, no GPU did all three things well, but we thought that eventually the industry would get there, so we took a risk and designed the entire architecture based on that assumption.
Then he says, things didn't go entirely to plan.
Basically, they designed this in 2009, and for years and years, there was no chip that did all of these things well.
Maybe there'd be one or two of them, but in particular,
fast transfer on and off the GPU, that's usually a bottleneck, right?
Because you could have fast on-ship, you know, VRAM between your GPU, but then you have to ship everything from main memory to the GPU and then it grinds in and sends it back.
And they designed the entire architecture expecting to be able to do that back and forth very quickly.
So fast forward to today, where Andy is testing the M1 Max with Affinity Photo.
This is from a tweet.
The M1 Max is the fastest GPU we have ever measured in Affinity Photo Benchmark.
It outperforms the AMD W6900X, a $6,000 300-watt desktop part, because it has immense compute performance, immense on-ship bandwidth, and immediate data transfer on and off the GPU.
He says, the GPU isn't the only big win here.
The vector multi-CPU score in the M1 Max is the highest we have ever measured for Affinity Designer users, as is the combined single GPU score for Affinity Publisher.
So in the right circumstances, in an application that is designed to take advantage of the things that this system on a chip does well,
In an actual application that people use, like Affinity Photo, not an artificial benchmark, but an actual shipping application, Affinity Photo, it's faster than the W6900X.
Again, a $6,000 GPU.
So, Apple definitely had certain applications in its sites, and if your applications...
play to the strengths of these chips, they can do amazing things with very little power.
But finally, as Paul Samaciu says, the only benchmark that really matters is extracting Xcode from its zip file.
If you're a developer, you know what this is.
And you know that when I said zip, I pronounced it with an X instead of a Z. But if you're not a developer, you might not know that one of the ways you can get Xcode is by downloading a file from Apple called Xcode, you know, version number .xip.
.xip is some compression format.
I don't know if it's Apple proprietary,
I think it's just a renamed zip that also has code signing, I think.
Or signing, you know, content signing.
Yeah, whatever it is.
It's a compressed file, right?
And when developers get a new version of Xcode, often they're in a hurry to decompress it and install it because they have to do a build to submit to the store.
So you download this .xip file, this zip file.
And then you decompress it and it's one of the most common times a Mac or iOS software developer feels their machine is slow because it takes forever.
One big tip, by the way, turn off Dropbox if you use their client for the reason we talked about two episodes ago with the FS events thing.
Or if you use Maestrol, you won't have that problem either.
yeah so why does it take so long well part of it is probably just cpu grinding and decompressing because it's a multi-gigabyte thing and it's decompressing but the other part of it is that it decompresses into like thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of tiny files right and doing anything with the file system making lots of files takes a lot of time that's why you don't want dropbox watching every file system event as it goes by because it's just going to put drag on your system right um
And you may be wondering, like, well, how does the M1 Macs help with that?
How do the new M1 Macs, including the one with the M1 Macs, help with that?
So obviously CPU helps with the decompression part, maybe.
Memory bandwidth, maybe.
But also, as we mentioned last time, the SSDs are faster in these things.
So here is the benchmark we care about.
If previously you had the fastest, best Mac laptop you could buy, 2019, was the 8-core the best you could get?
Yeah, 8-core i9 16-inch MacBook Pro.
And you're unzipping Xcode 13.1.
It would take 9 minutes and 34 seconds.
If you have one of the fancy new M1 Macs 16 inches, less than half that time.
4 minutes and 43 seconds.
So there you have it.
Or is that less than half?
Yeah.
In the benchmark, the only benchmark that matters, you will unzip Xcode twice as fast.
Wow.
That's amazing.
I'm excited.
Although, now that I think about that, how does it do it twice as fast?
The disks aren't twice as fast.
The new SSDs did get a lot faster in read performance.
I don't know if they're that much faster in write, but I think it's probably one of those things where you're just shuffling a ton of data around.
And so it probably stresses the bandwidth of the entire system, like memory bandwidth, cache lines, IO speed, obviously is going to be a big one.
But there's going to be like just stuff moving back and forth all over the place within the system.
So I would imagine like making everything kind of faster and higher bandwidth and increasing the caches everywhere and increasing the IO speed.
All of those things probably play into it.
Maybe there's some kind of like, since it's like a signed version, maybe verifying the signature.
There's some dedicated, I think, for that.
Anyway, it's faster.
These are fast machines.
They are very fast indeed.
All right.
Tell me about Jonathan Dietz and the Pro Display XDR and 120 Hz refresh rates.
Our resident graphics expert who writes us in about all sorts of graphic stuff wrote a very long email doing some math that I asked for last show about whether or not it would be possible to drive a Pro Display XDR at 120 hertz given the current interfaces that connect monitors to Macs.
So the first thing I did, uh, with Jonathan's permission is I put up the text of his email, uh, on a URL.
You can find a link in the show notes.
If you want to look through all the math, cause he did all the math, like longhand and showed his work.
Right.
And so if you want to know the gory details and where all this is coming from and learn a little bit about, uh,
I don't even know what these things are called, the 444, 442, the whole color component thing, chroma subsampling and all that.
I know about it from the TV space, but I don't actually know how you describe those things.
Do you guys know what I'm talking about with the 444 and the 422 and stuff?
I didn't know anything about it until I read this.
I know only the parts that I had to know to, like, transcode pirated videos.
Yeah.
Anyway, it's more commonly seen in the television world.
But it basically has to do with how much information you can throw away and still have the picture look decent in terms of the various channels.
In the world of video, we're talking about chroma and luminance, which is different than RGB.
Because if you separate the color from the brightness, you can save a lot of space.
So anyway, the Pro Display XDR, with the resolution that it has, the shipping product, the 6K screen, at 120 hertz at 444, which means not dropping any of the information on the floor, would require 78.61 gigabits per second to drive.
And no interface does that, right?
Yeah.
The maximum DisplayPort tunneling bandwidth with current DisplayPort interfaces that connect up to Mac video cards is 38.88 gigabits per second.
So you can see we have about half, a little bit more than half than what we would need.
But the whole point of DisplayStream compression and Chroma subsampling is to try to compress things down.
And they can actually compress things down to about half of what the size that...
they would normally be so it seems like if you're willing to give up quality which i probably don't think you are uh for at least for chroma subsampling on a screen you could in theory squeeze it down a single wire
With two wires, you could definitely drive it, but two wires, I don't think there's no support for two wires to go into the back of the Protis XDR.
So they'd have to make a, you know, a different interface for it or whatever.
So I would encourage you, if you care about this, to look at the document to see the math.
But the bottom line is...
that it seems unlikely that you would even want to drive the existing Pro Display XDR or something like it, 120 hertz over a single cable given current interfaces, because you would have to lose a lot of quality, which doesn't matter so much when you're watching a TV.
I think there's a link somewhere in his email that shows what is chroma subsampling.
It's basically throwing away data, which is fine if you're looking at a picture of a beach, but not so fine if you're looking at your menu bar because some of what it might have thrown away is the pixel data that defines the shape of the letters.
Like if you're looking at small text on a screen, you really want to be able to see all the individual pixels.
And if you throw away even just, you know, supposedly imperceptible data at very small feature sizes, you will notice that because you're sitting way closer to your computer screen.
So...
I feel bad that Jonathan wrote all this information and I really just wanted the bottom line question is like, is it technically possible in any feasible way?
And it seems like maybe, but probably not something that you would want.
And I really don't think Apple's going to ship a monitor with two wires coming out of the back of it.
I mean, they kind of did that, I think, on the inside of the original 5K iMac, but you never saw that.
yeah we'll also keep in mind like even if you had the two cable solution that would take the entire bandwidth of i believe two thunderbolt buses and most modern most apple computers have between two and i think at most four thunderbolt buses on like the mac pro maybe but you you know like the new uh macbook pros that were just released have three um that's why there's three thunderbolt ports and
assuming those all have that full bandwidth, but you'd also be consuming it, so that would basically reduce your capability of having any kind of peripherals using bandwidth to basically one port.
Or in the case of the MacBook Air or the 13-inch MacBook Pro, none.
So it's not a great solution in the era of today's Thunderbolt and DisplayPort standards.
But in the future, when these things presumably have increased bandwidth in their upcoming revisions, then we'll talk.
And Jonathan had one more thing he wanted to get off his chest, and I figure it's worth noting because I've heard this as well.
He says, and incidentally, because I've been seeing this all over the internets, the HDMI ports on the MacBook Pros being HDMI 2.0b does not point to any lack of IO bandwidth intrinsic to the new SoCs.
We talked about this last week.
I said that the three Thunderbolt ports...
were a limitation of the SoC.
And I was disappointed that the HDMI port wasn't a fancier standard, but they're not connected to each other.
They're just two separate decisions slash limitations.
Jonathan says, the HDMI port is almost certainly implemented using a DisplayPort 1.4a to HDMI 2.0b protocol converter because Apple chips only support DisplayPort output.
while there are various chips that support display port to hdmi 2.1 conversion apple's decision was most likely based on the availability reliability pricing or so other combination thereof right so yeah it is disappointing that doesn't support better hdmi standards but these machines were designed a while ago and maybe they just didn't have the parts available to do the conversion but what they would be converting for is display port coming off the chips and they're converting that with some other set of chips to an hdmi standard and
They went with 2.0b, which is not great.
This is, I mean, maybe we should have a topic on this for future shows.
Now that we've got these great laptops, what thing, what are sort of like obvious spec bump things they can do to improve them in the future?
I'm sure we touch on some of that when Marco talks about his experiences in a bit.
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Tell me about memory pressure, because Sean Woods wrote in about this.
Sean writes, I was listening to the latest ATP and I heard John's skeptical take on the 16 gigs of RAM in the MacBook that Marco ordered.
This sent me into a total tailspin as I had ordered the exact same config earlier this week and wanted to know if I had chosen poorly.
That's a reference, John.
I discovered that Apple recommends checking your Mac's memory pressure as a way to gauge whether you need more RAM for your Mac.
Would you recommend using memory pressure as a way of gauging likely RAM needs?
So how do you get here?
If you open up Activity Monitor and then at the top, you choose Memory.
At the bottom, there'll be a running-like graph of what your memory pressure on your machine is.
And that's how you look at it.
According to an Apple support document, yellow memory pressure means your computer might eventually need more RAM.
Red memory pressure means your computer needs more RAM.
And one of you is kind enough to put in here, I assume, John, the number of Macs... Oh, it was Margo.
Okay.
The number of Macs currently for sale with upgradable RAM.
Two, the 27-inch iMac and the Mac Pro.
Yeah.
I thought it was funny that they have this important document that says, your computer might eventually need more RAM.
And it's like, well, that means throw away the computer.
I mean, they're just saying it needs more RAM.
They didn't say it can get more RAM.
It just needs it, but it can't get it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I thought this was interesting.
I had never actually watched this before.
And I'm sure John will tell me why it doesn't matter in a second.
But I thought this was interesting.
And so I started watching my memory pressure graph on my Mac Mini that I've been using as my desktop, the 16 gig M1 Mac Mini.
And sure enough, it is basically always yellow, meaning my computer might eventually need more RAM.
So it was worth knowing that my quest for higher memory machines to eventually replace this desktop is not in vain, that I actually would benefit from that.
And so...
We'll get to some of my ideas later and how I might get there.
But that is definitely a need.
And I recommend if you think you might need a certain amount of RAM, run this, you know, run activity monitor in the corner for a while and glance over at the graph every so often and see like, is it yellow or red?
If it's always green, you probably don't need more RAM.
A lot of people were asking about memory stuff.
And like, I think the reason, I mean, Marco just touched on probably the main reason we all recommend in general getting more RAM is because it increases the life of the machine because you can't upgrade it later.
It's not like in the old days where, you know, if you ever need more RAM, you can install it.
And we suggest this because even if you look at your memory usage, which by the way, is a good idea, like actually measure, don't just assume, right?
That just tells you what you're doing today and how that affects your memory pressure.
You don't know if you're going to keep that laptop for five years or if you're going to keep your computer for 10 years like me,
you don't know what your RAM usage will be like years from now.
You just know what it's like today.
And because you can't upgrade it, and you can't upgrade the SSDs either, but you can add external storage, but the RAM, there's nothing you can do about it at all.
So if you want to lengthen the useful lifetime of the machine,
get more memory because you know you can never change it again and that will allow the mac to be viable for a longer period of time based on the assumption that ram usage tends to go up over time not stay level or go down the history of computing is more or less shown that uh you know kind of like induced demand on roads you add more ram software developers use it you open more chrome tabs whatever four years from now you'll probably be using more ram than you are today even if only by a little bit
But yeah, definitely do measure.
And in terms of this memory pressure graph being accurate, it's so difficult to measure this in a useful way.
Especially even with your gut, you're like, why don't I just tell if my computer feels slow, there's just so many reasons your computer can feel slow.
This is this is kind of a problem for everybody who uses technology.
People know when it's not satisfying them.
I don't like how this is working.
It's making me wait.
Something is wrong with it.
But beyond that, it's too much to ask of individuals to be able to diagnose exactly what is causing their computer to feel slow or be annoying or whatever.
And so graphs like this are better than nothing.
But just because you see it in the yellow, like my question would be like, yeah, but does your computer ever feel slow?
Because if it's yellow, but your computer never feels slow, maybe that tells you, you know, you're on the edge of something that bad can happen.
Or if your RAM usage is going to double in the next five years, then maybe you want to get more RAM.
But just this is kind of like a, you know, just a rule of thumb, like for a laptop or for a computer in general, if you want it to last longer,
On machines where you can't upgrade the RAM ever, ever, ever, get more RAM than you think you need, and that'll be an insurance policy for the future.
Yeah, I agree with that wholeheartedly.
So I wanted to do some quick follow-up on pants that have the dedicated side leg iPhone pocket, which is not to prevent the problem that Merlin thought it was preventing.
It really is to prevent the problem of it just like swinging on the forward part of my leg.
Anyway, so I talked about this in the past.
I mentioned how a lot of people had recommended pants by a brand that I think is pronounced cool.
It's K-U-H-L, and the U has the two dots over it.
Is that the umlaut or is that something else?
Yes, it's an umlaut, I believe, or umlaut.
I'm sorry, Germany.
But chapters are great.
Yeah, chapters are great.
I actually did order a pair of these, and I tried them out and everything.
And they're fine, but the problem with these pants, besides that they don't look very attractive, literally every single option that people have sent in of pants or shorts that have like a side leg phone pocket...
They're all, I would say, utilitarian.
Tactical, you might call them.
Many of them are specifically tactical, yes.
Or it's like workout gear, like workout shorts.
That's...
I don't like to wear tactical or athletic wear as my everyday pants.
I, I, I'm, you know, I'm a boring jeans person.
I like jeans, uh, regular looking decent jeans, stretchy, ideally.
Um, so I have not been tempted by the looks of pretty much anything anybody has sent in with, with such pockets.
Uh, however, uh,
Um, the cool pants are no exception.
Um, but anyway, so, so looks wise, you know, not really what I'm going for, but I decided, let me try one pair and, and just see like the utility of it.
Maybe I'll find use for it.
But the issue I have with it is that, and maybe this is just the, the ones that I got.
Um, but the, the side pocket for the phone is,
is actually so low down the leg that not only is it kind of awkward to actually reach the phone in and out of the pocket, but also as you walk, it basically just slams into your leg over and over again.
So I think I just traded one problem for another one.
Anyway, so this category of pants that have special phone pockets so it rests on the side of your leg instead of the front of your leg, so far this seems to be an unsolved problem.
And I think I know why.
If you look at the construction of most pants, usually it's basically just like a front piece and a back piece with a seam that runs down the side of your leg.
And I think it's probably difficult from a construction perspective to make a pocket that rests on that seam on the inside as opposed to like on the front side, really.
So I understand why it is this way.
Doesn't really solve my problem, but instead I'm just slowly getting used to having this giant brick of a phone in my pocket.
So anyway, my tactical pants situation is not really being solved.
I'm just slowly forgiving the problem and just living with it.
i still don't fully understand the problem to be clear about your merlin reference before he thought your phone was hitting you in the junk but that's apparently not happening um but then like the problem is what i don't like things touching the front the more fronty part of my legs it's i think it it definitely makes walking inconvenient if the phone starts like swiveling over towards like the front i feel like instead of the side and i think i think it looks ridiculous as well how does it make walking more difficult it's just your thigh your thigh has no joints in it it's just it's unjointed
I don't know.
I think it is not the way you're supposed to put stuff in your pockets.
Stuff in your pockets, I think it's supposed to rest more to the side.
But because these phones are so big and heavy, they just kind of migrate as you walk to whatever is the most ideal gravity position, which tends to be more in the front.
Maybe you need tighter jeans.
These are already pretty snug.
I gained some weight this summer because I started going to restaurants because it became okay again.
So, yeah, I don't know.
I don't think I do.
I think my jeans are pretty snug.
Those back pockets are always there just waiting for you.
Oh, goodness.
I can't imagine.
All right.
So we should move on and talk about new stuff, at least some of us.
John, you got some AirPods 3.
Tell me about them.
I did.
I got my AirPods.
Boy, the personalization on them is so bad.
It's all caps.
I mean, they showed you a preview on the side.
I knew what it was going to look like, but it's just comical.
I really just sort of gotten like a little emoji or something, but I get my full name on them just because like the whole point of having, there's two points.
One is to differentiate around the house so you know which little case is yours, right?
But the second is, if I lost them somewhere and someone found them and that person was feeling nice, I want them to be able to find me.
So if I just put my initials on it, they can't find me.
But if I put my full name and they type it into Google, there's a shot they can find me.
So far, I haven't lost them.
But anyway, I got my full name on the case.
It's fine.
So my impressions of the new AirPods 3.
The size and the shape was my major concern.
Like, are these gonna fit nice in my ears?
I've been using the original AirPods for years and years.
I love them, they fit my ears perfectly.
Would these fit?
Because these are shaped entirely different.
There's nothing, no part, no panels, body panels are shared, as they say in the auto industry.
It's an entirely new thing.
It's very much like the AirPods Pro, but not quite like them either.
But it's similar shape.
They don't have a little softening that goes in your ear.
They're more like the old AirPods.
They're just hard plastic things that go in your ear, right?
So when I first put them in, I'm like, oh, this is great.
They fit perfectly.
They feel even more secure in my ear than the old ones in terms of like if I shake my head around, how much should they wiggle?
I didn't do the taking – I should have done this before the show.
I didn't do like the taking the shirt on and off with the AirPods test.
which the original ones basically fail because they have long stems and they aren't in my ears that type of these felt very secure very snug in my ear so great that's a pro move yeah it's it's hard to eat like even with the airpod pros which have the short stems that's a difficult thing to pull off without one of them flopping out right but it's a good test of whether like how snug they are in your ear right
That said, I wore them for, I've been wearing them since I got them for a few days or whatever.
And I've seen this exact complaint from a bunch of other people who presumably are like me or using the original ones and now have the AirPods 3.
They press up against more parts of your ear.
Like, they have a larger volume.
Like, they're just bigger.
There's a bigger thing inside your ear.
Ignoring the stems.
I was talking about, like, the pod part, right?
That part is bigger, and it presses against more parts of your ear than the old one.
And I think the old ones kind of, like, just hung in my ear.
That's why they were a little bit loosey.
Like, there was more air around them.
These ones have contact points on, like...
the top, the side, like they have more contact points, which is why they're more secure, but it feels like there's something in my ear sort of pressing outward.
And it's not painful or annoying, but I have, maybe I'm hypersensitive to it now, but when I take them out, I can feel where they were touching my ears a little bit, whereas I don't remember that sensation before.
Or maybe I'm just noticing that now they're touching a top part instead of hanging down from my ears.
They also press up against the top part.
So far, not a deal breaker.
It's only been a few days.
But it made me consider a couple times, should I order a backup pair of the regular ones just in case?
But I figure I have plenty of time.
If they're still selling the old ones, they're going to sell them for at least probably six months or a year.
So I have time to think about it.
But anyway, that's the size and the shape.
Very secure footing in my particular ear.
Maybe feel a little bit big, and I'm concerned that over, like, the long haul, I will find it annoying.
The longest I've ever worn them is, like, cleaning up the kitchen time, you know, or, like, going for a walk time.
So I haven't even worn them for, like, an hour to stretch yet, right?
Or actually, maybe.
I think I watched something on the iPad, but it was at least an hour.
But jury's still out, but so far, so good.
Second thing, squeezing the little stubby things instead of tapping.
not a fan i knew i wouldn't be i wanted to give it a chance interesting like here's the problem in this scenario is where i want to quickly first of all i have double tap or whatever you know tapping the air pod set to stop the playback that's what i use it for right and it's always when someone in my house comes over and wants to say something to me and i can't hear them because i'm listening to music or a podcast i gotta go tap tap what you know like you want to be able to do it quickly right and
The first problem is obviously a habit.
They come up to me.
They tap me on the shoulder.
They say something.
I tap my ear.
Nothing happens.
That's just a habit.
But I've done it like 19 times now.
I just tap my ear and it's like, oh, nothing happens.
Sometimes I tap it twice until I remember, oh, yeah, tapping does nothing on these anymore, which is annoying.
They're so huge.
Put an accelerometer in there.
Anyway.
But the real problem is when I do remember, how quickly can I take one of my hands, which may or may not be covered in dish soap, and bring it up to my ear and find that little stubby little thing sticking out and then get it between my little fingertips and squeeze it?
it's tricky because the little stubby thing is like against my ear it doesn't stick out and it doesn't extend down and it's so tiny and it's not like squishy and you can kind of squeeze it anywhere you can squeeze it more in more places than you think you can and it does have the nice little click to know that you did it all that is good but squeezing it i find very
difficult and fidgety whereas tapping i could do literally with an oven mitt on i could do it outside of a winter hat people have talked about wearing helmets and being able to just smack the side of the helmet and it would trigger the accelerometers that's all out the window when you got to find that little tiny thing and squeeze it so i'm a little bit sad about that but again only been a few days i'm willing to give it a try
And the main reason I'm willing to give it a try is these sound so much better than the original AirPods.
Not that I didn't, mostly didn't listen to music.
I just mostly listened to podcasts and stuff on them, but you can tell that the sound quality is, I mean, the volume is louder.
The bass is better.
The reproduction is better.
Like,
They're just better sounding, as they should be.
Like the original AirPods are what, like four or five years old now?
And these are just bigger.
They're just plain bigger.
They probably have bigger drivers in there.
And then also I think the battery life is probably going to end up being better.
I have no idea because I haven't come close to sort of draining the battery on these.
But yeah, they're better headphones.
So that's why I'm going to stick it out.
um and the case yeah i don't like the case the case is bigger uh i prefer the old case uh but i tested the mag safeness of the case and there are definitely more magnetic sort of alignment points than there were before and i did some testing with like old versus new on my little apple mag safe puck thing and it's like the old case had maybe two ill-defined magnet points that would stick or you know i don't know if they're magnet points they're probably just metal things right because the magnet the ring around the mag safe puck is magnetic
So it felt like it had only two, and that didn't really...
give it kind of a firm placement it was just kind of like wobbly just on those two things the new one has like four clear points you put it on the mag safe puck and it has four clear points it still isn't kind of like spring into place but when you get it into place it is more secure so apple did actually change some aspect of the design to be better with the mag safe but almost too good because now if you just like i don't have i don't have marco's like suction stuff sticking my puck to my nightstand so if you're not careful and you go to lift the
air pods case off of the puck it'll take the puck with it that's how strong the magnets are if you don't like sort of get your fingers underneath it so overall i give a tentative thumbs up good sound quality so far no deal breakers uh but i kind of miss tapping and it's just a question of whether the ergonomics will be adequate for me um and you know and i won't be able to leave them because i'll get too used to the good sound quality
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We should talk about the MacBook Pro.
Marco made mention that his was dragged underwater for a mile in order to get to his house this afternoon.
Not quite.
Mine... So I have the first-worldiest of first-world problems.
My MacBook Pro...
has been sitting somewhere in Shenzhen for like three days now, I think, or something like that.
It was originally due next week sometime.
I forget exactly when it was, actually.
But it shipped a couple of days ago as we recorded this on Wednesday night.
And UPS was like, hey, it's on its way.
It'll be here Monday.
And Apple said, well, maybe Wednesday, as in a week from when we're recording right now.
But UPS said, no, no, no, no, no, it'll be Monday.
And actually still says, no, no, no, it'll be Monday.
But it just kept sitting in Shenzhen and sitting and sitting over a day, over two days, over three days, if I'm not mistaken.
Just sitting, chilling out in Shenzhen.
Doesn't want to leave home, apparently.
And I was getting increasingly embittered about this because I want my treat.
I really am excited for this.
I really want my treat.
Is that so much to ask?
I don't buy computers very often.
I buy them more often than John, but considerably less often than Marco.
Well, that's not hard.
On either side of that.
That's very true.
You're exactly right.
It was really difficult to thread this needle, I tell you why.
But anyway, I just want my treat.
And a friend of mine, Simon, pointed me to a MacRumors post that was put up this morning.
MacBook Pro shipments being delayed due to UPS mechanical issues.
And I've heard conflicting reports over exactly what's going wrong, but one way or another, it seems like UPS just doesn't have enough planes to ship all the stuff they need to ship.
So my MacBook Pro is sitting in China for a while.
Maybe it'll leave at some point.
I presume it will.
Don't know when.
Y'all, I'm really trying to find some chill about this issue.
I'm coming up short, though.
I really don't have a lot of chill right now.
And I should, because really this doesn't matter.
And I'm extremely appreciative of the fact that I can get one and that it's eventually going to show up.
But patience is not my strong suit, gentlemen, and I'm really running low on chill on this issue.
So I did go to the store.
yesterday and i went to see what builds they had in stock they didn't have anything that was close enough to what i ordered that i was willing to just impulse buy on the spot but nevertheless i did quickly handle both the 16 and 14 inch machines i didn't play with them in terms of like software very much but in terms of physical design and whatnot i did hold on to them you know to lift it up spin it around and so on
The one thing I think I should note right away is that as compared to my Intel MacBook Pro, I didn't feel like they were that dramatically heavier.
My understanding is as compared to an M1 MacBook or certainly MacBook Air or perhaps even a MacBook Pro.
that it is quite a bit heavier.
And Marco, you can correct me in a moment here.
But compared to my Intel machine, it was actually roughly the same.
Other than that, it looks beautiful.
I like the new design.
I love those ports hanging out there and the screen looked great, but I didn't have it like side to side or side by side with anything else.
Uh, so I, I didn't, I don't have really good comparisons.
It occurred to me well after I left that, uh, I must be a professional podcasters because I didn't even think to like open up Safari and go scrolling to see what the 120 Hertz was like.
It just did not even cross my eye.
Okay.
So I feel a little better.
what you should have done is gone to the screensaver and see something in hdr because i think like you said oh the screen i can't tell because i don't have anything side by side if you were to bring up something in hdr as in not the ui you would notice the difference and one easy way to do that with the built-in thing is well isn't it built in maybe it's not i'm thinking of apple tv anyway if you use the aerial screensaver and tell it to show hdr video only and turn that on suddenly you have your screen filled with hdr video and it will really pop you won't need like a side-by-side comparison you will notice the difference
I can't imagine Apple shipping a screensaver for a laptop that runs on batteries that would show HDR content continuously.
There's no way they would do that.
In that case, it's actually kind of hard to find HDR content because none of the UI is going to be HDR.
You need a video or a photo.
Maybe they have some HDR photos if you launch the Photos app.
Just take a photo with a modern iPhone that can shoot HDR photos and just view it.
Yeah, but you do need something with a highlight or something that's going to really show that off.
But I think that's where the screen difference, you'll be able to see that without a side-by-side comparison.
It's just so much brighter.
Yeah, that's a good point.
And by the way, real-time follow-up, I was saying Shenzhen.
I meant Shanghai.
I'm sorry.
And it has been sitting – I don't know if this is actually my local or their local, but it's been sitting in Shanghai since 4.13 a.m.
on Monday.
So it's been two days that it's been – well, almost three at this point that it's been sitting there.
And yeah, it eventually will show up at my house, I'm sure.
But I'm very sad, y'all.
So Marco, let me live vicariously through you as I weep quietly and perhaps on mute.
How good is it?
I really don't know yet.
Fair.
So part of that is because of the aforementioned issues with just getting it here during a big storm and my town is flooded and everything.
So it's – and by the way, not like a flood that anybody has to feel sorry for.
This is just what happens in a beach town on the offseason.
It's – nothing's –
ruined or anything.
Anyway, so issue number one is that I haven't had it for very long.
Issue number two is that for the first time I think ever, Migration Assistant totally failed me.
And so I have nothing on it yet.
All I did so far was...
Get whatever I could set up so I could run my Xcode comparison building Overcast.
And so I could see how much more quickly does it build Overcast than my M1 Mac Mini and MacBook Air.
Because what I want to know with this computer is...
Do I want to use it as my desktop until Apple makes a faster desktop than this?
Because my current thinking on that, which you talked a little bit about this on Under the Radar today as well, my current thinking on that is that...
Chances are, based on the rumors and based on Apple tea leaf reading, that they're probably done releasing hardware for this year.
And they are almost certainly, if they're not done releasing hardware, they're almost certainly done releasing Macs for this year.
And the soonest I can imagine there being
A Mac Mini or any other kind of desktop Mac with these chips in it or better is at least next spring.
And as we discussed, it might even be next fall.
So we have probably between 6 and 12 months where the fastest computers Apple makes are going to be MacBook Pros.
That's the most likely outcome here.
And so I decided, well, I want to see how fast is this?
Because after last show, we were talking in the after show, and Casey and John convinced me maybe I should have ordered higher specs and maybe I should be using this possibly as a desktop, clamshell mode or whatever else.
And I had a good experience doing that with my M1 MacBook Air last fall when I first got it before I got the Mac Mini.
And so I know that that works really well on the M1s.
And so I'm like, all right, well, fine.
So I placed a just-in-case order because it was a while out for a more decked-out 14-inch, 64 gigs of RAM, 4 terabyte storage, the 32-core, you know, top-end CPU.
Because I'm like, well, just in case I end up getting this and wanting something faster, then at least I'm ahead of the order queue a little bit.
And that's not going to ship until the end of November, allegedly.
So I have a month roughly before it's even going to get here.
If yours shows up before mine, your second one shows up before mine, I'm going to come up and steal it.
So put it under lock and key if it does show up.
I'm telling you now.
Bring some tall boots.
Before Marco gets to the end of his story, which may or may not have a happy ending, I just want to warn people that if you ever think of trying to do this, you say, oh, it says it's going to arrive at the end of November, so I don't have to worry about it.
You do have to worry about it because kind of like progress bars in our past discussion, Apple doesn't know the future.
And even though when you order it, it says this is the date range your thing may be coming.
Sometimes, in fact, fairly often, that date is not the date your thing comes.
It could come days or even weeks earlier than you expected.
And they think that's a good thing.
And if you are relying on the fact that I have a week, I have a month to decide whether I have to cancel this order, you may just wake up one day with your computer that you thought you still had another two weeks to cancel sitting on your doorstep.
So be careful.
Yeah, but I only have two weeks to return this one.
And so and I know that I have most likely four or so weeks before I get the higher spec one if I don't cancel that order yet.
So I kind of have to make a decision like what do I do here?
I do love a lot about this computer.
I definitely do not want the 16 inch for myself.
I love the 14 inch size.
It is great.
And I think if, again, if I were using the laptop as a laptop, as my main computer, I would get a 16 inch, no question, because I would want the extra screen space.
But because I'm using it either to most likely drive a display in clamshell mode, in which case its size doesn't matter at all, or when I'm going to take it somewhere, you know, then I'm going to want it to be mid-sized, not maximum sized, then the 14-inch, I think, remains the size for me.
But anyway...
So going back to trying to get this to work, it did eventually work in the sense that I gave up on trying to migrate my M1 MacBook Air to it.
I don't know if you have seen the target disk mode equivalent for M1s.
It's actually different.
You have to boot into the recovery mode, and then there's basically a little share disk app that you run that you type in all the passwords, and it makes the disk available.
I tried to get this to work with a Thunderbolt cable and USB 3.0 cable in every port configuration I could figure out, and I could not get the new MacBook Pro to recognize the MacBook Air in its, whatever it's called, target disk mode at all.
It just wouldn't show up as the available disk in the setup wizard thing.
So then I tried, okay, I'll boot with MacBook Air in regular mode, and I'll launch Migration Assistant and try to get that to work.
And migration assistant said I couldn't authenticate the current user and failed.
And I'm like, that's weird.
Okay.
I rebooted.
Same thing.
Okay.
I guess this isn't happening today.
So anyway, so I just set it up as new and I ran some tests.
Um, and I don't have, I have almost nothing on it yet, but I, I just basically airdropped a bunch of files to airdropped my version of Xcode, my, my checkout directories for Overcast got, you know, got the signing credentials over there, which was a wonderful pain in the butt as it always is.
But, oh, well, um, that's, that's not the M1's fault.
And, uh, finally was able to, uh, build some stuff.
Now, we've seen benchmarks for Xcode all over the map on basically how much faster these are than the M1s.
And I should clarify also, the MacBook Pro I have here to test today is an M1 Pro, not an M1 Max.
It is the 10-core, so it's the M1 Pro with all of its parts working, but it is still the M1 Pro, and it only has 16 gigs of RAM, John.
um so which yes i do regret thanks thanks john so um the building building overcast in its current version uh from a clean build on my m1 mac mini my desktop takes 30 seconds that same thing on the m1 pro takes 19 seconds so it's 36 faster nice
Now, a lot of people don't do clean builds very often.
So I figured, let me try something a little more realistic.
Let me try an incremental build.
I did two incremental builds.
One of them that changes a file that's included by a lot of files in the project, my Appearance Manager file.
Lots of stuff uses this.
So when I change anything in that file, it has to rebuild a lot of other files.
That on the M1 took 20 seconds.
On the M1 Pro took 13 seconds.
So 31% faster.
And then I did, after that, the most common thing, a very small incremental change.
This was changing one view controller, but this was a Swift file this time.
So one Swift view controller file.
So the most simple incremental build that you could probably do.
M1, six seconds.
M1 Pro, four seconds.
So...
It is faster.
It is a decent amount faster, and these are gains that I want.
And in addition to that 30% to 50% faster build time for my actual work that I actually do with my actual project, in addition to that, it also has the higher RAM ceiling available.
So what I am definitely going to try is getting this higher spec machine in and running it in clamshell mode as my desktop again.
As I mentioned earlier, I had a great experience doing that with the MacBook Air, the M1 MacBook Air.
And so I know the M1 machines can do clamshell mode reliably.
I know they're good at it.
I know it's a totally fine experience.
And then my plan is to kind of go a bit of a different direction with what the role of this machine is.
Since it'll basically be a desktop, great, but...
And I mentioned last week, I enjoy having my MacBook Air laptop as our around-the-house machine doing FaceTime workouts with our trainer and running any kind of Zoom call we have to have with the school or with the teacher or whatever.
I love having that machine for that.
And we do those things often enough that I don't want to disrupt my desktop every time we have to do those things.
We do those things like multiple times a week.
And so it's a pain to have to take my whole desktop out and do that.
So I want to have a lower-powered laptop available to me in the house.
So I think what I should do is...
is actually return this one or mail it to Casey.
Wait for my high spec one to come in or finagle one from the Apple store.
I'll get to that in a second.
Wait for that to come in.
And then when that comes in, use that as my desktop and just keep my M1 MacBook Air as the workout and around the house laptop.
And then when I go on a trip where I might want to get some work done, take my desktop laptop with me.
you know because i wouldn't be moving it that often it would be you know maybe once a month i'd be doing that uh as opposed to you know four or five times a week and i think that will be a really good solution until i can get a pro desktop in which case maybe i won't even want it anymore because maybe the laptops will be close enough and so good and maybe i'll love this lifestyle where i can just pick up my desktop laptop and bring it with me on trips but otherwise it basically behaves like a desktop
So I think I'm going to try that approach.
I think it is the more reasonable one than having two of these MacBook Pros.
The downside is I might be without this MacBook Pro for two to three weeks while I wait for the new one.
But I think ultimately, I think that's the better move.
Now...
That being said, if I don't keep this one I just got and I use the MacBook Air, I am really going to miss these speakers in the new one because the speakers are good.
I mean, again, good for laptop speakers.
We're grading on a big curve here, a really tinny, metal, sharp curve here.
But the speakers in the new one are significantly better.
The screen is brighter.
And I do so clearly see the difference in a scaled pixel mode versus a non-scaled pixel mode.
You can look at the two screens side by side, and it's clearly visible that the MacBook Air screen next to the MacBook Pro screen, the Air screen looks a little bit blurry.
You can just see it.
You can see it on the edges of all the text.
Just look at any sharp line, any text or anything, and you can see, compare it between the two,
The one that is not running the scaling mode is sharper.
And I'm so happy that they finally fixed that.
So anyway, I actually didn't instantly notice the 120 hertz thing.
Maybe I've lost my eyesight for that in the last two weeks.
some apps have to be updated for like there's been some reports of like will you actually see 120 hertz in your mac app and it depends like so i i mean i'm assuming safari or whatever would do it so if that's what you were looking at then you probably should have noticed it but it's um but don't expect to see it everywhere because i think especially mac apps well same thing in ios apps you have a choice whether you want your animation to even take advantage of 120 hertz or not
So I don't know what every individual app has chosen to do that's either part of the iOS or otherwise.
Yeah, I mean, this was Safari that I was testing in.
But again, I've had this for such a short time.
So I will do more testing and report back next week.
But yeah, in the meantime, this thing is really great.
It's fast.
And I'm looking forward to having more RAM when I get the big one in.
That being said, so to get the big one in, I have two options.
I can either wait up to another month for my order to come in.
Or I can go to an Apple store tomorrow and get almost the exact spec I'm waiting for.
Because as Casey mentioned, the stores are actually stocking two high-end configurations.
If you want the M1 Max, you know, top end CPU, 32 core, so top end CPU, and if you want 64 gigs of RAM, you can get the 14 inch with a two terabyte hard drive or SSD, excuse me, or the 16 inch with a four terabyte SSD.
Those two configurations are widely being stocked in stores for same day pickup.
So if that's what you're looking for, you don't have to wait.
You can go right into a store and buy it like almost any day.
The downside is that what I wanted was a 14 inch top CPU, 64 gigs of RAM and a four terabyte SSD, not a two.
Hey, it's me.
Right.
The Casey computer, right?
So I, so if I want to do this, so my options are either wait a month to get exactly what I want or immediately get either what I want, but too big of a laptop to get the 16 inch or what I want, but too small of an SSD.
Now, I think I'd be most happiest with the too small of an SSD solution.
And so I went today through my M1 Mac Mini, which itself is two terabytes also.
I've been living on two terabytes for a year.
It's been fine.
It's been a little tight sometimes.
But for the most part, I do okay.
And then I occasionally run low on space and I have to go be responsible and clean stuff up.
Today I decided, let me see how much I can clean stuff up exactly.
How much could I live with here?
Because one thing I wanted to find out is, I keep my photos, in order to save space on that 2TB internal drive, I keep my Apple iCloud photo library on an external SSD that's just always connected.
But if I'm going to have a desktop laptop, I don't want any external SSDs to be in use.
I want to just take it and not have to take any drives or disconnect there and eject there or anything.
So I would probably move the external SSD storage to basically this Mac mini being like a home server in a closet or something.
And it could have the external to stay with it, and it could offer network shares.
Fine.
But I don't want my photo library to be served that way.
That would be a little odd.
So I want my photo library to be able to move locally onto the laptop.
So I figured, well, how big is my photo library exactly?
And could I actually fit all this on my laptop?
How hard could it be, right?
Two terabytes is a lot of space.
So I go, I look at the external drive and my actual iCloud photo library, and it says it's 76 gigs.
And I thought, that's less than I thought.
And I currently had like 200 gigs free on the main drive.
So I'm like, I could just move it back.
Like, I don't actually need to have it external.
I mean, it would leave me with only about 100 gigs free.
That's a little tight.
Let me see what else I can free up.
So I launched one of these trusty disk space viewing apps to scan my drive and see where is all my space going exactly.
And I've used many of these apps before.
The one I typically use is called Space Gremlin, more specifically Space Gremlin Pro, because I like the way it presents the space better than the rest.
I find it easier to find stuff and prune what you want to prune from it.
But I also tried the same thing with, what's this called, Gram Perspective, which is, I think, even older, and I think it's open source.
So I tried that, and...
When I scan my 2TB driver's base Gremlin Pro, I see my user's directory, which is 700 gigs.
Miscellaneous app stuff, about 200 gigs free.
And then I see restricted files, 900 gigs.
What?
And I thought, huh, that's weird.
Let me see.
And I'm running it in full root read access mode.
It should be able to see everything on the file system.
Did you give it full disk access?
I did.
Full disk access and root.
This is why you choose Grand Perspective, because what the heck is restrictive files?
That's why I try Grand Perspective.
I thought, hey, maybe SpaceGremlin hasn't been updated recently for all this new crazy security stuff they're doing.
Let me try Grand Perspective.
So Grand Perspective has...
a giant gray block that is about that size and it says miscellaneous used space cool this is like the gray other bar that i was just joking about in the ios storage manager here's so i decided why don't i look at the actual built-in storage manager of the os before you go to that i would say the reason one of the reasons i use grand perspective is if you see any block you don't understand you can right click on it and just have it show you where that thing is in the finder
Copy path.
Slash.
Hmm.
Cool.
Okay.
Do you have the little info drawer?
I'm launching Grand Perspective now because I use this all the time.
Hopefully this is not going to hose my recording.
Yes, please scan my four terabyte drive while I record a podcast.
Yeah.
But like you can change the like there's like a sidebar that comes out and you can change it to change it to focus and then focus and then mouse over the part that you care about and see what the focus thing says.
Folder in view, slash, selected area, miscellaneous used space.
What?
1.04 terabytes.
I mean, did you look at TMUTIL to see if you've got local snapshots?
So I looked up, how do you remove time machine snapshots or APFS snapshots?
And it said basically turn off time machine or uncheck the automatic backup thing and just wait a few minutes.
It'll delete stuff.
And sure enough, it did.
It freed up, I think, about 50 or 100 gigs doing that.
So I thought, okay, that's something.
So I'm now, somehow, I'm to the point where SpaceGrammon thinks I have about 200 gigs free.
Finder thinks I have 600 gigs free.
And when I went to the system information storage tab and had that tell me where things were, it says I have 850 gigs of photos.
So I thought, OK, this is interesting because I know my photos are most likely larger than 70 gigs as they are on my external drive.
I have tons of space missing on my main drive that is somewhere and nothing seems to know where it is except the system storage panel, which says my photo library is 850 gigs, which I mean, that sounds high, but that actually sounds way more plausible than 70 gigs.
If you just go to your .photo library file and do get info, command I in the finder, what does it say?
It's 70 gigs.
No.
Yes.
And I dove into it.
I show package contents, dive in, look for all the files and all the random subdirectories that are named under it.
And nothing in there is very old and it's all iPhone photos.
Are you sure you're looking at the right photo library?
Yes.
I even double-checked the preference screen in the Photos app.
Like, where is it pointing?
Show in Finder.
So what I think is happening is somehow it is storing the bulk of my photo library somewhere on the main drive that is considered restricted space that none of these apps can see.
Do you have optimized storage on?
No.
This doesn't make any sense.
This is supposed to be downloading all of my photos.
So somehow I have photos in some kind of state where I have no idea where my photos are, basically.
It thinks it has them.
I can scroll all the way back to 2004, and I can see my old photos.
They're all there.
It doesn't seem like it has to download them.
I can't find any kind of show and finder equivalent in photos.app.
I don't know if there is one, but I couldn't find it for all these old photos.
Somehow, this is in a strange state.
My plan is...
I think before I get this laptop, I have to figure out where the heck my photos are, how to consolidate them into an actual storage system, then into the file system where I can see them and see how big my photo library is because I have no clue.
And then I guess redo this whole thing and go from there.
But this has been quite a journey today, trying to figure out where the heck are my photos and where is all my disk space.
And I don't know.
I haven't rebooted yet.
Maybe I should just reboot and this will all fix itself.
Who knows?
But this is very, very strange.
Well, I wish I could help you with Grand Perspective, but it's still scanning my hard drive.
I have a lot of files.
Yeah, I'm surprised.
Yeah, you know, I'm feeling pretty smug about my photo setup over here.
You came over to us.
I know.
But the one canonical photo library is still being maintained, and it doesn't have anything to do with Apple.
I know where my photos are.
I'm just saying.
I haven't had these problems.
Grand Perspective shows you my photo library.
You don't have multiple users on your Mac, do you?
I sure do.
Well, but do you have – who owns the photo library?
You're looking at your photo library, right?
Yeah.
Because one thing I was going to say about Grand Perspective is if you run it on an account that doesn't own the photo library, it won't show up there.
Like you have to run it as each user to see like their files essentially.
You know, it's just – as far as I can tell, it's just me.
Yeah.
Yeah, but you're looking at your photo library, right?
Yes.
Because I have a situation where my photo library, I do have a photo library.
There's not much in it, but it's mine.
But the quote-unquote family one is in my wife's account.
So I had to switch to my wife's account, run Grand Perspective there, and I see the photo library.
And even on her computer where the photo library is external, it's on an external disk.
And I know how big it is because the disk is whatever, you know, one terabyte.
And there's like...
400 gigabytes free so it's 600 right that's how big it is you know and then as it grows it slowly fills the desk right i haven't actually done get info on the photo library i guess i just always know either based on the grand perspective block or based on how much it's filled the one terabyte drive but there's no getting around the fact that if you have a terabyte drive you know you know how much space it's taking up because it slowly starts inching up to be filling the entire drive i used to have it on a 500 gig drive and it filled that that's why i had to get a bigger one so if my scan ever completes i'll see what i can get
like i don't i don't think this is the case of tips user account having a giant photo library because like her home directory is only 100 gigs so i i can't imagine that she also would have like a mysterious terabyte of photos sitting somewhere that like but like i think i think the answer is obvious the answer is that these are my photos somewhere in this space somewhere on my file system that i can't access from anything but they show up in the photos app
Yeah, that's weird.
Like, cause I mean, obviously on my main computer, the photos library is on the main drive.
So there's no weirdness about like which drive would be contributing the storage.
But on my wife's computer, the photo library is on an external SSD and it wouldn't fit on it.
It doesn't fit on her internal SSD at this point because she's got one terabyte internal and one terabyte external.
All right.
Finally, grand perspective.
Finally finished.
Let's see what it has to say.
Bring open the little, where is the little side panel thing?
it's on the the info icon on the upper right it's weird it's these are not standard icons or retina it used to be a drawer back in the day that's what i was thinking um and now i would go to focus uh there's my iMovie library which is surprisingly huge because it's all this destiny movies
wow there's my photos library and it's like the second biggest block next to my movie one and it's 183 gigs and it's photos library dot photos library and yeah it's yeah that's what i would expect like that's but i don't see anything gray like i don't see anything unallocated space or anything like that there's a a bunch of vms from vmware those are big uh
some streaming video files.
Yeah, no, I look at this all the time because I'm always, I'm forever like trying to clear out disk space because otherwise I would just fill it up and I have never run into any surprises and never seen any block that it didn't explain what it was.
yeah so this is this has been this is one yet another reason why i haven't spent a lot of time with a new macbook pro yet because i as i started figuring out stuff on my desktop i'm like wait what's going on where are these photos like now i'm running all these disk utility apps trying to figure out what the heck is going on you should look at tmutil though is there easier ways to deal with snapshots than tmutil just look at the man page
All right, yeah.
And also, if you could, for my edification, take a screenshot of you in focus mode mousing over your mystery block in grand perspective.
I want to see the info window and the screenshot.
Just take a full screen screenshot and put it in Slack or something.
We can move on after this.
I thought that you would enjoy the frustrating aspect of it.
Although, I have to say, on my local hard drive, again, this is excluding the quote-unquote real photo library, just in my account, one of the largest growing blocks is this tiny little village of little tiny squares, and every single one of those little squares is a recorded podcast.
And it just keeps getting bigger because I never delete them.
One of the things I did today was delete all of my old audio hijack recordings that are for already completed podcasts.
When I record podcasts, I keep all the source files of all the tracks and everything.
I keep all those, but I show those for the archive drive once I'm done with them.
I compress them.
I just have a basic shell script that compresses all the waves to Flack and compresses the logic project slightly in a zip thing and then just shoves it off into the archive drive.
so this i'm not i don't have a computer full of podcasts like it's what you expect you know from a developer who has a lot of fish so it's like you know there's you know my biggest folders are like library developer and then you know music itunes itunes media music fish which is 163 gigs of fish but otherwise my word hey it's all i listen to well most of the time
So anyway, hopefully I will have some answers for this at some point soon.
I hope to figure out where my mysterious terabyte of storage has gone and also where my photos are stored.
Hopefully it's the same answer.
I have some questions about your laptop while you take these screenshots.
Yeah.
I know you've only had it for a short period of time, but how did you feel about the sort of the physical reality of the thing in terms of handling it, carrying it, picking it up, putting it down, like the hinge, all the different pieces?
How does it feel?
It feels dense and great.
So I would say, you know, compared to the MacBook Air, the M1 MacBook Air that I have sitting right next to it, it is clearly heavier and more substantial.
that is not necessarily in a bad way it's it's a beefier computer you know um it is not as bigger or not as much bigger or as much heavier uh as you would expect it to be compared to the macbook air like it the macbook air definitely looks like the slimmed down older version of it um but the
it's in the same size class and so if you are comfortable carrying an air or 13 inch pro i think you'll be comfortable carrying the 14 inch pro as well um that's it's fine in that regard it looks at a quick glance just like the 13 inch pro always has or not always but you know more recently has um so
That being said, I am not at all tempted for the 16 because as I feel this and as I handle this, I think this is great.
I don't want it to be bigger.
So it is great for what I want.
The reviews so far that have come out and the very few teardowns that have come out so far,
It seems like you don't really get much else with the 16, with the exception of obviously the more screen space, the bigger battery, which are both things that I don't think I would need for the context in which I'd be using it.
And also then this high power mode where it basically runs the fans at an audible level constantly.
So you can do like all your 8K ProRes color grading and stuff, none of which I will ever do while I have this computer.
Yeah.
It seems like what the 16-inch offers is a lot of value for people whose needs are very different from mine.
And for my needs, I think the 14 is great.
So I'm going to, I think, stick with the 14-inch size.
The only thing that – oh, I guess the 16 might also be better on the speaker's front.
Through a wonderful fluke of shipping, I will actually have TIFF's new 16 tomorrow.
um because in the opposite of what happened to casey uh tip 16 inch went from like you know it the estimated shipping time of next week to delivered
just today it got delivered so this is what i'm talking about where if you try to do a speculative order and feel comfortable like i don't have to worry about canceling that for another week no it might come tomorrow exactly like so it's like it never even entered like preparing to ship or shipped status it just it went straight from you know ships november 4th to 9th or whatever to deliver
so sorry casey so how does the how does the lid feel like in the pictures the the screen lid looks thicker does it feel any thicker or is it just kind of like blunt edges but otherwise pretty thin it feels thicker than the macbook air and and i i mean i don't know if it actually is or if it's just the just the you know the curvature on the edge is no is no really not really there anymore um
But it is actually way easier to open one-handed.
The bottom of the MacBook Air is so light, you've got to hold your hand in a certain way to be able to lift it up one-handed without having the bottom come up a little bit.
And the new 14-inch does not have that problem at all.
I think one of the reasons why people think they look so much thicker and boxier is that
i think the body like the the bottom half of the body i think got thicker but the screen lid i think got thinner and so i i think what has happened is that the total thickness has stayed roughly the same but they've just moved some of it from the top to the bottom effectively so the bottom is a little bit thicker i think um but i don't have a 13 inch here to compare uh like a 13 inch pro what do you think about the engraving on the bottom
Oh, I don't care.
It looks great.
I mean, here, let me pick it up.
Do you ever touch it?
Does your finger ever run across it or is it just not in a touchable area?
I have yet to actually use this computer on my lap.
So I don't know.
Again, ask me that in a week or so.
I'll have more information then.
I was thinking like when you're carrying it, like you pick it up off the table and put it under your arm.
I don't think, you know, I can't even reach it.
Like unless I'm, I mean, I'd have to be holding it in a really weird way to actually touch the middle logo because like I'm holding it on the edge.
And I think my final physical question thing, have you heard the fans yet?
Not at all, no.
I wish they had changed the feeling of the vents on your fingers on the side.
They do feel a little sharp, just like the 2016 and forward models have always felt this way.
Like when you pick it up, you feel those side vents and they kind of dig into your fingers in a slightly unpleasant way.
So I do wish they had changed that now that I'm handling it and stuff.
But otherwise, that's a pretty minor issue.
Yeah, I noted that when I saw a bunch of YouTube videos about it.
I'm like, oh, those side slots.
Because the people you're handling on YouTube videos are like, oh, those slots are still there.
Of course they have to be.
The air has to come in from somewhere.
Like in Apple's product shots, they don't really ever show you a shot that emphasizes or highlights them.
But if you see one in real life and someone rotates it around, you see these huge slots and sides.
It's a shame to hear that they're a little bit sharp because it feels like there's no reason, especially since they're so sort of subtle and not...
in your face it's not like a design element to make the sharp edges so just rounded them over more because i don't know you know why not it's a little bit more comfortable that way yeah i don't i mean again it's not it isn't a big deal and it's it's not any worse than the outgoing models were yeah
And so in terms of using the thing, what do you think of the notch in your brief time with it?
I still only have the stock wallpaper that came configured on it because I couldn't migrate my stuff over, as we said.
And stock wallpaper, that middle area is a very dark navy blue.
It's almost black.
And so with the wallpaper, I really don't see the notch.
But as I was using the computer, I would occasionally have light colored content in the vicinity of it or whatever.
And I really just didn't notice it at all.
I honestly haven't noticed it once while using it.
Like I just had to double check.
It is definitely there, but I really don't notice it.
So on the topic of the notch, The Verge had a story.
It was highlighting a couple of tweets that I was originally going to put in the show notes, but now we'll just put the story in there.
It was Quinn Nelson pointing out some strange behavior with the notch.
The first is that, and I'm surprised more people have tried this.
I don't know if this requires holding the mouse button down because people don't do that anymore.
But very old school Mac users will remember at a time when if you wanted to use a menu from the menu bar at the top of the screen on the Mac, the way you would do it is you bring your cursor up to like the word file, you would click the mouse button and hold it down.
and then you would move down to the item you wanted like save or something and then you would release and save would activate and that was the only way to use a menu with the mouse on the mac for many many many years of course windows came along and used a different approach in windows you would go up to the word file put your pointer on it you would click mouse button down mouse button up you just click and then the file menu would display itself and the file menu would stay on the screen
And then you would move the cursor down to save and you would click again and it would do save.
The philosophy behind that in the original days of the Mac is like if you get into a situation where, you know, the Mac was introduced to where no one even knew what the heck a mouse was.
Like it came with a tutorial about how to use a mouse.
Like, it was a very important part of using the product.
Like, this is called a mouse.
And when you move it, you see the cursor.
Like, they had to explain that.
There was on-screen tutorials for it.
It was in the manual.
It was the first thing you needed to learn, right?
And so to throw a computer in front of people and have it behave the Windows way,
where you would click the file menu and the menu would display.
Now you've got the menu displayed, but your cursor is free.
So you might go off and try to do something else, but you're like, how do I, like the file menu is stuck down.
It's like a mode, but you'd go off and do something else, but the file menu would be there and you'd click somewhere else.
And that click would essentially, if you're lucky, deactivate the file menu, but maybe not go through to the thing that you clicked on because that click was just the clicking outside the file menu thing, right?
So anyway,
The reason the Mac worked that way was because it was one operation, click, hold down, go to the thing you want, and release.
And there were no modes and no sort of getting stuck in a position, which made perfect sense for the original, you know, day of the Mac.
But obviously when Windows did it the Windows way, everyone got used to it.
Eventually Apple adopted it because the world didn't need to learn how to use a mouse and wasn't afraid of getting the menu stuck down and not knowing what to do.
And so that's the way they did it.
So...
This is a long winded way to say with the notch if you have a series of menus that span the notch like some of your menus are on the right side of the notch But the most of them are on the left if you activate the menu on your Mac by holding down the mouse button or even just clicking and The menu bar is active and you just move your mouse to the right like you go, you know file edit whatever and you keep moving to the right and
apparently the mouse cursor will teleport around the notch when you get to the last menu that is to the left of the notch and you go to the right.
Rather than the cursor hiding under the notch, which is what it would do if you were just mousing, because you are in, like, I am currently highlighting menu items, again, either holding the mouse button down or clicking and being in that mode, the mouse cursor will teleport to the other side of the notch and immediately you move one pixel and it hops to the other side and now you're on the next menu.
So it preserves sort of the muscle memory of...
you know, mousing through the menus if that's what you wanted to do.
And you'll see that in the video, which I think is a good behavior.
Another thing you'll see in the video is that the menu bar icons, the menu extras, the little icons that appear on the right side of your menu bar, those things have no idea the notch exists, which is bad.
Now, it takes some amount of effort, or being Casey, to get enough menu bar icons.
Oh, stop.
to get enough menu bar icons to reach the notch because remember the notch is dead center in the screen so you have to build up quite a conga line of icons to reach the notch but if you do those menu bar icons will apparently just display underneath the notch and you can use them you can put your mouse cursor underneath the notch and find like blindly find like whatever menu but menu uh extra icon is under there and click it and it will display a menu out from under the notch that's not good behavior that seems like a bug they should work on that um
I mean, what it should do is those menu extras that are basically controlled by the system, more or less, of how they're laid out, should have an awareness of notch just like the menus do.
And it should do the sort of same teleporting thing.
And then the final thing that Quinn, quote unquote, discovered is that if you have lots of menus, like you have an app with tons of regular menus, they will just overwrite and push away the menu bar icons.
That is not a new behavior.
They'll do that today in any computer with or without a notch.
in a contest between those icons and the menus the menus always win and they don't win in a graceful way it's not like your icons get truncated or you scroll or there's a sub menu they just they just disappear so a couple of things to software packages to deal with that obviously there's bartender and what was the other one called vanilla maybe
is that the one that does the same thing as bartender but it's cheaper anyway those are two apps that you can use that will let you sort of compress your own menu bar icons down to a smaller size while still being able to get out of all of them and as for the notch there are two applications to make it less prominent one is called denotchifier from the same person who made boring old menu bar and the other was called top notch they're both ways of essentially
because the menu bar is transparent, putting a darkly colored thing behind the menu bar so that the menu bar blends better with the notch.
Obviously, you can just change the dark mode and do that, or you could use a dark desktop background, but both of these tools let you darken the menu bar or blend it with a notch without doing either one of those two things.
So we'll have links to all these in the show notes.
I would suggest... Listeners, if you get one of these machines, I would suggest instead of rushing to install one of these notch-hiding utilities the second you get the machine, try using it for a few days first.
Because I think you'll probably find that, oh, actually, you don't actually care.
You don't actually notice it in practice.
So just try it the way it's designed first.
Because, again, I think these apps are...
jumping to solve a problem that people think they have but i think once you get these machines you'll quickly realize you don't actually have this problem i have a lot more questions about the notch like in terms of how does it behave if you are on a menu bar hiding i'm assuming the menu that space is still preserved and the menu bar just slides down into it um the various like how it behaves with different apps that are that know about the notch versus ones that don't in that compatibility check box box and get info and
There's lots of nuances to the behavior.
Like this is just one example of the menu icons not being notch savvy yet.
And I bet there are lots of other weird edge cases like that where you could lose things under the notch, which is a shame.
But if the notch is young, I'm sure we'll figure it out.
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Earnest, and Lutron Caseta.
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
We will talk to you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter.
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Arman S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental Accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Oh.
which for those of us who are, who are not Americans, it's basically American football, but without tackling so that you can play it responsibly with children.
And the idea is you basically, each kid basically has like one or two like little straps of fabric, like hanging off their waistbands and to, to do the function of quote of tackling them in regular American football, you just like pull one of these flags off of them.
And it's like, okay, that's it.
You're, you're down or you're out or whatever.
Um, so anyway, um,
The assignment that the gym teacher assigned was sometime in the next two weeks, you have to watch a football game and fill out this worksheet of questions about the football game that you've watched.
Why are there so many beer and Viagra ads?
So, I am not a sports person, really.
Yeah.
I know the rules of the games enough to watch them and know what's going on, but I don't care about the games, and I don't care about any of the teams or the players, and that's why I'm not into sports.
You know, I respect them as games, but I just don't care and therefore don't watch them.
So, I don't have cable TV.
and so at first i'm like all right at first i thought i'm like oh no how what if i just like go on youtube and find video of an old game so i'm like does it have to be a current football game or can it be any football game and i should have found is uh i mean this probably wouldn't qualify for the homework but have you ever watched even marco must know this you know nfl films am i getting the name right casey
Yes, I believe so.
Old grainy film footage with this one guy's voice narrating over.
He says, and this was the greatest game you've ever seen.
They're great.
They're amazing.
They're basically the football equivalent of, oh God, what's his name?
Chat room.
Warren Miller.
There we go.
You didn't even need it.
They're the football equivalent of Warren Miller's ski films.
They're not an actual game.
It is someone doing a voiceover of a summary of a dramatic thing that happened.
But even if you hate football, they are so amazing.
NFL Films, I think, is what they're called.
Check it out.
Well, I didn't know about that.
But anyway.
You could have called either one of us.
You could have called Uncle Casey, who has season tickets to a university football team's games.
And you could have called me up, but you didn't.
So what did you do instead?
So first, we were at a restaurant one night, and I asked the bartender, I'm like, hey, when is football on?
Because they have TVs there that normally when I'm in a restaurant, I do my best to ignore what's on the TVs.
But they do occasionally show football games.
And they even have a whole separate menu of junk food that you can order during football games.
So I thought, all right, when are the games on?
And they said, Sunday is at 1.
Great.
Okay.
So between that day and Sunday, I forgot what time she had said.
And so Sunday comes around.
I'm like, what time do we go again?
And I thought, oh, I've always heard that Siri is really good at sports stuff because I think you like sports.
Great.
All right.
So I asked Siri, what time is the football game on?
Oh, my God, Marco.
Oh, my God.
And I was presented with...
this list of like 30 games and i'm like oh i i didn't even consider the possibility but of course there's more than one game at a time because there's a whole league more than two teams yeah it's like wait a minute of course like there's this whole league this whole country full of teams they probably play more than one game a week
You realize we are talking about this during the World Series.
The World Series, which is not football, is happening right now.
Yeah, but my point is, this is how clueless all of us, but particularly Marco, is.
We are recording during the World Series, and we're, oh my gosh, Marco.
I'm trying very hard not to lose my mind, and I'm trying very hard to channel XKCD and the, oh, you've never seen this, you know, oh, then today's your lucky day.
But, like, it didn't even cross your mind to go to ESPN.com and look at football schedules?
Why would I do that?
I don't even— Because it answers your damn question!
well siri answered that one she just told me like 30 different games fortunately most of them were on at one o'clock and i remembered oh yeah that's right that's right she said one o'clock okay so at me and adam and tiff we made this family trip to go sit at the bar in this empty restaurant in a beach town in the off season at one o'clock on a sunday for like the only people in there
and they and they turn on the game the game i i didn't even ask which game it was because part of the homework assignment the worksheet that i had to fill out included in that was what teams are playing so i thought okay this is actually kind of fun because he and i can try to figure this out together because i don't know either so for somebody who is an expert at watching football i
I'm sure all the different stats and things and abbreviations they're showing on screen make total sense.
But to someone who is not an expert, first of all, it was very, very confusing because what football power users want is to know what's going on in all of the 30 games that are happening at once.
And so they keep... First of all, the very bottom row of stats on the screen was some kind of rotating carousel that was showing all of the games in the universe that were going on and all the scores of all the games in the universe.
So first I had to figure out
wait which where's where are the stats for this game that i think i'm watching right now and then they keep showing highlights and clips and replays from all of the other games so i'm like okay well i i really don't care about all those i'm trying to figure out one game whatever one is the game that the people in this restaurant turned on as quote the game what is what game is this okay
eventually I see, I figure out on the screen that this series of letters appears to be the teams in this game.
And I noticed that it was, it was whatever the abbreviation.
Uh, I figured out it was the giants versus the Patriots, which makes sense.
We're in New York.
So of course they're showing a giants game.
Okay.
And I think, all right, so that, so we wrote down, you know, New York giants, you know, New England Patriots.
And then it says, what, what, like who, who is the home team?
Who's the away team?
So they're like, Oh crap.
Yeah.
Oh, Marco.
We watched for a few minutes and eventually we saw like a wide shot of the field.
When did you do this?
This past weekend.
Sunday.
I thought it was Carolina Giants.
Oh, Jets?
Patriots?
Was it Jets?
Oh, God.
I hope not for your sake.
Who's green and white?
Yes, yes, it's Jets.
Oh, my God.
All the Giants fans are crying.
You can't tell the difference between the Giants and the Jets.
I am crying.
I am a Giants fan.
I'm listening.
All right, they're green and white, the Jets.
Okay, sorry.
Determining the home team is like, well, what state is the stadium in?
That's not going to help you.
Right, yes.
That's true.
That's true.
So, all right.
So, so for eventually they zoom out to a, like a wide shot and I see on the 50 yard line, what I'm pretty sure was the Patriots logo, but then I'm like, wait a minute.
They superimpose so much stuff on the video stream.
Good.
Good.
I see that your tech angle is helping you out here.
Not everything you see on that screen is real.
Right.
I'm like, I know they're superimposing the line of scrimmage and then whatever the 10 yards after that line is called.
I know they're superimposing that.
I'm sure they're probably superimposing some of the ads on the side or whatever.
So I'm like, I don't know.
Maybe that logo is superimposed.
I don't know.
The ball is CG too.
It might be.
The glowing puck in the NHL.
Right.
That's not been a thing for a long time, I believe.
But yes, I'm with you.
I mean, at this point, it wouldn't surprise me, right?
Oh, I should also clarify that there's no sound where we're watching it.
So I'm only seeing the video, which honestly is probably better.
Because a restaurant is the ideal viewing place.
yeah did it have subtitles on as well no no it was just video no subtitles um so but look because how how the hell would i have watched it what would i have put like i'm not going to buy some streaming service to watch one game for my kid to fill out a worksheet just download the nfl app for the apple tv pay for a month of it and watch a game no it's not that simple with the nfl because the nfl hates people yeah
it's never that simple it's never that simple with any of this crap that's why can't you just buy the nfl one and pay for it i thought that nfl was the one that was simple it was not like local blackouts like the stupid baseball team no no remember no because this is when uh lex had put up a post years ago about how you can get a foreign like an overseas dns server such that when you go to pay the nfl it thinks oh you're european so i'll totally take your money because if you try to pay the nfl in the states they're like ha get direct tv because otherwise pound sand i don't
See, this is why.
You guys still can't figure it out.
We're like two minutes after you asked the question.
No, I know.
I absolutely know the answer.
You just didn't come to me.
In the time it took you to argue with each other about how I could have watched it, I could have ridden my bike at this restaurant.
No, no, no.
We're not arguing.
I am educating John.
I would say, but I had heard that NFL was the league that was more savvy about this stuff and didn't have the stupid local TV rights and blackout things like the baseball has, but I guess it's still screwed up in its own way.
yeah so i knew that there was a bunch of crap to deal with with how the heck you even go about watching sports so i'm like all right let me just outsource that to a place that i know broadcast them and then i can at least have a good sandwich while i'm watching the game all right so anyway so we eventually i eventually figure out okay that that logo does not appear to be superimposed i unless they did a really good job and like i'm gonna assume this is where it is so then i asked siri
where is the Patriot Stadium or whatever?
Because another question is, what city and state is the stadium in?
It's in New England.
It's right in the name.
Yeah, exactly.
Unfortunately, that's not a state.
You should have asked Adam, what state is New England from?
Yeah, right.
So...
so eventually like siri gives me some kind of info card um that shows the stadium on on like a zoomed in map but apparently the stadium's like in the middle of nowhere and this the town name is somehow never heard of that's like not near really anything foxborough yeah that's it there it is that's it yep i had to i had to show adam how to spell that that was fun
So like Worcester.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Worcester.
My Worcester Shire sauce on my steak.
So anyway, so eventually, you know, we figured out that.
And then it then came the even harder question.
Who are the quarterbacks?
Oh, no.
All right.
So I know enough about football to know that the person who the hike person hands the ball to is probably the quarterback.
But they pass this information to the quarterback.
And then I'm like, wait a minute.
Who is that?
I also know that teams might have multiple quarterbacks.
And maybe the person who's normally the quarterback wasn't playing this game.
Or maybe they pulled them out early or something.
I don't know.
So we're like, all right.
First, we have to wait for each team to get the ball to figure out who the quarterback is currently playing.
And then we have to, like, wait for a clear shot of the back of their shirt so we can see their number and their name.
That's because you didn't have the audio on.
If you had the audio on, all they're going to do is talk about the quarterback and what he did or didn't do on that last play.
Yeah, but what are the odds they're going to actually, like, use his full name?
Like...
are going to use his last name and you'll be able to figure it out from there.
Yeah, you could Google for this once you know a last name and granted it took you half the game to figure out what teams are playing.
Can you name a famous quarterback who might have played for the New England Patriots in your lifetime?
Yeah, so I knew about Tom Brady, right?
But I don't know if he was still playing.
It turns out he's super old.
These are all valid questions.
I'm just saying you do know quarterbacks.
How many NFL quarterbacks living or dead can you name, Marco?
uh dan marino from ace ventura pretty good miami dolphins right yeah yeah uh is that it tom brady and dan marino when do i need to know this you've heard of joe montana right oh i i've only from like the video game series was john madden ever a quarterback or just a commentator
Yeah, he's definitely a quarterback.
He's built to be a quarterback, John Madden.
Yeah, I don't know.
He's a little old now, but maybe back in the day, I don't know.
I would say, if you want to identify the quarterback, if you want to identify the quarterback and special teams isn't on the field, it's the guy who's skinny.
Anyway, so yeah, so we went through this exercise first, like, you know, figuring out, oh, look, here's number, you know, 10 or whatever, appears to be the quarterback on this team.
Let's look up the roster, figure out who the heck that is, because we couldn't get a shot of his last name on his shirt yet, and then eventually you look up, oh, and then you see the last name, you confirm it and everything.
Then eventually the green team got the ball.
We had to see who their quarterback was, look that up.
The green team.
Yeah.
Zach somebody, and we looked that up, put right back down, all this stuff.
Oh, my God.
And then...
Then came the most difficult question of all.
Describe something interesting that happened during the game.
Did this game... Are they still using those flying cameras on the wires, Casey?
Yes, usually.
That's an interesting thing that happened during the game.
It's like when they did a replay, it was like a drone was chasing the runner, and it looked really cool.
Oh, yeah.
I didn't... So... And, you know, granted, this is all...
Not only a test of my patience and certainly of my ability to explain and figure stuff out, but it's also – it's hard for a nine-year-old who's not into sports to sit and focus for this long on this crazy thing because one thing that made this surprisingly difficult is – I don't think you realize when you watch sports regularly.
How many ads there are.
Yeah, and I told Adam, I warned him, I'm like, look, pretty much every time they stop playing, we're going to see commercials.
He's fine.
But it was very hard to explain what's going on or even to understand what's going on because they're constantly cutting to replays and highlights and other games.
Constantly.
And so the actual shot duration of each shot you get of the actual game as it's live is so short compared to all of the replays and cuts and quick.
And there's so much.
It's very hard for me.
It was very hard for me to explain to him what was going on as it happened because they kept cutting away and showing other stuff.
And it was hard for him to understand, like, well, what?
versus what's a replay what is the game versus what is some other game like it and then commercials cut in like it was manic trying to watch this broadcast like in many ways i think it would have been easier to just go to a game and watch in the stadium with the exception of you wouldn't get those wonderful line overlays which i think do make it easier to understand what's going on but other than that like it was it was very difficult to understand this like it and at one point adam
at one point he even asked he's like so you know they just go back and forth in the field over and over again like isn't that kind of boring like what's the point okay i feel like the audio really would have helped here though because especially with the replay it's just there's an audio there are audio cues for the replay the fact that the sound is cutting and replaying and the crowd noise like a contract they do a good job of audio mixing to sort of make it clear what's a flashback what you know in in movie parlance what's a replay
when they're going to a different game and the announcers say stuff the announcers the people who are calling the game say things that make it clear that this is a replay here we are seeing again you can see where he did x y and z anyway here we are we're back now that they say anyway but you know like audio helps again watching a restaurant i mean on the one hand maybe you could distract adam with food when he gets bored but on the other hand it's not the ideal viewing environment
honestly i think watching football on tv is just not a very good not a very ideal like you know first sports explanation like i think probably the easiest sports explanation is to just go to like a triple a baseball game and sit there in the stands and get some hot dogs and watch the baseball game in person in you know at a triple a stadium so you have nice close seats and there's not a lot of pressure or anything like that and actually we we listen to doing that and it's
I don't think it's going to happen this fall, but it might happen next whenever baseball starts.
But spring?
Summer?
I don't know.
Spring, I guess.
Well, there's spring training.
You might have heard of that.
I haven't.
Marco.
Go watch the Long Island Ducks play.
That's what we're trying to do.
Yeah, their fall schedule is not so great for our ferry schedule, but we're going to try to do it in the spring.
If only you knew someone, if only you knew the phone number of someone, if only you knew the Slack ID across six different Slacks of someone, that would have been overjoyed to tutor you on this very issue.
But I wasn't the one who needed to learn.
Well, I mean, maybe I do.
So did he complete the assignment?
He completed the worksheet.
Yeah.
We'll see.
You should complain to the gym teacher this is a dumb assignment.
I mean, it would be better if you said kids should watch a televised sport of their choice and answer some questions about it because then at least the kid gets to pick what they're interested in, whatever sport they're interested in or think they might be the most interested in, and then they can write about that.
Because teaching kids about organized sports so that they're televised I think is a valid role for gym.
But focusing on the NFL makes me think like,
oh someone said is he getting kickbacks from the nfl he's not the nfl is cheap they would never do that they don't have to though because they're the most popular sport in this country yeah oh and the chat room is asking like what what was the interesting thing that happened that adam wrote down and i'd like for that question i don't even remember it was just something some really stupid thing like you know when the one team ran really hard and got the ball like it was something like that because we both of us had just lost so much patience i knew i was about to lose and i'm like let's let's just write something down here and get out of here
Did you explain to Adam about CTE?
No.
Is that the brain injury stuff?
Yes.
Yes, we did actually.
Because I think that is the most salient point about the NFL.
This sport shouldn't exist and it exists to exploit the bodies of these people who get paid millions of dollars but often have terrible consequences and no one cares because they just get ground up in this giant machine and really the NFL should not exist as it currently stands.
But since it's the most popular sport, we will never...
do that well i wouldn't say never because unlike the second amendment it's not in the constitution so in theory if we ever get a clue we could stop destroying people's brains with the nfl well this is this is exactly why i stopped paying so my football team my professional football team is new york giants and this is why i've i almost never watch the nfl anymore and of course and you you know ask about college football we're just going to sweep that under the rug real quick but
For the NFL, it's just so exploitative and it just made me feel so gross that I just really stopped paying attention.
But the answer to the question of what interesting, which probably wouldn't have been good for his grade, but I think the most reasonable answer to the question is what's interesting about the game to you two, it's how that yellow first downline works.
Because I read a really fascinating story about the development and how it works.
I was Googling trying to find it and I can't find it, but
My recollection is that they have to take hyper-accurate 3D models of the stadiums because the stadiums don't have perfectly flat fields and so on and so forth.
And they have hyper-accurate readouts of where the cameras are pointing and where they're panned and tilted and zoomed.
And then they're running this through a series of computers to paint the stuff on as quickly as possible as the game is happening.
It's really, really fascinating, all the technology that goes into this.
And I think even you, Marco, would appreciate that, even if you didn't appreciate football.
Yeah, because honestly, I remember when they started adding those lines, whenever that was, like 15 years ago or whatever, and that really made a massive improvement in how watchable football games on TV became.
And it was the first time that it was actually nicer to watch it on TV than in person in some way.
Not necessarily in all ways, but...
yeah so that that i thought that that's a great technological advance that they made it is unfortunate that it's for such a you know overall terrible sport but yes we did have that conversation but yeah i mean the most interesting thing that happened in the game was the mahi sandwich i ate and it was really good
Oh my gosh.
Do you bring these things up just to troll me?
Is that what's happening right now?
Are you doing this?
You're describing this beautiful laptop that you have and you're telling me, oh, if only I understood football, if only there was some way for me to understand football, then it would have made this assignment so much easier.
Do you do this just to mess with my emotions?
Is that what's going on?
I understand football fine enough.
I just didn't know when to watch it or whose teams were playing or what their names were.
Oh my God, Marco.
Oh my God.
I was, I was explaining what was happening to Adam.
It was just really hard to watch.
I love you so much, but I hate you so much right now.
I hate you so much.