Plausibly Viable
Casey:
Before we record every single week, we've gotten in the habit of doing what John likes to call pre-flight, which is reasonable.
Casey:
And we'll quickly, quickly walk through what we're going to talk about and where we think we're going to stop follow-up and start topics and end topics and do Ask ATP and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And we went the entire way through pre-flight.
Casey:
And I felt like we had it pretty well sorted.
Casey:
I think John felt like we had it pretty well sorted.
Casey:
And then Marco looked at us, puss in boot style, with his hat in his hands and his big eyes looking up.
Casey:
And he said, well, what about the overcast update?
Marco:
No, I said, like, I don't want to be too self-serving here, but do we want to talk about the overcast update?
Marco:
It was suspiciously not mentioned yet.
Marco:
And why was it not mentioned, Marco?
Marco:
Because you didn't mention it.
Marco:
Because you didn't put it then.
Casey:
Because you didn't put it in the frigging show notes.
Casey:
Good grief.
Casey:
Well, this is the last episode of ATV.
Casey:
I hope everyone's enjoyed the program.
John:
Anyway, that's the point of pre-flight.
John:
It fulfilled its intended purpose.
John:
We made sure we knew how the show was going to go, and Marco brought this up now instead of just springing it on us mid-show and saying, oh, yeah.
Marco:
By the way, we also didn't mention, now that we're pre-flighting in public, Apple did their external link thing, and then they revised the dating app thing.
Marco:
But it's, I mean, they're in such little tiny...
Marco:
Yeah, well, and I read it over all of it.
Marco:
And the only thing of note really is that they made the text on the dialogue for the dating apps thing a little bit less horrendously biased.
Marco:
But otherwise, it's mostly stuff that we already knew or stuff that's very unsurprising.
Marco:
But yeah, so I don't know how much there is to talk about there because, you know, it's just Apple doing their usual jerky stuff around this area.
Marco:
And, you know, there's not much different here.
Casey:
You know, what we could do is we could put things that we want to talk about in a shared document.
Casey:
That's a good idea.
Casey:
And maybe the next time we record, we could potentially look at that shared document and see what we should talk about.
Casey:
Alright, we have a lot to get through.
Casey:
We have a mountain of follow-up, and it just keeps growing and growing and growing.
Casey:
And so I feel like we should just start by trying to conquer it.
Casey:
So, first item on the list, resolution, independence, and retina.
Casey:
I feel like...
Casey:
We have gone two to three consecutive weeks trying to explain this and apparently failing.
Casey:
So I had a pleasant, if long, exchange with a listener who was not being, you know, belligerent, who was not being mean in any way, which is somewhat rare for the Internet.
Casey:
But they just really weren't understanding what the big deal about retina was.
Casey:
And it's not that they were an unintelligent person.
Casey:
It's just I don't think I was doing a good job describing it.
Casey:
And learning from my mistakes in that regard, I can take a crack at this.
Casey:
But I wonder, John...
Casey:
If it would be best if you took a crack at this, because one of the things I referred this listener to was some old Ars Technica Mac OS X reviews.
Casey:
So would you explain to me, John, for those of us who are not aware, what makes retina screens and retina displays so crisp?
Casey:
If it's just two times the regular resolution, but it's showing the exact same stuff, why would it look better?
John:
Yeah, a lot of people sent feedback with asking questions that and their questions revealed that they had a mistaken notion of how how macOS specifically deals with retina displays.
John:
And then some other people had some questions clarifying a point that we didn't really bring up comparing how Mac does it with Windows.
John:
Right.
John:
So we'll start with the basics.
John:
Every time we talk about retina, we try to describe it as like there's twice as many pixels.
John:
So before, you know, if you're measuring length in one dimension, you'd say what was previously one pixel long.
John:
Now two pixels sit in that same place.
John:
Or what we would say is on a non retina screen, what was previously one pixel.
John:
Now it's a two by two grid of four pixels, a little square of four pixels.
John:
right and we're doing that to express the change in density right for the way apple did retina displays for the most part is if there had been a pre-existing thing like say the 27 inch thunderbolt display what they did for their 27 inch retina display the apple studio display is it's like the thunderbolt display but every place there is a single pixel on the thunderbolt display the retina the apple studio display has four pixels in a little square
John:
Right.
John:
And so people ask, but why would you want that if it's just going to draw things with a bunch of little blocks of two by two pixels in these four pixel squares?
John:
Why not just draw a single pixel on the Thunderbolt display?
John:
What do you get?
John:
Who cares if every pixel is made of four pixels?
John:
It's still the same thing on the screen, isn't it?
John:
And the the disconnect there is what we're trying to explain is how the density of pixels changed.
John:
But macOS does not draw things with two by two squares of pixels.
John:
It draws things with individual pixels.
John:
So if you have like a letter O where the sides of the O are all in a big curve shape, it doesn't make that the curved side of the letter O out of two by two blocks of pixels, right?
John:
It makes them out of single individual pixels.
John:
So it's twice as smooth.
John:
around the oh obviously you can imagine if you're you know trying to make a curve out of big blocks the smaller the blocks the more the curve looks like a continuous curve and not a stair step right so that is the that's the disconnect for that thing and the second thing to understand on this topic is how did apple eventually decide to come upon the solution um where they you know they took their previous screen and for every single pixel they made you know a two by two grid of pixels and then drew at the higher resolution right and
John:
For many years, I'll put links in the show notes, starting from 2005, then another link in 2007, then another link in 2011.
John:
Apple had tried for many years to figure out how am I going, how is macOS going to draw on higher density displays?
John:
you know mac os uh mac os 10 was a newish operating system then came out in 2001 high density displays look like they might be a thing where the pixels would be really really tiny you wouldn't want to just continue to draw exactly the way you know you had been drawing because then everything would be really tiny no one could see it what you'd want to do is what i described keep things more or less the same size so a 12 point letter o would be the same size as 12 point letter o it would just be smoother so how do we go about doing that
John:
One way that Apple tried for years and years and years is that
John:
you know, you'd have the drawing commands that are, say, you know, draw a letter O at 12-point text, and you'd have the screen, which would have some arbitrary pixel density, and the operating system would figure out, based on the screen density and how big a 12-point letter O is supposed to be, use the right number of pixels, which sounds like a great solution.
John:
It's like, any screen density, the more pixels you have, the smoother that letter O will be, but the letter O doesn't change size.
John:
Like, a 12-point letter O is a 12-point letter O is a 12-point letter O, and they would try to keep that consistent.
John:
The problem with that is...
John:
If you have something that you're trying to draw, like, you know, things in the operating system are defined by how big they're supposed to be, that 12-point letter O or whatever.
John:
If that 12-point letter O requires a number of pixels that is odd on one pixel density, but even on the other, it might be offset by a little bit.
John:
Which doesn't sound like a big deal, but now imagine trying to do things like draw tab bars or toolbars or buttons or things where they have to abut and join exactly, and
John:
If you can have an arbitrary pixel density, you might end up in a situation where, oh, this dividing line has to be right in the middle, but it can only be in the middle if this is five points, because you've got two points, then the middle one point, and then two points.
John:
Well, what if it's six points?
John:
Where's the middle of six points?
John:
There is no middle.
John:
It's got to be closer to one side or the other because of the number of pixels.
John:
And so you get what they call pixel cracks and all sorts of other things where if you try to let the operating system draw at an arbitrary, what we call a scaling factor, an arbitrary scaling factor, it's very difficult to draw things consistently because you always end up with like one pixel extra leftover that you have to decide whether it's on the left or the right and then you can't line things up.
John:
So Apple eventually just pretty much gave up after years and years of having that feature sort of as a debug feature in the operating system.
John:
You'll see screenshots in the links where there was actually a resolution scaling slider that you can move around and you can move it to fractional values like 1.5, 1.25.
John:
And then you'd see how just the drawing of everything broke because nothing expected that.
John:
And it's very difficult to get that to join up.
John:
So what Apple decided is we're not going to do that.
John:
We are only doing integer scaling factors.
John:
So it's either 1x, 2x, 3x, 4x, but it has to be an integer.
John:
So that way you always know exactly how to draw anything.
John:
You never end up with pixel cracks because you either, you know, either one regular non-retina pixel or a two by two grid, you know, double the density or triple the density or quadruple the density or whatever.
John:
That's how Mac OS draws things, as in draws them to the in-memory buffer.
John:
Final thing to understand is, okay, so that's how macOS draws stuff.
John:
But hey, I can take a 4K monitor and display a 5K.
John:
I can set it to 5K.
John:
How is it doing that?
John:
That doesn't divide evenly.
John:
That's not an integer scaling factor.
John:
How does that work?
John:
Well, the way it works is macOS draws at an integer scaling factor.
John:
Like when it draws the screen, it says, here's all the pixels in the screen.
John:
It is an integer scaling factor.
John:
It's twice, three times.
John:
I think only the iPhones do three times, whatever.
John:
But it's either 1x or 2x.
John:
That's how macOS draws it.
John:
And then at the very end, after drawing a 5K image at exactly 2X, right?
John:
It scales the entire final drawn image down to 4K.
John:
And that's where everything gets all fuzzy.
John:
And then it shoves that on the screen.
John:
So that's why people are like, why non-native scaling factors?
John:
If it had fractional scaling, you could display...
John:
5k quote unquote 5k worth of points on a 4k display without any fuzzy scaling but then you'd have pixel cracks everywhere but that's not what mac os does same thing on the 3x phones by the way maybe marco remembers details this more than i do but yep well originally yeah what the when the when the plus phones launched the the the six plus yeah so they they drew everything internally at 3x but the screens did not have three times the number of pixels so they would draw at 3x and then take the final 3x drawn pixel image and squish it
John:
and make everything all blurry and then put that on the screen but the pixels are so small people really didn't notice right and that that lasted until the iphone 10 and that's when they could do 3x at well not really because three the iphone 10 uses didn't use a pentile pattern which is getting into more complexity pixels how pixels are drawn but anyway these pieces of information are key to understanding what's different about mac os and i think windows tries to do what apple did which is arbitrary scaling factors and
John:
but i'm not entirely sure so i'm not going to speak for windows but i can say that mac os if you follow these links and look through the years they tried the other way to do it and they could not get it to work to be like perfect and so they said we're just going to do integer scaling which i think was the right call because 2x and 3x turn out to be
John:
you know adequate for not seeing the pixels anymore and it just makes everything so much easier because you never have to worry about that leftover pixel and how which side of a thing to allocate it to you never have to worry about pixel cracks the price of that is because of the way macOS works if you want to display quote unquote 5k worth of stuff which i know it's it's not you know what however many many points is horizontally and vertically on apple's 5k monitor if you want to display that number of points worth of stuff
John:
it had on a you know on a 4k monitor it mac os draws it at 5k and then it takes the final image and squishes it just like you would squish it in an image editor and that's why everything looks fuzzy so you don't get any pixel cracks but you do get a little bit of blurring in the same way that you take any image that's pixel perfect and you scale it
John:
everything gets a little bit fuzzy it gets anti-alias around the edges so hopefully that will explain to people who are wondering why why any of this matters to mac users it's a combination of our expectations based on products apple shipped and also how mac os and ios and ipad os and every os apple makes decided you know back in 2011 basically
John:
how they decided how they're going to draw in high dpi screens they always draw at an integer scaling factor and then if necessary they squish that image down to fit in the number of pixels on the screen but the way we like it is no squishing it draws at the at an integer scaling factor and then just puts those pixels directly on the screen which has exactly that number of pixels
Casey:
Yeah, and I get feedback, including today.
Casey:
I had two different pieces of feedback in the span of like five minutes from each other on Twitter.
Casey:
Like, hey, what about this monitor?
Casey:
What about this one?
Casey:
And I don't know what I'm being unclear about, but let me try one more time.
Casey:
I feel this way every single time.
Casey:
What am I being unclear about here?
Casey:
Like, if your screen is physically 27 inches or bigger,
Casey:
it must be at least 5K, if not bigger.
Casey:
Because how big is the XDR?
Casey:
It's like 30 or something like that?
Casey:
30 inches?
John:
32, I believe.
John:
32, I think.
Casey:
So between 24 and 27 inches, you need to be 5K.
Casey:
Much above 27 inches, you're getting into the 6K XDR territory.
Casey:
And if you're 22 to 24 inches, then 4K is sufficient.
Casey:
People are sending me these like...
Casey:
32 inch ultra wide screens that have the same horizontal resolution maybe it's the same vertical one of the other with one of the dimensions is the same as a as a like uh ultra fine 5k or a studio display 5k and they're like oh this would work right no no that's way physically bigger and zero more pixels what is it zaro zaro more boogs or whatever it was john i don't remember now but there's not enough pixels in there yeah it's totally it
Casey:
There's not enough pixels there.
Casey:
There's just not even close to enough pixels there.
Casey:
And people keep thinking, like, it's like us with Trump.
Casey:
Like, oh, we got him this time.
Casey:
I got him.
Casey:
And no, it's not even in the ballpark.
Casey:
If it's bigger than 27 inches, it better be more than 5K.
Casey:
If it's bigger than 24 inches, it better be more than 4K.
Casey:
Like, I don't feel like this is unclear, but somehow people just aren't getting it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I love all of you, though.
John:
And that gets back to the scaling thing, because it's like, oh, why don't you just set your monitor resolution to higher res?
John:
Well, then it will be non-native, because then macOS will draw at the higher res and squish that down to fit within the number of pixels that are on the screen, and everything will look slightly fuzzy.
John:
And then, yes, many people wrote in to tell us, well, I bet you can't see those pixels.
John:
Isn't your vision bad anyway?
John:
That's just up to the individual, whether they care about what we call non-native display, where the
John:
operating system draws at a higher resolution than the number of pixels on the display and then scales the drawn image before pushing it to the display that's that looks fuzzy to us some people don't notice the fuzz again the the old iPhones when they were when the big iPhones came out they drew it 3x but there weren't 3x the number of pixels so they scaled it and I bet a lot of people didn't notice because those pixels were really really small but uh you know on on mac screens uh I think a lot of us can still tell
Casey:
And I mean, even if even if I can't or John can't or somebody else can't like whether or not we are being ridiculous, this is something that is important to us for right or wrong.
Casey:
It's important to us.
Casey:
So if you don't agree, that's fine.
Casey:
That's fine.
Casey:
Just let people like things.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Joe Line wrote in to tell us about why silicon wafers are round.
Casey:
And Joe writes, the ingot of silicon is created as a cylinder as the solid silicon crystal is grown and pulled out of molten silicon, which leads to round wafers.
Casey:
Furthermore, many of the processing steps in the fab to produce the chips on the wafer are based on circular polishing motions and spinning the wafer around its center, which also requires angular symmetry and just wouldn't work well or as efficiently with a non-circular wafer.
Casey:
And then there's a video...
Casey:
I think it was like, how do they do that or how it's made or something like that, which we'll put in the show notes.
Casey:
I watched it.
Casey:
The whole thing is like eight, nine minutes.
Casey:
And the good part starts at about just shy of two minutes.
Casey:
And we'll put a timestamp link in the show notes.
Casey:
I will note that the source video does seem to have a couple of places where it freezes.
Casey:
I was concerned that my Mac was on the fritz, but no, no, no.
Casey:
It appears that it's the video itself.
Casey:
But anyways, it does a really good job of explaining all of this stuff.
Casey:
And I definitely think it's worth a watch of all nine minutes if you have nine minutes to spare.
Casey:
So yeah.
Casey:
Check that out.
Marco:
I love the idea of somebody who would answer that question with, no, I do not have nine minutes to spare.
Marco:
Meanwhile, they're listening to our show.
Casey:
Fair.
Casey:
Hey, man, let people spend time how they want, but I agree with you.
Casey:
Moving right along, can you tell us, John, about winning the M1 Ultra Lottery, please?
John:
this is jonathan raggan kelly uh chiming in about the possibility that was uh of the theory espoused in that maxx video about having to uh fab two m1 maxes next to each other in order to make an ultra so like you've got the wafer which as we just established is round and then you got a bunch of these rectangular chips on it and they're in a big grid uh and there's a little bit waste around the edges that's why we asked about the round thing but apparently there's good reasons for that as i surmised uh and then
John:
The theory was, okay, well, if you want to get an Ultra, not only do you have to find two M1 Maxes that, like, you know, have all the parts working if you want to get, like, an Ultra with all the parts working, but they have to be next to each other on the dies.
John:
Here's what Jonathan has to say about that.
John:
It is almost certainly not the case that neighboring pairs of M1 Max dies are cut out of the wafer to make an M1 Ultra.
John:
What they described at launch matches much better onto a more standard technology, which is the class of thing Intel markets as EMIB, which we will link in the show notes, and TSMC markets as LSI, which is Local Silicon Internet.
John:
That's a standard, widely used available technology, and cheaper and easier to build with better yield, precisely because you don't need directly adjacent dyes to be functional to pair them up.
John:
You don't need to have fabricated dyes next to each other on the same wafer to use this technology at all.
John:
The way to think about all these technologies is they're basically circuit boards, just like the human-scale printed circuit boards you're used to, just built at different levels of miniaturization with different technologies.
John:
And then Jonathan lists a bunch of the different technologies.
John:
And so people know what a circuit board is.
John:
It's a big flat board that is mostly non-conductive, but that has conductive what we call traces on them.
John:
You'll see you often see it in, you know, if it was an emoji, which it probably is or will be.
John:
It's like a green board, but with like gold lines on it.
John:
Those gold lines are the conducting paths.
John:
so they're kind of like wires but laid down as these sort of you know gold you know they're made of gold usually but gold things on there that conduct and circuit boards can have multiple layers so you see the little gold lines that are on top but sometimes they have multiple layers where there are other gold lines sandwiched in between connecting point a to point b to point c all at different levels right so that's what it means by circuit board and these things these interposer type things they are just like circuit boards but way way way smaller
John:
So here are the different technologies you can do with.
John:
One is multi-chip modules like AMD uses for its CPUs to do the integration of multiple dies with the quote-unquote circuit board organic substrate in package using traditional package and die connections along the edges of the dies.
John:
This is also what Apple uses for its integrated memory.
John:
It's just standard package level interconnect that cell phones and some laptop chips use.
John:
No special 3D stacking going on.
John:
So if you see all the RAM chips that are around, like the M1 Ultra, they're just connected with this, like a multi-chip module.
John:
There is traditional silicon interposers through the circuit board as a 3D stacked big slab of silicon all the way under the entire array of chips with through silicon vias, TSVs to connect the chips to the interposer.
John:
So this is like a thing that's just underneath the whole chip and has these little tunnels that go through it to reach up to the chip.
John:
And then finally, the newer EMI-B-like things are like the full interposer where the circuit board is again silicon and connected with high-density TSVs, but where you only put a very small interposer under the adjacent edges of the pair of dies for point-to-point connections.
John:
This is very clearly what the M1 Ultra uses based on everything Johnny Tsurugi said.
John:
and is the most sensible balance of cost and performance.
John:
So rather than being an intraposer that goes underneath the whole chip, as we saw in the video, it's just a little strip between the two that connects them.
John:
So if you think of that intraposer as like a really, really tiny microscale circuit board with all sorts of little traces and things happening in it, that's how they're connected.
John:
And to do that, you do not need them to be next to each other on the silicon wafer.
John:
So I found this pretty compelling evidence that they don't need to be next to each other.
John:
Now I'm angry again about the price of the M1 Ultra, I suppose.
Marco:
well but if anything you know this means obviously that yields would be massively higher doing it this way than doing it the way that we initially guessed uh which is good in the sense that this this method of making giant chips effectively um is is scalable and is healthy long term probably um so that i think it's great in the sense that this isn't just some kind of weird one-off they're going to do and then figure out something else for later this is something that they're going to be able to do
Marco:
for a long time probably and this is scalable you know when they when they want to go to say four of these instead of two of these maybe for a potential future mac pro that becomes much more possible and relatively much more affordable i know it's again the term relatively here
Marco:
um then if you would have had to have like four perfect dies all next to each other like that that would have been ridiculous where and two is even you know pretty pretty out there um so this this is promising in the sense that it's much more reasonable of a technique to use and it suggests that there will be much higher yields and the ability to do larger scale combinations in the future
John:
Something we might touch on in a future episode is the other problem of having a bunch of, you know, in this case, a bunch of M1 Maxes, a bunch of Jade Seed dyes or whatever, connected to each other, doing stuff.
John:
It's kind of what we've talked about a little bit in the past of, like, it's...
John:
Each one of those ships can act on its own, but now you want them to all act together as one, looking like one big CPU to the operating system.
John:
And that can be tricky because each one of those ships does have its own stuff, right?
John:
It's got its own, all its own stuff that is closer to it.
John:
Sometimes also in the case of the M1 Max, it's got its own connections to its own RAM and all that stuff.
John:
if you've got four of them together, now four things all have their own stuff and you want them to cooperate as one, it starts to become important how you allocate, it starts to become even more important, let's say, how you allocate work to those things.
John:
Because you don't want to give a piece of work to one die and then give it to another die, a millisecond later, and then give it to another die.
John:
Because every time you give it to a different die, it left behind all its stuff.
John:
It might have left stuff in the cache that was in the one die, and now you put it on another die and it goes to look in the cache and it's not there.
John:
So it's a good idea to keep things
John:
in the in the die where they started because their stuff will be there as they build up their cache or whatever and you don't want to flush all that stuff out when you change processes anyway this is a very complicated process it's they're already doing it within a single chip obviously and then within the m1 ultra it's an even bigger problem and if you had four of them it would be an even bigger problem so we'll see if apple ever mentions that in a future keynote to emphasize how they've been able to harness these four different chips woven together or whatever
Marco:
We are brought to you this week by Backblaze, unlimited computer backup for Macs and PCs for just $7 a month.
Marco:
Now, I didn't know there was a World Backup Day, but it turns out today, March 31st, is World Backup Day.
Marco:
So don't be an April fool.
Marco:
Start backing up your data and tell your friends and family to do the same.
Marco:
Backblaze is the best.
Marco:
This is what I use to back up my data because I've tried everything out there.
Marco:
I assure you, I've tried every cloud backup solution.
Marco:
Backblaze is the one that I've always gone back to and the one I've used the longest and the one I've been the happiest with.
Marco:
because you back up everything unlimited space even if you even have external drives connected to your computer it'll back those up to everything unlimited unthrottled for just seven dollars a month you can access it from anywhere from either their website or their wonderful android or ios mobile app so like if you have a file on your home computer and you're away somewhere you can just pull it off their app it's right there in the backblaze app
Marco:
If you need to do a large restore, you can either download the files off the website or they have this great restore by mail function where you can actually have them mail you a flash drive or a hard drive with all your data.
Marco:
And then if you just return that drive when you're done with it, they'll refund you the cost of the drive within 30 days.
Marco:
So it's just fantastic.
Marco:
They even have additional things like for an extra $2 a month, you can increase your retention history to one year of version retention.
Marco:
It's just fantastic to be a Backblaze customer.
Marco:
I love cloud backup.
Marco:
It solves so many problems, provides such great reassurance and really a true backup when it's totally off-site, totally out of your office and your building and everything.
Marco:
It's just great.
Marco:
So see for yourself with a 15-day free trial with no credit card required at backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
That's backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Go there, play with it, start protecting yourself from potential bad times right now.
Marco:
Backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Backblaze for sponsoring our show, and happy World Backup Day, apparently.
Casey:
Phil Stullery writes that the fans in the Mac studio are not just cooling the chip.
Casey:
They're also cooling the power supply, which needs cooling no matter the load.
Casey:
So this is the context for this is that we were wondering why the fans are really spun up always.
Casey:
And as per Phil, they're cooling the power supply.
John:
Yeah, that's a good theory, except the M1 Mac Mini also has an internal power supply, and it does not make this much noise or run as fans as high.
John:
So it is a factor because we were always comparing it like, why would this be making more noise than the laptop?
John:
Well, of course, the laptop doesn't have an internal power supply.
John:
It's got that external power brick.
John:
It's also true of the iMac.
John:
Why is the iMac so silent?
John:
Well, the power supply is not inside there either.
John:
It's in the external brick.
John:
But the M1 Mac Mini has got a fairly beefy, you know, oversized power supply from the Intel version still inside there.
John:
And it's basically silent.
John:
Obviously, everything is beefier in the Mac Studio than it is in the Mac Mini, but it seems like the math still doesn't quite add up.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, also, you know, the iMac Pro had a massive power supply in it, supplying hundreds of watts to all the guts of that machine.
Marco:
And that was silent.
Marco:
So yeah, I don't... It is worth noting, certainly, that that is a factor.
Marco:
But I still don't think... First of all, I still don't think this is the only factor leading to why this machine is so mysteriously loud.
Marco:
And I still think something here is possibly wrong.
Marco:
That's how weird it is that this machine is...
Marco:
that people are saying this is audible at all because you know compared to its peers that it still seems weird that they've set the fan minimum to be so audible when it seems like it probably shouldn't be necessary yeah the studio display also has an internal power supply also has two fans and is also according to everyone who's had one silent yep
Casey:
And then there was a Twitter thread from OnlyMe about returning a Mac Studio due to fan noise.
Casey:
And so we'll link the thread in the show notes.
Casey:
This person says, Cooling does seem to be over-specified in the Mac Studio, at least with my admittedly light usage.
Casey:
With normal usage, my Mac Studio CPUs are about 35 degrees Celsius.
Casey:
My 16-inch MacBook Pro with M1 Pro is around 45 degrees Celsius with the fan off.
Casey:
according to high-step menus.
Casey:
As an experiment, I taped a piece of paper around the back of the Mac Studio.
Casey:
This seems unwise, but whatever.
Marco:
Don't do this.
Casey:
But with a little gap between the case and the paper, a bit like a chimney.
Casey:
This reduced the fan noise by about four to five decibels, which made it audible.
Casey:
but completely acceptable to me the cpu temps increased by less than 10 degrees celsius which is still less than my macbook pro with the fan off and then this person clarifies actually i don't think the paper increased the temperature at all i only did it about 90 minutes ago and they include a graph so yeah i mean i don't know what to make of this it seems like maybe this will get fixed in software maybe
John:
i don't know yeah i don't recommend blocking the vents on your computer but as a fun experiment somebody else does not me uh it is interesting that even blocking the fence didn't seem to increase the temperature much it's just so over provisioned with cooling it seems like there's like nothing you can do to make this thing hot and yet the fans they keep spinning
Marco:
It is a little suspicious that at this point, now we are a couple of weeks out from release, and I don't think anybody's gotten a weird statement from Apple PR saying, oh, we'll tweak the fans in a software update.
Marco:
I haven't seen anything like that come by the news people.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Maybe this is just how it is.
Marco:
But it just seems so odd to me that they would ship something like this with fan noise that is audible.
Marco:
Obviously, we're going to get into this in a second.
Marco:
What does audible mean?
Marco:
It's very variable.
Marco:
It depends so much on people and on conditions, but...
Marco:
It just seems like a weird misstep.
Marco:
And they've been so good about fan noise with all their other recent models for years, excepting the Intel laptops before.
Marco:
But for all the desktops have been really quiet for a long time.
Marco:
And all of the M1-based computers, including the laptops, have been really ridiculously, amazingly quiet.
Marco:
And so to have this chip come out, and even the configuration with the M1 Max, the same chip as in the high-end laptops, even that configuration has audible fan noise to a lot of people.
Marco:
And so it seems like something went wrong here.
Marco:
And I have a hard time believing that this is just how they designed it, because they've been so good otherwise.
Casey:
And then acoustician Andrew Wade, this is someone who is very smart with audio things.
Casey:
Andrew Wade says, acoustician checking in on this fan noise thing with some rules of thumb since you sound a little unsure of the decibels thing.
Casey:
For noise level differences, according to Andrew, one to two decibels, the human ear can't hear the difference.
Casey:
Three decibels, just about noticeable.
Casey:
Five decibels, clearly noticeable.
Casey:
Ten decibels sounds about twice as loud.
Casey:
So a 25, 26, and 27 decibel fan will sound the same, assuming, of course, one isn't making a weird hum or something.
Casey:
As for quote-unquote audibility, that depends on how loud the room is already that you're in, how close you are to the thing, how old you are.
Casey:
Your hearing, especially at high frequencies, normally fades with age from about 20 degrees.
Casey:
So I would probably, I as in case, he would probably be able to hear fans that John can't, coincidentally.
Casey:
So yeah, I don't know what you're complaining about, John.
Casey:
But anyway, back to Andrew.
Marco:
Newsflash, I'll tell you why.
Marco:
Because the frequency distribution of fan noise is...
Marco:
is not mostly in those very upper ranges that you lose, like the teens, teen K hertz kind of range.
Marco:
It's not those ranges that you're hearing.
Marco:
It's broadband noise across many frequencies, including most of the mid-range frequencies that people tend to hear pretty well for a very long time.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
So back to Andrew.
Casey:
So as a 25 to 26 decibel fan quiet, in almost all normal circumstances, it's going to be inaudible.
Casey:
Most offices are anything from 30 to 50 decibels.
Casey:
Sitting one to one and a half meters from the studio, you're never going to be able to hear a 25 decibel fan.
Casey:
Quiet recording studios are at about 20 to 25 decibels.
Casey:
So in that highly unusual scenario, you may hear it if you're close to it, maybe.
Casey:
Challenge accepted.
Casey:
Says someone who is professionally trained in this field.
Marco:
Well, so I would say I am not an acoustician.
Marco:
I am a computer nerd.
Marco:
I know a little bit about audio, but not as much as Andrew most likely does, I hope, for somebody with that title.
Marco:
So Andrew probably dramatically out-qualifies me on this.
Marco:
So that thing aside, we're clearly hearing from lots of people, hey, subjectively, I'm hearing these fans and they're loud, or they're at least noticeable.
Marco:
most people are not saying like i can't believe how loud it is most people are simply saying it's odd that i'm hearing the fan because on on all these modern computers i haven't heard the fan it's weird i'm hearing it on this one but some people also characterize it as silent right and anyway i'm sitting here like i measured i have happen to have an spl meter for reasons um so i measured my office earlier tonight and uh my office hovers around 40 decibels at night
Marco:
Which is, you know, right there in the middle of the range, Andrew said most offices are.
Marco:
But if my office is 40 decibels, I can hear quiet fans when they're on.
Marco:
So are the measurements wrong?
Marco:
Am I wrong?
Marco:
Am I somehow magically hearing?
Marco:
Probably not.
Marco:
My hearing's not that good.
John:
When you have something that is a certain volume, it's not like adding another thing that is lesser volume doesn't count somehow or cancels it out.
Marco:
Right, that's true.
John:
It just adds to the noise.
John:
What he was just saying is if you don't find the noise in your office deafening with nothing turned on, adding something, a noise source at that volume level, you're not going to find it super-duper offensive, right?
John:
And I was I was I think Gruber linked to Panzerino's thing or something.
John:
I read something again today from somebody who just offhandedly said, oh, and the great thing, it's absolutely silent.
John:
I know it's frustrating to hear us talk about this when none of us have one.
John:
The shipment dates of these things are out into May or June.
John:
I eventually will have one.
John:
I wish I didn't have to wait until May or June, but I did not place my order soon enough.
John:
So I'm sorry.
John:
But like I will eventually have one and I'll tell you how it is.
John:
And I do have the Mac Pro here.
John:
which is probably the previous loudest Mac Apple makes.
John:
So I'll be able to tell you what it's like.
John:
But for now, none of us have one hint into Apple.
John:
So we can't actually tell you firsthand, but we're getting lots of different reports.
John:
And that's why we're looking at all these, you know, people doing measurements, people chiming in about what is audible and what is not audible.
Casey:
yeah you know i went and i saw the studio display and the mac studio in an apple store and i'll be the first to tell you an apple store is really loud i am not denying that not in any way shape or form but i did pick up the studio and this is i didn't have the presence of mind to like stick my ear next to it but i picked it up someone had to come over to you put that down what are you doing alarms start going off yeah i know it's not did you pick up the mac pro they don't even have a mac pro never mind
Casey:
No, I actually asked if they had an XDR and they were like, no.
Casey:
Or at least not a display model anyhow.
Casey:
But anyway, I picked it up.
Casey:
And again, I'll be the first to tell you, it was in an Apple store.
Casey:
Apple stores are not quiet.
Casey:
I understand that.
Casey:
But in the context of an Apple store, even with the thing like, I don't know, a half a meter away from my head, it was completely silent.
Casey:
Again, I'm in an Apple store.
Casey:
I understand.
Casey:
But I couldn't hear squat.
Casey:
And the way some people are talking is that it's like a freaking...
John:
you know like they're saying it's a wind tunnel coming out of this thing yeah and a bunch of people have sent us like someone tried to do like a youtube uh video that is supposedly uh precisely calibrated so that if you play it on your iphone at maximum iphone volume it exactly simulates the decibel level and sound of the the studio i have to say that there are too many links in that chain for me to believe that is remotely accurate so although i did try it i again reserve judgment until i get one of these things to my house
Casey:
If only one of us got a review unit, or all three of us, imagine that.
Casey:
That would be so convenient.
Casey:
That's all right.
Casey:
Renfred writes, I wanted to point out that Apple actually provides noise measurements for their products on the technical specification pages.
Casey:
Here are a few examples, and you can search for acoustic performance if you want to see exactly where it's listed.
Casey:
And Renfred has done the courtesy of doing the work for us, so I'm going to rattle off some numbers.
Casey:
The Mac Pro, 11 decibels.
Casey:
Mac Studio, 15.
Casey:
MacBook Air,
Marco:
i don't know macbook air three macbook pro three wait hold on macbook air doesn't have any moving parts that how how i mean is it like a little like electrical noise i mean three maybe three decibels is just the the atom is vibrating and
Marco:
This is suspect.
John:
I mean, these are Apple's official numbers, right?
Marco:
But like the Mac Pro 11 decibels, really?
Marco:
That's it?
Marco:
That's all it makes?
John:
Well, so let him finish the thing because obviously how you measure sound can vary, like where you put the microphones.
John:
Anyway, go on.
Casey:
All right, so Mac Pro 11, Mac Studio 15, MacBook Air 3, MacBook Pro 3, iMac Pro 13, which splits the difference between the Studio and the Mac Pro.
Casey:
The quote-unquote best laptop ever made, otherwise known as the 2015 MacBook Pro, 6.
Casey:
And so Renfred continues, these results are quite different compared to the QuietMac site.
Casey:
We don't know exactly how Apple's measuring these, but they noted a decent number of details, including the fact that they are measuring from, quote, operator position, quote.
Casey:
They compare idle versus wireless web mode, the latter being pretty pointless.
Casey:
I know for a fact that the 2015 MacBook can get much louder than 6 decibels under load, but given that the M1 Macs and Mac Pro tend to stay at idle, these numbers should be a pretty good comparison point if they're being measured consistently.
John:
Yeah, you would think Apple has to have some sort of procedure, like why would they list this on their spec pages, whatever Apple's procedure is, they must have like a standard of like, here's how you measure the sound of a Mac, put it in this position where we expect people to use it, but the microphones here use these microphones in this environment and measure the sound.
John:
i am not an acoustician but through maybe three decibels is just like the electrical noise of like the the various inverters and stuff that are inside there like is that really really quiet maybe that's like so low that it's below the level of human hearing because and i'm sure i still experience this even in my old age but especially when i was younger you can hear the sound of electronics that have quote-unquote no moving parts
John:
yeah right there's no fans you can depending on how if there's a power supply or a transformer or an inverter or lots of things can vibrate and make noise that ostensibly aren't supposed to be moving parts and it can be really bad like my power mac g5 had a chirping power supply that that power supply is not wasn't supposed to have any moving parts in it but it had parts that move so much they made chirping noises like a bird right so it can happen so that makes me think maybe that's what rearing the macbook air
John:
maybe these numbers are so they're so first of all they're so low that they're suspiciously low and also relative to each other they're they're very odd i don't think they're suspiciously low because if they do operator like everybody on youtube who's measuring the sound is sticking a mic like behind the the mac studio like they're literally putting a mic right like they're micing a drum kit or something like they're putting a mic right where the fan outlet is
John:
Whereas Apple says they're doing it from operator position.
John:
So operator position is those, the output is facing away from you.
John:
The thing is on the desk.
John:
It's like three feet away, huge difference.
John:
So I don't find the absolute value suspect at all.
John:
The relative values, I don't know.
John:
I don't have, I haven't had enough of these machines to know.
John:
Like again, maybe three decibels is below is just electrical noise.
John:
Uh, iMac pro, uh,
Marco:
at 13 and mac pro at 11 you're right i kind of that's the thing like relative to each other it's very strange and and to say and if you know the mac pro is 11 and then the mac studio is 15 like that's again like then that's then the mac studio is pretty loud so see previously about about like a three decibel difference or four decibel difference being just about noticeable
John:
you know so it's i notice a three decibel difference i i make three decibel adjustments when i'm editing like i know that i know what that sounds like so eventually eventually at the very least i eventually will get one of these in the distant future and then when no one cares anymore i will tell you how it sounds all right
Casey:
So, real-time follow-up from Mr. Jason Snell.
Casey:
All I can say is that I noticed the sound.
Casey:
I wasn't trying to hear it.
Casey:
I noticed it.
Casey:
But it is very quiet, and my office was entirely silent when I noticed.
Casey:
And then some of us just don't really care about fans and, in fact, have a clickety-clattering sonology.
John:
You've got the sonology in the same room as you, and that thing is.
Marco:
so loud it's the loudest fan having thing in my house i don't i don't get the vibra slap only when casey says it he i was no he was delayed he was delayed does it sound like a vibra slap like all the hard drives clicking you know yep oh i'm just backing up the time machine oh i'm watching some plex actually that's how you know when they're failing yeah right
Casey:
Alright, moving right along.
Casey:
That's enough about fan noise for now.
Casey:
Anonymous writes in with regard to cellular and licensing.
Casey:
So the context here is that, you know, what happens if Apple were to release a cellular-equipped MacBook?
Casey:
Which, by the way, Marco, did you see somebody was saying, there was like a brief rumor that somebody was saying, I think, that that's coming?
Casey:
Maybe I made that up.
Casey:
I could swore I saw that.
Marco:
nevertheless i mean that would be nice i i'm not holding my breath like i i hope so much that they do it i think cellular might be my last outstanding laptop feature request from apple like i i love everything else about the current laptops i think they nailed pretty much everything else i want besides i mean you know i'm i would always appreciate more ports but i'm i'm very happy with these laptops i have pretty much no outstanding wish list items except cellular that's that's it that's like the only thing
Casey:
Yeah, I cannot say enough good things about the laptops right now.
Casey:
They are so freaking perfect.
Casey:
But anyway, so we were talking about, you know, would it be a fortune for Apple to add, you know, a cellular modem to one of these devices?
Casey:
And so Anonymous writes, I don't see a discussion about laptops, but at least for phones, Qualcomm caps the dollar royalty as a percentage of a $400 phone.
Casey:
And they quote a thing from Reuters about this because we were saying, you know, we thought that the royalties owed to Qualcomm are a percentage of the cost of the device.
Casey:
So if you have like a $5,000 laptop, that's a lot of money you owe Qualcomm.
Casey:
And so Anonymous is pointing out that, oh, no, no, at least for phones, it was capped at 400 bucks.
Casey:
And there were a couple of links about this.
Casey:
And then what was also interesting, which I'd forgotten, is that Qualcomm collects royalties, this is anonymous again, Qualcomm collects royalties regardless of whether an OEM gets the modem chip from Qualcomm or from someone else.
Casey:
And this is quoted in a court document that we can put in the show notes as well.
Casey:
And the quote from that document is, OEMs are required to pay a per-unit license from royalty to Qualcomm for its patent portfolios regardless of which company they choose to source their chips from.
Casey:
Man, that's a racket.
Casey:
I want to get in on that.
John:
That's just how patents work.
John:
Patents are a racket.
John:
Yeah, we don't actually know if there's a patent cross-licensing agreement with either Apple and Qualcomm or with Intel's cellular modem thing that Apple bought.
John:
Lots of companies.
John:
That's why patent cross-licensing agreements exist.
John:
you know patents are terrible and stupid and shouldn't exist but they do and because they do it's this mutually sure destruction thing where companies have their own portfolios of patents and then they sort of enter these agreements so they say we won't annihilate you with our patents as long as you promise not to annihilate us with your patents and they enter a cross licensing agreement that says we let you use your patents as long as we can you know we let you use our patents as long as we can use your patents and then we agree not to sue each other and that's the only way anything gets done sometimes because patents are so dumb and so many companies have them
John:
uh but yeah i'm sure i mean everything is patent encumbered everything that's in you know if you look at all the patents that apply to you know the m1 chips i'm sure there's tons of patents in there that apple doesn't own they have to pay somebody for and apple is making its own cell modems and i'm sure there are patents in those cell modems that apple has to pay for i just don't know if there is an existing cross-licensing agreement between apple and qualcomm or the x intel cellular company in qualcomm or whatever yeah patents are great you should do a podcast episode about that sometime john yeah
Marco:
We are brought to you this week by Remote.
Marco:
Do you employ or pay workers in other countries?
Marco:
Even if you don't yet, you probably will soon.
Marco:
Now that remote work is the norm, employees have more freedom than ever to move around.
Marco:
So if you want to keep your best people, you have to stay flexible.
Marco:
And this is why Remote makes it easy for companies of all sizes to employ global teams.
Marco:
They take care of international payroll, benefits, taxes, and local compliance so you can focus less on paperwork and more on growing your business.
Marco:
We'll be right back.
Marco:
And to save you money, remote never charges any fees or salary percentages.
Marco:
You get access to everything remote offers, from payroll to compliance to benefits management, for one low flat rate.
Marco:
No hidden fees, no surprises ever.
Marco:
Just the best global employment solution in the business.
Marco:
And our listeners, you can get an even bigger discount.
Marco:
You can get 50% off remote's full suite of global employment solutions for your first employee for three months.
Marco:
Just visit remote.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP.
Marco:
So see why top global companies like GitLab trust remote to manage and pay their international teams.
Marco:
Whether you want to hire one person or 100, Remote makes it easy.
Marco:
Visit remote.com slash ATP and use promo code ATP to get started.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Remote for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Deep, deep cuts.
Casey:
This was when we were talking about open source and funding open source and how so many people, so many companies specifically, are kind of riding on the coattails of open source.
Casey:
And I brought up Discourse, which had put up a blog post, if I recall correctly, saying, oh, look at us, we fund open source.
Casey:
And they gave, you know, tens of thousands of dollars to different open source projects.
Casey:
And at first I was like, oh, that's great.
Casey:
And then the more I thought about it, the more I thought, well, tens of thousands of dollars, really?
Casey:
That's it?
Casey:
Well, I got an email.
Casey:
I got an email from Jeff Atwood, who is one of the co-founders of discourse, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
And Jeff writes, as far as open source goes, our primary contribution is the discourse code and almost all of its plugins.
Casey:
One of our core values is to be 100% open source now and forever.
Casey:
So far, so good.
Casey:
We've been a self-sustaining, profitable, fully remote, no headquarters open source company since 2012, almost a decade now.
Casey:
We host 100 plus forums for open source projects free of charge as part of our free hosting programs, which I'll put a link to that in the show notes.
Casey:
And then Jeff continues, we also contribute hundreds of hours of upstream fixes to the open source that we rely on and pay other open source projects for work and or subscriptions whenever we can.
Casey:
For example, until we built a native chat feature in Discourse, which is currently in early beta, we paid for a yearly enterprise subscription to Mattermost, an open source web chat solution.
Casey:
So that's my kind of stuff.
Casey:
That's the spirit I like to see.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And Jeff Atwood, I mean, so those of you who don't know, obviously, he's forever known as his blog, Coding Horror.
Marco:
But also, he was one of the founders of Stack Overflow.
Marco:
And I'm pretty sure the reason why Stack Overflow had since the beginning, it had that thing where its content is all released under like an open license of some sort.
Marco:
I forget the details.
Marco:
But like all the content on Stack Overflow that everyone's writing is freely available for other people to redistribute under certain terms.
Marco:
And I'm pretty sure that's because of Jeff.
Marco:
I think he was the one who championed that early on because he has always been pretty strong about this kind of open source stuff.
Marco:
So, yeah, I respect him a lot.
Marco:
And that sounds all right to me.
John:
Yeah, and open source companies are like, they're, you know, if you are a company that's trying to make money from open source, again, the old discussion, how can you make money?
John:
You give people the source code.
John:
Well, they pay for support and, you know, they sometimes pay for hosting and pay for all this other stuff.
John:
But anyway, if you are an open source company and you're doing that, it behooves you to also...
John:
help support other companies that do the same thing because it doesn't help you if you are the only company in the entire world that does open source stuff and every other one goes out of business so if you are using some other open source component in your open source throw some of your money their way right so just you know try to make it an actual ecosystem that is self-sustaining you know because you can't just have you can't sort of be i you know i get all the free stuff from everybody but i give nothing back especially if you're going to be an open source company you really have to sort of give and take
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then speaking of that, there was a really good blog post that was pointed out to us.
Casey:
This blog post is by Filippo Valsorda, and it discusses how to pay professional maintainers.
Casey:
So people who, you know, their job either literally or effectively is to maintain open source projects.
Casey:
So basically, in so many words, kind of sort of treat them like a real employee.
Casey:
And I think that's good advice.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And this is, you know, what I'm saying, like, oh, people charge for support and stuff like that.
John:
This this advice is I agree with, but it's so hard to sell inside the company because that's why these bullet points are so, you know, shocking.
John:
It's like, you know, paying the maintainers versus people external.
John:
It's that.
John:
Well, that's not that shocking.
John:
I suggested that on the last show of like.
John:
don't pay random people to help there are already people maintaining this just pay those people because they already know how to do it they're already the experts but then pay for maintenance not features or governance or support who no one wants to pay for maintenance no one ever wants to pay for maintenance on anything in on cars houses uh but especially software if if you're going to convince your company to pay for something like well what do we get for the money they'll add the feature that we want right or you know they'll they'll give us commercial support like those are things you can buy as well but
John:
Also, someone has to maintain it.
John:
There's nothing to give you support on if no one maintains it.
John:
And paying for maintenance, everybody hates that, but it's important.
John:
And then keep paying them.
John:
It's like, can we just pay them once like during open source week?
John:
We'll give them $1,000 and we don't have to think about it again for a year.
John:
That's not sustainable.
John:
The year goes by and maybe that thing, you know, will have some bug in it that destroys your whole company that no one fixes because you never paid anyone to maintain it.
Casey:
And then tell us about software warfare, John.
John:
This is another, you know, we talked about open source people doing things intentionally because they're cranky about not getting paid enough to maintain their software.
John:
This is like literal warfare as in some people who are, again, good old Node.
John:
Some people who are authors of a popular Node package intentionally updated it with some malware that wipes your disk if you happen to have a Russian or Belarusian IP address to sort of punish everyone who is in those countries for the war in Ukraine.
John:
uh if you didn't notice and didn't pin your dependencies and downloaded this thing and it does a geo ap lookup it tries to erase your hard drive and that is an example of absolutely positively 100 malicious intentional on purpose damage from an open source thing and it gets back to the whole argument uh you know whether it's an accidental bug or a malicious thing or someone who's just having a bad day if this piece of software is super important to your business uh and if you care about your business you have to take some ownership of that by either pinning the dependency to a version that you have vetted
John:
or making sure that you have some kind of a relationship, business relationship with the people who rank the software so that you can have some recourse.
John:
Like, for example, if you had a support contract and somebody did that, probably you could sue them and win.
John:
But if you have no commercial relationship with this person whatsoever, when something like this happens, you know, there's not much you can do about it.
Casey:
Yeah, this is something.
Casey:
I don't even know what to make of this.
Casey:
But it's fascinating what you can do if people are nefarious.
Casey:
So moving right along.
Casey:
Marco, you've been busy.
Casey:
I have.
Casey:
So busy you couldn't add anything to the show notes.
John:
Too busy pushing out software.
Casey:
Right?
Casey:
So all kidding aside, congratulations.
Casey:
New Overcast release.
Casey:
Can you walk us through it?
Casey:
What's new?
Casey:
What was good?
Casey:
What was bad?
Casey:
What was ugly?
Casey:
Tell us everything.
Marco:
I have just released the Overcast 2022.2 update that includes a significant redesign, probably the most significant redesign that I have done in its history, as well as a bunch of features and little tweaks here and there.
Marco:
And this was the result of...
Marco:
roughly i don't know five months of work however long ago thanksgiving was like it was like the week before thanksgiving that i really started this like in in earnest it's been a lot of work and i think it turned out pretty good uh i'm i'm really happy with with it
Marco:
i think this is the first time that i think something that i designed is good looking in an app you know i i've always had programmer designs before and i've never thought that what i was releasing was absolute crap at the time i was releasing it but you know in retrospect my design skills were terrible or in my early years of making apps and got a little bit better over time
Marco:
But I think this is the first time I've finally reached the point where I think looking at this current design, most people will not look at this and say, wow, you should really hire a real designer.
Marco:
I mean, some people will because that's always the case.
Marco:
Even people who have, quote, real designers will have people telling them that.
Marco:
But I'm proud of this in the sense that
Marco:
I think this is something that is nicely designed that I designed.
Marco:
That's not a common feeling I've had in my career so far.
Marco:
So I'm very proud of that.
Marco:
So secondly from that, I think I'm pushing the design forward in a way that...
Marco:
is a little bit more aggressive than I've done.
Marco:
Most of the time, my designs have been fairly conservative in the ways they would use system elements, the colors and fonts they would use.
Marco:
It was all fairly conservative.
Marco:
Here again, I think I'm very aggressively pushing into color.
Marco:
with this update i have you know thicker line weights everywhere as well i'm using the sf rounded font and i even customized the numerals so that it has the alternative four six and nine glyphs because i thought that it made them look more fun and and improve legibility at small sizes so
Marco:
Then a lot of a lot of that kind of design work of like pushing this into what I think looks much more modern than it did before, because the the previous overcast design and if you want to see before and after shots, I have this this blog post I did on my site and it shows certain screens side by side and you can see the difference like, you know, night and day.
Marco:
if you look at that it's very clear that the previous design was very much of its era which was largely unchanged since i launched it at least in the list screens the now playing screen has changed a bit over time but oh and by the way this redesign doesn't include the now playing screen uh or some of the other screens in the app but um i'll get to those you know next but the the main area of redesign here was the the home screen you know the thing that lists all your podcasts and playlists and
Marco:
And then a little bit on the episode screens, like the playlist themselves or the podcast.
Marco:
But there's more to come on the podcast screen.
Marco:
Anyway, I did a lot here that dramatically looks different than the way the app has looked on the home screen since basically it launched eight years ago almost.
Marco:
It launched in the summer of 2014.
Marco:
So this is almost eight years ago.
Marco:
That was in the era of iOS 7 design.
Marco:
And so the entire app before this, at least the list screens, looked very iOS 70.
Marco:
And that's a very dated look now.
Marco:
Now, the rest of the screens in the app, you know, the playlist and podcast screens and the now playing screen, I had done incremental revisions to those over the years.
Marco:
But the home screen that lists all your podcasts and playlists, that screen looked so old before.
Marco:
So that's really what I was aiming mostly at was that home screen.
Marco:
And lots of stuff throughout the app that happened to be affected.
Marco:
Like, you know, when I changed the font, that changes everything in the app.
Marco:
I changed the orange for the first time ever.
Marco:
It's now a different orange.
Marco:
It's now actually iOS system orange.
Marco:
The default sequence of colors and most of the colors that are available in the color pickers, those are iOS standard system colors that they introduced, I think, two or three years ago.
Marco:
where ios basically launched its own like here's a here's a nice design palette with colors that all harmonize together or you know whatever um throughout the entire app i'm using sf symbols uh instead of my own icons for almost everything i'm highly customizing some of them you know in many cases i am using multiple sf symbols together or i'm i'm taking an sf symbols base icon and like badging it in a custom way or things like that but for the most part i'm using sf symbols almost everywhere
Marco:
All of this, I think, makes the app look and feel much more like a modern app than it did before, where before, in many ways, and especially on that home screen, it just looked so iOS 70.
Marco:
In the era of iOS 7, when I designed that home screen, that was fine.
Marco:
But we've moved on quite a bit since then.
Marco:
Other than design, this also introduced a bunch of features, things like a Marcus Played button, a bunch of special playlists.
Marco:
But for the most part, it was mostly about the design.
Marco:
And I'll get to the reception in a minute, but before I get there, did I cover what you wanted me to cover?
Marco:
What do you think of this?
John:
Can you explain?
John:
I know you've gone back and forth on this a lot with Twitter.
John:
I know Marcus Played was the number one requested feature since 1.0, and I understand tons of people want it and everything, but I have to say I'm in the camp of not understanding...
John:
the purpose or function of this can you so can you tell me what the masses that were demanding a mark is played feature like how they use it and how it functions because from my perspective with the i'm used to the overcast defaults as they've always been when a podcast completes i have it set to auto delete itself right so marking is played
John:
but not deleting, I don't understand how that interacts with... What were people who wanted markets played?
John:
What did they want from Overcast, and what do they now have now that you've added it?
Casey:
Agreed.
Marco:
Since the beginning, I'm like you.
Marco:
I let things play until they're done or until close enough, then I fast-forward to the end.
Marco:
I have a little behavioral trick I've had in there, I think maybe since 1.0, certainly for a very long time, where if you fast-forward 30, 30, 30, 30, 30, and if you hit the end...
Marco:
It ignores any further fast forward commands until you stop fast forwarding for a second or two.
Marco:
That way, if you want to quickly reach the end, you can just slam on fast forward from whatever you're in.
Marco:
If you're in your car, if you're on your headphone clicker, whatever it is, you can just slam fast forward, just spam click it basically.
Marco:
And then when it reaches the end of the podcast, it won't seek into the next one.
Marco:
because that's that's a common thing that i would want to do sometimes and often i'd be like in a car or something and well you know i hear the ending theme song begin to something ah skip skip skip skip and then once it stops skipping i knew i'd reach the end anyway uh ever since 1.0 my vision of deletion was i would hit the end in some form and i would and it would delete and that would be it and i never thought like i mean it did track whether something had reached the end so it was tracking played status since the beginning but
Marco:
but it never had a button that you could make it say it was played.
Marco:
You could delete it,
Marco:
But deleting doesn't mean mark as played.
Marco:
It would get rid of it, but it would not show that word played in the description unless you actually played it till the end.
Marco:
And the only way to get it there quickly, if you saw an episode on this and you wanted it to be marked as played, you would have to open it up, seek to the end, let it hit the end.
Marco:
By the way, you also can't seek to the end by dragging.
Marco:
That's another intentional little behavioral thing.
Marco:
If you drag the slider all the way to the right, it will seek to 10 seconds before the end.
Marco:
Now, you could drag all the way to the right and then hit seek forward.
Marco:
That will hit it right to the end.
Marco:
Anyway, so this is also, you know, these are ways people were doing this who wanted to do this.
John:
But when you say it would be shown as played, if it is deleted, or is this for, like, if it was streaming?
John:
Like, where would you see the word played displayed on an episode that you no longer have?
John:
Like, you notice that you're tracking it, so you can know that, like, they have played it.
John:
But if, like, when I go to the end of a show naturally...
John:
It gets deleted.
John:
Presumably internally in your database, you mark it as played.
John:
How does that manifest?
John:
How do I ever see that again?
Marco:
Progress slash played and deleted are two separate values in the database.
Marco:
And the only the way it manifests itself is if you're looking at like the list of episodes of all episodes of a podcast, like if you go into the podcast screen, you hit the alt tab and you see all episodes of that podcast.
Marco:
Historically, you will see which ones you have actually played and which and the rest that are dimmed out or just deleted.
Marco:
So the reason why people wanted this is that a lot of times people will selectively play only certain episodes of a podcast.
Marco:
Or they will want to go back and replay a podcast.
Marco:
Or they will want to, if they come to Overcast from another app, maybe they want to indicate where they are, like where they've listened up to, by marking certain episodes as play that they've already heard.
Marco:
So those are the major use cases for this.
Marco:
And in those cases, they want that all list,
Marco:
to properly represent which ones they have played and which ones they have merely deleted or not ever listened to.
Marco:
So that's the demand side of it.
Marco:
And I don't really work that way when I'm listening to stuff, and that's why I never really saw that need.
Marco:
But literally since the beginning, not only has this been a constant request,
Marco:
But people would write in not saying, hey, could you please add this feature, but saying, where is this feature?
Marco:
As if it's so fundamental to them that, of course, this feature would exist.
Marco:
They assume it must exist, and they aren't finding it.
Marco:
Or it's a bug in my app that somehow it's not displaying.
Marco:
That's how fundamental people have thought this feature is.
Casey:
I feel like I just blue screened.
Casey:
This is the antithesis of how I personally go through and listen to podcasts.
Casey:
Like, I'm not saying it's wrong.
Casey:
I'm not saying that I'm right and they're wrong.
Casey:
It's just, this never would have crossed my mind in a trillion years.
Casey:
Like, to go surfing through the all episodes list and making decisions based on what you have or have not played.
Casey:
Like, I conceptually understand the words that are coming out of your mouth, but this is so foreign to me that this is how people choose to listen to podcasts.
Marco:
Yeah, and this is why a lot of the things I've added or changed in this version were about trying to accommodate more usage patterns than just the way I do things.
Marco:
I've always designed the app primarily for me.
Marco:
And if I can accommodate other people relatively easily, great.
Marco:
But it's always been designed to fit my mental model of how I listen to things.
Marco:
But there's always been lots of other people who use it who don't use things like I do.
Marco:
Like I use playlists.
Marco:
I almost never play a podcast by going to the podcast screen and then playing it from there.
Marco:
I'm almost always playing it from a playlist screen.
Marco:
But yet there's a lot of people who never use playlists or very rarely use them and only ever play from the podcast screen.
Marco:
So it's like there's always been these divides of like how people use it.
Marco:
It's such a fundamental workflow for people, like how they play and manage their podcasts, that there's lots of different ways that lots of different people want to use this.
Marco:
so like you know the features i added um i had i added the ability to have special playlist types that would show you um episodes that are in progress episodes that are downloaded or all episodes that you have starred in practice i personally need none of those things and i don't intend to actually use almost i might have the starred list you know here and there if i want to like look up something again but for the most part i don't need any of those things
Marco:
But they were very highly demanded features as well.
Marco:
Because a lot of people, the way their workflow works, they want to know which ones are in progress.
Marco:
Or they want to know only which ones are downloaded.
Marco:
Like if they're on a plane or something.
Marco:
Or if they have some kind of weird data restriction situation going on.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
There's all these needs that I've been hearing about over and over and over again from my user base for a very long time.
Marco:
That's why I added these things.
Marco:
And Marcus Played was just so incredibly popularly requested, so frequently requested slash demanded so frequently that
Marco:
I decided not only to add it, but to add it prominently.
Marco:
That's why it has its own button on the toolbar next to the delete button.
Marco:
It's that demanded that that's how many people wanted this over such a long time that it had to be a top level feature right there, very visible right next to delete.
Casey:
I mean, I hear you, but it's just like I said on blue screening.
Casey:
It just seems so bananas to me.
Casey:
But whatever makes people happy.
Marco:
I mean, you can see, like, if you look in our chat right now, our live chat, everyone's saying how they listen to podcasts, and it's all different.
Marco:
Everyone has different ways that they want these features to work or different subsets of these features that they want to use.
Marco:
You know, half the people are like, why do you need that?
Marco:
The other half are like, how do you not need that?
Marco:
Like, it's just...
Marco:
This is just how this market goes.
Marco:
And so the more versatile my app can be without ruining itself and getting too complicated, then I think the better it is business-wise to do it.
Marco:
Now, the reception to the design, I think, shows quite a bit of maybe not discrepancy, but different preferences, let's say.
Casey:
So tell me more about that.
Marco:
When I was designing this, I remember I was sitting in a hotel room.
Marco:
Tiff and I had taken a vacation right before Thanksgiving for a few days, just in upstate New York.
Marco:
And she had this idea, and forgive me, I've now told a story on three different podcast interviews that are all coming out around the same time.
Marco:
So I'm sorry if you've heard it before, slash we'll hear it again.
Marco:
But basically...
Marco:
she was she was looking through an app i forget which it might have been pinterest i think um and she had these like these like pill shaped you know oval things that were showing topics or whatever and she's like look this is what modern apps look like this is what people expect a new modern app to look like and i saw those pills and i'm like huh
Marco:
i think because for a while i've been thinking i want to in the redesign i was thinking like i wanted to make playlists look better somehow and i played with all sorts of ways to do it i played with just giving them their own album artwork on the side like their little their own little like round rect on the left side matching up with like the specs of the album artwork or the podcast below them and i've tried different things over time with um
Marco:
Like, how I represent them in CarPlay.
Marco:
Have you ever seen them in CarPlay?
Marco:
I did, like, a 2x2 grid of the artwork of the episodes that were in there, and I was trying to render that on the home screen, but it was looking really busy and ugly.
Marco:
I was trying to figure out, what do I want playlists to look like?
Marco:
And I couldn't nail it in my head.
Marco:
I couldn't figure out, like...
Marco:
Everything I was trying, everything I would think of, like the little 2x2 artwork, I tried rendering the artwork in a little stack as the icon for the playlist.
Marco:
And everything I tried just looked busy or ugly or both.
Marco:
I couldn't make it work.
Marco:
I couldn't nail it yet.
Marco:
And then when she showed me those pill shapes, I'm like, wait a minute.
Marco:
If I make them pill-shaped, that changes how they look from the podcast below them in a very prominent way.
Marco:
And that would enable me to have more customization.
Marco:
And I was thinking, maybe I could add icons.
Marco:
Maybe I could add custom colors.
Marco:
I've seen for years, people have been hacking this in bad ways.
Marco:
Because before, you couldn't have custom colors or icons or custom ordering of playlists.
Marco:
Those are all new.
Marco:
And so to get custom ordering, a lot of people have shown me screenshots over time where they would name the playlist like one workout to running, you know, that kind of thing.
Marco:
And so they would they would prefix them with numbers.
Marco:
And to achieve icons, many people would just add emoji to the front of them.
Marco:
And I don't know, Casey, if you've heard about emoji.
Casey:
I should look into that.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
So people have been doing these hacks to get around these limitations, but I thought, I can do a much better job of this and make it much nicer if I first have manual reordering, because that's clearly a need that people have requested a lot over time.
Marco:
And then second, if I can have playlists have their own custom visual identity that people can just set whatever they want.
Marco:
So custom icon, custom color, so...
Marco:
So that's kind of where that came from.
Marco:
And I played with it and I thought, and this is, you know, people who have been, you know, paying attention to, I hate to say it this way, but to my fashion preferences recently, you know, I've said over time, I'm so tired of black computers and black t-shirts.
Marco:
I did that for a very long time.
Marco:
I did only that for a very long time.
Marco:
And now I'm like exploding with color.
Marco:
Like I just give me all the colors.
Marco:
Like I recently changed my Apple watch strap from white to yellow.
Marco:
Like I'm all colorful now.
Marco:
And so I wanted to bring some of that energy into the app.
Marco:
It was a very aggressive design.
Marco:
And I intentionally, even like even during the beta testing, I played around a little bit with these things.
Marco:
But I decided I'm going to force color upon people by default.
Marco:
Now, if they want to remove some of that color, they can.
Marco:
It's customizable.
Marco:
I have had feature requests of people saying, can you please make gray a color?
Marco:
and i'm frankly i'm not going to do that for lots of reasons number one it's hideous number two um i use gray to indicate an empty state for the playlist so that they wouldn't work very well um and i i don't intend to do it but by default if you want to go in there and set every color to one color you can but by default i actually created a default color sequence that if you have multiple playlists they all follow the same color sequence by default as you add them or as you know as it runs first um because
Marco:
I want people to try some color because it's nice.
Marco:
And we've had a lot of dark times in the world in recent years, and maybe this will help a little bit.
Marco:
People feel a little bit nicer.
Marco:
And I think that's one of the reasons why, I don't know if you've noticed, colors are in fashion right now.
Marco:
And not just a color, but just being colorful is kind of in fashion right now.
Marco:
I hate that I'm telling you fashion advice, but this is the world we're in now.
Marco:
So anyway, the reaction to this
Marco:
I was nervous about because it's a very big, bold change.
Marco:
One thing that's interesting is that some of the reaction has been, why did you make everything so big?
Marco:
Now, if you look at my screenshot comparisons, everything is exactly the same height.
Marco:
Playlists, podcasts, and episodes are all exactly the same height as they were before.
Marco:
I think it's 88 points, something like that.
Marco:
Exactly the same height.
Marco:
Actually, when you're in a playlist view, you actually have a few pixels of additional width for the title than you had before.
Marco:
Because the way the artwork margins work out, you actually have more width for the title.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
people view it as big and bold because before it was so sparse you know especially playlists playlists before on the on the on the home screen were just black text in the middle of a giant float floating in the middle of a giant cell like there was it looked like when i look back on it now it looks like a rendering error i'm like they were so basic before um
Marco:
if you make things more colorful and put borders around them, people will think they're bigger even though they're not.
Marco:
So that's fun.
Marco:
Anyway, so, um, I was very confident launching this, that I had made something good, that I was very proud of the design and I was, I was ready to assert to the world if necessary, no, trust me, this is good.
Marco:
And if you don't like it, well, I'm sorry, but I've, you know, I'm not going to bow to, you know, there were any, any demands to like, you know, change it back like this, this is the way forward.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
I put it out there first to the beta group, and the beta group was pretty positive about it.
Marco:
There were like one or two people out of a couple of thousand maybe who were like, I really don't like this.
Marco:
I want to go back to the original.
Marco:
But for the most part, it was a relatively small percentage.
Marco:
Everyone else was pretty positive about it.
Marco:
And then when I gave out press invitations to look at it and everything, and I knew press was all going to hit it once when it released last Friday.
Marco:
The press was all set for a certain time, and I thought, here we go.
Marco:
We're going to see what the press says.
Marco:
I have no idea.
Marco:
I'm confident.
Marco:
I think this is very good, but we'll see.
Marco:
And the press comes out, and actually, it was pretty universally positive.
Marco:
So I'm like, all right, here we go.
Marco:
I'm riding high now.
Marco:
Here we go.
Marco:
And then it starts getting out to all the users over that overall Friday.
Marco:
And I'm nervous as heck because I'm watching my servers thinking, on first run...
Marco:
of the new version, the playlists assign themselves colors, and then they have to sync those changes to the servers.
Marco:
So on first run, everyone's playlists are going to have to sync new changes to the servers.
Marco:
So I'm watching the servers like a hawk, like, oh my god, is this going to explode?
Marco:
What's going on?
Marco:
I approved it at like 2 in the morning, or like midnight, to go live at midnight, just so that most of those syncs would happen, most of those first syncs would happen overnight when the server's traffic is low.
Marco:
But anyway, so...
Marco:
I'm watching the press.
Marco:
I'm watching the servers.
Marco:
I'm really nervous.
Marco:
I start seeing all the reactions on Twitter and they are amazingly positive.
Marco:
Everyone who's getting the update, they're all tweeting on Twitter.
Marco:
Oh my God, this is great.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
Look at that.
Marco:
You know, everyone's calling it words.
Marco:
I don't even understand like whatever young people say that when things are good that, you know, I saw some of those words fly by and I'm like, wow, this is amazing.
Marco:
I'm like, I'm even getting young people to think it's good.
Marco:
Like not, I mean, probably not all of them because it's still a podcast that made by a 40 year old guy, you know, a programmer.
Marco:
But anyway, you know, so,
Marco:
i'm getting all these things like all these praise and so for the most part it's been very very good however the people who don't like redesigns tend to be a little bit slower on the uptake of updates for apps so day you know days one two and three were fantastic now that it's like day six or whatever um a lot i'm getting a
Marco:
but but you know there when i look at the proportions it is universally very very well received um like and i and i look at my you know i'm of course i'm getting one two star reviews as well from people who are angry but if you look at the the average still of new reviews coming in it's still very good so anyway
Marco:
Please, I would encourage you all.
Marco:
I don't ask this very often.
Marco:
If you want to rate Overcast, this is a good time to do it because right now I'm at maximum anger from those people who don't like things to be changed.
Marco:
But this is not to say anything is dire.
Marco:
My average is still very good.
Marco:
It would be nice to have a little bit of goodness coming into my inbox for the next couple of days as the slower and more grumpy group gets in.
Marco:
let me see which i just deleted one a few minutes ago this was amazing oh i can't find it anyway it was like a one word thing it was like the subject was like it's poop and there was an empty body nice yeah so that's you know that's the the caliber of things i'm getting i'm getting nicer ones too but they're just like can we please have a have a switch to switch back to the old design no did you reset the ratings for this version
Marco:
No, I don't think I've ever done that.
John:
Because I guess I've never rated Overcast.
John:
I just went in and rated it.
John:
Thank you.
John:
I said it was poop.
John:
This is my turn to apologize for being a bad beta tester, because part of the reason we forgot about the new Overcast version is because Casey and I have been using it forever, because we've been on the beta...
Marco:
um and we're just kind of used to it by now it's not the new it was the new version for us like months ago right um but by the way but please everybody out there please don't as a joke review overcast and say it's poop like oh gosh no that sounds like a good not funny that might in your head that might sound like a good joke
Marco:
Trust me, it won't be received that way by the other people who are looking at the Overcast page trying to decide whether they want to download this app or not and don't know us and don't know you and don't know me.
Marco:
Trust me.
Marco:
Let's all laugh at that joke in our heads right now and then not do it.
Marco:
Thank you.
John:
Sorry.
John:
Go ahead, John.
John:
I was thinking I've been using the beta version for so long, and for the most part, I just continued to use it the way I used it or whatever.
John:
But then I realized, like, when you do a release and you do, like, the blog post that explains all the features, I kind of wish you'd do that at the beginning of the beta instead of at the end.
John:
Because I read the blog post and I learn things about the application I've been using for months.
John:
I'm like, oh, I didn't know it had to be.
John:
I mean, again, as that gets back to, like, if you don't use those features or it's not the way you work with things, I'm not going to go hunting for them, right?
John:
So I just look at it and say, can I continue to use Overcast the way I've already used it?
John:
And, you know, oh, it looks different and it does a few more things.
John:
And, you know, I notice the mark is played button or whatever.
John:
Like, oh, that's not for me.
John:
um but then there's other things that it can do and so i'm a bad beta tester in that the only time i actually really start exploring that happens after you release it and do the blog post that explains all the features that i should have been seeing and yes i do look at the test flight notes but they're not always that informative certainly not as informative as the uh as the blog post uh
John:
And so the second thing is now, you know, for example, customizing playlists.
John:
I just accepted the colors and the names that you picked.
John:
I'm like, they look nice.
John:
It's fine.
John:
But you can customize these.
John:
You can change the colors.
John:
You can change the icons.
John:
Huh.
John:
And so after it's released officially and I learned that from your blog post, I go and I'm like, oh, I should change some of the let me see if I can change some of the icons.
John:
And, you know, of course, you talked about the SF symbols thing and everything.
John:
So I saw this huge list in there.
John:
And now I'd like to do, in the grand tradition of any of us releasing software on the show, I need to do my real-time bug report.
John:
So please take out your iPhone now.
Casey:
Oh, how the tables have turned.
John:
Take out your iPhone now and go to a playlist and edit it.
John:
Go to playlist settings and then tap on icon, please.
John:
Tell me when you're all there.
John:
Okay.
John:
all right uh so this is what i did i'm like oh look at all these icons and i love that you have the search and i knew that you did it like based on the accessibility data or whatever like so you can do text search or whatever so just type mus for like searching for music all right and you type mus oh look and it's narrowed down to a bunch of icons mustache that yeah mustache or they look like they're music symbols or whatever so pick one of those i'm like oh i'm gonna go with the three music notes and i tap on the three music notes and
John:
And then I stare at my phone and I'm like... Oh, yeah.
John:
I need a done button.
John:
I know.
John:
So what do I do now?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the answer is you hit cancel.
John:
No, no, no.
John:
You hit the back button.
John:
Or the back button.
John:
Neither one of those things feels like an affirmative action.
John:
I literally couldn't figure this out.
John:
What I did, I hit the X button.
John:
And I did and I searched again and then I long pressed.
John:
Then I was like at cancel.
John:
And then I eventually I figured it out.
John:
But it is so obvious how when I'm going to add a done button to the upper right.
John:
Yeah, I need I need something that's like and now because because just hitting the three little arrows that doesn't complete the screen.
John:
It's not like I found the icon I want and I hit it in the screen dismisses.
John:
It stays there staring at me and I don't know what to do.
Marco:
No, no, that is very valid.
Marco:
And in fact, I tifted that when I was watching her use it for the first time and I just forgot to write it down.
Marco:
So yeah, no, that's true.
Marco:
That's good.
Marco:
Thank you.
John:
I'm sorry for not giving you that bug in the months that I was testing this beta, but there you go.
John:
I made it up for it live on the show.
Casey:
Well, you also didn't give me the same bug then because in the version of Masquerade that as we record, I hope to release tomorrow morning.
Casey:
It's through app review.
Casey:
I just want to check a couple of things.
Casey:
Anyway, I rejiggered the way the default emoji settings page works.
Casey:
And there's a new settings page for face detection size where you can tell it even, you know, make this a little bit bigger than just the face.
Marco:
We have very large faces in my family.
Casey:
Yeah, my family is full of big, hardy faces.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
There's basically a slider and the options in the upper left and right, in the upper left is just to go back to settings.
Casey:
And in the upper right, there's a reset button that is only valid if you've futzed about with, or don't leave it exactly where you found it.
Casey:
And so in order to save your setting, you just go back, which is basically what Marco's got here.
Casey:
And I went back and forth about this, but it seems, I actually think I like this more now because as soon as you make a change, it is saved.
Casey:
And then there's a reset button in my case if you want to go back to the way it was.
Casey:
So I'm with you, Marco.
Casey:
I don't think you need a done button.
Casey:
No, no.
John:
I do need one.
John:
You definitely need one.
John:
I mean it really has to do with the context of like having things take effect in real time versus having select and then hit a done.
John:
It's really, really sensitive to like the expected context.
John:
Like are you throwing up a sheet?
John:
where the you have to make the sheet go away and if the only ways to make it go away are like cancel or back those don't feel affirmative versus are you flipping a switch and you're confident that when i flip the switch the setting has taken effect because i've not placed into a second like there's all sorts of cultural baggage of like when there is an expectation that you have to sort of say i have now done the thing yes versus no never mind everything i did
John:
um and you know we used to have this debate in the old days of uh mac os 10 of like if you bring up a pref screen like you bring up preferences and it's got a bunch of check boxes for like you want this setting on or off or whatever should the preferences take effect as soon as you hit that check box or only after you decide whether to hit okay or cancel on the preferences window and that culturally changed between classic mac os and mac os 10 mac os 10 way to do it by the way is
John:
to essentially do it in real time uh and then closing the press window is just like i'm done setting things but as soon as you hit that checkbox on a well-behaved mac os 10 whatever mac os whatever we call it these days application that's it that you've done the thing you know uh reticulate splines check right you know that's it and then closing the preferences window is okay well now i'm just not going to do any more changes to preferences but closing or not closing the preferences window should have no effect on you know
John:
It's not like if you make a bunch of changes and then change your mind, there's no way to get out of the preferences window and not commit those changes because they were committed the second that you did it.
John:
Whereas on iOS, I don't know all the cultural things, but I do know when I was on that screen, I didn't know what to do.
John:
And it seems like Tiff had the same problem.
John:
So that cultural context of bringing up a card or whatever you call that requires some affirmation or it requires when I tap an icon, it self dismisses and say, great, you've picked it.
John:
UI is weird and hard.
John:
It's not a bug, but it's a confusing part of the UI.
John:
And why was it confusing?
John:
For reasons that are actually fairly difficult to explain.
John:
It's not obvious.
John:
It's not obvious that this is, you know, anyone can tell that that's wrong.
John:
It's only the type of thing that you would realize by, you know,
John:
someone who didn't create the app and write the code to do it attempting to use that screen all right any other complaints while i'm here um it's not your fault but really there's nothing in fs symbols for shower bath water soap like nothing i have a shower playlist who doesn't have a shower for shower i use a thunderstorm icon but that's i'm just saying it's not your fault this is not enough of symbols but come on like literally nothing what about lightning bolt for shower well because the thunderstorm
John:
I search for rain, but I don't shower in a rain cloud.
John:
It's funny.
John:
It's a rain cloud.
John:
It's a shower.
John:
I know you talked about this before.
John:
I'm like, oh, I could use Emoji, but what about SF Symbols?
John:
I'm sure there's an emoji I could use that would be a closer match.
John:
And I feel like SF Symbols has a shower gap.
Marco:
No, and I think the...
Marco:
The availability of SF Symbols, it is clearly a UI toolkit.
Marco:
It is not made for the purposes I'm offering it for here.
Marco:
It is not made for arbitrary user input of classifying their podcast listening.
Marco:
There's many weird omissions from it.
Marco:
And there's many things in it that have no business being being selectable here.
Marco:
Like, you know, there's like, you know, like every every number, every letter in circled or squared form.
Marco:
Like, you know, maybe that's not necessarily, you know, needed here or certain oddities like, you know, every individual button on a gamepad like you could have.
Marco:
You can have those as your icons because that's just needs of the system have.
Marco:
But anyway, I tried it with Emoji.
Marco:
I never shipped it as a beta, but I tried it in testing with Emoji.
Marco:
And in this context, it looked a little bit dated.
Marco:
I had used Emoji in my UI a lot.
Marco:
I used the Emoji...
Marco:
cloud and star icons, like on description labels in the episode cells to indicate whether an episode was streaming or not.
Marco:
I had a couple of emoji like here and there in the interface.
Marco:
And when I first started doing that, geez, I don't know, five years ago, it was a long time ago.
Marco:
When I first started doing that,
Marco:
It was cute and novel, and the use of emoji in UI was fairly unusual at that time.
Marco:
And in fact, John, I believe you even complained to me about it when I started doing it.
Marco:
But now I think that is a little bit dated for these purposes.
Marco:
Casey, in your app, it's a little bit different because the entire app is about Emoji, so that obviously makes more sense there.
Marco:
In Overcast's new design, with all the SF Symbol icons everywhere and with these thick line weights and big, bold, flat colors and pastels, Emoji didn't look right.
Marco:
I tried it, and it just didn't look good.
Marco:
And so I decided to just stick with SF Symbols for these because it was much better looking in context.
Casey:
You know, I almost wonder, and maybe this exists, but something that I know we used a lot back in my web development days, which was a decade plus ago, was Font Awesome, which was, if I recall correctly, basically a font, but it was a bunch of glyphs.
Casey:
Think Wingdings, but less weird.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And we would use that as like UI elements all over the place.
Casey:
And I feel like what we need is like a Font Awesome, but with glyphs, like a shower glyph, for example.
Casey:
So I was poking about on the Font Awesome website, and there's plenty of excellent shower glyphs that to my eyes are in the spirit of SF Symbols.
Casey:
a person with much better design sense than me which is basically almost everyone would tell you that these are not really in the spirit of sf symbols but you know what i mean like something yeah along those lines that gives you more breadth because like you said marco sf symbols is really designed to be used as ui elements or to supplement your user interface not exactly what you're doing like i don't fault you for doing it i think it makes sense but it's not really what sf symbols is about i
John:
No, I think it's exactly what it's about because there's lots of things that are representative.
John:
Like SF symbols I don't think is about the semantics.
John:
It is really about the incarnation, which is like line drawings, clearly readable line drawings that are abstract representations of things.
John:
So it's not super amount of detail.
John:
The lines are pretty thick.
John:
They're good icons that –
John:
that are exactly for this type of thing this is useful in your ui because it's not going to draw attention to itself like a subtly shaded cloud uh emoji would right that may clash with your ui and like you know like the emoji are very they're very bold and they have their own style and that style is not the same style that the rest of the ui and overcast has so the the sf symbols i think this is a perfect you know use of it it's just sf symbol salts for not having anything there for shower so maybe you could augment it by drawing one
Marco:
one vector showerhead icon throw it in there like you should actually have a custom set of icons that you can add to sf symbols and then eventually sf symbols get stuff added to it all the time i think eventually it will probably get a showerhead yeah and and another common one people are complaining about the lack of is that there's not a lot of sports representation there's like a sports court there's like a like a like a basketball court looking or tennis court looking thing but that's like that's like the main sports thing there's not like you know different balls soccer ball right right yeah
Marco:
But there's also one of the great things about this.
Marco:
First of all, one of the great things about this is that I don't need to buy or commission or create this artwork.
Marco:
It is just there in the system waiting to be used.
Marco:
Secondly, there's all sorts of benefits you get by using it.
Marco:
So for instance, they have all these different modes.
Marco:
They have these different rendering modes.
Marco:
You can render them as... What I'm doing here is hierarchical mode where you can have different levels of transparency in certain icons.
Marco:
If you look at the guitar icon that I use for music or my fish playlist...
Marco:
um that that is like you know these different layers of guitars also um one of the big advantages is uh if you for accessibility settings like if you if you enable the setting called bold text in the accessibility panel in the system every icon in the app including those gets thicker
Casey:
That's nice.
Marco:
Not every SF symbol has a bold version.
Marco:
The guitar one doesn't, but most of them do.
Marco:
You have variable weight.
Marco:
You have all these different rendering modes they can be in.
Marco:
There's a lot of advantages to using them.
Marco:
Also, you have Apple keeping them updated, hopefully, over time.
Marco:
They're always adding more.
Marco:
Almost every point release of the OS adds more SF symbols.
Marco:
Not a lot more, usually.
Marco:
The major releases tend to add larger numbers.
Marco:
It's great that Apple has a team of designers that effectively now work for me for free.
Marco:
And that's fantastic.
Marco:
And somebody like me, I'm getting better at my app design skills.
Marco:
I'm not nearly as good as them at icon design.
Marco:
And I also am not nearly as good as them at just spending the time on that and drawing thousands of symbols.
Marco:
There's something like 3,800 SF symbols right now.
Marco:
I would never in a million years address even a tenth of that.
Marco:
So this is just a fantastic resource for me, and I think it looks really good in the app.
Marco:
I think it makes it look very, very modern.
Marco:
And the amount of reward that has to me of how great it looks and how much it enables versus how little effort and time and money and app file size, John, it takes for me, it's pretty great.
Casey:
It looks real good, and I've been enjoying it, obviously, so kudos from me.
Casey:
But I will be sending you a 25-minute list of bugs and issues, a 25-minute video sometime tomorrow.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
Hey, do what you got to do.
Casey:
Have you watched mine yet?
Casey:
I was going to say, I finally got – I had enough time to watch a portion of it, and I got to tell you – Did you have nine minutes to spare?
Casey:
i i had nine minutes to spare uh no i i think i removed approximately 15 pounds of text from the app during during the five minutes that i of your video that i was able to watch the entire app is now five kilobytes yeah exactly right uh no i actually got a little bit bigger on the pending release because i added a picture of me that i used on the aforementioned uh you know how big do you want the face detection to be and then uh did did we talk about this that uh
Casey:
The icon on the landing screen was not properly Retina because the two size icons, it appears that Apple bakes into your bundle.
Casey:
One of them is like a not very big iPad icon.
Casey:
And then I think there was one other one that was even smaller.
Casey:
And so I was just using the biggest one I could.
Casey:
And a couple of eagle-eyed users were like, hey, man, why is this not Retina?
Casey:
Is this broken?
Casey:
Well, no, it's not really broken.
Casey:
I just didn't want to add another icon just for that one screen.
Casey:
And then I got...
Casey:
browbeat enough about it that i that i allowed myself to add one more icon in there and so uh the the app is probably like five or six megs now instead of three or four something along those lines i'm so sorry i think you're still okay we did talk about this his name was stampy you loved him reference for marco i got it i got it i got it i got nothing simpsons did it
Marco:
We are brought to you this week by Memberful.
Marco:
Monetize your passion with membership.
Marco:
Memberful allows you to build sustainable recurring revenue by selling membership programs directly to your audience.
Marco:
It is the easiest way to do this, and it's used by some of the biggest creators on the web.
Marco:
You know, we know right from this show, we know that it's really good to diversify your income.
Marco:
You know, if you're a creator, if you have an audience out there, it's really, really great to not just rely on ads or to be entirely, you know, direct payment based.
Marco:
And memberful really makes it easy to do that.
Marco:
They seamlessly integrate with all the tools you already use.
Marco:
They have great support to help you get integrated and get set up if you want to.
Marco:
And their incentives are aligned with yours.
Marco:
And so what this means is that, you know, they just want you to make money because they provide the tool and you provide the content.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
It's a nice relationship.
Marco:
They're not trying to like take over.
Marco:
You retain control and ownership of your audience, your brand and your membership.
Marco:
Payments even go directly to your own Stripe account.
Marco:
So you are really retaining tons of control here.
Marco:
Meanwhile, they're offering tons of great features to you.
Marco:
Custom branding, gift subscriptions, Apple Pay, free trials, private podcast support, and tons more.
Marco:
So it's just fantastic no matter what you're selling.
Marco:
Memberships for podcasts or YouTube channels or other kinds of content, they have you covered no matter what you are doing.
Marco:
And again, they really let you have full control over this.
Marco:
That's why I really respect them a lot because I would never consider something that didn't give me that kind of control.
Marco:
And they really do.
Marco:
You can see for yourself with a free trial with no credit card required at memberful.com slash ATP.
Marco:
You can start there.
Marco:
See, poke around the tools, take a look around, see what this can do for you.
Marco:
It is so great to diversify your income and membership is a great way to do that.
Marco:
And memberful is a great way to offer membership.
Marco:
So memberful.com slash ATP one more time for that free trial.
Marco:
Get started today.
Marco:
Thank you so much to memberful for sponsoring our show.
Oh,
Casey:
UnforgettableLuncheon, very good name, writes, do you have any preferred file naming scheme that you follow?
Casey:
Recently in my university degree, we were told to name our files with the prefix year, month, day, underscore, title, underscore, subtitle.
Casey:
For example, this is with no hyphens or anything.
Casey:
So example, 2-0-2-1-0-3-2-9-underscore-proj3-underscore-siteplan.
Casey:
But this seems clunky and space inefficient to me.
Casey:
I feel like we've talked about this before.
Casey:
This is going to horrify a lot of people, as with so many of my opinions.
Casey:
But for general usage, I don't favor year, month, day.
Casey:
However, for file names or things where I'm going to be sorting by file name and I know I want this stuff to be sortable, then yeah, year, month, day with hyphens.
Casey:
And then use spaces like an adult and kind of do whatever you want after that.
Casey:
Marco, what is your opinion on this?
Casey:
And then we'll round it out with John telling us what we should believe.
Marco:
It depends a lot on context.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree with that.
Marco:
You know, what John is probably going to mention is that the file system does keep track of things like creation date, modification date.
Marco:
However, and I'm sure John's going to mention this as well.
Marco:
The problem is when you're in this kind of context of, okay, you're in a university program, you're creating documents, you're
Marco:
Well, as they get moved around, if they get emailed or Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever, Google Driven, whatever it is, as they go around, the opportunities for them to lose this metadata on someone else's computer or in some other context increase dramatically.
Marco:
So if you're relying only on creation date in the file system to indicate when something was made and that it's not represented actually in the file, like, you know, like in a document, like actually as text created on whatever, or as metadata somewhere, if you're relying on that, it's going to get lost as these things travel around.
Marco:
Now, when I make files on my own personal computer, uh,
Marco:
I have faith that those things are not going to be a problem for most of my files here.
Marco:
I've learned to trust the file system and its metadata for the most part.
Marco:
As I'm using my own computer, that tends to be maintained and so I can look and see modification or creation dates and they tend to be accurate.
Marco:
That isn't true of everything though and of all contexts.
Marco:
That's why I think it depends.
Marco:
In this kind of situation where you're working with other people a lot, you're sending files between other people a lot,
Marco:
I see why they would do something like this.
Marco:
There are good reasons for that in that context, even though I personally don't bother doing that with with one exception.
Marco:
And that is for files that I'm not naming that are being named automatically by something else.
Marco:
when that is the case and i think my my most common version of that is uh whenever i i have these i have a sheet fed scanner and it automatically creates pdf files whatever i scan in this in this folder in dropbox and those files are just named just like this like year month date and then you know number within that day that i scan them because most of the time i'm scanning paperwork so i can get rid of it and i
Marco:
don't usually need to reference most of that paperwork again.
Marco:
I need it to have names so that it exists in the file system and I can find it somewhat.
Marco:
But I don't need those names to be very meaningful.
Marco:
I don't need to manually type in date-electric bill.
Marco:
I don't go to that.
Marco:
I just let it be the date.
Marco:
And if I ever need to find something, I just think about roughly when it was and go to that time range and just start hitting up arrow with QuickView open and just look...
Marco:
browse through my pdf scan around the time oh here it is you know i've never had any trouble finding stuff that way because you know adding to that is much more common than reading from it for me but other than that i don't do this
Casey:
John, what's the right answer?
John:
So school, work, and other institutions will make you comply with all sorts of things.
John:
So if they say you have to name your TPS report this way, you name your TPS report that way.
John:
That's just part of life, so don't worry about it.
John:
But for doing stuff, your own personal things, here are a few things I would encourage.
Yeah.
John:
I would encourage you to only put things in the file name that describe the content of the file.
John:
Surprisingly, often, that includes the date.
John:
Even though, yes, of course, I'm going to say the file system has dates or whatever.
John:
If the document, if describing the content of the document includes a date, put it in the file name.
John:
So, for example, tax return 2001.
John:
it's not you're not saying the file was created in 2001 you're not duplicating file system metadata here you're saying it's really important that i know which year this tax return is for put that in the file name and yeah then you can do it year month day you can put year at the beginning year at the end do whatever you want but put putting dates in the file name is not ridiculous it's only ridiculous if the date you put in the file name is the same as the creation or modification date
John:
just because you're mirroring that data um and again that people may make you do that or whatever but that's a little bit silly and for portability reasons like if you want that to be preserved it's super important that people know the year month and day this this file was created even though it has no intrinsic connection to the content that is a little bit sketchy but you got to do what you got to do um
John:
i i think even in this the age of the internet and although it's use spaces between words like the internet can handle it right i i promise you the http protocol will not die i know lots of people don't do encoding stuff right i know sometimes things are not url encoded and they're not double encoded and people get confused about plus versus percent 20 and but like
John:
functionally speaking, it can work.
John:
So for your own purposes, use spaces to separate words, please.
John:
Don't use hyphens or underscores.
John:
Computers don't need those things.
John:
You may feel like you need them and you'll be like, how am I ever going to tab complete something with a space in it?
John:
all these things are possible.
John:
I promise you, there's no reason for you to be reading things that look like, you know, a bunch of little snakes tying together your words like you, you know, I, I prefer to use title case.
John:
When I title my file names, you can do all lowercase if you want to feel like you're cool or whatever.
John:
But like, I feel like words, you know, capitalization is important for a reason.
John:
URL is all capitals, uh, you know, Acme or whatever, like IRS is all capitals.
John:
Like,
John:
maybe acme isn't or whatever but use proper capitalization uh in your words um don't like you know for for dates and stuff and other things that are in file system metadata that do not describe the content of the files to help you to discourage you from doing that think about how weird it would be think of how absurd you would feel if and if your name your quote-unquote naming scheme for your files was oh whenever i name my files i always put the file size in the file name
John:
right nobody does that and the only reason nobody does that is because we all have 100 confidence that the file size is something that will transfer with the file whereas we have very little confidence that the modification and creation date will transfer with the file right so i kind of understand what the difference is there but in general describe the content of the file don't try to mirror a file system that data
Casey:
And then finally, oh no, not finally, excuse me, in the middle we have Carson Brown writing, I've been experimenting with time machine setups and noticed that backing up to an SMB share is very slow compared to an external drive attached via USB, especially since it's all wired.
Casey:
Has that ever made you reconsider backing up to a network attached storage?
Casey:
Nope, not for me.
Casey:
I don't want to be bothered having to physically connect stuff.
John:
I reconsider it all the time because it is so slow.
Casey:
It really is slow.
John:
It's the slowest thing ever.
John:
And especially as drives get bigger, it just seems like it gets slower.
John:
So I'm actually highly interested in this topic.
John:
And I've been keeping up with, what was it, Howard Oakley at Eclectic Light Company.
John:
He's also constantly fighting with this and trying to figure out why Time Machine is taking so long and the different techniques it uses to back things up.
John:
And like, all I really care about is bottom line, why is it so damn slow?
John:
So we'll put two links in the show notes for what is the state of the art of trying to make Time Machine not be as slow as balls when, you know, backing up to a NAS.
John:
And apparently the only thing that actually has any effect whatsoever is if you globally disable, like, I.O.
John:
throttling for background processes in macOS, right?
John:
macOS does not apparently have a way for you on a per-process basis, especially an already running process like BackupD or whatever, to make it not be throttled.
John:
And, you know, by default, macOS, you know...
John:
gives less priority to background jobs so when it runs the thing you know it's running time machine or spotlight indexing it is intentionally saying don't swamp the machine right you know you have a low priority do things slowly pace yourself don't you know don't go nuts because you don't want they don't want the thing like the performance of your mac falling off a cliff because like spotlight indexing is happening which is the thing that used to happen back in the day
Marco:
And in fact, this is actually one of the major reasons why the M1 architecture computers get such great battery life and aren't so hot and loud at the time because most of those background processes also get forced to run on the efficiency cores instead of the high performance cores.
Marco:
And you can like, you know, like most like right now I can look at mine and I see I have the Backblaze BZServe thing running on the efficiency core right now because...
Marco:
It's a background process, just backing up cloud stuff, and so it doesn't need constant high CPU, high performance access.
Marco:
Whereas in the past, with Intel machines that had symmetric cores, you would have Dropbox or Time Machine or MDS or whatever...
Marco:
maxing out a high performance intel core and it would it would not throttle that and so it was it would make your machine heat up and kill your battery life so having the asymmetric core thing here really helps a lot in terms of the amount of processing power background tasks are given
John:
Even back in the Intel days, you still had processor priority in terms of how much CPU you got, but they couldn't go on a cooler core for the most part.
John:
They would just go on the same core as anything else.
John:
The I.O.
John:
throttling in particular, though, is saying how much disk I.O.
John:
is it allowed to do?
John:
And as you can imagine, Time Machine Backup, all it's ever doing is basically waiting around for I.O.
John:
to complete.
John:
So it's not like it's burning your CPU, but...
John:
If left to its own devices, it would be like read files as fast as possible.
John:
I've got thousands and thousands of files to back up and just one after the other in parallel and multiple process, like whatever it's going to do.
John:
It just I can't get enough of those files and I got to send a bunch of network requests.
John:
There's some more IO.
John:
And so the IO throttling is the thing.
John:
that is slowing it down because the i o throttling says seems like you just did like a hundred file operations at a fraction of a second maybe chill a little bit right you know there's a limit to how fast it can go so if you want time machine backups to a nas to go faster you can globally disable the i o throttling on the entire system and it doesn't just affect time machine it affects every single process the machine is now exempt from this global thing you don't want to do that in general
John:
But if you know like, okay, I just got a new Mac or I just got a new Synology, I need to do like my initial backup and it's like four terabytes and it's going to take like a day, maybe globally disable that thing because it can speed up the process.
John:
You can read the links to find out about it.
John:
It annoys me that it's so slow.
John:
It makes some sense.
John:
Like this is something that's counterintuitive to anyone who hasn't ever done server-side development, but...
John:
Doing anything to lots of small files takes way, way, way, way longer than doing something to an equivalent number of equivalent size of large files.
John:
Right.
John:
So one one gigabyte file versus a million files that are whatever a gigabyte divided by a million is night and day difference.
John:
And if you as you do things over the network where everything that you do has to be like.
John:
Send this thing over the network.
John:
Find out what happened at the other end when it completed and go back and forth.
John:
It just adds so much overhead.
John:
Basically, you burn up all your time on overhead and very little time on actually doing anything, and that slows stuff way down.
Marco:
Do we ever figure out, like, you know, one of the things when APFS launched, the potential promise existed for a much better and more efficient Time Machine.
Marco:
That never happened, did it?
John:
No, it did.
John:
One of the strategies that Time Machine uses, Time Machine has multiple strategies to answer the question, what changed since the last time I ran?
John:
One of the strategies is APFS snapshot diffs.
John:
And that is a very efficient way to find out what has changed.
John:
The problem is, OK, now that you know what's changed, do you also have an efficient way to send those changes to a NAS over SMB?
John:
And the answer is no.
John:
There's nothing like SMB doesn't know about APFS.
John:
SMB, there's no like wire, like ZFS had a protocol where you could send snapshot diffs as a byte stream.
John:
like as long as it was zfs on the other end you could do that but if you're just doing you know it's doing smb it has no idea what the file system is on your synology it's probably like btrfs or ext4 or whatever like so that snapshot functionality helps with local can help with local backups i don't even think they're doing the the byte stream thing i'm not sure if that exists but snapshot diffing is one of the things but if you see if you look in the logs and say hey time machine what strategy did you pick often it will pick the old one which is
John:
uh fs events uh you know id i i last process event id one two three and now i'm going to start picking up from there it picks whatever it thinks will be the most efficient strategy but uh snapshot diffing is one of the strategies to figure out what changed i'm not sure if there is any plausible way for it to
John:
to then say, okay, now that I have the snapshot diff, can I get a block stream?
John:
Because to do that even with ZFS, you kind of need the other file system to sort of be on the same page to efficiently receive the changes.
John:
Anyway, I still have hope that it can get better over time, and it has gotten a little bit faster over time, but the IO throttling is the biggest culprit right now.
Marco:
I mean, it could also presumably, like, store it on the other end in a different format that is more like, you know, blocks, you know, big block chunks instead of individual files.
Marco:
I mean, it's... Yeah.
Marco:
But, I mean, it's using a sparse bundle a lot of times now, but so is that not as efficient?
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
I mean, the sparse bundle is just...
John:
inefficiency on top of inefficiency because you know so let's say you're using ext4 on your synology right and you're doing it over smb but for it to work there has to be a disk image and the disk image is apfs and that's one more abstraction of these little stripe files and sparks bundle folder it's like abstraction on top of it does not make things faster to do this right uh so
John:
you know there there is potential for it to be better but i i wouldn't want the backup to be stored in some weird super efficient format right i i like the fact that if i go onto my synology i can see the files you know if you mount if you mount that disk image you see the file sitting there it's different than using hard links with hfs right now it uses the like the uh
John:
what do you call it the clone files and stuff like that um it is much better than it was and it is getting better all the time but there are definitely ways that it could improve and every time i see how long it's going to take to do a backup to my synology it makes me wish it was just a little bit faster it makes me wish kind of that there was a big button that i could say time machine i'm going to be away from my computer for an hour use all available resources no throttling go as fast as you can saturate my bandwidth you know max out the iops on my synology just get the backup done and instead it's so polite
Marco:
just doles out the bits one at a time and takes forever to finish yeah i've actually been considering it's funny i bought my synology here with the intention not that long ago i talked about right here on the show of it being only a time machine device but it is really slow for that i was thinking about like so i i've actually you know repurposed a little bit of it and i've
Marco:
I'm now using it for archive file storage as well, and I have a backup thing that's backing it up to Backblaze B2.
John:
It's like buying a bigger house, so you just fill the rooms.
Marco:
Yeah, and now I'm thinking maybe I should actually move Time Machine off of that because now I freed up the little SSD I was using as my archive drive at my desk.
Marco:
That's so much faster.
Marco:
Yeah, so I can just Velcro this SSD under my desk and just have that be a local Time Machine.
Marco:
I think I might do that because it is so much faster.
Marco:
and i mean i hardly ever need to restore anything from time machine but the process of restoring it from a nas is like hilariously slow like if you think backing up is slow try reading the backups it's amazing so yeah i haven't kind of thinking of flipping that over
Casey:
Finally, C writes, Apple's been making their own chips for a while.
Casey:
It seems that Apple's been bringing more and more components in-house over the years.
Casey:
Do you think that Apple will ever create, design, and or manufacture their own display panel, at least for larger displays like the iMac and the studio display?
Casey:
I mean, on an infinite timeline, timescale, timeline, whatever, timescale.
Casey:
Yeah, of course.
Casey:
But I don't see that happening anytime soon, personally, because it seems like they outsource damn near all that to LG, don't they?
Casey:
At least on the computer side of things.
Marco:
Or Samsung, I mean.
Marco:
I don't see this ever happening, honestly, even on an infinite timescale, because Apple outsources things that are commodities.
Marco:
They don't make their own flash storage.
Marco:
They don't make their own memory chips.
Marco:
These things are areas in which a specialized manufacturer who specializes in that kind of component is able to just iterate like crazy and make really good ones of these things that are
Marco:
not i mean i hate to minimize the work but like not as complicated and not as differentiatable that's a word um compared to something like designing their own processors they aren't even manufacturing their processors but they are designing them you know and they are designing they're certainly you know making all their own software making all their own tools like there's all sorts of these areas where apple is able to do things in a much more custom way and have a much bigger impact on things whereas
Marco:
Like, are they really going to make a better display panel than Samsung or LG?
Marco:
Maybe, but they could also just order them from Samsung and LG and be fine.
Marco:
And those components, I think Apple would consider too boring and too commoditized.
Marco:
And there's not enough reason for them to make it because they can already buy the best ones of those in the world from other people.
Marco:
Whereas they can't buy the best software from other people.
Marco:
They can't buy the best processor design from other people.
Marco:
They can make that themselves and be way ahead of everyone else by doing that.
Marco:
Whereas this kind of thing, these kind of basic commodity component type things, I don't think Apple would gain anything by making it themselves.
Marco:
And they don't have any reason to take on that burden when the rest of the market is supplying that very well when they order it from them.
John:
Well, it's the differentiation you mentioned, like the Tim Cook thing.
John:
I was like, we don't want to enter market unless we think we can make a significant difference.
John:
And recall from episodes a long time ago, months, years, that Apple has been reportedly investigating micro LED displays like itself.
John:
And again, we're talking about display panel, like setting aside, obviously Apple had a big hand in designing the XDR and everything, but like the display panel itself, not all the electronics and the backlight and everything, but just the display panel is
John:
Micro LED is something that lots of manufacturers have created at various sizes, but not at the sizes that would work in any Apple devices.
John:
And if Apple somehow, if those rumors were true, and Apple was funding attempts to develop micro LED...
John:
um which i don't want to get into the details but it's a different screen technology it's different than oled it's different than lcd and it is in theory better than both of them um if you could if if they had some kind of breakthrough there where they succeeded in making a micro led screen let's say that's like for the apple watch or something where no one no one else has been able to do that in a cost-effective manner apple manages to do it that would be a big competitive advantage for their product um
John:
they would be able to make a big difference not necessarily in the market because they wouldn't be selling to other people but suddenly they would differentiate their product like their watch battery life would be much higher or their screen would be much higher quality or whatever um like so i don't see apple making an lcd display or an oled display or because those are technologies with established players it's a it's you know what is it uh
John:
Red ocean versus blue ocean.
John:
It's red ocean.
John:
They're all out there killing each other to try to make the best, uh, the best LCDs, the best OLEDs, all that other stuff.
John:
Right.
John:
Uh, but so far, no one has succeeded in micro LED of the type that Apple would be interested in.
John:
So that's why it wasn't too surprising to me that they might be investigating that.
John:
It would be useful.
John:
And AR had said, it'd be, you know, if Apple could somehow make cost-effective micro LED, it's useful in every single one of their products and is superior than almost everything.
John:
You know, if they, it has a potential to be disappeared to all other technologies.
John:
Right.
John:
Uh, but I don't know if that rumor is true.
John:
I don't know if that's a thing they're actually doing.
John:
Maybe they're just partnering with somebody who's, who is like helping invest, you know, to a lot of people in chat room are pointing about this.
John:
Apple does spend a lot of money trying to get other companies to build the thing it wants.
John:
And it's been a long time doing Intel.
John:
In fact, um,
John:
So even when it buys things from other people, it likes to use its money and its potential ordering capacity to influence the things that they make to get the thing that it wants.
John:
So maybe those rumors we're hearing is just Apple investing in some company that was already on its way to making micro LED because Apple knows that it's if they can get first dibs on that product, like that'll be a competitive advantage for them or whatever.
John:
So.
John:
I would say never say never, because I think Apple is interested in breakthroughs like that.
John:
Solid state batteries is another example.
John:
Who knows what they're doing with the car stuff?
John:
It's just that historically speaking, that is not how Apple has added its value.
John:
It's not to say that they couldn't do that.
John:
Like, arguably, they did a lot of original work with like...
John:
not perfecting the mouse but sort of like who had a lot of experience building computer mice before Apple not a lot of companies and Apple shipped them on every single one of their Macintosh computers so learn pretty quickly how to make one of those is decent right but even there they you know sort of they weren't the first to make an optical mouse or anything like that they eventually just let the rest of the market pick up for them so I think it would be kind of neat but it seems like a seems like a reach
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Memberful, Remote, and Backblaze.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean to.
Casey:
I have an after show.
Casey:
Oh, all right.
John:
It's so rare that I have an after show.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I'm excited.
John:
To make it a game of it, I'll give you each one guess what my after show is about.
John:
TVs.
John:
The freezer.
John:
You're so fast.
John:
So fast on the guesses.
John:
That didn't even take a second to think about it.
John:
You got a TV or freezer.
John:
Those are your two guesses, huh?
John:
So which one of us was right?
John:
Well, you're both wrong.
John:
My after show is that I quit my job.
John:
What?
John:
Wait, what?
John:
Really?
John:
And I'd like to say that in the guessing game, Merlin got it on the first guess.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
This entire show I've spent with just blue in front of my eyes.
Casey:
Wait, you quit your job?
Casey:
I did.
Casey:
You didn't lead with this?
John:
No, it's an after show topic.
Casey:
How did you make us sit through?
Casey:
How have we sat through an hour, 57 minutes and 38 seconds of chatter and this is now the time that you decide to come out with this?
John:
it's the after show is where we talk about personal so i have a whole podcast where i talk about my feelings in my life it's called reconcilable differences if you listen to episode 179 uh you will learn uh all about this and you'll hear me talk about it at length at length that i'm not going to talk about it here because we're just in the after show or whatever and that isn't out yet right that ever record oh no it's out right now oh my god when did it come out john i hate you and if you if you yeah
John:
Oh, it came out today?
John:
If you go to hypercritical.co, you will see the top post on my website is a text version of an explanation of this whole thing.
Casey:
When did that go live?
Casey:
Oh, my God.
John:
That went live about three seconds ago.
Casey:
John, I'm going to kill you.
Casey:
Before I kill you, and I'm not going to read this right now.
Casey:
First of all, congratulations, since you said you quit, you didn't get laid off or fired or anything like that.
Casey:
So congratulations.
Casey:
Can you give us the short, short, short version of what the plan is from here?
Casey:
Are you getting a new job or are you pulling a casey?
Marco:
I don't want the short version.
Marco:
Give me the full version.
Casey:
I love the full version, but I know I'm not going to get it.
John:
The long version is on Rectifs.
John:
On Rectifs, I started out giving like a fact type thing because I just felt like we were in that mindset and it's probably a useful approach here.
John:
So I'll give a mini fact version here.
John:
Mini fact.
John:
Did I get fired or get laid off?
John:
No, I quit.
John:
What are do you have a new job lined up?
John:
No, I don't.
John:
Do you have a terminal disease?
John:
No, not that I know of.
John:
What is the plan here?
John:
The plan here is to do podcasting and other stuff as the way I make my living just like Marco and Casey to varying degrees do as well.
John:
that's awesome i am so unbelievably proud and excited i cannot even tell you i know i probably don't sound it but i'm like smiling ear to ear i'm so excited for you i never would have guessed this i thought i thought you were like a company man forever same well another another fact item that i think people need to hear um have you suddenly come into some huge amount of money that makes this possible like your podcast suddenly making more money did you win the lottery like you did a whole bunch of new people sign up for membership and now suddenly it's possible whereas before it wasn't no that's not that did not happen
John:
So they're like, why now?
John:
Why not before?
John:
Well, you can read my blog post about it, which I think was the smallest time investment to get this.
John:
Or you can listen to the longer Rectives episode.
John:
And I'm sure we can talk about it more in future episodes of this show if you would like.
John:
But I just wanted to throw it in the after show because it's important news.
John:
And the other thing I'll say on this show, which I also said in my blog post,
John:
is this is a good opportunity to thank everybody who is listening to this podcast.
John:
Thank anyone who has ever listened to the podcast.
John:
Thank everyone who has ever read anything that I've written or gone to a live show or bought a t-shirt or done any of those things because all of those people are the people who made it possible for me to attempt to do this.
John:
Obviously,
John:
Casey made a similar decision back in 2018.
John:
Marco made a similar decision back in 2010.
John:
Like I said, it seems like everybody I know has done this before me.
John:
So I have all this experience watching other people do it.
John:
And now I'm going to give it a try myself.
John:
So we'll see how it goes.
Casey:
I am so excited and so proud of you.
Casey:
I echo what Marco said a moment ago.
Casey:
Never in a million trillion years did I think you would make this leap.
Casey:
And I know that the math is a little bit different for you than it is for anyone else on the planet.
Casey:
But I still am extremely excited and proud of you.
Casey:
This is very, very big John Syracuse energy that you did this quietly and didn't confer with your two friends here.
Casey:
But that's okay.
Casey:
It might have been worth it just for this bombshell moment right now.
John:
Totally worth it.
Casey:
But I am overjoyed.
Casey:
I'm so excited and so proud of you.
John:
I mean, if you read the post, you'll see that I've been thinking about this for years.
John:
It's kind of a coincidence that in recent ATP episodes, we had a bunch of questions like, how does John fit everything in?
John:
And what's the deal with John didn't do any research?
John:
That was just a happy coincidence.
John:
I was smiling when hearing that because this is a plan I've had for multiple years.
John:
In fact, I had a date certain set to do this multiple years ago.
John:
And then something else happened with the world that caused me to maybe reconsider that.
John:
You know, so when COVID came, it was everything got put on hold.
John:
And, you know, so it's not this is not a decision I made at spur of the moment.
John:
This is a multi year long process that was going to go off and then didn't.
John:
And then I reconsidered again.
John:
And anyway, you can read all about it.
John:
yeah this is uh it's just in time for my kids to go to college so it's a great time to put my income in an uncertain position oh my god this is this is great i i i really am genuinely extremely surprised genuinely extremely happy uh and just oh man i'm i'm so happy for you this is this is great congratulations i hope it i hope it is great i mean coming from the two of you who already have been there for a while and you sound like you're it's great for you so i hope it will be great for me too
Marco:
oh, think of all the jokes we can now make.
Marco:
Because before you were like, well, when you worked at a job, you know, now none of us work at jobs.
Marco:
This is great.
Casey:
Does this mean we're going to start recording for like European friendly times from time to time?
Casey:
Because now the day is our oyster, right?
John:
We can discuss.
John:
There are multiple other factors in flight here.
John:
I've felt bad because I've been trying to keep it a surprise so it could be a surprise on this show.
John:
So I haven't been able to talk to people about things.
John:
But now that will change.
John:
We'll see.
John:
We'll talk.
Casey:
Oh, my gosh.
Casey:
John Syracuse, I'm so excited for you.
Casey:
I'm so incredibly excited for you.
Casey:
I am gobsmacked.
Casey:
I cannot freaking believe.
Casey:
holy crap, this rocks my... I don't even know what to ask you right now.
Casey:
I'm so stunned.
Marco:
Well, that's why he did the frequently asked questions.
Marco:
He addressed all of the most frequent things we would think of.
John:
No, there's many more.
John:
One phrase that I did not mention in my post about this is midlife crisis, because I really honestly don't feel like this fits the definition of midlife crisis, other than the getting older and recognizing your mortality type thing.
John:
But it's, again, not something I...
John:
I went into a spur of the moment spontaneously.
John:
It's just generally not how I do things.
Marco:
This is incredible.
Marco:
I'm so surprised.
Marco:
Again, I would never have guessed that this would happen.
John:
You both didn't guess, but Merlin got it on the first guess.
John:
He's smarter than us.
John:
With no context, because I sprung it on him 100% as the same.
John:
No hints, no context, no nothing.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So when is your, if you're willing to share, when is your last day at your jobby job?
John:
It was last Friday.
Casey:
Oh, you're already done?
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh my God.
Casey:
I hate you so much right now.
John:
I mean, directives and records way ahead of schedule.
John:
So it's a, they had to coordinate all this stuff, you know?
Casey:
Wait, so you said this past Friday.
Casey:
So as we record, it's Wednesday.
Casey:
What'd you do all week?
John:
Same stuff I always do, just without the work part.
Casey:
Well, what did you do during the day?
John:
I mean, well, let's see.
John:
You sound like my wife.
John:
She's like, what did you do?
Casey:
Monday was my first day without a job.
John:
Like, what did you do all day?
John:
It's like, surprisingly not that different.
John:
Like, on that Monday, I think what I did was...
John:
I wrote this blog post.
John:
So that's one thing I did.
John:
Finalized the t-shirt designs, uploaded them to the Google Drive.
John:
Let's see.
John:
I did some cooking and puttering around the house, drove kids to places, took out the garbage, made dinner, like just...
John:
a normal day with like the, the normal amount of pocket, you know, worked on the show notes for ATP, worked on the show notes for rectifs, you know, like did, did all the coordinated people of getting the rectifs episodes up because I posted them while we were recording.
John:
So you, one of you couldn't listen to the episode beforehand and no listeners could listen to it and spoil it or, you know, like that's kind of what I did with my day.
John:
And so it's like the same thing I do in normal days, except for normally insert all that activity as like context switch constantly with a normal eight hour workday.
Casey:
Oh, I am.
Casey:
I'm still I heard every word you said, but I'm not sure I was listening because I'm so happy.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
John:
I ate breakfast without my laptop on the table next to me.
John:
Imagine that.
John:
I don't even have a laptop.
John:
I returned that accursed thing.
John:
That was the best part of this.
John:
No more butterfly keyboard.
John:
Return that thing.
John:
Take it back.
John:
God, I hated that laptop so much by the end.
John:
It was getting so slow.
John:
And not because of the laptop.
John:
It was just like the corporate malware they were putting on and everything.
John:
I'm so happy to not have that.
Marco:
No more corporate malware.
John:
They added more.
John:
I think we talked about this in one of the slacks we're in.
John:
They added an app called Santa.
John:
that would intercept application launch and it would tell you whether the app was naughty or nice right that's creepy as hell like that there's whoever designed that and whoever bought it at your company they need to like really evaluate that and it was flagging everything it was like oh you want to run expand drive so you can do sshfs to your dev machines expand drive we don't know what that is santa says it's naughty would you like to request access to use it i'm like oh
Marco:
ew that's so oh my god how does anybody work anywhere that's that's like a that was new as of like a few months ago and it was like this is not helping me you know sometimes i wonder like i often wonder whenever i have to deal with a real company and you know i'll be like you know on a call or something that somebody had insisted on having and
Marco:
and there'll be like 17 people on the call, and two of them talk.
Marco:
I'm like, what are all these other people here for?
Marco:
What do these people do?
Marco:
I hear from... You read reports about how big a company is on the web.
Marco:
You say, oh, wow, Twitter or whatever has 5,000 employees, whatever it is, and you're like...
Marco:
What do they need that many people for?
Marco:
But I think the answer is they create their own overhead.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
It was somebody's job to choose that.
Marco:
It was somebody's job to purchase it, to set it up, to maintain it.
Marco:
I assume somebody has to behave like, I guess, the elf and receive those inbound requests for running your expand drive and other boring things that people need that this is somehow thinking are naughty and
Marco:
And so there's all this overhead.
Marco:
John, I am so incredibly happy that all of that is now in your past.
Marco:
Because I will warn you, and I know you probably already know this, but I will warn you that this will ruin you.
Marco:
And that in a matter of weeks, you will be unemployable.
Marco:
Not because nobody would ever hire you, but because you will not tolerate anyone else's crap ever again.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I had like 25 years of tolerating it.
John:
I feel like that is a skill, the ability to tolerate that and to sort of thrive in that environment is a skill I will probably never lose, but we'll see.
Casey:
See, and I feel the same way about myself, but I'm sure if I put my money where my mouth is, I bet Marco would be right.
John:
You were in it for a little less time than I was, Casey, so you may come out of it.
John:
Marco was barely in it before he escaped it.
John:
he really is unemployable that's that's true and i've been out of it the longest but yeah but i mean i was i was barely employable when i was employable i had to find it for my for my blog post i had to find your like you know when did marco leave tumblr right i had to find the post about that it was like a two paragraph post
John:
It was not very long.
John:
I mean, maybe you had a longer one later where you reflected on it, but you're like, you know, day of thing, like, oh, I'm no longer a Tumblr.
John:
It's like five sentences long.
Marco:
Well, because that was, you know, that was careful because at the time, you know, we didn't want to like alarm anybody.
Marco:
You know, I was, you know, the earliest employee of Tumblr and I was leaving.
Marco:
And so and at the time, I didn't I didn't have like an obvious like there were some people who took over my duties, but it wasn't like a high profile replacement thing.
Marco:
And so we didn't want to alarm people.
Marco:
And so that's why like we like David and I very carefully wrote that together, you know, to really just make sure like, are we going to be OK here?
Marco:
We're not going to alarm people.
Marco:
Try not to make a big deal out of this.
Marco:
So that's why that was so short and why I really never addressed it again.
John:
Well, anyway, I found it.
John:
Oh, it's so hard to find things on your site, too.
John:
You don't have any kind of, like, archive page that lists all the posts somewhere?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, not all the posts, but you scroll to the bottom, it lists them all by, like, month and year.
John:
Does it?
Marco:
I think, well, by month at least.
Marco:
Yeah.
Yeah.
John:
Oh, there it is.
John:
Archives.
John:
I guess I was on an individual post.
John:
Let's see.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, it's not a good... Overcast Redesign.
Marco:
I mean, you know, I searched my site the way everyone else searches their site, using Google, site colon, you know, that's... I was on an individual post.
John:
Like, if you're on the Overcast Redesign one, at the bottom of that page, there's nothing.
John:
There's Twitter, RSS feed, you know, stuff like that, but the archive is only on the homepage.
John:
And then your main top nav is Apps, Podcast, Twitter, About, but only on the homepage homepage is the archive thing.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Will you now post three posts a year on your blog?
John:
I've already done.
Casey:
I was going to say we're there.
John:
The two streaming app things?
John:
Who knows?
John:
Will I post to my blog more?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Don't limit my options.
John:
Who knows what I'll do.
Casey:
So sitting here now, what do you suspect your day will be?
Casey:
Like, are you planning to take some— All destiny.
Casey:
Well, I ask this, I mean, jokingly, yes, all destiny.
Casey:
But like, in all seriousness, what I thought I was going to be doing when I stopped my jobby job is very different than what I'm actually doing now that I stopped my jobby job, or well, several years ago now.
Casey:
What do you think sitting here now will be your day to day after you allow yourself some time for project like house projects and and taking a damn break after 25 years?
Casey:
You know, what do you expect to be doing to fill your day?
John:
Well, one of the things that sort of led to this decision, again, you can see it summarized in the post and I talked about in Rectifs, is like I've had to turn down a lot of things, both my own ideas of like, hey, wouldn't it be neat if I – and then I would reject myself and say, well, you can't do that because you've got other things to do.
John:
Well, what about if I try this?
John:
You don't have time for that, right?
John:
And also opportunities that are sometimes presented to me.
John:
Hey, would you like to do X?
John:
Actually, I would like to do X, but I can't because I'm already doing all the things that I could possibly do, right?
John:
So now suddenly I don't have to reject literally every idea or opportunity that comes my way.
John:
I can actually say yes to some of them.
John:
And so that's something I will pursue.
John:
Will any of those things go anywhere?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But it annoyed me before that I literally couldn't.
John:
really say yes to anything after i had sort of calibrated what i was doing to sort of fit within my life which was part of what we talked about in the past in this show was like how does john fit everything in i've selected all the things i had selected all the things that i did to fit within my life but just barely there was not any room for anything else and so whenever there was anything bad that happened or whatever things would overflow or the example i gave in the post is when i decided to make those two mac apps
John:
That's the thing I had always wanted to do.
John:
And I said, you know what?
John:
I'm just going to do it.
John:
And that was kind of a mistake because that was over my limit of the things that I could handle.
John:
My regular job, all the family stuff, all my podcasts.
John:
Oh, and by the way, now you're going to make two Mac apps in two months and, you know, do releases of those and support them.
John:
That, you know...
John:
that was painful to do because it showed just how close to my limit i'm constantly running at and even it's like i'm just gonna do the thing i always wanted to do and a lot of the phone was sucked out of it by like well now you're gonna get even less sleep right now you're gonna be even more tired now you have even more things to think about and worry about uh and that just showed like i either decide that these are only these are the only things i'm ever gonna do or i have to remove something um and you know
John:
To reiterate the John DiNuni research thing from the song, the deal with ATP was I had just come off hypercritical and I was burned out on podcasting, again, having gone over my current capacity with my current family, your constraints and everything.
John:
And I was just like, I can't do this anymore.
John:
And you're like, oh, why don't you come do a car show?
John:
It'll be casual.
John:
We'll just do a thing.
John:
It won't be a big deal.
John:
It'll be so much easier than that tech thing that you were doing.
John:
And that, of course, eventually turned into ATP accidentally.
John:
And the whole pitch was...
John:
but we don't want you to burn out again, John.
John:
So don't do any research like you did for hypercritical and everything.
John:
You know, we want you, we don't want you to quit the show cause you, cause you can't handle it anymore.
John:
Um, and obviously whatever it is that nine, 10 years or however long we were into this later, obviously I didn't quit the show.
John:
What happened instead was I've quit my job.
Yeah.
John:
mission accomplished when push came to shove and it was like you want to do new things what needs to get pushed out it's not like oh sorry guys i gotta leave atp i just left my job well you you chose correctly yeah i mean obviously i'm gonna pick the thing that i enjoy more if it is financially what is a plausibly viable and uh an atp is so again thank you to everybody who you know supports the show listens to the show uh thanks to all the members all that stuff
Casey:
Well, yeah, now it's not going to be me saying it all the time.
Casey:
Now it's going to be John.
Casey:
But no, all snark and jokes aside, it is worth noting once again, especially as we're approaching our 500th episode, that it is because of the shirts that you all buy, the sponsors that you patronize, the memberships that you've purchased.
Casey:
It's because of the time you give us that Marco and me, and now John, all three of us now, baby, are lucky enough to do what we do.
Casey:
And I was actually thinking recently that we should take a moment and thank everyone again.
Casey:
And now it's painfully obvious that I need to do exactly that.
Casey:
And even if you aren't a member, that's fine.
Casey:
Even if you're not buying t-shirts, that's fine.
Casey:
Even just spending time listening to us means a lot.
Casey:
And telling a friend about us means a lot.
Casey:
And I know I, and now I can speak for definitely all three of us, that we are so incredibly thankful for every single one of you, no matter how much actual money you send our way.
Casey:
Even if it's zero, it's still lost.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
Even if the only money you send our way is actually sent to St.
Casey:
Jude in September, that's fine too.
Casey:
We're so thankful and appreciative of every single one of you.
Casey:
And I am absolutely gobsmacked that in the course of this show,
Casey:
Marco was already, as previously stated, long unemployable, but in the course of the show, two-thirds of the show are now independent.
Casey:
Selfishly, anyway, I can't think of a happier outcome from this show, and I'm so incredibly thankful for all of you listening and for the two of you for making this possible for all three of us.
John:
Yeah, I was thinking about when I said, like, it seems like all my friends are doing this.
John:
When I was writing the thing, I'm like, oh, I can't list everybody.
John:
I'll just list my podcast.
John:
Every single person I podcast with is essentially self-employed.
John:
Merlin, you, you know, Jason, right?
John:
So it's just, it's, you know, I was the odd one out of still being the sucker going into the regular job all the time, right?
John:
It just felt like time for me to join the club.
Marco:
i am so excited john congratulations this is such such incredibly good news you know what i hope happens and i think it will probably before before too long on an infinite time scale for sure um at some point we're gonna hear about some kind of new corporate speak and john's not gonna know it
Casey:
Oh, that would be amazing.
Casey:
Oh, that would be so good.
John:
We'll see.
John:
It could happen.
John:
I have to admit that I hear Merlin use his corporate speak from when he had a job or whatever.
John:
It does change a surprising amount.
John:
And if you're not actually forced to be exposed to it, I eventually probably won't know about it.
John:
We'll see.
John:
But then who on the show will bring that language in, though?
John:
Because none of us can bring it, so it would have to come from the outside somehow.
John:
Maybe we don't need it.
Marco:
Maybe we don't need any parking lots or kimonos here.
Marco:
We can just leave that in the parking lot and just move right on to our action items.
John:
Even you, you're just quoting stuff that Merlin says, which is now out of fashion and out of date.
Marco:
How would I know it?
Marco:
If I didn't hear about it from you or Merlin, how would I know it?
John:
Where would I learn this from?
John:
But there's, like I said, there's so much of it that I don't bring to the show because you don't want to hear it.
John:
It's just so, it's so weird how you just, you don't notice it until you speak with other people and realize no one else uses these phrases, but you start hearing it constantly at work.
John:
It just comes, it comes through the work environment like a wave, like it just ripples through and it's really invisible unless you start thinking about it.
Casey:
you'll hear it from tina i'm quite sure so uh no i'm sure you'll hear it and many thanks for me and i'm sure you john more than anyone many thanks to tina for for taking this leap with you because that is a big ask especially with the financial burden that's why we talked about it for multiple years yeah i don't blame you and uh yeah with the financial burden of uh of you know college looming that is that is a big ask this is how much college will cost for maggie i just i'm gonna make all day long because now marco at least one person in the show will get them
Casey:
Well, John, I could talk to you about this for years, but we should probably pick a title and move on.
John:
Save questions.
John:
If you have questions about it, we can talk about it in future shows or whatever.
John:
But I would encourage you to read the post and listen to Rectives.
John:
Maybe they'll answer all your questions, then you'll be done with it.
John:
We won't be done with it.
Casey:
We won't be done with it.
Casey:
All kidding aside, is there anything that you would like to plug other than the obvious ATP.fm slash join and things of that nature and your two other shows, Robot or Not, Reconcilable Differences?
Casey:
Is there anything else you would like to plug while we're thinking of it?
John:
No.
John:
I mean, if and when I have new things, I'll probably talk about them here.
John:
But, you know, that's baby steps.
John:
We'll get there.
Marco:
I'm really curious to see, like, you know, because you've been a programmer your entire life since you were a baby.
Marco:
You've been a programmer.
Marco:
And, you know, now you're going to have that angle of yourself just be removed for a while.
Marco:
And so I know you're going to keep coding because you will have to.
John:
I got two Mac apps to support.
Marco:
Well, but you probably don't have a lot of ongoing needs for those.
Marco:
So I hope and I bet that one thing you're going to do is more apps.
John:
Maybe.
John:
I mean, there's lots of things that are now on the table.
John:
It depends.
John:
It depends on how things go.
John:
I'm still weighing options and thinking about things.
John:
Like, right now, I'm still kind of in the mode of, like, it's nice to have options.
John:
It's nice to not have everything constantly be closed off, and I really need to evaluate those options.
John:
I haven't spent a lot of time in that mode where I can consider all sorts of different things, right?
John:
And, you know, setting aside work stuff, there's, like...
John:
You know, spending more time with my kids before they disappear to go off the college.
John:
Right.
John:
Or other sort of family things that I haven't had time to do before.
John:
Right.
John:
That's my priorities are definitely shifting around to not be like, well, now let me fill every second of my life with work to make up for the work I just removed from it.
John:
That's probably not what I'm going to do.
Casey:
Yeah, I have very strong opinions about this that we should talk about sometime.
Casey:
You know, it's funny to me as you say that it occurred to me that my driving impetus for going independent was wanting to be around for Declan and Michaela while they're young and before they go off to school as in elementary school.
Casey:
And now, and so I felt like my clock was ticking because, you know, that they were going to be gone all day in elementary school.
Casey:
And well, kindergarten, that wasn't the case for Declan because he was here on an iPad because pandemic, but you get the idea.
Casey:
Well, with you, it's the same thing, but on the flip side, Alex is not that far away from college and the clock is ticking for you too, just on the other end of it, which is, which is totally wild and funny.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They don't just, they don't just go away for the day and come back.
John:
They go away and don't come back.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Golly.
Casey:
Oh, John, I'm so happy.
Casey:
I'm so excited.
Casey:
I'm mad at you for not having told us, but I'm so excited.
Casey:
I am so incredibly happy.
Marco:
I'm so happy that you just dropped this like a bomb the way you do.
Marco:
This was the most John way you could have possibly told us this.
John:
It took a lot of coordination to keep the secret for the two weeks since we recorded Rectives.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
I am so excited.
Casey:
Well, congratulations, John.
Casey:
This is fantastic news.
Casey:
And let me say, just one more time, atp.fm slash join.
John:
I think it's still you constantly plugging back, Casey.
John:
I was just thanking the people who had already been members.
John:
Just everyone who's already a member, just stay a member, and I will continue to be able to pay my mortgage.
Casey:
John, if you would like a plug-in to put the membership numbers on your menu bar, I know a guy.
John:
No, thanks.
John:
I don't need to see how much CPU is being used at every second, and I certainly don't need to have that on my menu bar either.
Casey:
Well, I can give you new things to stress about if you need them.
Casey:
Don't you worry.