A Bomb on Your Home Screen
Casey:
I'm kind of interested in the mini review, except I am extremely, I am extremely not interested in your mini review because I don't want to know.
Marco:
Oh, my iPhone mini?
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
I don't want to know.
Marco:
So let me tell you.
John:
I don't want to know.
John:
I stopped the show rundown right after we got up to that thing, but Marco can feel free to talk about it if he wants during the topic section, which we'll get to shortly.
Casey:
Fast resolution switching on M1 Max.
Casey:
Gokhin Avkarogulari writes, and I believe this individual is an Apple engineer, writes, I was waiting for this.
Casey:
Our display pipes are many years ahead of the industry, and this is just one example of that.
Casey:
From contrast to accessibility to color management, many teams at Apple, including my display driver team, put so much effort to it.
Casey:
Glad to see it makes a difference.
Casey:
uh yeah it does make a difference because i have seen it yet well so i finally saw a demo and somebody tweeted this and we'll put a link in the show notes and they have i guess an older an old and busted macbook pro on one side they have the current top of the line macbook pro the 16 inch yes
Casey:
yep and then which is obviously old and busted yeah and then the on the left hand side they have a brand new macbook pro which is the 13 inch and you know when marco i think it was marco or maybe it was john yeah it's always john no no it's always john that's the rules remember and so um when john said when when john marco said when john ralphio said that uh the resolution switching was instant uh i i conceptually understood the
Casey:
the words that were being said but seeing it visually is a whole nother thing like this tweet it's so ridiculous how fast this is i just cannot believe my eyes it's one of those things that like you know with computers we've we've used computers for a long time now and it's just one of those things that always has taken a few seconds like it just it's a thing that when you change resolution of your screen it
Marco:
it goes blank for a few seconds and things kind of like pop in kind of ungracefully and you know a few seconds later everything is kind of basically where it should be and when you go from something that takes a few seconds and you see the transition and it's ungraceful like that to something that literally is like instant you just like boom it's just like click click click boom it's
Marco:
It's shocking.
Marco:
Again, this is not something that they had to optimize.
Marco:
This is not something that needed to be done.
Marco:
But it's just so damn delightful to see it.
Marco:
And it's something that you don't see very often in computing, where something that previously used to take a good amount of time all of a sudden takes no time.
Marco:
And again, most people don't change resolutions that often, although many people do plug in monitors and unplug monitors frequently.
Marco:
And from what I hear, I haven't been able to test this yet, but from what I hear, that is similarly fast now.
Marco:
So I am just so happy that this kind of stuff is being worked on and that we can still have...
Marco:
things in modern computing that make us go whoa like that really surprise us because that doesn't happen that often anymore because stuff is really good pretty much everywhere so like you know to get one of those whoa moments is rare and it's just so incredibly delightful when you see one and this is one of those times
John:
I guess one of the benefits of the iOS project, you know, having started for the phone and of course they started from Mac OS 10, but they had to rip like tons of stuff out to just get it to fit into the phone and to get it to be fast enough on that very slow phone hardware.
John:
And that sort of gave them a chance to tear everything down to the studs, so to speak, and to build back up from there without concern for legacy because they totally controlled the hardware and the iOS didn't need to run anywhere except for on, you know, this phone hardware.
Um,
John:
And so that's the perfect opportunity over the course of the next 10, 15 years to reconsider things like the display driver stack, which like Marco said, they weren't broken.
John:
There's nothing wrong with them.
John:
They worked fine.
John:
Like their main job was to be reliable and, you know,
John:
do the things we want them to do they supported retina you could change resolution you know they you know it it did all the things that you would expect it to do but if you have the opportunity to sort of rebuild that for nothing starting from very simple display driving on the original iphone up till today you can end up building a
John:
display driver system especially with the move to metal not having to support open gl not having to support other people's graphics drivers if they control the hardware and the software stack it's an opportunity to do something better and i don't think there was huge pressure from the outside saying you really need to make resolution switching faster i think it is just a side effect of redoing the display driver stack to be high performance in all ways and one of the benefits you get basically for free for doing a good job is oh guess what resolution change that's lightning fast now too
Casey:
Oh, it's extremely, extremely impressive, and I'm only seeing it on video.
Casey:
It's very cool.
Casey:
And to your point, Marco, Sylvain Filto writes, you mentioned how fast it is to change resolution.
Casey:
It is exactly as fast plugging in an external display like the Ultrafine 5K.
Casey:
Very cool stuff.
Casey:
Tell me, John, about TensorFlow and Forks and M1 Max and so on.
John:
So, you know, one of the things that Apple talked about in their presentation about the M1 Max, they showed the system on a chip, and we've talked about this in the past, how much of these system on chips is dedicated to machine learning stuff.
John:
Obviously, you know, the benefit that Apple touted this, oh, we'll take our cruddy 720p camera and it will make those pictures look a little bit better.
John:
Although that may be the image signal processor and not the neural engine.
John:
But anyway, that's splitting hairs.
John:
The point is there's hardware on the M1, just like there is on all of the iPhone and iPad system on a chips, that is dedicated to doing specific tasks very well.
John:
Um, and on the Mac, it's like, okay, that's great.
John:
The OS uses it for certain things, but otherwise it's just sitting there not being used until someone updates their software for it.
John:
So this is an announcement that, uh, that Apple, I think is Apple's fork of TensorFlow, which is a machine learning thing of some stripe.
John:
Um, the new version optimized for the M1 base Macs, uh, has seven times faster performance.
John:
and how does it get seven times faster performance it's not in this case because you know the m1 is faster in cpu than than any other mac but it's not seven times faster it's getting seven times faster because it's using the machine learning hardware that's on the chip the previous version didn't because there was none right on the intel chips there was nothing right and now it's using that machine learning stuff that's on there huge speed boost so this is the type of sort of
John:
non-linear increases you get for actually taking advantage of the hardware that they put on these system on chips for you know for phones for ipads and now the mac has them too and you know the sooner mac developers pick up that the better it's going to make their applications look i think i'm i don't remember if what's the what's the app that has like that super resolution plug-in is it pixel meter yeah
John:
yeah i think that one is also now taking advantage of the neural engine and stuff like it is yes yeah so those are and there was someone did a benchmark of those things they were showing like if you know if you do it on the cpu like it's still it's still faster because the cpu is faster but if you don't do it on the cpu but instead do it on dedicated hardware it's a lot faster so the those things are great and probably more power fishing as well so
John:
That's exciting.
John:
It's not just like, oh, we recompiled it for our Macs.
John:
We didn't just recompile it.
John:
We wrote to use whatever new set of APIs targets the new hardware.
John:
That makes it way faster.
John:
Yeah, that is extremely impressive.
Casey:
Then tell me about 8K rendering, if you please.
John:
I think I did my own McGurk effect, Green Needle, iPhone, Fortnite, whatever thing in the last episode.
John:
During the section where we were talking about various people's impressive benchmarks of the M1 Base Max, one of the examples was an 8K video render test.
John:
And the thing was that the M1-based Mac rendered it and it was competing with the Intel version and the Intel version couldn't do it without draining its battery.
John:
And what was written in the notes and what I could swear I tried to say twice on the podcast was the percentage that the M1-based Mac depleted its battery and
John:
And I listened back to the show and I realized twice I said what sounded like the M1 Mac used 70% of its battery and the Intel Mac drained its battery before completing the task.
John:
But what I was trying to say was the M1 Mac depleted 17% of its battery.
John:
Two more than 15.
John:
The number after 16.
John:
So the M1 base Mac not only did it faster, but it depleted only 17% of its battery, having 83% remaining.
John:
And the non-M1 base Mac, the Intel base Mac, could not complete the task on a single charge.
John:
So I just wanted to clarify.
John:
My mouth said what sounded like 7-0, but it is not.
John:
It was 1-7.
Casey:
That is absolutely bananas.
Casey:
We're going to talk more about these new Macs, and I don't want to.
Casey:
I might quit the show because...
Casey:
i like i really like my macbook pro that i have from june of this year it doesn't feel like it's a 40 year old computer but the way everyone is talking about this m1 max i feel like this is barely better than the 8088 i had in my bedroom when i was like 10 years old when it was already you know a way too old computer my word all right tell me about running ios apps with just the ipa files please yeah
John:
We talked about this when Apple made the announcement that like if you have an iPad or if you have an iPhone app, you have a choice of whether you want that iPhone app to be available for people to download on their Macs through the quote unquote Mac App Store.
John:
Right.
John:
And you can say yes to opt in and no to opt out.
John:
And every developer basically has to make this choice.
John:
But what if you want to run an iPhone app, but the developer of that iPhone app has decided not to make it available to Mac users?
John:
For example, Marco could have decided, oh, Overcast, I'm going to make a Mac version, so I don't want you downloading and using the iOS version.
John:
But he didn't, so you can get Overcast on your Mac, right?
John:
But another developer may not make that choice, right?
John:
Well, many people through experimentation have determined if you can just use, I don't know what they're using, iTunes or whatever, whatever way you can get to download the .IPA file onto your Mac.
John:
.IPA file is, what does it stand for?
John:
iPhone package something?
Marco:
Something.
Marco:
It's a renamed zip file.
Marco:
It's one of many file formats that is just zip renamed.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, it's basically how we package up iOS applications for distribution.
Marco:
Probably iPhone app.
John:
Yeah, maybe.
John:
But anyway, if you can get one of those, as in a legit downloaded one from like the app store, the real app store, and you can like, you know, get it through iTunes.
John:
But when iTunes would download stuff, you can do it in a local backup.
John:
But anyway, get a legit downloaded .ipa for your iPhone applications.
John:
Lots of different ways to do this.
John:
Get that on your Mac.
John:
and double click it on an arm based mac it'll run because it's it's not it's valid it's signed it's you know you have downloaded it through your apple id it will do the fair play check and everything will you know it's it's not like you're hacking anything if you can get that ipa which you can you can just run it on your mac apparently now it may be broken there may be a reason the developer chose not to distribute it on the mac and i'm not sure how sustainable this is and when apple will close this door but if there's some app
John:
that you want to you know use that you can't right now try it uh the person who wrote this into mac rumors named amy said she's used this method to install netflix hulu youtube and spotify all of which at the time of writing were not available on the mac app store but you can get the ipas and you can run them on your mac that's very cool by the way real time real time follow-up ios app store package so i in ios a in app store p i don't know if you can dig that a stand for app store app store is two words wikipedia says it so it must be true it's like the iso
Casey:
What does ISO stand for?
Marco:
It's something French, but it's like the International Standards of Organization.
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
I thought you meant the CD-ROM archive.
Marco:
Technically, it's the same thing.
Casey:
It's the same thing.
Marco:
It's a little bit of a walk to get there, but yes.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Well, today I learned.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Tell me about Crossover.
Casey:
So this is something that I was not aware of, but apparently this is like a, well, I'm going to sell it short, but kind of like a white labeled version of Wine.
Casey:
What is going on here?
Casey:
So for those who are not familiar, Wine is a thing that I used to use when I told myself that running Linux full time was a worthwhile endeavor.
Casey:
It wasn't.
Marco:
We all had a Linux phase.
Marco:
Yep.
Casey:
Title.
Casey:
And so Wine, last I remember paying attention to it, was basically a shim on top of your local systems, like OS APIs, that acted like Windows APIs.
Casey:
So if you wanted to run an app that was built for Windows, it would start talking to Wine, W-I-N-E, which I think is a backronym for something.
Casey:
wine is not an emulator i believe yeah i think you're right um sorry so we talked to wine and wine would kind of like translate these api calls into something that your system like mac mac os or linux or what have you would understand and i guess crossover is a for pay uh like fancier version of wine that's presumably a lot less fiddly is that fair to say i'm not sure which one of you put this in the show notes so i'm reaching out to the two of you yeah
John:
Yeah, that's basically what Crossover is.
John:
And one of the main uses of it has been to run Windows-based games on your Mac without having to boot into Windows.
John:
Obviously, on an Intel-based Mac, you can use VMware or Parallels to run a full Windows OS, and then within that, run games.
John:
You can also reboot with Bootcamp to boot your Intel-based Mac into Windows and run your games there for best performance.
John:
But Crossover is like Wine.
John:
It's like, what if I don't want to run a VM?
John:
I don't want to run a full Windows operating system.
John:
I'm sure I don't want to reboot my Mac, but I do want to run a Windows game.
John:
Well, like Wine, you can launch the Windows game in the Crossover environment,
John:
And it will basically take all your Win32 calls or whatever and say, OK, well, you know, this isn't Windows, but I understand what you're trying to do, Windows application.
John:
So I will make the roughly equivalent set of Mac OS or Unix calls to do the thing that you want and get the job done.
John:
So that's what crossover is where you're like, well, that doesn't have any relevance on M1-based Macs because M1-based Macs, you know, they're not Intel, right?
John:
And this is all about running Windows things and Windows only runs on Intel except for the weird ARM version, the Microsoft won't license to anybody yet.
John:
But anyway, what if I want to run Windows games on my M1 Mac?
John:
You might think you're just SOL because you can't run Parallels.
John:
You can't run Windows in Parallels or VMware and you can't reboot your ARM-based Mac into Windows yet.
John:
So what are you gonna do?
John:
Oh, and by the way, as we know, like, Big Sur is 64-bit only, and there has never been a 32-bit processor in a Mac in ages, right?
John:
So how are you gonna run, and most Windows games are still 32-bit, how are you gonna run a 32-bit Windows game?
John:
Well, apparently, through the magic of crossover,
John:
You're able to take a 32-bit Windows game written for Intel processors and run it on a 64-bit ARM Mac.
John:
That is bananas.
John:
Through the magic of translation.
John:
So here's Jeremy White from Crossover.
John:
I think he's one of his... Yeah, he works at the company that makes his code weavers.
John:
There's so much emulation going on under the covers.
John:
Imagine a 32-bit Windows Intel binary running on a 32-62 bridge in Wine slash Crossover on the top of Mac OS on an ARM CPU that is emulating x86, and it works.
John:
This is just so cool.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And Brendan Shanks, one of the developers, says, Mac OS 10.15 removed 32-bit executable support, but added support for 64-bit apps to create 32-bit code segments.
John:
Crossover uses that on Intel, and Rosetta emulates it, which is how you can do it on the Apple Silicon.
John:
So...
John:
I didn't know that, that you're able to, like, in a 64-bit app, create a 32-bit code segment and then apparently execute that.
John:
And so that ability on Intel CPUs plus macOS 10.15 and later is being correctly emulated by Rosetta on ARM.
John:
And you would think, OK, well, this is, you know, it's like one of those things where you run VMware inside VMware inside VMware.
John:
It's cool and it's funny, but that's silly.
John:
It's not actually practical, is it?
John:
They show playing actual games like you get acceptable gaming performance on certain varieties of games.
John:
It's not incredibly it's not as slow as you would think it would be is actually viable for playing some type of games, which is amazing.
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Casey:
This is not something that I've dabbled with yet, but I know a lot of people are very happy about this forthcoming change.
Casey:
iOS 14.3 Beta 2 no longer opens the Shortcuts app when launching an app from a custom icon.
Casey:
So to back up a half step here, using Shortcuts, you can put a quote-unquote app on your home screen with a custom icon that the shortcut, all it does is launch the app.
Casey:
And so people are using this to be able to...
Casey:
make their own icons for existing apps, both system and otherwise.
Casey:
And this is part of the customization craze that our dear friend David Smith has been riding with Widgetsmith, which you should check out if you haven't already.
Casey:
So the way it used to work was, or the way officially it still works, is that when you launch one of these shortcuts from your home screen,
Casey:
it will launch the shortcuts app for a flash and then punch you into this actual thing you're trying to do.
Casey:
And apparently in beta two, that's no longer the case.
Casey:
It will just immediately open the app.
Casey:
And I believe it does one of the little banners at the top of the screen as well.
Casey:
But there's no like flash into the shortcuts app first, which is excellent.
John:
This makes me think about sort of the corporate mechanics inside Apple, right?
John:
Because we know that, you know, where do shortcuts come from?
John:
It was the workflow team that Apple sort of acqui-hired, and then they made shortcuts for iOS, okay?
John:
And you know, especially given how, you know, it wasn't very long ago when these were independent developers.
John:
Now they're inside Apple.
John:
they see everyone doing this customization craze where they want to make custom icons for the applications and they do it by making a trivial shortcut and all it does is launch the apps and it goes through the short cut app and people use it anyway just because it's a cool thing to do but it would be better if it didn't you know that workflow development development team sees that and says oh
John:
We can do that.
John:
Like we work inside Apple now and we, you know, we're the we're the shortcuts team.
John:
It's pretty easy for us to say, hey, if you make a shortcut that just launches an app, don't bounce through shortcuts, just launch the app directly.
John:
And so they implemented and do it.
John:
And this is a beta, so it hasn't shipped yet.
John:
But, you know, I can see that sort of feedback loop being simple and closed.
John:
But on the other hand, there are larger strategic implications of allowing customers this level of customization, which based on our discussion of the whole widgets thing back when we were talking about iOS 14, we're all in favor of and we think it's a great idea to let people customize in this way.
John:
But I have felt like that Apple accidentally backed into this by accidentally providing a critical mass of customizability combined with, you know, apps like Underscore's Widgetsmith that suddenly allowed people to express themselves in a holistic way and theme their home screens.
John:
It doesn't look like anything that Apple planned and pitched and promoted.
John:
They just kind of got it accidentally.
John:
So this type of small changes, the shortcuts team does an obvious thing based on customer feedback.
John:
Hey, this is the thing people want and we can do it pretty easily.
John:
So here you go.
John:
Is kind of a tacit endorsement of this theming craze without, I feel like, buy-in from the larger org.
John:
Because the real full buy-in way to do it would be, oh...
John:
Now on the settings screen, there's a place where you can customize every app icon.
John:
Or now on the settings screen, there's a themes section where you can download theme packs from the theme store.
John:
Like we know how a full-throated sort of endorsement of this thing would look from Apple, right?
John:
I mean, hell, they did the iMessage store.
John:
No one uses that.
John:
Like a theme store or a watch face store.
John:
Like that's sort of the whole Apple buys in.
John:
This is the shortcut team is filled with developers who want to do the right thing.
John:
And so they have.
John:
So I'm still watching this space to see how much Apple is willing to embrace theming and customization on iOS.
John:
Because I can tell you on the Mac, aside from free or accent colors, Apple has not fully endorsed theming and has mostly accidentally shut down every application on macOS 10 anyway that has allowed some kind of theming from candy bar to shape shifter to all that other good stuff.
John:
It's not that they had it out for them, it's just that they never considered that an important use case, and they slowly, semi-accidentally, semi-on-purpose broke it all until where we are today, where no one really tries to do anything.
John:
But iOS is going in the other direction, so I'm still watching this space.
Casey:
Yeah, didn't, wasn't there, I don't know, like an iOS release or two ago, a way that I think shortcuts could set like your lock screen or your, your, your wallpaper on your home screen.
Casey:
And then that like got pulled and then it came back and then it got pulled.
Casey:
And from the outside, it almost smelled like there was a cat and mouse going on between, uh, the, the, you know, former, uh, uh, the shortcuts team.
Casey:
What was it called?
Casey:
Workflow.
Casey:
God, I just had a total blank.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
The former workflow now shortcuts team and the rest of the iOS team at Apple where, you know, shortcuts slash workflow was like, oh, yeah, we can totally make it so you can change your home screen and your lock screen.
Casey:
And then the rest of the iOS group was like, huh?
Casey:
What?
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
And it just went back and forth a few times.
Casey:
I think it actually just came back recently.
Casey:
But, yeah, it is interesting to see.
Casey:
A group of developers that very much believed in the, you know, go fast and break things mantra and how they're dealing with the large, you know, aircraft carrier that is Apple.
John:
I don't think they're going fast and breaking things.
John:
They're just being as responsive as they would be as an independent company, which is more responsive than Apple is.
John:
And by the way, we're talking about teams being responsive.
John:
I will once again make my pitch to anybody Apple who is listening.
John:
Yeah.
John:
There is a level of customization that iOS has allowed basically from day one, which is the ability to rearrange icons in your home screen.
John:
That interface continues to be a thorn in the world side.
John:
Please, please, somebody... Because third-party developers can't do this.
John:
If you let third-party developers do it, it would be solved already.
John:
But you haven't.
John:
You're keeping it for yourself.
John:
So if you're going to keep it for yourself, please...
John:
Give us a way to rearrange home screens and icons in a way that does not drive us all up a wall and make us tear our hair out because the current system is really, really bad and my home screens are a mess and I want to fix them and I can't.
John:
Please, please, Apple, do something about this.
Marco:
Yeah, I would like Apple to treat the home screen arrangement as more valuable data than they appear to treat it right now.
Marco:
Because right now, when I was going through COVID the last two weeks, I decided I should add to my home screen a widget that can display the blood oxygen level for my Apple Watch.
Marco:
Whatever the last measurement was, I want that on a widget on my home screen so I can see it all the time.
Casey:
Well, that's a good idea.
Marco:
yeah thanks i i thought so too and i did eventually find something that could do that um let me plug it real fast it's called health view and it just displays like you know anything from health kit in a widget and when i first like i don't know anybody myself included who has placed a widget on their home screen successfully without totally screwing up a million other icons in the process
John:
It's like setting off a bomb on your own screen.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And there is not only is there no undo, but even if you just take whatever widget you had just bombed your home screen with and just move it to a different page, the icons don't go back to the way they were.
Marco:
They go back to some other like shuffled random order.
Marco:
It's really weird.
John:
It's literally like a bomb.
John:
It's like if you set off a bomb and then you then you remove the bomb, the bricks don't go back to where they are.
John:
They stay scattered to the four winds.
Marco:
Yeah, and they just collapse back inward in random orders.
Marco:
It's very strange.
Marco:
I had to look back at a screenshot that I had taken of my home screen a few days earlier for other reasons.
Marco:
I had to look for that to know, how did I have these icons arranged again?
John:
That's the main reason I take screenshots of my home screen, by the way.
John:
Sometimes people say, oh, show us your old home screen.
John:
The only reason I have those is because I always take one, if I'm smart, before I start trying to rearrange because I know it's going to be chaos.
Marco:
Yeah, and it seems like maybe whoever works on Springboard at Apple, just by the nature of working on Springboard, maybe they have such constant disturbances in their icon arrangements as part of that job that they just don't realize how incredibly disruptive it is when it happens to most people.
Marco:
Because I'll keep the same icon arrangement for a lot of stuff on my main home screen.
Marco:
I'll keep it for years.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And when that gets disrupted, you can't find things where they are because you're so used to the spatial memory of where things were.
Marco:
And so it's such an incredibly disruptive thing to have that be messed up in a big way.
Marco:
And I don't know how you can possibly install a widget on any home screen and not do that.
Marco:
I do hope that Apple realizes how bad this is sometime and actually improves that.
John:
To be clear, the app library stuff and being able to hide home screens, those are all good features.
John:
We're not saying get rid of those.
John:
You have to have those too.
John:
And also, for the home screens that you want to actually have, you have to be able to arrange things in a sane way.
John:
I've been trying new techniques because I've been trying to work on my later home screens because, like I said, my home screens are a mess.
John:
and no technique i can find can get me sanity like i've been i think the behavior has changed slightly recently because what i've been doing my main technique that i've used is the grab and hold and then flick with the other finger to scroll so it's like a two-handed technique rather than pushing to the screen edge which is you know you'll it's madness you'll never be successful that way right so you just grab one or more icons then you swipe with the other finger quickly the problem is no matter how fast you swipe
John:
Because momentarily, iOS thinks you're on one of the other home screens.
John:
And when you're on there momentarily, it tends to eject other icons like subatomic particles in a particle collider.
John:
It ejects them outwards.
John:
Right.
John:
And you're like, but I'm just passing through.
John:
I'm on my way to page five.
John:
Right.
John:
I don't I didn't want to disturb anything on page three, but I have.
John:
And the new thing that I think in the last two iOS versions or whatever is I'll get to page five.
John:
I'll find the place for it.
John:
It's like preparing the way with my fridge again.
John:
I will have prepared a spot for it.
John:
I'll get to page five.
John:
I'll land the icons if I'm lucky.
John:
Sometimes I'm unlucky and they just go somewhere and have no idea where.
John:
But then I'll go back and I'll swipe backwards and I'll see that icons were ejected and somehow spawned a new page just for the ejected icons between what was page three and page four.
John:
And now there'll be a page with one or two icons on it.
John:
I'm like, where did you come from?
John:
And I'll look to either side and sometimes either side is filled with icons.
John:
I'm like, how is that possible?
John:
Where did these come from?
John:
And how did you make a new page for yourself?
John:
I was just passing through and I thought I successfully landed those two icons on page five, but now I have an extra page with two icons on it.
John:
It's the worst.
John:
It's getting worse.
John:
Like it's before it used to be, oh, well, like, you know, I keep going from one edge to the other and it squirms out of the way and yada, yada.
John:
But at least it was somewhat sensible.
John:
Like there was just a big linear list, like a big snake and you just push things.
John:
But now they spawn their own pages.
John:
It's like we need an interface to do this.
John:
That is not that a is undoable slash like sort of rearrange and then commit.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
and then b provides a richer interface than our fingers on the phone screen if we could do it on a mac if we could do it on an ipad or if we could do it on a phone in miniaturized size in a sort of trial mode where you're just in this app that lets you rearrange home screens and only when you get it all the way you want it do you say commit or you just bail and say well never mind or you leave it in progress or whatever but like like i said if this if there was an api for doing this which i'm not i'm not really asking for this is a tall order for an api but
John:
All I'm saying, if there was a third party API for home screen management, this problem will be solved a hundred ways because it's, you know, third parties would make money doing it because there's a need and people want to do it.
John:
And we just met this proof that there's an appetite for this type of thing, but there's no third party API.
John:
Fine.
John:
It makes sense.
John:
It should be a first party thing.
John:
Apple just do a better job at it.
John:
That's all we're asking for.
Casey:
You know, it's funny because just a couple of days ago I was talking to my dad and he said, you know, can you still arrange your home screen in iTunes?
Casey:
And I was like, well, it's not iTunes anymore.
Casey:
It's music.
Casey:
And no, I don't think so.
Casey:
And you can't do it in the Finder either, I don't believe.
Casey:
In fact, I don't think that's been a thing for you.
John:
You can do it in the Apple Configurator 2, supposedly.
John:
I took a run at it a few times, and I think there's a way to do it, but I think you kind of have to pretend that you're managing a bunch of people's corporate iOS devices or something.
John:
It was scary enough that I bailed out every time I took a run at it, but before people send us feedback, apparently there is a way to use Apple Configurator 2 to somehow do this, and Apple Configurator 2 is an app that you run on your Mac.
John:
So maybe there's a better, easier way to do it, but iTunes was...
John:
the best solution we've had so far.
John:
And even that wasn't great because you would think that, oh, you've got a Mac screen and this huge iTunes window.
John:
Surely you can make this easy with a mouse cursor or whatever.
John:
It was still weird and hard.
John:
It wasn't a good interface.
John:
Again, if this was a third-party API, many people would make third-party apps and the good ones would float to the top.
John:
Instead, we just got the one implementation on iTunes, which was better than nothing.
John:
That's why your dad was asking for it because it was better than just trying to do it with your finger, but it still wasn't good.
Casey:
Then finally, one very quick piece of follow-up.
Casey:
I was lamenting last week about GitHub's relationship with the U.S.
Casey:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and it was pointed out to me that that isn't a direct relationship.
Casey:
So what happened was a third-party reseller sold an on-premises GitHub Enterprise Server instance contract, whatever,
Casey:
on behalf of github but github like didn't seek this business themselves there is a third party in between the two it doesn't make me feel that much better about it personally but you may have a different interpretation of it and i will put a link it's like money laundering for morals so i'll put a link in the show notes to their response about this which was from uh late last actually almost exactly a year ago so you can check it out if you're interested
Marco:
Also, I wanted to give a quick shout out to this wonderful, so okay, earlier this evening, I had discovered throughout all of my new device setups that for the first time ever, I had a sync problem with my contacts database.
Marco:
For the first time ever, I all of a sudden had duplicates of every single contact in my address book.
Marco:
Woof.
Marco:
And I had heard Merlin talk about this before in Back to Work, so I knew there were apps out there that would help you find and clean up duplicates.
Marco:
So I asked in a Slack group what these apps were called and what a good one was.
Marco:
And somebody who knows a bit about macOS named John Siracusa said, did you try the menu command in the contacts app to deduplicate?
Marco:
I didn't even know this was here.
Marco:
John, when was this added?
Yeah.
John:
It's been there for a long time.
John:
I ask that timidly because a lot of people have contact problems.
John:
And sometimes that dedupe command doesn't do the job.
John:
And the reason they're asking is, hey, I tried the built-in dedupe command and it couldn't do what I wanted.
John:
So now give me the third party like power app or whatever.
John:
And I was hoping that maybe you didn't even know that was in there.
John:
But yeah, it's been in there for a while.
John:
I've used it a lot.
John:
It's pretty good.
John:
If you have a straight up duplication, it will handle it.
John:
If instead you've done like I've done several times where you import a bunch of V cards that are from an old backup or something and it really takes a little bit of doing, it's a good first step.
John:
I think it's been in there for many, many years, but I couldn't pin it down to a particular release.
Marco:
So this is under the Card menu.
Marco:
So in the Contacts app, Card menu, look for duplicates.
Marco:
And it also had a feature, which is a great little thing that I frequently need, where if it has two names, you can have it optionally merge the info whenever it sees the same name in two different records.
Marco:
And this happens all the time because of a...
Marco:
relatively terrible design decision in the messages app where you and I think I think you see this a few other places like phone and stuff where you you get something from a new number and it gives you the option create a new contact or add to existing contact
Marco:
And the problem is – does anybody else face this problem?
Marco:
I face this constantly.
Marco:
I never know.
Marco:
Do I have a contact for this person yet?
Marco:
And so what I want is a name search box that I can type in their name and see whether I have a contact for them yet.
Marco:
And then if I do, add this number to it.
Marco:
And if I don't, create a new one.
Marco:
And the interface doesn't let you do that.
Marco:
It's just create new or add to existing.
Marco:
And if you change your mind, you've got to cancel out of that screen and then rebuild the entire sequence of taps or commands that got you there.
Marco:
So I frequently would have two contacts with the same name that are the same person, but one of them has an email address and one of them has a phone number.
Marco:
And this command...
Marco:
also fixes that uh and i i had some good luck with that as well so i ran this earlier tonight i fixed my entire problem and yeah thanks contacts app in apparently mavericks when this started uh that was a very good feature so the cynical message that i didn't write in the slack to follow up is uh and now enjoy doing that at least once a week for the rest of your life
John:
because because here's the thing where did the duplicates come from like you didn't make two of all your contacts somehow they just appeared and not knowing why they appeared the fact that you can fix them you're like oh great i've solved that problem but then tomorrow you wake up and you have two all your contacts again and then you do find duplicates and fixes it and then next week you see i have two of all your contacts and so it's like i hope that doesn't happen to you but like but that is one of the sort of
John:
You know, when sync goes wrong and you don't know why, it's great to be able to fix it in an automated way, but it still sort of shakes the foundation of your confidence in the system.
John:
Like, how did this happen and will it happen again?
Marco:
Yeah, that's why I was so surprised to see it because really, like, the basics of iCloud syncing, the, you know, contacts, calendars, like that kind of stuff has always worked very well for me.
Marco:
And I've heard of other people having issues.
Marco:
I'm like a contact syncing unicorn.
Marco:
Never had any problems.
Marco:
And the amount of devices that I set up and delete and go through is higher than average.
Marco:
And I've carried the same database through a much longer time span than probably the average customer.
Marco:
And so to have gone this long without having any...
John:
sync hiccups at all i consider that a win and when this happened i was like yeah of course this is going to happen like if this happens once in what is it in 15 years fine that's that's like mice or cockroaches yeah you don't just see one of them here's the speaking of your database if you see one it's okay if you see more than one you're screwed no no if you see one there's 100 you don't see that's the whole thing um speaking of database have you made a backup of your contacts database recently slash ever
Marco:
Yes, right before I did the deduping, I did the export to the big contact archive thing.
John:
That's a thing I would recommend people do.
John:
Anytime they find themselves diving into the Contacts app on their Mac because they're really going to get some stuff straight, like say before doing your holiday cards, you're like, okay, I'm going in and I'm going to straighten out my addresses because a bunch of people moved and yada yada.
John:
Stop.
John:
Before you start getting in there and digging around, make a complete backup of your Contacts database.
John:
The Contacts app has a command to do this inside of it.
John:
and make a backup of it and don't just call it contacts backup put the date in the name put it in a folder somewhere and have multiple contacts backup so then if you do get bitten by an evil you know contacts bug that keeps duplicating your things you can always go scorched dark the beauty of contacts unlike photos and other data that is really big contacts are relatively small you can make a complete backup of them and say forget it i give up
John:
wipe all your contacts delete everything and then just restore again from within the contacts app restore from your backup and get back to hopefully a good starting point even doing that can be difficult because to really delete all of your contacts is that surprisingly tricky because you'd have to delete it and allow that deletion to sync to all your devices and make sure there's not one poison device screwing everything up somewhere and then when you're confident okay the only contact in there is the me contact which is another tricky thing you got to deal with how do you set up the me contact
John:
right now i'm good then you could restore from your backup but if you don't have a backup you're kind of out of luck so please everybody make a backup of your contacts before you start screwing with them also if you use the um you know file export contacts archive uh version of this it puts the date in the file name for you in the box so you don't even have to type in the date it's right there look at that there i don't know when they started doing that but that's convenient that's exactly what you want
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Flatfile, the easy, very well featured import button for your web app.
Marco:
Think of the last time you imported a spreadsheet to an app.
Marco:
Did it work correctly the first time?
Marco:
Nearly everybody has dealt with formatting messy CSVs or Excel files so the data can be imported correctly into an app.
Marco:
It's a huge pain.
Marco:
Even engineers like us are not spared from this pain.
Marco:
We are typically doomed to build our data parsers from scratch and usually not even for the first time.
Marco:
I personally can relate to this.
Marco:
I built so many CSV importers and it isn't just CSV upload.
Marco:
It's things like header mapping and data validation or even a nice UI component, which really adds to the complexity of this.
Marco:
As exciting as it is to build another custom importer compared to your core product features, our friends at FlatFile have finally made a good solution.
Marco:
FlatFile Portal is the elegant import button offering an intuitive data import experience for your app.
Marco:
Portal integrates with virtually any application and in a matter of minutes can intelligently ingest, validate, and transform incoming spreadsheet data so it's clean and ready to use in your backend.
Marco:
If you're interested in testing out flat file portal in a production environment or even playing with it in a code sandbox,
Marco:
visit get.flatfile.io slash ATP.
Marco:
Once again, that's get.flatfile.io slash ATP for Flatfile Portal, the elegant import button for your app.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Flatfile for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
Okay, so for the last couple of weeks, if you've heard the bootleg, which is our, you know, no holds barred, immediately released, not that great sound quality, no ads, but you get to hear all the garbage version of the show.
Casey:
I'm selling it super well.
Casey:
Really selling it.
Casey:
Yeah, you can join us in listening to the bootleg or a ad-free but nicely edited version of the show by going to ATP.FM slash join.
Casey:
And for those of you who have already joined, thank you.
Casey:
You've heard me trying desperately to
Casey:
to bring up a topic for like two or three weeks running that underscore my name is T said in the chat a couple of weeks ago.
Casey:
And they said, after show request for the week after next, which again is like two or three weeks ago now, two Wednesdays from the time this was written is the 10th anniversary of the first build and analyze episode.
Casey:
It'd be great to hear some reflections on 10 years of podcasting, how it's changed, what surprised you, et cetera.
Casey:
I am so desperate to hear this, not because I really have anything to contribute, but because I really want to hear what you guys have to say about this as the elder statesman of the three of us.
Casey:
What has podcasting been like for you for 10 years?
Casey:
And since we started with Build and Analyze and this question, let's start with Marco.
Marco:
Well, first of all, you do have a lot to contribute to this because this show is, what, seven years old?
Casey:
That's a good point.
Casey:
I feel like it's not that old, but you're exactly right.
Marco:
It's like seven and a half years old.
Marco:
Yeah, you're right.
Marco:
Really, you have been here for most of this time.
Marco:
You also were listening for this whole time.
Casey:
That's true, too.
Marco:
So you do have things that you should add to this.
Marco:
So I am going to put you on the spot and have you add stuff to this later as well.
Marco:
But I honestly... You know, I don't have...
Marco:
a lot to say about this right now you know it's in many ways what we do as the kind of podcasters we are which that's a big asterisk but the kind of podcasters we are in many ways what we do hasn't really changed much during this time you know
Marco:
We have our handful of totally non-diverse white men talking with each other for a couple hours each week, unscripted.
Marco:
We have an outline of topics, but we don't script things that we're going to say.
Marco:
It's a very, very high quality implementation of very low production value.
Marco:
so like if that makes sense like we try to sound as good as we can with sound quality and we we put in some niceties that we didn't used to do things like um chapter markers and you know we have our our ad free members version as case we're just talking about and stuff like that it's like we have like production values in that sense we and you know we do detailed show notes for each episode we do little descriptions so like the experience in a podcast app is pretty rich our website exists and is functional and so you know
Casey:
It remains a product in our lineup.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, but there's permalink pages for each episode.
Marco:
That's not a given for podcasts.
Marco:
Trust me, I know.
Marco:
I maintain an index of podcasts.
Marco:
That's far from a given.
Marco:
Our podcast is easily shareable because we don't do dynamic ad insertion.
Marco:
And so our timestamps matter and are stable.
Marco:
And so stuff like that.
Marco:
So we have a lot of production value on that side of things.
Marco:
But we are not doing like a music bed under every segment and having scripted segments and interviews where we go out on scene and talk to a person in Iowa whenever like we don't we don't do stuff like that the way like high production podcasts do because that's just a different style of show requires a totally different skill set and a staff and everything else that this is not what we do.
Marco:
But what we do is a really good version of people talking to each other unscripted about computers and Apple news each week and funded by a few statically baked in host red ads spread throughout the episode.
Marco:
And that basic format, we've been doing that for pretty much 10 years.
Marco:
We've refined the format over time, but that basic thing we've been doing for pretty much the whole time, and that existed before us, and there's no sign of that stopping anytime soon in the future either.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
That's just what we do in our little corner of podcasting.
Marco:
What has mostly changed in the last 10 years is that while this version of podcasting has definitely grown, the rest of the podcasting world became way bigger.
Marco:
and went in some pretty different directions.
Marco:
So our version of podcasting became a much smaller proportion of the podcasting world as a whole.
Marco:
And some of this is great.
Marco:
Some of this, I mentioned our diversity issues earlier.
Marco:
As podcasting has gotten bigger, diversity has dramatically improved.
Marco:
And thank God, it needed to.
Marco:
It still needs to.
Marco:
We're still nowhere near being a representative sample of the world's population.
Marco:
Not even close.
Marco:
But it is way better than it used to be, and we're making progress in that area.
Marco:
So that's good.
Marco:
There are other areas of where podcasting has gone that might not be so great for us.
Marco:
Things like as the big money platforms move in and start locking stuff down and making all these exclusivity deals that take people out of podcasting and lock their stuff into a certain app or something.
Marco:
That's not great.
Marco:
That actively threatens the world that we're in.
Marco:
Not as much as people think, but it does threaten it.
Marco:
And also, I mentioned earlier that we are funded, as we've been this entire time, mostly by the sponsor reads that are in each episode.
Marco:
And if the sponsor landscape dramatically changes in some way, that could affect us too.
Marco:
So even if the big business side of podcasting
Marco:
Most of the time, we can kind of coexist, and we don't get in each other's way, and what they do is over there, and what we do is over here, and it's fine.
Marco:
But if they cause major changes to happen in the sponsor landscape, that could affect us.
Marco:
So that could be things like if all sponsors start requiring way more tracking data than what we give them –
Marco:
So far, we have had to turn away, I think, one or two sponsors ever because we don't do demographic tracking.
Marco:
But everyone else... And they've required it.
Marco:
And everyone else is... They ask and we say, we don't do that.
Marco:
And they say, okay.
Marco:
And they buy that anyway.
Marco:
We should tell you something about the value of demographic tracking.
Marco:
Anyway... But if...
Marco:
the sponsor landscape shifts around in bigger ways where sponsors start requiring for all the shows they sponsor the same kind of data or other things that they get from the really, really big shows with their dynamic ad insertion platforms and micro-targeting and tracking and all that stuff.
Marco:
Then that would affect us in a negative way.
Marco:
But for the most part, as the big world of podcasting has grown,
Marco:
Most of the ways that it grows is just in having some really big shows.
Marco:
And if a show is really big, that doesn't really negatively affect us in almost any possible way.
Marco:
Again, these kind of macroeconomic factors could affect us, but so far they mostly haven't.
Marco:
So it's been overall good for us.
Marco:
But interestingly, the thing that we do, the kind of shows that we make, the kind of shows I listen to, frankly, are mostly the same as they were 10 years ago.
Marco:
There's more of them.
Marco:
There are more people in this world than there were back then.
Marco:
There are more listeners in this world.
Marco:
The shows have all gotten better.
Marco:
We've gotten better at doing this format.
Marco:
We've gotten just better at our jobs.
Marco:
The equipment has gotten better.
Marco:
The software has gotten better.
Marco:
Our techniques and...
Marco:
That's all gotten better, and hopefully we've gotten a little bit wiser in a decade.
Marco:
But for the most part, the core of what we do here is basically the same but better now.
Marco:
And 10 years is a long time.
Marco:
I think it's a lot better.
Marco:
But overall, we're still...
Marco:
hanging out, talking with our friends once a week for a couple hours about technology and Apple stuff.
Marco:
And I love that.
Marco:
And I'm in no rush to change or stop that because I still can't believe that we get paid to do this.
Marco:
That's incredible to me.
Marco:
It's still incredible to me.
Marco:
I've said this before, so I won't go too far into it, but I'm not even a good speaker.
Marco:
I've never been a good speaker.
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't pronounce words right and I stutter constantly and I don't plan what I'm saying and I say uh or um and like and constantly.
Marco:
I know this because I'm the editor of the show.
Marco:
You would think like, you know, I did used to think before podcasting that like I could never get a job as like one of my like kid fantasy jobs was I wanted to be a radio DJ.
Marco:
But I thought, well, I don't have the voice for it.
Marco:
I don't speak well enough.
Marco:
I don't have that kind of like low 90s radio DJ voice, like all that stuff.
Marco:
So I figured, yeah, you know what?
Marco:
I guess I won't ever be able to do that.
Marco:
It turns out being a radio DJ is a terrible job in practice.
Marco:
And being a podcaster is an awesome job in practice.
Marco:
And yeah, I could never be a radio DJ.
Marco:
I don't have the right traits to do that.
Marco:
But I do apparently have the right traits to stumble into this because the world of podcasting is different and more forgiving and more human and less of that polished 80s artificial perfection kind of image.
Marco:
And so this I can do.
Marco:
And it still shocks me that I can do this, but, you know, now, like, it's been 10 years, and after this long, like, I'm not... I used to be nervous before every single show for probably the first six or seven years.
Marco:
That's finally stopped.
Marco:
But, yeah, otherwise, like, I'm just very happy...
Marco:
With what we do, I'm incredibly happy that people still tune in and listen to this stuff.
Marco:
Because to me, it's just BSing with my friends about tech that we would have been talking about anyway.
Marco:
But we just happened to record it and do it in a slightly more structured way.
Marco:
And that's how we started...
Marco:
Back then, and that's still what we're doing now.
Marco:
So I'm just really happy that we've kind of found our groove and that this is a thing that continues to exist and that podcasting, for all of the effort that has been thrown at trying to ruin it,
Marco:
no one has succeeded at ruining it and i think it's i think it's proven to be pretty resilient to being ruined by many things about its nature that are likely to stay that way for for a while longer at least i hope so yeah so far i mean you know back when i started i wasn't as much in the business um i you know i didn't make overcast until almost halfway through this period
Marco:
So, you know, I was only a podcaster before that.
Marco:
I wasn't a podcast app maker for the whole time.
Marco:
So, you know, that kind of changed my view of it in certain ways.
Marco:
But overall, I still love this world.
Marco:
I still...
Marco:
Back when I announced Overcast at XOXO, I think it was 2013 or something, I gave this comparison in my presentation about how the world of text on the web and big text was a world that I kind of was turned off by, but the world of big podcasting
Marco:
was just like everything I liked.
Marco:
It was, it was all like good technology, good people, great audiences.
Marco:
Uh, and I just, I loved how the world of podcasting worked and that was almost seven years ago now.
Marco:
Uh, actually I might've been exactly seven years ago.
Marco:
Uh, and that's still the case.
Marco:
Like I still look around the web and I still look at like the world of text on the web, you know, all the big media articles and everything.
Marco:
And I,
Marco:
I don't want to be a part of that world.
Marco:
I was for a long time, and it really took some bad turns over these years, and it's not a good place for a lot of people to be anymore.
Marco:
Some people can still make a good time out of it, but...
Marco:
it's certainly not what it was.
Marco:
Uh, podcasting seems to just still be getting better.
Marco:
And, you know, as all this big money has moved in, it's certainly, you know, there have been a little bit of kind of uneasy times here and there where we're not like, we see some massive amount of money being spent to try to ruin it.
Marco:
And it's, you know, it's hard not to feel a little bit scared when that happens, but so far, like the, those attempts mostly just bounce off of us or they, uh,
Marco:
are a bunch of the big shows and the big ad networks and the big hosting platforms that host the big shows with the big ad networks, all like buying each other and doing things that affect each other, but that don't affect us over here.
Marco:
So as long as that dynamic continues to be the case, I'm very optimistic and I love the world of podcasts and I'm very happy to be in it all this time and I'd like to stay here.
Casey:
I concur.
Casey:
You know, I really want to hear what John has to say, but just briefly, you know, I was looking as we record, I get a pretty solid first draft of the show notes together and Marco will, you know, edit things here and there and John will add things here and there and edit things occasionally.
Casey:
But I was looking at the, to get the link for your XOXO video that you just mentioned and
Casey:
And, you know, I found it pretty quickly and I'm looking at this and it says, you know, Marco Arment, the magazine slash Instapaper.
Casey:
When he asked New York writer and programmer Marco Arment to speak at XOXO, he was still developing Instapaper in the magazine and Tumblr was an independent startup.
Casey:
Since then, he sold the magazine to Glenn Fleischman, Instapaper to Betaworks, and Tumblr sold to Yahoo in a billion dollar deal.
Casey:
One of the best parts of independence is choosing what you work on.
Casey:
And Marco's clearing his plate for something brand new.
Casey:
It's funny to me that I'll read this and the magazine was like 30 years ago, but ATP started last year.
Casey:
Like that's the way I feel about it.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Like the magazine was so long ago to me.
Casey:
It was forever ago.
Casey:
And yes, conceptually, intellectually, I understand that ATP was seven, you know, we started almost eight years ago now.
Casey:
but it doesn't feel like it's been almost eight years, which hopefully is a testament to the two of you and our awesome listeners.
Casey:
But nevertheless, it's just so funny how one thing can feel forever ago and another feels like it was just yesterday.
Casey:
But anyway, John, what are your thoughts on this as the other elder statesman?
John:
I need to plan more surprise segments on the show to make Marco feel nervous before we record again.
John:
I want to get back that nervous energy.
John:
Why?
John:
You shouldn't be coming into this show complacent.
John:
You don't know what's going to happen.
John:
Anything can happen.
Casey:
You've got to start pre-flighting before we record.
John:
It's time for Marco to get nervous again.
John:
Great.
John:
I think Marco covered most of the industry stuff pretty well, and I think I got most of the navel-gazing slash back-padding out in the episode 400 Spectacular.
John:
So the only thing I'll add here is...
John:
some personal reflections on 10 years of podcasting.
John:
Did I start hypercritical or maybe I started on, on the incomparable before hypercritical.
John:
I don't remember.
John:
Like this is where you keep good records of things.
John:
Cause no one else cares about this thing.
John:
Someone says, when did you start podcasting?
John:
Honestly, I don't know.
John:
Like I can, I can look it up and I can think I can determine that.
John:
I think I was on the incomparable before the first episode of hypercritical, but I might've been on another ad hoc podcast with episode with Dan Benjamin before that.
Um,
Marco:
You were probably on his interview show.
John:
Yeah.
John:
What was that called?
Marco:
I forgot.
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
We're all too old.
John:
But all I'm saying is I think I started podcasting around the same time as Marco.
John:
So here, you know, so I've been podcasting for a similar amount of time.
John:
Um...
John:
And the reason I am reflecting on this, I think about how how did I get into podcasting?
John:
Because I had been, you know, I've been a programmer since I left school, since even before I left school.
John:
That's been my profession.
John:
I still do it professionally.
John:
And.
John:
I had been, you know, in the sort of Mac web world from the Usenet groups to eventual websites and web forums.
John:
And eventually I started writing for Ars Technica and did all the Mac OS 10 reviews.
John:
So I was, you know, I was in the tech world as well.
John:
So I was a programmer.
John:
I needed tech writing.
John:
But podcasting is another thing I can't really remember.
John:
The first podcast I remember listening to, though, the first one that made an impression on me was Merle Lafferty's podcast called I Should Be Writing.
John:
As the tagline of the show went back when I started listening to it, it was...
John:
a podcast for wannabe fiction writers by a wannabe fiction writer uh at the time merle lafferty wanted to be a fiction writer and she was trying and she made a podcast where it was literally just her and a microphone and that was it no no music beds no intro music no theme song just merle lafferty and a microphone um
John:
And she would talk about the struggles of being a writer, different things about being a writer, how to plan your stories, you know, what to work on in your writing, the value of writer's workshops, how to try to get an agent.
John:
And, you know, she wasn't coming in as an expert because she was a wannabe fiction writer.
John:
She was working through these things in real time and podcasting about them.
John:
eventually the show tagline had to change because she became a published author she just kept doing the podcast so on and so forth but anyway i would listen to her in the car as an alternative to listening to npr or whatever i was listening to on my radio because you know i had music i think i had music on my ipod at this point but i you know my cars didn't have bluetooth and so it was kind of hard to hook up so i would listen to npr and when i didn't want to listen to that say during pledge week or whatever
John:
pledge month pledge decade i will listen to i should be writing i didn't want to be a fiction writer particularly you know i enjoyed writing and i enjoyed hearing people talk about it but i just love listening to her talk about i mean she's got a great voice for podcasts it's very calming it's very soothing she's she was you know very sort of uh
John:
thoughtful uh and you know spoke about writing with a lot of feeling uh but with you know a lot of good insights and uh what sounded to me like good advice for all i knew about about fiction writing um and so that was one aspect of it and the second one was at this time i was going into the office like we all used to and working as a programmer and we we had like this was one of the smaller companies i was at
John:
There's like maybe one or 200 people by the end and start off significantly smaller.
John:
And we had a lunchroom and we'd all sit at the lunch table and eat whatever we packed as our lunch and just hang out and talk about things.
John:
And inevitably we'd end up talking about, I'd talk with my friends about tech stuff, but we'd talk about anything.
John:
It was a lot like a lunchroom at school where maybe if you sat with your nerdy friends, you got to talk about like D&D or cars or baseball or whatever it was you were nerdy about.
John:
But if you were at a more sort of
John:
you know, general audience table, like on a field trip or something, you just talk about whatever anyone wants to talk about.
John:
And we'd have great conversations at this table about stuff like this.
John:
And as you can imagine me being a big blabbermouth from hearing me on all these podcasts, sometimes I'd go off on a big rant about something and it doesn't take much, you know, it can be about refrigerators or computers or pizza or bagels or like, you know, whatever it would be.
John:
And sometimes I'd go off on one of those and I'd see that I had a little audience of people who was listening to me.
John:
do this and then i would quickly shut up because i would be embarrassed or whatever but i did take note that occasionally i could entertain an audience with the thing that i do that i now do on podcast so these two things combined hey i like listening to merle afferty talk about a topic that i'm not even that interested in just because i find it entertaining and soothing and interesting right uh and also
John:
I have things that I can talk about.
John:
I'm writing articles on Ars Technica and people are reading those.
John:
And I know a lot about a couple of specific tech topics.
John:
Maybe I could combine those two things.
John:
And it was a certain point where for doing both these things combining, I said, I think podcasting is a thing I might be able to do, right?
John:
Because I'd heard people podcasting and I'd had experiences in real life where occasionally people would be entertained by me talking about things.
And
John:
and so that sort of culminated and you know however it happened that it probably knowing me what probably happened is dan benjamin probably reached out to me and said hey do you want to be on a podcast because like so many things in my life i need to be drag kicking and screaming into things that are you know good for me right so i've always been very bad about sort of putting myself forward how it happened in ars technica i don't think i've told the story a million times or not but like i was active in the ars technica forums and
John:
And Ken Fisher, who founded Ars Technica, reached out to me and said, hey, would you like to write something for Ars Technica?
John:
I didn't go banging on his door and say, I want to write articles for Ars Technica.
John:
Almost everything that's good has happened to me in my life has happened because someone else has dragged me into it, which is why, anyway, that's just the way I am.
John:
So I'm assuming that's what happened with podcasting as well.
John:
But at that point, I was primed to jump on that because I had already been thinking about the idea
John:
that I think podcasting could be a thing that I could do.
John:
Uh, and sure enough, 10 years later, it seems like it is a thing that I'm glad I did.
John:
Even if I had to be dragged into a kicking and screaming, not really kicking and screaming, but I had to be, I had to be like a vampire.
John:
I had to be invited in.
John:
Let's just put it that way.
John:
And now I'm here.
John:
You can't get rid of me.
Casey:
It's funny how different and yet similar all three of our paths into this were.
Casey:
You know, for me, I had been aware of podcasting, but I don't think I'd ever listened to a podcast until this friend of mine from when I was a child, literally a child, who I think I had started to talk to again around this time.
Casey:
But this guy, his name was Marco Arment, and he started this podcast called Build and Analyze.
Casey:
And I thought, well, you know,
Casey:
I knew Marco, and I'm getting to know him at this point again.
Casey:
I forget where this was in our grand reintroduction to each other.
Marco:
I believe I was instant messaging my friend Blista.
Casey:
How can we forget?
Marco:
On aim, yeah.
Casey:
but uh one way or another you know this is around the time that marco and i you know because we were as close as two kids who saw each other once a year could be you know when we were like 10 and then you know and not in an angry way we just fell out of contact for a long time and then around this time we started to talk again again i i don't remember if we were talking already and then build and analyze started or if you know build and analyze was what spurred me into reaching out or whatever the case may be maybe it was marco that reached out i don't know but the point is
Casey:
We were getting to know each other again, and this guy, Mark Warman, he's doing a podcast.
Casey:
I should check that out.
Casey:
And he does the same sort of work that I do for a living in a different environment.
Casey:
I was all on the Windows stuff at the time, but it's still writing code, so I should check that out.
Casey:
you know, as so many people have said to us, you know, once you start listening to Build and Analyze, you know, Marco's constantly name dropping hypercritical.
Casey:
And then once you start listening to hypercritical, you get constant name drops of the talk show.
Casey:
And so it does not take long before every waking minute of your day is spent listening to other people talk.
Casey:
And then, you know, I would listen to the show to Build and Analyze.
Casey:
I would listen live and I would be one of the jackals in the chat room.
Casey:
And I remember
Casey:
even though Marco and I are friends and were at the time, you know, every great once in a while, he would mention my name or, or even more impressively because I didn't know him, John would mention my name and my, my freaking heart would beat out of my chest.
Casey:
Cause like, Oh my God, Oh my God.
Casey:
Oh my God.
Casey:
They know I exist.
Casey:
Like Mario, of course, Marco knows I exist.
Casey:
Like we're friends, but nevertheless, when you hear it in the context of the show, it's like, Oh my God, what's happening.
Casey:
And, uh, and so that was, you know, circa 2010, 2011, something like that.
Casey:
And then I guess was the end of 2012 or thereabouts when I started needling Marco about doing a car show with me.
Casey:
And I've told the story several times before, probably on this very program.
Casey:
But, you know, Marco had the genuinely brilliant idea of saying, well, you know, I stopped build and analyze.
Casey:
And, you know, John Syracuse had just stopped hypercritical.
Casey:
And he likes car stuff.
Casey:
I wonder if the three of us could do something together.
Casey:
And, and that's when neutral started and I still stand by neutral.
Casey:
It was a disaster, but it was a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful disaster.
Casey:
And I loved it so much.
Casey:
And, and again, Marco in a, in a stroke of brilliance realized, well, when we stopped recording neutral and just started goofing off about the things that, you know, allegedly we weren't there to talk about, which always ended up being nerdy tech stuff.
Casey:
Marco put, what was it on SoundCloud?
Casey:
The first few episodes went up.
Casey:
Is that right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Yeah.
Casey:
And then it turns out that we actually know things about technology and don't really know squat about cars.
Casey:
And, you know, fast forward a couple of years, three, four years, and suddenly this is my job.
Casey:
Like, it's utterly bananas the path that I have taken from being one of those people in the chat room just trying to get noticed.
Casey:
And I mean that both in a self-deprecating and also a literal way.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
Now, you know, I'm hosting what I like to think of, at least for our little pond, a relatively popular and important program.
Casey:
And it's amazing to me that this is how I can put food on the table and how I can feed my family and how I can spend my time.
Casey:
And the three of us are indescribably lucky that any of you are listening, much less any of you who have spent money on either an advertiser or membership or what have you,
Casey:
It's wild.
Casey:
And it's scary to see these changes.
Casey:
It's scary for me because I have very chicken little tendencies.
Casey:
It's scary for me to see all of this big money coming into big time podcasting.
Casey:
And while I do think a rising tide raises all boats, you know, and having cereal take off in such a big way.
Casey:
God, I've been poisoned.
Casey:
I almost said so bigly.
Casey:
Oh, God, is it over again?
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
It's so bad.
Casey:
Having cereal take off in such a big way is helpful to all of us, right?
Casey:
If you're around the proverbial water cooler and everyone is saying you have to listen to Serial, this podcast, it's amazing.
Casey:
Well, just like I said, Serial isn't about to name check the Accidental Tech podcast, but if you find this thing that you enjoy and if you happen to enjoy Apple stuff…
Casey:
I like to think that ATP is one of a handful of shows that'll bubble to the top of the list of things you should check out.
Casey:
And so it may be that probably more listeners than we would expect came to us in an indirect way from Serial.
Casey:
And it scares me to see what's going on with Spotify.
Casey:
It scares me to see these exclusives.
Casey:
It scares me to see this...
Casey:
this seemingly inevitable march toward the Facebook-ification, Google-ification, if you will, of big data advertising and tracking and so on.
Casey:
And obviously, we have zero intention of ever doing that.
Casey:
And that's part of the reason why membership is a thing.
Casey:
But it scares me to think about that.
Casey:
And I hope that it remains exactly as Marco describes, where they're over there, we're over here, never the two shall meet, and everyone's happy.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I just...
Casey:
I probably say this more often than I should to the point that I hope it's not frustrating, but it is important to me that listeners know that as best I can, I recognize and we recognize how incredibly lucky we are that you'll spend a couple hours of your week every week with us.
Casey:
And that is an incredible, incredible honor because one of the most precious things in the entire world is
Casey:
golly, especially as we're learning in 2020, one of the most precious things that we all have is time.
Casey:
And to spend your time with us is such a compliment.
Casey:
And I know all three of us are deeply appreciative and, and it's extremely cool.
Casey:
And I know I speak for me and I'm pretty sure I speak for the other guys that, you know, if you'll have us, we'll be doing this in another 10 years.
Casey:
So don't get, please don't get sick of us because we'd like to, we'd like to keep doing it.
Marco:
Actually, one last thing to add because Casey, you kind of touched on this.
Marco:
With the serialization of podcasting and all these big hits and the comedians who have all these massive audiences, one major thing that has changed is that I no longer have to explain what podcasting is to people.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It used like, you know, 10 years ago, you know, people would ask me what I do and oh, yeah, I make an app and I do some podcasts.
Marco:
They'd be like, what?
Marco:
And even when I started Overcast, because I started Overcast before Serial, not by much.
Marco:
It was like a year before something, but it was it was still before like that big wave started.
Marco:
And so I've had to explain so many times to so many people like in the regular world who are not nerds, what podcasts are.
Marco:
And I largely have stopped having to do that in the last few years because they're so big now.
Marco:
Such a large portion of at least Americans so far listen to podcasts.
Marco:
It's still – podcasting is still very heavily skewed towards the English-speaking world, very, very heavily like North America and the English-speaking countries of Europe and –
Marco:
Australia, Canada, it's still very much like an Anglo-centric, what's the word for that?
Marco:
An English-centric thing.
Marco:
But among the people I interact with around here in the English-speaking North American world, podcasting is so ubiquitous, podcast listening is so ubiquitous that I no longer have to explain what the heck it is to almost every single person I meet.
Marco:
And that's pretty great.
Marco:
And that has only come because of those massive shows that attract those giant audiences that are way, way bigger than ours.
Marco:
So again, as long as their world doesn't end up crushing our world accidentally, then I'm happy that they can exist and we can exist and everything's good.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
So you guys have spent more time with your MacBooks Air, MacBook Airs, however we pronounce it.
Casey:
Anything new you would like to share?
John:
I have one new thing I think someone asked about this.
John:
It was going to be an AskATV, but it's a shorty.
John:
Someone asked, is PowerNap still present on the M1 Macs?
John:
PowerNap is the feature that's been around for a while on Mac OS X that basically says when you put your Mac to sleep, occasionally it will wake up but not really wake up and do a bunch of things, mostly through Apple apps that you might want it to do, like it'll do a time machine backup, it'll check your mail or whatever, but, you know...
John:
as far as you can tell, your computer is still asleep.
John:
Like it won't turn on the screen.
John:
Some Macs at various times have tried not to turn on the fans or to turn them on very low RPM.
John:
And it will, you know, basically do some activity when you think it's basically sleeping in sort of a low power state and then go back to for realsy sleep, right?
John:
One of the items on the slides at the presentation introducing the M1 Macs was like, what was like, always on computer?
Marco:
Always on processor.
John:
Always on processor.
John:
And if you have an iOS device, iPhone or iPad or something, you know, there's no power nap mode.
John:
Like, yeah, when you hit the quote unquote power button, the screen turns off.
John:
But what determines whether your mail gets checked for is whether the mail application has background processing turned on and setting so on and so forth.
John:
The idea being that.
John:
you don't put your phone to sleep.
John:
It's always kind of in this same state.
John:
It knows whether the screen is on or not.
John:
And it knows whether an app should be allowed to run in the background and the iOS versions that support that or not.
John:
But there is no mode where it's like a sleep and nothing is running to save power, right?
John:
It's got an always-on processor, I guess is what Apple's calling it, right?
John:
So the answer to this question, on the M1 Macs, as far as I can tell, in the energy saver slash battery preference pane, there is nothing that mentions PowerNap.
John:
The place where it should be, there is just no checkbox for it, because as far as I can tell, it's not needed in the same way that it's not needed on iOS devices.
John:
Now, macOS is not iOS, and there's no sort of setting screen where you can enable background processing or whatever, so...
John:
i'm not entirely sure how what the interaction is between the os and the applications because other than to know that that it seems like the mac never goes to sleep sleep where nothing is happening whatsoever it must go into a low low power mode where maybe it just uses one of the efficiency cores or something and in that mode if mail is running or if there's a background demon that checks mail it seems like it will execute um
John:
I don't know the technical details of it, I'm just guessing, but I can tell you that I could not find a PowerNap checkbox.
John:
So I think this is part of the always-on processor thing, that that is a complication that is no longer necessary now that Apple is making the guts of these things.
Casey:
Marco, you tweeted earlier that your iMac Pro has been a breath of fresh air to return to, and you are so happy to have this actually fast computer and not have to be slumming it on your MacBook Air.
Casey:
Did I read that right?
Marco:
It certainly is taking many breaths of fresh air through its fans that I keep hearing.
Casey:
Is it really that much faster than the MacBook Air?
Marco:
I mean, the reality is the speed difference, yes, it is faster.
Marco:
The MacBook Air is indeed faster.
Marco:
Most of the time, I'm not maxing it out constantly end-to-end such that I would notice the speed difference, honestly.
Marco:
I do notice the fan difference, but I'm also just really happy to be back on my iMac Pro after two weeks away because...
Marco:
It has all my stuff on it.
Marco:
It's a giant screen.
Marco:
It has my nice split keyboard in front of it.
Marco:
It's my main computer.
Marco:
You know, when you're away from your main computer and you get back, it's nice.
Marco:
And I was able to just plow through massive amounts of work today of just like, you know, catch up admin work that I've been putting off or missing the ability to do.
Marco:
So I've just been...
Marco:
I've been getting a lot done on it, so I'm happy with this computer.
Marco:
I do wish I could figure out the fan noise thing.
Marco:
It does seem to be this intermittent thing, probably caused by some dust wedges in some very hard-to-reach places that I won't be able to get out without disassembling the entire computer, which I'm not going to do.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I do wish I could solve that problem because I know that when the iMac Pro was working normally, like when it was new, I didn't have any fan noise almost ever.
Marco:
It was nearly impossible to hear them.
Marco:
So I think it's just mostly because it's old and full of dust.
Casey:
Like us.
Marco:
But I am going to... I'm very much looking forward to what a future iMac can be.
Marco:
I don't think they need to do that much from what the MacBook Air is now to make larger computers that are performance competitive.
Marco:
There are some areas that I would like to mention quickly.
Marco:
We're seeing a lot of speculation and worrying or excitement about...
Marco:
How do you take the M1 and make bigger, faster, more powerful, more expandable computers with it?
Marco:
And we're also having a bunch of these new interviews that are being done by Apple execs that are constantly... One of the biggest things everyone's talking about, especially the Apple people, is the unified memory architecture and quite how much that matters.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
So there is this massive question of like, okay, we know that they can make really incredible computers at the low end with this chip.
Marco:
We know that as long as they cap the RAM at 16 gigs for now, and as long as they don't need massive GPU power or more than four of these high-performance cores, we know they can make something amazing.
Marco:
But how do you scale that up to the other models in the lineup?
Marco:
The number one question I have,
Marco:
is how do you scale the RAM?
Marco:
That's number one.
Marco:
Because the GPU is almost as important as the RAM in terms of how do you make larger machines.
Marco:
But the RAM, I think, is probably the harder question to answer.
Marco:
You know, Apple engineered this giant Mac Pro case, this whole new Mac Pro case.
Marco:
And again, when I talk to the Apple people in that demo room after the Mac Pro unveiling, I talk to a few different people there.
Marco:
And you can also look at some of the comments that have been made publicly by people like Craig Federighi in that machine's PR release cycle that really make it seem like they did not design that entire machine to be a one-off.
Marco:
And so if you think, okay, well, somehow the M1 Mac world is going to have to scale up through the rest of the lineup, or at least similar-ish products in the rest of the lineup.
Marco:
I don't know if there's necessarily going to be an iMac Pro, but I know there's going to be an iMac, and I know there's going to be some kind of Mac Pro, and it's probably going to be very similar to the current one in general dimensions and capabilities and stuff.
Marco:
So how do you do that?
Marco:
We've also seen in the teardowns of these new Macs, the way they put the RAM, quote, on package is really, you know, it's next to the processor.
Marco:
It's not part of the processor.
Marco:
And we actually heard from a number of people who know more about chip design and manufacturing than I do, who said that
Marco:
It would almost make no sense at all to ever move the RAM on die, like where it's part of the same silicon wafer and it gets punched out from the same wafer as the CPU.
Marco:
Because apparently the way you make DRAM is so radically different than the way you make logic chips at that silicon level.
Marco:
that it would be a ridiculous process, and it would be inefficient in tons of ways, and it would be really stupid to try to make DRAM and logic chips as part of the exact same chip.
Marco:
So it's going to be a separate thing.
Marco:
There is already a separation between the CPU, the chip, and the RAM.
Marco:
There is some kind of interconnect between them, and I don't know enough about modern memory bandwidth and interfaces to know for sure, like...
Marco:
how possible is it to just make that interconnect bigger and support four ram chips instead of two or eight or 16 how much would that cost in terms of memory bandwidth or speed or you know what would we be reasonably able to make some kind of like ram in a socket that we have like on the mac pro or and still even on the high-end iMacs like can we have socketed ram or
Marco:
still in this new world?
Marco:
Or are the interfaces between the pins in the socket and the CPU, are those too slow?
Marco:
Would that cost too much performance?
Marco:
So there's this huge open question of how the heck we scale these things.
Marco:
You could also just take the current chip and just make it a lot bigger.
Marco:
But then you'd run into some pretty significant cost issues with the manufacturing and yields of that chip.
Marco:
So I think the way they're probably going to have to scale it
Marco:
We speculated a couple weeks ago.
Marco:
I said I think they're going to definitely move the RAM out to its own area of the board and possibly also move the GPUs out.
Marco:
And John said definitely not GPUs, I think, right?
John:
I don't recall this conversation, but I can tell you what I think now.
John:
For the Mac Pro level machines, you're thinking?
Marco:
I'm thinking it's probably for everything above what we have now.
Marco:
I think it's going to be for all of the laptops that might have a discrete GPU in the past.
John:
oh yeah no no i think yeah so this is coming back to me yeah no i think there there is no way the gpu is moving out of the system on the chip for even their biggest meanest laptop i feel like the 16 inch macbook pro their top of the line laptop will have a quote-unquote integrated gpu it will just be bigger and i say that not be not because i think it's a limitation i say that because i think they can meet their performance requirements they can make a really really good powerful gpu
Marco:
with it being integrated by just making it bigger and putting fans on it i look at the size of this chip such a massive amount of the area on the chip is gpu area and another massive amount of it is the high performance cpu cores and so if we think like how does this chip scale up to the next level of performance for the higher end machines
Marco:
Do they add two more of the high-end CPU core, maybe, or four more, even?
Marco:
Do they double the GPU core count, so it has double the GPU performance?
Marco:
That is roughly what we'd be talking about in terms of the performance gaps between the model lines that we have had to date.
Marco:
we don't know that that's a big assumption maybe the next generation 16 inch macbook pro isn't going to be twice as fast as the air it doesn't have to be technically like you know apple can design these things however they want basically but certainly the customer base has certain expectations and there there have things have been done a certain way for for a long time and so we kind of expect that you would probably in the large laptop and in the iMac and
Marco:
and definitely the Mac Pro, we expect we're probably going to have much higher core counts for the CPU, 8-core, 12-core, for the high-performance cores, I mean.
Marco:
And you look at the GPU, and you look at the performance of how it compares to discrete GPUs today, and how you might be able to scale that up to achieve something like a 16-inch MacBook Pro, or a high-end iMac, or a Mac Pro customer would demand.
Marco:
And I don't see how you keep this as one chip.
Marco:
I don't see it scaling because you would need to make the chip so massive they wouldn't be able to manufacture any of them.
Marco:
It would be ridiculous with yields and size and everything.
Marco:
So I think there's got to be a separation between
Marco:
of probably both the Ram expanding so it can accommodate way more Ram chips, not necessarily being socketed.
Marco:
I think the, the idea of having, having the Ram be just in regular like Ram slots, um,
Marco:
that you can pop out and put in a stick from Crucial if you want to, I think those days are over.
Marco:
Even with the Mac Pro, I don't see that coming back because what we're seeing is that when they make the RAM integrated, truly integrated the way it is now, it can be way faster.
Marco:
They have just massive amounts of bandwidth to the RAM, and that's a big part of why the M1 is so fast.
Marco:
So I don't see them giving up the RAM speed, necessarily.
Marco:
But I also don't see them sticking with the way it is now, where it's just kind of glued onto the package as one very, very small real estate thing.
Marco:
I don't see that scaling to a Mac Pro that supports...
Marco:
hundreds of gigs of ram i don't i don't see how they can do that they need more they just need more chips simple as that like they need more chips um they need more ssd chips too like to get larger storage capacities there like they just they need to scale these up and so the question is how do they scale these up um and you look at the real estate on the chip on the main chip
Marco:
And I don't see how you meaningfully scale up CPU cores or GPU performance without splitting up that chip also.
Marco:
So I still think that the way this scales up...
Marco:
is the package gets split into everything that's in it now except the GPU, which gets split off into its own thing.
Marco:
And they can do whatever they want with how they talk to each other.
Marco:
They can have some kind of massive, wide bandwidth interconnect between the CPU, the GPU, and the RAM.
Marco:
But I don't see...
Marco:
they know way more about chip design than I do, but I don't see how you double the core count and double the GPU size and not have some massive chip that it was very, very hard to manufacture.
Marco:
Um, and I also don't see how you really scale up to achieve their high end performance needs for their higher end products without doing that, like without having twice the CPU cores and without having at least twice the GPU area.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
This remains to be seen, like how they're going to do this.
Marco:
But I also, you look at how the M1 is turning out so far.
Marco:
You look at what they're talking about, what they're really pushing.
Marco:
And the unified memory architecture does not sound like it's going to be optional in the future.
Marco:
It sounds like they're all going to have that.
Marco:
So somehow they're going to keep a unified memory architecture, but they're going to have to be able to support way more RAM than they have now, more CPU cores and more GPU cores.
Marco:
So I don't know how to do that without splitting this up.
John:
People are getting hung up a little bit on the unified memory architecture thing.
John:
Part of that is, I think we said this before, it's a marketing term in some respects in that they're trying to give a name to a thing that they're doing that lots of computers used to do.
John:
Only computers used to do it to save money, but Apple is not doing it to necessarily save money, which is not having a dedicated pool of video memory.
John:
Now, it was the cheap computers would do that because it's cheaper not to have a bunch of video memory because there's a bunch of extra expensive chips you need to have.
John:
So we can just use system memory.
John:
Macs have done this.
John:
You go back to like classic Mac OS or 68K Macs.
John:
Yeah, a lot of them had a quote unquote unified memory architecture.
John:
That's all it means is that there's not separate VRAM, right?
John:
The, you know, the iPhones and iPads and the ARM-based Macs are doing it for performance reasons.
John:
Most of all, you know, part of it is cost and power savings on the, you know, iOS devices, right?
John:
But on the Mac, for these similar devices that are also power-constrained, they're doing it just to, you know, to save the power, but also because they can get really good performance.
John:
Like, the memory bandwidth of this unpackaged RAM is, like, three times what it was on the Intel machines that they replace, right?
John:
So...
John:
that's a benefit and also it's a benefit that you don't have to power the extra vram chips and yada yada um but like you said margo if you you know same thing with the on package ram and everything if you scale that up to the mac pro the mac pro you can put 1.5 terabytes of ram in um you i mean you could make a gigantic package and have 1.5 terabytes of on package ram but that starts to look a little bit silly you'd have this little tiny system on a chip in the corner and then you'd have
John:
ram chip ram chip ram chip there's a rose rose of them lined up probably lined up around it in a circle um you know you could do it like if you um if you look at some the modern game consoles i always look at them a lot of people are asking like and you made the same point like how big of a gpu can you put on die because the gpu is on die the cpu gpu neural engine that's all on the system on a chip die and then next to it in the same package are the ram chips how big can you double the size the gpu on a die absolutely you can't
John:
Look at the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5.
John:
They have an AMD CPU and a pretty darn big AMD GPU all on the same die.
John:
It's a bigger die.
John:
It takes more power than the M1, that's for sure.
John:
But you absolutely can do it.
John:
And those GPUs would more than satisfy the needs of a 16-inch MacBook Pro.
John:
Again, the 16-inch MacBook Pro has never been like a gaming laptop.
John:
We're not asking it to have the world's highest-end GPU, but the best discrete GPU Apple has ever shipped on a laptop, I feel like Apple will have no problem matching that performance with an on-die GPU, right?
John:
imac is potentially a different story depending on how they go in that direction and of course mac pro is an entirely different story because the mac pro can have four gpus and you're not you're not gonna you know or even more than that you're not going to fit that onto the die because that's where you start pushing the limits of the die size um
John:
The RAM question is interesting.
John:
I'm looking at the clock.
John:
I'm thinking we can segue this into the very first Ask ATP question, if that's okay with Casey.
John:
Totally.
Casey:
Nicely done.
John:
Nicely done.
John:
Because that's what this first question is about here.
John:
I'll let Casey read it because he's good at reading questions, but then I will attempt to answer it.
Casey:
All right, so Chris Choffy, Chris C. writes,
Casey:
can't be the end state.
Casey:
This is what Marco was describing.
Casey:
Then I thought about the memory hierarchy, where computers really only operate on registers, and everything above that is just slower but larger forms of cache.
Casey:
L1, L2, RAM, even SSD storage.
Casey:
So for some future Mac Pro, the ultimate Mac Pro, what if Apple keeps only 8 or 16 gigs of fast RAM on chip, maybe even calling it an L4 cache, and then allows off-chip cache that just so happens to be user-serviceable DRAM chips?
Casey:
I think this would give Apple a huge performance boost for the memory-intensive tasks that people put hundreds of gigabytes of RAM into a Mac Pro for while allowing them to keep a lower number of variants that they need to design in stock.
John:
All right.
John:
So here, this question is basically about the cache hierarchy, the memory hierarchy in computers.
John:
So a brief sort of, you know, introduction to this concept.
John:
you know, memory is just a place to store data, but there's memories of different speeds and different latencies inside your computer.
John:
When your CPU or GPU or whatever is doing some kind of processing, the fastest, sort of closest, lowest latency memory registers, and they hold small amounts of data, one or two numbers, five numbers, whatever, depending how big the registers are.
John:
And there's, you know, 10, 20 of those, depending on the execution unit.
John:
So those are registers, very, very tiny, just one, you know, 10 or 21 number slots or something like that.
John:
right above that you have what they call level one or l1 cache which is on you know also on the cpu you know the the cpu die just like the registers um and that is a smaller amount some amount of kilobytes or maybe a couple megabytes or whatever depending of memory or
John:
What makes that memory fast?
John:
Registers are barely like memory.
John:
It's like, you know, like a mail slot.
John:
You can put one or two little things in there.
John:
SIMD registers get weird because they're a little bit wider, but they're small, right?
John:
L1 cache is a pool of memory, but it's a pool, a tiny pool in the grand scheme of things.
John:
Why don't computers just make all their memory L1 cache?
John:
If L1 cache is the fastest memory and it's right next to the computer, why not make everything out of the stuff that the black box is made of?
John:
Why not make the whole planet out of the black box?
John:
Whatever.
John:
It's the same answer, right?
John:
So...
John:
l1 cache first of all you can't put 1.5 terabytes on die because your die can't be that big right so that's reason number one number two is when you make the memory that makes up l1 cache it's a different kind of memory than dram usually it's sdram or something similar sram or sram there you go the the different the main difference in the in terms of economics that you care about is
John:
Whereas in DRAM, we try to use as few transistors as possible to store a bit of memory.
John:
SRAM will use like six or eight transistors to store one bit of memory.
John:
It's complicated.
John:
You can look into it and see.
John:
But basically what it boils down to is it costs way more money and takes up way more space to store one bit in SRAM than it does in DRAM.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's a cost speed trade off.
John:
So that's your L1.
John:
L2 is also on the die and even larger pool of memory that is more distant in terms of latency and slower than the L1.
John:
Right.
John:
So there's your cache hierarchy registers, L1, L2.
John:
Sometimes you'll have an L3 and you could keep going what level and the whole, you know, however many levels of cache you want to have.
John:
all about to memory and you can visualize the hard drive being another pool of caching for ram just even slower and more distant uh the key point of the cache hierarchy is the sort of closer you get to being l1 or you know registers or whatever the more expensive it is the lower latency meaning how long does it take for me to get anything into or out of it and the more expensive it is
John:
And to have a useful cache hierarchy, you need gaps between them.
John:
You need your L1 to be slower, cheaper, and more distant than registers.
John:
Otherwise, why wouldn't you just use registers?
John:
You need L2 to be slower, cheaper, and more distant than L1.
John:
right you need ram to be slower cheaper and more distant than l2 that's the point of the hierarchy if l1 was two percent faster than l2 you're not you know doing something useful because having that cache hierarchy has overhead the way cache hierarchies work is when you need some piece of memory you can say okay well let me check is it in a register well this is not how the world works but just imagine you can check whether it's in a register
John:
If it's not in a register, you can look in L1, but it might not be in L1.
John:
If it's not in L1, you can check L2.
John:
But it might not be in L2.
John:
If it's not L2, you can check in RAM.
John:
All of that checking takes time and adds complexity.
John:
And then you have cache invalidation, which is one of the two hard problems in computer science.
John:
Naming be the other one.
John:
I'm not going to do the joke.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Then you have to invalidate that memory.
John:
If something changes something in the memory, oh, but I have a cache copy of that in L2 and possibly a cache copy in L1.
John:
You need to invalidate those caches or have some sort of cache coherency algorithm, especially when you have multiple cores sharing different pools of memory, to make sure everyone's all on the same page in some well-defined way.
John:
So there's a complexity to a cache hierarchy.
John:
And for that complexity to be useful...
John:
You need the cache hierarchy to be distant from each other.
John:
You need them to be different.
John:
You need them to have different performance characteristics.
John:
You need the more distant ones to be bigger and cheaper to make up for the fact that they're slower.
John:
You don't want a cache hierarchy where each level of cache is like a tiny percentage different than the previous one.
John:
So getting back to this question, finally, what about a Mac that has like an M1 or whatever style chip where there is on package RAM that counts as kind of like an L4 cache and then the big pool of 1.5 terabytes of DRAM like in the Mac Pro in slots on the motherboard that's slower, right?
John:
So I just got done saying a little bit earlier that, according to people who have measured this, the memory bandwidth of the on-package RAM on M1 chips is about three times as fast as it was on the Intel laptops that they're replacing.
John:
In terms of bandwidth, whatever it was, like 60 gigabytes per second or something, or gigabits, I forget, but whatever it is, it's around three times as fast.
John:
Three times as fast, or three times as much bandwidth or whatever...
John:
I think is pushing the limits on an acceptable difference in performance for a cache hierarchy, right?
John:
It's not 1%, but it's also not an order of magnitude and it's also not two orders of magnitude, right?
John:
So I question whether...
John:
Well, first of all, even if you just accept all those numbers and say, well, DRAMs, say the DRAM was like the speed of the Intel DRAM, which I don't accept as a given, but say it was.
John:
You've got a cache hierarchy where there's a 3x difference between, you know, the L4 and then the DRAM.
John:
I feel like that may not be worth, the juice may not be worth that squeeze, right?
John:
That you'd want a bigger gap in the cache hierarchy.
John:
And the second thing is...
John:
Getting back to Marco's question, I don't think there's any reason that you can't have an extremely high bandwidth, high performance memory bus that talks to RAM that is not on the package.
John:
Just because the Intel MacBook Pros had RAM that was three times as slow as the M1s did...
John:
doesn't mean that the $6,000 high-end Mac Pro can't have an extremely high bandwidth memory bus.
John:
And I haven't looked up the numbers, but for all I know, the current Mac Pros have a higher bandwidth memory bus than the Intel MacBook Pros, which wouldn't surprise me or whatever.
John:
Again, I point to game consoles.
John:
that have had similar problems where they need to have a large pool of memory to feed that big honking gpu that's in their system on a chip or whatever and a lot of them do actually arrange on the motherboard a bunch of ram chips in a circular pattern so they're equidistant from the big giant soc to feed it that's not you know there's no dims right because it's a game console and it's like 500 bucks or whatever but you can have or just look at any gpu you can have very high bandwidth pools of memory
John:
They're not literally on the same package, but are on the same board.
John:
Look at a high-end GPU.
John:
Look at their pools of multiple gigabytes of memory.
John:
You can buy GPUs with like 1632 gigs of memory.
John:
That memory has a huge, extremely wide, sometimes they're like 512 bits wide buses to and from the GPU, right?
John:
So I'm thinking that...
John:
almost all the benefit you get of having the the sort of on package memory chips you can get by having an extremely expensive extremely wide slightly more distant as in not on the same package but still on the same board bus on your six thousand dollar plus the mac pro so when i'm picturing a mac pro in my head i like the only reason i can imagine doing this sort of l4 based approach where there's the very fast ram that's close to it in the big distant pool is
John:
if Apple couldn't justify the expense of doing a custom solution, because, uh, what Chris describes would work and be feasible.
John:
I still think the gap in performance wouldn't be big enough to justify having a separate pool of RAM, but, uh,
John:
you could do it and the only reason you do it is like well we didn't want to make a whole new chip that doesn't have it has an entirely different interface to memory so we'll just take what we have which is whatever the biggest chip we had in our 16 inch macbook pro and then tack on a bunch more memory and everything but i have a feeling that's not what apple would do again going back to marco's you know impression that he got from hearing people talk about the mac pro that this beautiful giant case over here
John:
like was not made in a world where Apple didn't know it was making our Macs.
John:
Like they knew, right?
John:
So there has to be a plan for that.
John:
And Apple is not shy about charging a lot of money if they want to do it.
John:
So I feel like they should end up with a solution that is properly fit for a computer of this size.
John:
It doesn't have to be quite as modular.
John:
It may not use standardized parts, but a solution that gives you huge amounts of RAM that are also very, very fast,
John:
definitely feasible and it doesn't require any sort of gymnastics the GPU question is a little bit different because Apple has in the past made computers that have a quote-unquote integrated GPU and then in more distant but more powerful discrete GPUs and they could do that again because the OS certainly supports it but they could also just excise the GPU entirely from the system on a chip and put it entirely external on a machine like the Mac Pro because
John:
What is all that space in the Mac Pro for if not to put cards that potentially have multiple GPUs on them and tons of RAM and all that other stuff?
John:
I wanted to look up the relative die sizes and I couldn't do it in time.
John:
Maybe I'll do it for next week.
John:
But I was trying to look up, you know, how much bigger can the die get?
John:
The M1.
Marco:
Yeah, I tried looking this up, actually.
John:
I found the Intel die size, but I couldn't find the M1 die size.
John:
My impression is looking at the iFixit thing is the M1 die, it's not anywhere near the limits of what is reasonable to put on a single die.
John:
So if I imagine it in a Mac Pro type system where you've removed the RAM from the package and also removed the GPU,
John:
there's plenty and and again look at the cooling solution that the mac pro case has available to it it has so much available cooling for a chip that so far barely needs a wimpy laptop fan you could make i feel like you can make the m1 four times as big ditch the the ram off the package and ditch the gpu off the package and still not put a dent in this thing cpu cooling capacity right so
John:
I think lots of things are possible, depending on how far Apple is willing to go.
John:
And the Mac Pro is the machine that has the least ambiguity about what they're going to do, because we know his whole purpose in life is to have huge capacity.
John:
So whatever it takes to get huge capacity, Apple will do that.
John:
Right.
John:
The real machines in my question are, what do they do with the iMac?
John:
Because the iMac, you could squint and say, well, whatever you did for the 16-inch MacBook Pro, do it for the iMac.
John:
But then again, what about the iMac Pro?
John:
Well, then maybe we can do something in between.
John:
It's those type of machines where I'm interested in how they're going to make that tradeoff between just do what you did in the laptops, but more and faster.
John:
You could end up running into limits there.
John:
Because if you want a GPU that is bigger than you could fit in any laptop, iMac Pro can support that.
John:
It's got the cooling solution for it.
John:
But you do eventually run into the limit of the quote-unquote integrated GPU.
John:
As far as we know, what's the biggest GPU we've ever seen shoved onto a system on a chip?
John:
It's probably this current generation of consoles.
John:
And it's pretty darn big.
John:
But you can get bigger and faster GPUs discreet.
John:
No problem whatsoever.
John:
So...
John:
That's where the real question is, and that's just a trade-off that Apple is going to make.
John:
But I think on the top-end Mac Pro, there's no reason that they can't have discrete GPUs, discrete RAM, and still have amazing performances.
John:
It's just a question of money.
John:
How do you make very high-bandwidth, high-speed RAM interfaces available?
John:
You give the chip more power and you spend more money on Intertex and you charge more money for the product.
John:
And Apple is really good at that.
John:
So I have some confidence that they will they will sort this out for the Mac Pro, especially if you consider.
John:
Well, I mean, again, don't try to associate price with parts in the Mac Pro.
John:
It won't add up for you.
John:
But those Xeons they buy from Intel are ridiculously expensive and they don't have any, you know, GPU in them that Apple is using in their Mac Pros.
John:
They don't have a neural engine inside them.
John:
They don't have any of that stuff in there.
John:
Right.
John:
And they cost so much money.
John:
apple you know will get apple will get its m whatever's for the mac pro they'll get them at cost because they make them themselves right they just have to pay taiwan semiconductor margin or whatever so i'm hoping that whatever money they save by making the system on a chip themselves for the mac pro they can spend that on more exotic faster memory interfaces and so on and it will end up being a really good machine
Marco:
Yeah, you've kind of convinced me a little bit because I looked up the die size numbers, and I don't think anyone has measured the M1 die size yet.
Marco:
That's what I couldn't find.
Marco:
Yeah, the A12X, for reference, is about 128 square millimeters.
Marco:
And to put that in context, the high Xeon core count, like the 18 core Xeons, are in the 500 square millimeter range.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
John:
um so there's certainly a long way to go between you know a12x size which is probably a little bit smaller than the m1 but probably not that much smaller um you know at 128 ish and the zeons at like 500 ish and remember they don't like it's not like you take the m1 and say well just stamp out four of those because if you're multiplying the cores the the cpu cores are not 100 of the chip you're not adding a second neural engine right you're not adding a second image processing engine
John:
Maybe you make those a little bit bigger, but you're just multiplying the cores.
John:
So multiplying the cores does not multiply the size of the die area by the same amount.
John:
So if you had four times the die area, you can get more than four times the cores, or you can get twice as many cores and twice as many GPU cores and still not be at a 4X scaling.
John:
So...
John:
There's breathing room there.
John:
And mostly what I think about is, again, the cooling capacity of this gigantic computer.
John:
Look at what it's cooling now.
John:
Look how many watts this Xeon takes.
John:
How many watts does the 28-core Xeon take to try to use that power budget?
John:
Try to use that power budget with Apple's processor.
John:
How big would you have to make this die?
John:
How high would you have to clock it to absorb that power budget?
John:
Absolutely.
John:
And that's assuming that Apple even wants to absorb that power budget.
John:
Like there's so much headroom that they can basically, like I was thinking of this idly the other day.
John:
It's like if you took the M1 and you just put it straight into the Mac Pro's chassis and just overclocked it until you couldn't cool it anymore, how fast could you make it go?
John:
I know cooling is not the only limiting factor on clocking.
John:
Eventually you're running to design constraints having to do with pipeline depth and so on and so forth.
John:
But like I feel like they have a lot of headroom to make faster computers once you can plug them in and put a huge fan on top of it.
John:
And that's what makes me fairly confident that technologically speaking, there's nothing stopping them from making an amazing Mac Pro.
John:
The only thing that would be stopping them is like budgetary considerations.
John:
And we've talked about this before.
John:
Like, how exotic does Apple want to make things for the Mac?
John:
So far, the answer is not that exotic.
John:
Because if you squint these, they look a lot like an A14X, which is exactly the appropriate thing to do for the machines they've introduced.
John:
But Apple has not yet proven that they're willing to...
John:
invest a huge amount of money to make a design that is radically different than uh than what they use their ios devices there have been a couple of interviews where apple people have been insisting no no this isn't just an a14x you see we had to do x and y and z for the mac and mostly they refer to things like expected texture formats for the mac operating system and stuff like that and that's all true like it's not just a straight up like we just took an a14x and put it into a mac
John:
But the tweaks are minor compared to the idea of like we made a whole new processor core or, you know, we invested in getting the GPU, you know, the whole discrete GPU interface.
John:
And by the way, you can have a discrete GPU with still have a unified memory architecture.
John:
You can have the RAM off chip and still have a unified memory architecture because unified memory architecture just means no separate VRAM.
John:
The GPU and the CPU all look at the same pool of memory.
John:
There's no reason you can't continue to do that no matter where you put the GPU, no matter where you put the RAM.
John:
It just gets much more difficult and expensive and takes an investment because iOS devices and the M1 work nothing like that.
John:
So you'd have to invest in saying, okay, I'm going to make a chip that supports this huge number of PCI Express lanes and
John:
has more thunderbolt connectivity and can drive umpteen 6k displays and knows how to talk to the external discrete apple gpu and shares its fast ram pool with the cpu and it's all soldered to the board and you have to pick when you buy whether you want the one terabyte configuration or the 512 or the 64 you know whatever they come up with right
John:
Or they could just down the capacity.
John:
Like, it's not outside the realm of possibility that the first ARM-based Mac Pro does not support 1.4 terabytes of RAM, and Apple just has a story for you about how it doesn't need it.
John:
I can see that happening, too, because it's all soldered to the board, and the biggest config they have is a 768, and yada yada.
John:
Like, but that would still be an amazing machine, so...
John:
And as we all suspect, that will probably be the last machine they introduced.
John:
And in the meantime, we'll get to see how much of an appetite Apple has to crank this thing up and to make more exotic designs with things like the iMac, which I think is the first point where we could reasonably assume that the machine could support something other than...
John:
in m1 style thing where everything is in the same place it's just bigger i think they're going to do that all the way through the whole laptops then the imac is the first and maybe just the imac pro if they have one is the first opportunity where they probably should consider doing something other than exactly the same thing they've done for laptops but bigger marco how how much ram did your prior macbook i guess your macbook pro how much ram does that have is it 32 gigs
Marco:
Nope, 16.
Marco:
I've been getting 16 for a while.
Casey:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
Wait, I think.
Marco:
I actually don't know.
Marco:
Wait a minute.
Marco:
It's whatever the stock configuration is at the slightly higher than base level.
Marco:
Let me see.
Marco:
Move on, I'll answer it in a second.
Casey:
All right, so the reason I bring this up is because...
Casey:
How do I not know?
Casey:
Because it ultimately doesn't really matter.
Casey:
I agree that especially the Mac Pro probably needs a metric crap ton of RAM for certain use cases.
Casey:
Not most people, certainly not the three of us, but in certain use cases, you probably do want to have a metric crap ton of RAM in the Mac Pro.
Casey:
But for everyone except those oddballs, I keep thinking about how I heard a lot of people like me complaining about 16 gigs of RAM as the maximum in these new M1 Macs.
Casey:
But I haven't heard anyone who has had one and used one really complain about it not having enough RAM.
Casey:
Which is many words to say, I don't know if we should really judge them, these M1 Macs or Apple Silicon Macs.
Casey:
I don't know if we should judge them the same way we judge Intel Macs.
Casey:
Because my 13-inch MacBook Pro is 32 gigs of RAM.
Casey:
And I think that that's probably as low as I would want to go on an Intel machine in 2020 or 2021 as we're almost there.
Casey:
But on an Apple Silicon Mac, I would probably entertain 16 now that I know a little more.
John:
so i'm going to push back on this i do see this conversation happening and i tried to wave people off from her last time and i will try again the architecture and the unified memory thing does not make mac os use less memory oh no totally now the code page the you know the the code segment of executables may be different size on arm versus x86 although i wouldn't necessarily imagine that it'll be smaller on arm because x86 has variable with instructions and arm i believe does not
John:
So that actually can make the ARM executables bigger.
John:
But anyway.
Marco:
Well, there is there is the texture format thing that that often needs like multiple copies of video memory on Intel machines.
Marco:
But, you know, that's it's still not going to be everything.
John:
I'm not saying they're exactly the same because they're not.
John:
But they vary in ways that are not like, oh, well, I could get away with an 8-gig ARM Mac, but I would require a 16-gig Intel.
John:
No, there is nothing with the architecture.
John:
There's nothing with anything that has changed in the hardware or the operating system that makes that a reality.
John:
What has changed is...
John:
three times the memory bandwidth and just faster overall, and the SSD in the air got twice as fast, all that can contribute to make swapping more tolerable.
John:
But in the end, if you need to have something that's bigger than 8 gigabytes in working memory at the same time, and you get a machine that can't support that and has to swap, it's going to be slower.
John:
slower in a way that you will notice and feel sad about it's just that most people don't have those kind of workloads the closest people have is they open lots and lots of apps and the ones they don't use get paged out and they switch to them and they get paged back in right but once they're in they're they're working okay right so there's there's nothing about like you know
John:
the change to ARM that is making it so suddenly you can get away with half as much RAM.
John:
And I would tell people that the trend always goes that you need more RAM in the future, not less.
John:
So don't, certainly don't skimp on RAM by getting an ARM-based Mac that has less RAM than you're currently using that you think you need.
John:
and in fact maybe consider getting more that even if you're getting away with an 8 gig machine now get a 16 gig one anyway just because that's the one of the best things you can do to future proof a computer like this and it's not that too costly of an upgrade right it you know and and this is in contrast to ios which does handle memory very differently from mac os which lets ios devices get away with having a lot less ram than a mac but trust me you would not want a mac that handles memory the way ios devices do because it would
John:
drive you up a wall in general on the mac it's frowned upon to kill an application out from underneath someone while they're using it whereas in ios that's just the way everything has always worked so uh once again get i'm not saying everyone needs 16 gigs because maybe they don't right and if you're pushing the limits on eight having faster memory bandwidth and a faster ssd in your macbook air is going to make it feel a lot better than an intel machine with eight but if you have and need 16 now don't get an eight gig
Marco:
m1 mac you'll be sad yeah and i would also push back a little bit on the argument too that like you know people are saying oh maybe maybe the these things are so fast that you know machines like the mac pro don't need more than x whatever that whatever you guess that number to be but the point of machines like the mac pro is to be that relief valve of like
Marco:
Apple makes a decision for, quote, almost everyone for the rest of their lineup.
Marco:
This is the lesson we've learned with Mac Pro neglect over the years.
Marco:
You can't just not serve extreme needs at all in your entire product lineup when you are the only vendor of all hardware that your software platform can run on.
Marco:
There has to be something in your lineup that people who have really specialized needs can have those needs satisfied by.
Marco:
And the Mac Pro and the Mac Mini are those things.
Marco:
Those two products combined do a huge... They carry a huge amount of weight from special needs.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
The reason the Mac Pro now can be configured to one and a half terabytes of RAM is that people need that.
Marco:
Not a lot of people, probably not you, definitely not me, but there are people out there who need it.
Marco:
And to them, that could make the difference between being able to use this computer for their intended application or just not being able to use a Mac at all.
Marco:
And having to go to, you know, Linux or something, God knows what.
Marco:
So, like, we do need those extreme needs to be servable and served by something like the Mac Pro.
Marco:
Even if most of us, quote, most of us or most people don't need that.
Marco:
It is important to have those needs served somewhere.
Marco:
And so I am not advocating in this transition for things like the Mac Pro to get significantly reduced in their usefulness.
Marco:
And I hope that's not the direction Apple goes.
Marco:
And that's why it's such an interesting...
Marco:
thought experiment to try to figure out like okay well how do they scale this up you know there are so many advantages to the m1 that we see now that you think about how they scale it up and it's non-trivial because like it again what we've been saying saying like how do you scale up to these massive amounts of ram how do you accommodate ram slots if you still want to do that which is pretty important to that market and
Marco:
What about error-correcting RAM, ECC RAM?
Marco:
So far, Apple has never made a memory controller that supports ECC RAM.
Marco:
Can they?
Marco:
Probably.
Marco:
Will they?
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
That becomes pretty important when you have that much of it.
Marco:
There's all these questions that we just have yet to have answers for with the ARM transition, and...
Marco:
some of them the answer is going to end up being yeah they just don't support that anymore and i hope there's not many things where that's the answer but the higher end they push these new chips the more we're going to get those answers and the more curious i am to see what the answers are honestly
Casey:
Colin DeVore writes, it seems like the next few years are going to continue to be incredibly exciting for the Mac.
Casey:
My question, is there any concern over the longevity of these chips?
Casey:
Intel-based Macs have a habit of lasting five years or more.
Casey:
I love being able to buy a Mac and use it for many years without even needing to think about buying a new computer, unlike the three of us.
Casey:
Should there be any discussion around how long the M1 chips will last?
Casey:
I mean, I don't see why it would be any different.
Casey:
I mean, we have exemplars sort of of this with iOS devices.
Casey:
And, you know, I have iOS devices in the house that are many years old that haven't been turned on in years that I like just the other day.
Casey:
I did this with one of my iPad minis.
Casey:
It hadn't been on in at least a year, maybe even two years.
Casey:
And I turned it on and worked no sweat.
Casey:
And I take the point, but I'm not personally worried about this.
Casey:
Should I be?
John:
I mean, my question about this question was, is this about the reliability of the chip as in it'll break after five years or like how long will these machines still be useful as in like, can I keep using a computer for 10 years?
John:
And by the way, buying a new computer every year, unlike you blokes, not me.
John:
I'm the one who had a computer for 10 years.
John:
Um, so for the, for the chip reliability question, I see no reason why Apple's system on chips would be any less reliable than the ones they've been making for years and years in their phones and iPads.
John:
So if you've had an iPhone or an iPad, like in general, iPhones and iPads die usually because the batteries go bad or someone drops them and breaks the screen.
John:
Or eventually if you actually let them survive long enough, they just get too slow.
John:
Um,
John:
Uh, so, but no, none of it has had to do with like, oh, the chip fries itself or something.
John:
That's, that's not a problem.
John:
So I don't, I don't worry about that in terms of Mac usefulness.
John:
This really depends.
John:
Like I've been thinking about this with everyone, uh, gushing over the, the M1 Macs, right?
John:
We were in a bad period where Intel's performance was not getting much faster year after year, right?
John:
And Apple just leapfrogged all of their Intel Macs.
John:
with these M1 base Macs.
John:
And this is just the first round.
John:
The second round will be faster still, and the third round will be faster still.
John:
But once that happens, kind of like me getting the 6K display, it very quickly becomes the new normal, right?
John:
And you're like, oh, I'm just used to this now.
John:
This is just the way things are.
John:
If you get used to M1, like, you know, your M1 Mac, and, you know, two years go by, the transition is complete, every single Mac Apple has is armed, and
John:
And you have the, you know, $999 M1 arm.
John:
Suddenly you have the slowest computer Apple sells.
John:
You were so overjoyed because it was faster than the fastest laptop Apple sells when you got it.
John:
But now that they've made the transition, now yours is the slowest.
John:
Does, you know, does that make your computer less useful to you two years later?
John:
Well, no, it's just as useful as it was before.
John:
Like, I don't think it's going to get any slower, but faster options will become available.
John:
And then like, you know, by that point, maybe the M2 based MacBook Air is out and you have the M1 based MacBook Air and you look at the M2 based one and you're like, huh, that one's only $999 too.
John:
And it's whatever amount faster than this one.
John:
And your computer didn't get any slower, but you know, there are faster ones available.
John:
So if you look at the M1 now, it's like this is going to last such a long time because I'm getting high-end Mac performance at a low-end price.
John:
But that high-end Mac performance is going to move on and leave you behind.
John:
And so you may find that...
John:
Not that it isn't useful anymore, but that you can get, you know, if things continue to go at this pace, so much better performance by buying the two or three year newer MacBook Air model to replace it in two or three years.
John:
So overall, I would say it's probably about a wash because the good thing about the Intel computers has been since their progress has been so slow, if you buy an Intel-based computer setting aside the stupid keyboard crap, which really threw a monkey wrench into this, but let's say like...
John:
I was gonna use the Mac Mini, that's a bad example too.
John:
An iMac, if you bought an Intel-based iMac, there's a safe machine, bought an Intel-based iMac three years ago,
John:
Before, you know, right today, how much faster of an iMac can you get?
John:
You look at them and you're like, my iMac's still pretty good.
John:
It's still, you know, 90% as fast as the fastest iMac that you can get today.
John:
Yeah, I'm good for a few more years, right?
John:
Whereas we made this huge leap to the ARM-based Macs, but if they keep going on a trajectory that has a steeper slope than Intel Macs in terms of performance year over year, it's going to make your M1 Mac feel slower relative to the best you can buy.
John:
more so than the intel wants because the good thing about intel max not getting much faster is it made your intel base mac not feel that slow year after year um so i feel like those two things are going to balance each other out that i do feel like especially in the laptop realm apple has passed a new threshold of performance and battery life that puts it up into like we've seen with the ipad puts it up into a category where
John:
they're really satisfying most people's needs like there's a reason ipad battery life hasn't doubled because it doesn't need to double ipad battery life is pretty good for most people doing most things right it has been for years and most people who have ipads don't say i like ipads but boy the battery just dies after it's just too you know i can't stand the battery life it's terrible people don't say that about ipads right in the same way i feel like
John:
that that macbook air that you bought its performance will still be acceptable for all the things you do on it if you're happy with it now and its battery life may have passed some threshold where it is now close to being acceptable so in that respect it will last you a long time but on the other side of it you should be able to get a much better macbook air in two years and you will be tempted to do so so that's why i'm just going to call it a tie and say whatever lifetime you've been getting out of your intel base macs
John:
expect to get a similar useful lifetime out of the ARM-based ones.
John:
It's just that the factors influencing your decision to upgrade may be a little bit different.
Casey:
All right, finally, Nick asks, I just accidentally spent 200 pounds on cable management stuff for my three-screen desktop setup.
Casey:
The daily paper cut of kicking cables and seeing the mess made me finally snap.
Casey:
Do you all just leave your cables where they may fall, or do you get super particular about it like I just did, or do you land somewhere in between?
Casey:
I have tried off and on over the years to do anything related to cable management.
Casey:
It never sticks.
Casey:
And then I just regret the waste of time I had trying to make everything pretty.
Casey:
So I don't bother with it at all.
Casey:
My desk is an absolute mess in the back.
Casey:
John, I would love to hear what you have to say about this.
John:
So I have two things going for me and against me when it comes to cable management.
John:
And they're both the same thing.
John:
My my computer desk is up against the wall.
John:
I don't have a lot of room.
John:
My computer, my quote unquote computer room is not that big.
John:
It's also got my PlayStation in it.
John:
It's kind of tight in here.
John:
I've got big bookshelves.
John:
But my computer is up against the wall.
John:
That's a pain for cable management, because to manage cables, you kind of get to get to where the cables are, which is in the couple of inches between my desk and the wall.
John:
And no, my desk isn't on wheels and no, it's not a standing desk.
John:
So to do anything back there is really difficult, you know, because there's a wall there and you've got to be like on your back looking up or coming from above and behind and you can't see anything.
John:
If my desk was like in the middle of a giant open area, I could just walk around to the other side of the desk and do all my beautiful cable management and tie everything off and put it in a little chat.
John:
But I can't.
John:
It's all like trying to work on the underside of a car without jacks.
John:
It's really torturous.
John:
But that exact thing is also my saving grace because it's against the wall.
John:
Nobody can see what's going on back there for the most part.
John:
So and the second thing I have going for me is that my desk that's up against the wall has a big piece of metal that goes from basically from near the top of the desk about halfway down to the floor.
John:
And that piece of metal can hide a lot of sins.
John:
So my main cable management strategy is to make things look neat from the perspective of someone who's in the room or someone who's sitting in front of the computer and to hide all my sins between the wall and that piece of metal.
John:
So I don't want to see cables snaking around.
John:
I want them to basically just go from the devices straight to the back of the desk and downward, and then I never want to see them again until they emerge beautifully and plug into the computer they're supposed to plug into.
John:
And I have mostly achieved that, but were you to look behind my computer, you would see where all the bodies are buried.
John:
you would see that it's not really that neat back there and yeah all the cables do beautifully go over the edge of the desk and reappear where they need to but in between bad things happen same thing for because i use a wired keyboard and mouse just because i do the wires that go from my keyboard amount like you know go from my keyboard tray and they somehow go up and they don't dangle and i don't kick them or whatever and they appear in the back of my computer and how do they get there
John:
Well, if you lay on your back and slide yourself under my desk, you will see a series of cable clips that are snaking their way in a random pattern from my mouse and my keyboard to my computer.
John:
So I guess the answer to that question is I'm not carefully arranging my cables, but I'm providing the illusion that I'm capably managing my cables by hiding all.
John:
It's like the shoving everything in a closet version of cleaning the house.
John:
Like the house looks neat, but don't open the closet.
Marco:
yep yeah i i do a little bit better but i i still wouldn't say i do a great job of this uh i do have a standing desk and that helps a lot uh for two main reasons number one when you are arranging your cables you can raise the desk so that you can more easily fit under it and it's more comfortable to be down there and to you know to do things nicely and
Marco:
But the number two benefit which is probably the bigger one of standing desks in this area is that if you routinely raise and lower the desk you have to have a certain amount of good cable management otherwise stuff will be pulled off the desk every time you lift it up.
Marco:
uh so it kind of forces you to keep things a little bit tidier um and you know just because it has your desk has to be a little bit more mobile and and you have to be able to move it knowing that cables are going to get pulled and then you know there will be some slack out of them when the desk goes down and so you kind of have to accommodate for that in your arrangement um
Marco:
um that being said my methods of cable management are pretty simplistic i'm actually kind of surprised that nick somehow managed to find a way to spend 200 pounds on cable management stuff which was like a thousand dollars like i don't even know how you do that like it i mean i guess there's probably like some you know cool boutique specialty stuff that's made of walnuts and hand carved or something but i
Marco:
My management strategy has usually been based on zip ties or Velcro cable ties or both.
Marco:
And there's not much that you have to do that costs a lot of money in this area.
Marco:
One of the best things you can do if you want to set more poundage on fire is to get new cables that are exactly the length they need to be and no more.
Marco:
because cable excess length is one of the biggest causes of desk cable clutter.
Marco:
And if you can minimize that excess length, method number one is just take a zip tie or cable tie and just bound up the excess length somewhere along the cable where you can kind of tuck it away and hide it in a useful way.
Marco:
But method number two, which sets more money on fire, is to buy new cables that are shorter, if you can, for whatever devices that you can do that for.
Marco:
also there's obviously the strategy of if you can consolidate your devices themselves like all your peripherals if you can get away with one thing to do the job of what you currently have four different things with four different power bricks to do like by all means do that but obviously that's that's not always possible um the other thing i would say is one of the standing desk advantages of keeping things tidy is that when you're designing a cable setup for a standing desk
Marco:
one of the easiest places to put something, whether it's a cable or a small peripheral, like an external hard drive or something, is the underside of the desk.
Marco:
Which I feel like is an area, like literally just attaching things to the underside of your desk, is an area of cable management real estate that most people underuse.
Marco:
So I would strongly suggest...
Marco:
consider that when you're arranging things so for instance on the underside of my desk i have two external hard drives plugged into a usb hub all of those things are adhered to the underside of my desk with command strips the velcro ones so they hold a ton of weight but because they're velcro and in two pieces you can like take the thing off and
Marco:
And then you can do the command, you know, slow pull to detach the top strip thing.
Marco:
So you don't have to like reach behind a hard drive and try to pull a little tiny tab like you can take the device off.
Marco:
Then you have full reach on the tabs.
Marco:
So it makes command strips way better to do the two piece Velcro ones.
Marco:
And they hold a bunch of weight.
Marco:
So like, you know, I stick two of those on the bottom of a hard drive or something, stick it on the bottom of my desk.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
I have a speaker amp stuck to the bottom of my desk that way.
Marco:
It's not a large speaker amp, mind.
Marco:
It was one of those $50 SMSL things.
Marco:
But the speakers on my desk are powered by an amp that is a command strip to the bottom of my desk.
Marco:
It works.
Marco:
They're very secure.
Marco:
They're made to hold five pounds each.
Marco:
I put two of them on something that weighs one pound, and I have a lot of leeway there.
Marco:
Anyway, so use the underside of your desk as well.
Marco:
Undersides of desks usually also provide some amount of framing, some kind of bars that go across it or somewhere.
Marco:
And those are also good things to attach cables to or to run cables along.
Marco:
Again, zip ties and cable ties are your friend here.
Marco:
But ultimately...
Marco:
The end game of my desk setups, my cable management setups, is, I think, a very common story where I'll get it set up really nicely and it'll be really nice for like two months and then I'll add something or a cable will break or I'll have to rearrange something and then I, okay, well now I'll just plug this in real fast and I'll get back to my job.
Marco:
And then a few months later, I'll add something else.
Marco:
I'll just plug this in real fast and get back to my job.
Marco:
And eventually there's so much crap built up and I can't move my iMac anymore because some cable is being pulled too taut and I, I can't tilt the screen to the right, you know, tilt level anymore.
Marco:
And at some point I'm like, all right, I'm just going to start all this over again, clip all the zip ties, take all the cables out, unplug everything.
Marco:
do it all over again and that's just that's just the cycle of this kind of thing and i don't i i think the reality of your desk setup is that it changes over time that's the nature of technology it's the nature of computers the nature of being a nerd so you can have the best setup in the world but in a year you're gonna want to redo it
Marco:
And instead of trying to fight that or feel bad about it, just accept like, yeah, this is what's going to happen.
Marco:
You're going to make it really nice.
Marco:
And in a year, it's not gonna be nice anymore.
Marco:
It's going to be full of, you know, knots and dust and bees and God knows what else.
Marco:
And then you're going to have to just redo the whole thing again.
Marco:
And that's, that's just how it goes and go into it with that in mind.
Marco:
And you'll feel a lot better when it happens.
John:
I don't know if I spent 200 pounds.
John:
I don't know what a pound is.
John:
Is it the same as a quid?
John:
I kid.
John:
I kid.
John:
But I did spend a lot of money on cables when I got my Mac Pro set up.
John:
And it's just for the reason Marco said.
John:
Not because I needed cables, although I didn't need a few of them, but mostly because now I had new distances to things because my Mac Pro wasn't going to be underneath the table and I had, you know...
John:
the new monitor and different things were connected to hubs and they weren't before and so i got cables that they're not exactly the right length but they're in the ballpark so i don't have any excess that i have to side and also none of them are pulled so taut that they are visible because again that's my main concern about hiding things i need mine to sort of loop down out of sight and then come back back up out of sight and go into the computer and so they can't be too sharp but they also can't be too long and that's why i got all these new cables
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Flat File, HelloFresh, and Purple.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you all next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
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.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M
Casey:
So long.
Marco:
a few weeks ago i said very very quickly as part as like a lead into some other segment that i i had thoroughly ruined my peak design everyday backpack and i was about to tell you how it went and then we just we got sidetracked and started talking about other stuff and just never came back to it yeah right and and people have been asking literally every week since then so what happened to the backpack yeah
Marco:
So here's the quick story on that.
Marco:
I was going to one of my trips to go run some errands off the island.
Marco:
So I had my backpack full of stuff, and I had my dog, and I had a bottle of water for the dog, and I had a bottle of water for me, and I wanted to carry a coffee as well because part of these errands involves a long drive.
Marco:
And I put my coffee, as I always do,
Marco:
In my Zojirushi travel mug.
Marco:
Zojirushi makes awesome travel mugs for coffee.
Marco:
They come in all different sizes and they have these flip top lids that you can close and you can lock.
Marco:
Normally I would have used the external cup holder on my backpack and
Marco:
But in this case, the two external cup holders or external bottle holders rather on the backpack, the ones on each side were already occupied.
Marco:
I decided to put the coffee in the top compartment of the backpack and it was kind of padded with like a jacket on one side so it couldn't tip over.
Marco:
And it turned out I, this one time, had forgotten to lock the lid.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
And this one time, as part of the process of getting myself and my dog and all the stuff I was carrying between the house and the walk and the boat and the car, somehow the lid, I had forgotten to lock the lid, and somehow in the shuffling around, something had pushed the button and it had popped open.
Marco:
And so my full thing of coffee in my Zojirushi travel mug had the opportunity to spill not even all of it, but maybe a quarter of itself into the backpack.
Marco:
It turns out that when you spill a quarter cup of coffee inside a backpack, it goes everywhere.
Marco:
you'd be shocked how much of the bag in how many different surfaces and different materials and everything how much of it gets surprisingly wet from a quarter cup of coffee the problem that i have with this kind of thing you know i love coffee i love lots of food and drink type things but after i have cooked and eaten a meal i
Marco:
I don't want to be going to bed at 10 o'clock that night and still be smelling the food that I cooked four hours ago.
Marco:
I want the smell of food to be there while I'm cooking and eating, and then ideally to instantly disappear.
Marco:
And similarly, as much as I love coffee...
Marco:
I don't want my entire backpack to smell like coffee all the time.
Marco:
So I have this backpack that's full of coffee somehow with a quarter cup, but trust me, it went everywhere.
Marco:
Uh, and I got it.
Marco:
I'm like, every time I open it up, you know, I've tried, I tried, you know, some wet paper towels and wet cloths here and there to try to like blot it and wipe some of the surfaces down.
Marco:
But like, it's really in the fabric.
Marco:
Every time I would open it up, it just smelled like now old stale coffee.
Marco:
And everything in it smelled like coffee.
Marco:
And I had to take everything out and wipe or wash everything that was in it.
Marco:
But still, the whole bag just reeked of coffee.
Marco:
And no amount of cleaning I was doing to it was helping.
Marco:
I even brought it into the sink and I just started running water over parts.
Marco:
I'm like, I already don't want to use this bag anymore.
Marco:
So if I happen to ruin the structure of it in some way, oh well, I've already ruined it.
Marco:
And so then I started washing it like crazy.
Marco:
I started like, you know, soaking parts, you know, really like hosing it down.
Marco:
I left it outside on the deck through three different rain and wind storms, hoping that it would like air out and really get and nothing I did could make this backpack stop smelling like stale, rotten coffee.
Marco:
They've actually since revised the bag.
Marco:
They've made a version two of it about a year ago.
Marco:
And TIFF has one of the version two ones.
Marco:
And there are certain things about the version two that are significantly better, but there are also certain things about that.
Marco:
I actually like a lot less than the version one.
Marco:
And so I'm like, I want, I just, I just want to replace this backpack and,
Marco:
but I don't want the current ones.
Marco:
I kind of want the old one.
Marco:
And fortunately on Amazon, they seem to be unloading old stock of the old bags for discounted prices on Amazon.
Marco:
So I'm like, you know what?
Marco:
This is available right now.
Marco:
It's not that much money.
Marco:
Let me just buy a spare.
Marco:
Sure enough, the spare comes.
Marco:
I get it.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
It's perfect.
Marco:
I'm happy with it.
Marco:
I now am keeping the old stale coffee one as the spare.
Marco:
And
Marco:
that's it i i there is no ending to the story this is not a very interesting story i was totally unable to remove the coffee smell from this backpack so i must caution you all out there don't carry liquids inside your peak design everyday backpacks unless you are really really sure that you have locked the lid on said liquids but to be extra sure i
John:
just keep it in the outside pocket and that's uh you know the bottle holder pockets they're there for a reason that's probably a better place to put liquids well the moral of the story was the coffee ruins everything you took the words right out of my mouth john siracusa well done sir well done stale coffee reminds me when i used to visit my mom's office that's what it smelled like like you know coffee and like the little uh what do you call them the hot craft hot plates things
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, I mean, that's really bad coffee.
Marco:
Like, at least this was good coffee.
Marco:
But even good coffee, once it has soaked into your backpack fabric, becomes bad coffee pretty quickly.
John:
Well, I'm saying like this is the 80s and there was no Keurig machines or anything like that.
John:
It's all there was was the little whatever coffee things for the office.
John:
But it smelled like old.
Marco:
Are you using Keurig machines as a good thing here?
Marco:
You're saying?
John:
No.
John:
i'm saying about certainly they make better coffee than these things because this was like the glass like you get in a hotel room a glass pot that you put on a hot thing with a little drip and the coffee would just sit in there and sometimes it would sit in there and get burned or whatever and just the the office permanently smelled like the worst of like three day old burned coffee in one of those things it was just a permanent smell i can imagine your backpack smelling worse than that
Marco:
Yeah, because again, the coffee was great when it was fresh and when it was not in the fabric of a backpack that I've been using constantly for four years or whatever.
Marco:
But yeah, when they combine, when you have an unwelcome food or drink smell in a place or at times when you don't want to be smelling that, it becomes significantly less pleasant.
John:
The only thing that could be possible, well, two things could be worse than that.
John:
One, and I know this from recent experience at my current job, one of the people who sat like a diagonal to me, one of my desks that I had, what did he had?
John:
He had a bottle of bourbon, I think, like a glass bottle of bourbon that was used for sort of after work activities.
John:
And it was stored under his desk and somehow got kicked into a metal thing and cracked.
John:
And leaked bourbon all over the floor.
John:
And I can tell you that is a strong smell that is difficult to get rid of.
John:
But the good thing alcohol goes going for it is volatile and a lot of it does dissipate, right?
John:
But the real worst one is, I think this was my younger brother, spilled milk in the back of our station wagon once.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
Just get a new car.
John:
And it soaks into the carpet and you're like, you try to blot it up, but whatever.
John:
But then you come back in the next day after it's been in the hot sun.
John:
rotten milk soaked into car like you know not just the carpeting that you can take out but like soaked into like the the stuff that is actually stuck to the you know metal panel boy that smell i'll remember that forever and it never really goes away the goat the ghost of rotten milk haunted that station wagon forever yeah that's you're never getting rid of that smell you can't just buy a new volvo station wagon well i guess you can but it seems to shame all right titles
Marco:
made of walnut i got nothing that's down in the zeros yeah i said it but it's not bad walnut has ruined all cool products the the nut or the wood the well the nut ruins everything it's in the nuts i'd rather have a backpack full of coffee than like a brownie that has one walnut somewhere in it but yeah
John:
I have a walnut acclimation story, actually.
John:
Oh, yeah?
John:
What does that even mean?
John:
I'm with you mostly on walnuts.
John:
The worst nut, right?
John:
It looks like brains.
John:
It tastes bad.
John:
I don't want them in my brownies.
John:
Like, the whole nine yards on, you know, anti-walnut, right?
John:
But one of my favorite ice cream flavors, Ben and Jerry's New York Super Fudge Chunk, has come with walnuts in it forever for the history of the flavor.
John:
And I love the flavor and I would get it and I would eat around the walnuts carefully.
John:
Like I'd extract them and put them aside and say, I'm not eating that and I eat everything else.
John:
And how long has that flavor been around?
John:
Decades.
John:
I've been eating New York Superfudge Chunk.
John:
I think I had some like three days ago.
John:
Like I eat a lot of ice cream, first of all.
John:
And second of all, I eat a lot of New York Superfudge Chunk.
John:
And over the decades, I slowly stopped extracting the walnuts and started just eating them.
John:
I don't like them.
John:
Walnuts are still bad.
John:
I don't want them in my brownies.
John:
I would like it better if they weren't in this, but now I can eat them without, you know, having a feeling of revulsion.
John:
I don't like them, but I don't hate them as much as I used to, at least in this one context.
John:
So I feel like I've turned a corner on walnut, and now it is not worth the effort to extract them.
John:
The way I get rid of them now is I eat them.
Marco:
Glowing endorsement.
John:
yeah right i mean what can you do with walnuts the other thing is you know when i grew up we had one of the traditional courses in italian american meals is the nut course before dessert and they would bring out a big thing of nuts in the shelves and half the fun of that is just getting to play with the nut crackers and crack open the things or whatever and walnuts are the biggest and the most fun to crack but then you got a bunch of walnuts and who the hell wants those so i always give them to like my uncle or grandfather and they would eat them but
Casey:
I think we talked about this a year or two back.
Casey:
So my mom's parents, my grandparents, are Italian-American, and I grew up with similar, although perhaps less devout, traditions as you, John.
Casey:
And one of the things that was always on display and out for consumption when I visited them was pistachios.
Casey:
And
Casey:
The thought technology of using a previously cracked pistachio shell as a screwdriver or lever to open a nigh uncrackable pistachio shell was something I just discovered like a handful of years ago.
John:
It doesn't have to be previously cracked.
John:
You just need a little, you just need a Pac-Man mouth and you can use that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Because otherwise you get a chicken egg situation.
John:
How do you get the first one open?
Casey:
Right, right, right.
Casey:
But anyway, that was thought technology that just blew my mind and it has changed my life for the better ever since.
Marco:
I regret to admit that I've actually switched to shelled pistachios.
Marco:
What is it?
Marco:
Is it unshell?
Marco:
Is it shell-less?
Marco:
The ones that don't have shells on them.
Marco:
Yes, the ones that do not come with shells.
Marco:
I've switched to those for pistachios.
Marco:
oh see but that takes away to some of the tea ceremony i know i i was on your side for many years but i i have since switched but now you just you crave pistachios so much you can't be slowed down by the shells yeah i just kind of just shovel them in pour them into my face now that's really it's really putting a damper on your nut based calorie intake yeah great it's best not to look at how many calories are in no don't that's what i'm saying it's for the price god pistachios are so expensive
Marco:
yeah well actually i've been i've found a nice uh solution to that there's what's the the brand that comes in the green bag like the good or whatever it's like some generic brand name whatever national advertising brand yeah yeah but they have they have now these little these like those like foil tube packs that you buy a box it has like eight of them in there and so you it's pre-portioned so oh yeah the wonderful brand thank you steve mull in the chat um
Marco:
Yeah, the wonderful brand.
Marco:
And yeah, so you can just have these little 120-calorie packs, these little foil tubes.
John:
It's like three pistachios.
Marco:
It's not that many, but it's nice that you can just grab one of those, and then you know how many calories you're eating in three seconds.
Marco:
And you can basically pour it into your face in two or three pours, and then you're done, and you can move on.
John:
yeah my dad uh he loves pistachios he's also allergic to them and it's just like i mean it could be right out of the simpsons like you know it's like but you're allergic to these like but i love them so he'd just sit there and eat them and just get all puffy and just it's like you can't stop it's like it's worth it i guess i don't it's not it hasn't killed them yet but it's not you know
John:
Pistachio ice cream is a pretty good way.
John:
There's not a lot of pistachios in pistachio ice cream, but there's enough that you feel like you're getting something.
John:
Of course, the rest of it is ice cream, which isn't great either.
Marco:
Yeah, from a calorie point of view, although pistachio ice cream is very good.
Marco:
But so hard, it seems like it's very difficult to do well.
John:
Yeah, Ben & Jerry's has the best pistachio ice cream.
John:
no contest haagen-dazs makes the pistachios too small and any ice cream that is green forget it yeah the ones that are like neon green to try to indicate pistachio-ness yeah no that's not that's a fake whatever yeah ben and jerry's pistachio what is it called pistachio pistachio i forget the flavor name yeah they are the only good store-bought pistachio ice cream i've ever found in conclusion walnuts are dicks
John:
And coffee ruins everything.
John:
Spill walnuts in your backpack and it's not going to ruin it.
John:
Yep, that's right.
Marco:
Well, it depends.
Marco:
I mean, they're really bad.
Marco:
Just pick those walnuts right out of there.
Marco:
Anyway, bye everybody.
Marco:
Thank you for listening.
John:
Happy Thanksgiving.
Marco:
Yeah, happy Thanksgiving.
Marco:
That's right.
John:
Don't put walnuts in your stuffing.
John:
Use pine nuts instead.
John:
They're better.
Marco:
Yeah, actually, that's true for sure.
Marco:
And also, since many people are not traveling for Thanksgiving, ourselves included.
John:
All people are not traveling, right, everybody who's listening?
Marco:
Yeah, please don't travel.
Marco:
But yeah, for all of us who are not traveling, the great thing about this is that you can edit what you have to be only the stuff you like.
Marco:
Normally, if you go to Thanksgiving at your parents' place or whatever, first of all, there's always the turkey, and turkey is usually terrible.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
Disagree.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
Marco is 100% right.
Marco:
There are ways to make it decent, but most people don't or can't do those.
Marco:
so the result is turkey is usually pretty bad um but you don't have to have turkey or you don't have to have a whole turkey like we decided for our little you know thanksgiving here for our little family here at the beach we decided we're not going to have a whole turkey because there's only three of us but we bought a turkey breast because you can buy just the breast and you can roast just that and brine it and everything you can do all sorts of fun stuff and it's way smaller you got the work you got the worst part of the turkey congratulations
Marco:
It's way smaller and way easier to deal with.
Marco:
Or if you like the dark meat, you can buy a couple eggs or whatever.
Marco:
You can buy just parts of the turkey.
Marco:
Or you can cook any other type of meat or no meat.
Marco:
You can have Thanksgiving that's all side dishes.
Marco:
You can have Thanksgiving that's a steak or a roast or anything else.
Casey:
Stop.
Marco:
It doesn't have to be.
Marco:
Steak Thanksgiving.
Casey:
I'm on board.
Casey:
Marco, I'm coming to that Thanksgiving next year.
Marco:
Yeah, take this opportunity that you are forced by major world events to have a different kind of Thanksgiving that is both smaller and much more within your control.
Marco:
Take the opportunity to make your Thanksgiving that, like... Pistachio ice cream for dinner.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
If that's what you want, you can have Thanksgiving that is only the things that you want and no other things.
Marco:
You can control the ratios.
Marco:
If you want to have a Thanksgiving dinner that's three quarters stuffing, you can do that.
Marco:
Like, that's...
Marco:
It's up to you.
Marco:
You have full control over what you make.
Marco:
So, you know, take this opportunity that you're forced to do something different and actually do something that you might enjoy a little bit better.
Marco:
Or at least at least the food part can be better while you talk to your family over FaceTime and you look at their dry turkey and you're like, haha, I don't have to eat that.
John:
alternately you could take this thanksgiving uh away from family as an opportunity to practice making turkey so you don't ruin it because turkey is good practice in a judgment-free environment it's not that hard to make turkey people just just forget all right anyway i love turkey i'm gonna have turkey this thanksgiving it's possible to make it without ruining it yeah i mean it's it's possible it's just very unlikely
John:
i don't know i think people i think people just cook it at too high a temperature lots of meat things like if your problem is that you keep screwing it up it's probably because you're trying to cook it at a too high a temperature especially for something big you just cook it low and slow then your only real problem is like the outside can be crappy but then you just do high heat to the beginning or end and you solve that problem and it's not that hard you know instant read thermometer is your friend
Marco:
Well, but, yeah, yes, but a thermometer tells you when the inside is done, when the outside is totally dried out and burnt.
John:
It doesn't prevent the... Well, the outside won't be totally dried out and burnt if you cook it at a lower temperature.
Marco:
Yeah, it's very hard to cook a very large piece of meat that you are leaving whole in its whole form.
Marco:
It's very hard to do that in a reasonable amount of time in a regular household oven.
Marco:
If you're going to smoke it and smoke the turkey over 12 hours, there are ways to do it.
Marco:
There are lots of low and slow cooking methods, but most people either aren't set up for them or don't have the skill for them.
Marco:
And the result is usually not great.
Marco:
Enjoy your Thanksgiving, whatever it is.
Marco:
And if you want to make something better than turkey, feel free.
Casey:
Ham's good.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Ham's more of a Christmas thing, though, I think.
Marco:
Or Easter.
Marco:
I've had good spiral hams more often than I've had good turkey.
John:
oh preach and i should clarify i don't like ham that much like i actually don't like ham in general like i'll eat it but i'd rather eat something else you should try the boris head ham they may they sell like the big ones yeah non-spiral cups just one big hunk of ham but it's already cooked you just heat it up it's so much better than that spiral slice stuff that you're getting i guarantee can you still put the big pineapple rings on the side
John:
i mean it's you know like the spiral slice it's already cooked so you're just heating it through and you could do whatever you want with it but i would if you just get the boar's head ham you can get like a small one that's like small enough for like one meal for a family get i mean it's very expensive but try it and then take buy a spiral slice one too and then put them side by side and and a b test against them it's like it's no contest
Marco:
And I would say, too, on the pricing side, if you're buying so much ham that the price of it is a problem, I would venture to say you're probably eating too much ham.
John:
Well, if you have a big family dinner and you're going to buy ham that's going to feed the whole family, you do have to buy a bigger ham.
John:
But yeah, we made the mistake of we've been doing Borset hams usually for Easter for a long time.
John:
We're like, oh, we couldn't find that.
John:
We bought a different brand, and it was so disappointing.
John:
I was like, oh my God, we can never buy this non-Boar's Head ham ever again.
Casey:
Boar's Head stuff is phenomenally expensive, but is phenomenally tasty.
Casey:
I know you two are going to judge me for this, but I swear to you, I could sit and eat a pound of Boar's Head white American like it was nothing.
John:
We know you and your white American cheese.
John:
We know all that.
Marco:
No, we've actually – we've had the Boar's Head Yellow American is our primary cheese of our household because like the little grocery store here didn't have good like Kraft Single kind of cheese like the pre-wrapped singles for Adam all summer like to make grilled cheeses for our kid.
Marco:
And so we just – we've switched the entire family over to just using Boar's Head Yellow Deli American for pretty much everything.
Marco:
And it's fantastic.
John:
mm-hmm the aaron's entire family is like very much on the anti-american cheese bandwagon and they're all wrong they're all the only thing i'll say about the boar's head uh cheese is for grilled cheese full fat craft is still uh real cheese not the singles not the cheese food craft american actual craft american actual cheese is still better than grilled cheese sandwiches that's probably true i'd buy that
John:
i might not have i know i had boar i grew up with boar's head cheese i know exactly what you're talking about i ate tons of it i still like it but for a grilled cheese sandwich straight up american do the full fat whole milk real uh american craft cheese versus the boar's head and just do make make two sandwiches and see which one you like better i think the craft one is better because that is its element the artificial craft american cheese and the grilled cheese sandwich
John:
That's true.
Marco:
That's fair.
Marco:
I will also argue once again that American cheese is the best cheese for hamburgers.
Marco:
Bye live listeners.
Marco:
Thank you for listening and we will talk to you next week.
Casey:
Oh my God.
Casey:
We were still live.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh God.