It’s Totally Leashed
Marco:
So, Casey, how'd you do on the watch ordering or not ordering?
Marco:
Did you manage to resist ordering a watch?
Casey:
Right, so we should start with follow-up.
Casey:
No, I'm kidding.
Casey:
No, I'm kidding.
Casey:
I'm kidding.
Casey:
No, I honestly did not order a watch.
Casey:
I really, truly did not.
Casey:
It is very much on brand for me to have ordered a watch, but I did not.
Casey:
You know, sitting here now, I'm not feeling enough FOMO yet, which is a very unusual occurrence for me.
Casey:
I'm sure the FOMO will come, title, but I don't.
Casey:
Sitting here now, I'm okay.
Casey:
And I was actually talking to my friend, Steve, about this, and he was saying that he's looking for— I love the idea of you having, like, therapy to cope with your FOMO.
I know.
Casey:
well no i was talking to him because i i wasn't sure if he and his wife had ordered watches or not and um and so i was talking to him about what his plans were and he had said you know i don't really like any of the colors of the aluminum that much and that's kind of put me at this impasse where i don't really know what to do and i was thinking about it and again i haven't done like
Casey:
deep research on the color profiles or anything like that on these new watches, particularly the aluminum, but... Well, you couldn't until ordering time.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
That's also true.
Marco:
There were no pages up that would tell you what combinations there were, how much they would cost.
Marco:
Like, there was nothing...
Casey:
It was so weird the way they did it.
Casey:
It seems like a really fairly bungled rollout.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I am not overwhelmed in a bad sense.
Casey:
I'm not really overwhelmed by any of these colors.
Casey:
And I'm not a fancy lad that wants one of the fancy watches.
Casey:
I'm not saying that's wrong for anyone else.
Casey:
It's just not for me.
Casey:
So because of that, I just – and there was nothing compelling that I felt like I needed to have.
Casey:
So no, I didn't order a watch yet.
Casey:
I am not closing the door on it happening sometime between now and the next watch.
Casey:
But sitting here now, I have no plans to order one.
Marco:
You're going to be lined up at the Apple store at 10 in the morning on Friday.
Yeah.
Marco:
could be that's true that is a fair point i kind of thought of it as like well it's all over and done with but you're right i suppose i could go on friday morning and see see how my luck holds out but i know how'd you do did you order four watches ten one um only only two oh i feel good about neither of them but so first of all i i do think it is it is interesting what they did with the aluminum colors this year the way they introduced starlight to replace silver
Marco:
I don't know if Starlight's going to end up looking silver in real life.
Marco:
But one thing I can definitely say that the way it looks on the website does not look like a silver replacement.
Marco:
It looks like a separate color.
Marco:
But that being said, in person, it's probably going to be more subtle than that.
Marco:
So maybe in person, it'll just be like, oh, it's just like silver.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And anecdotally, by far, the most common Apple watches I see being worn by people out in the world are black by a long shot.
Casey:
Oh, no way.
Casey:
No way.
Casey:
It is absolutely the bog standard silver or aluminum or whatever.
Marco:
I see silver more in women than men.
Marco:
But men, it's like overwhelmingly black.
Marco:
And women, it's like half and half maybe.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
Black is by far the most common color I see on people.
Marco:
And it's always aluminum.
Casey:
That is bananas to me.
Casey:
Now I have to pay more attention.
Casey:
Maybe you're right.
Casey:
I just haven't paid close enough attention.
Casey:
But my gut, which is super scientific, tells me that it's
Casey:
It's almost entirely silver watches with anything other than silver being a very rare occurrence at all.
Casey:
So maybe it's a different area.
Casey:
Maybe it's something about New York versus Virginia.
Casey:
I don't know.
Marco:
Long Island versus Fire Island?
Casey:
No comment.
Casey:
If I were to guess, I would say almost everything's aluminum and like 10% of them are black and maybe like 2% are other colors.
Casey:
John, do you pay attention?
Casey:
Which one of us is crazy?
John:
Yeah, my experience matches yours.
John:
I mostly see the regular standard
John:
Silver is the most common one, although I do have to admit that I'm probably looking at people's watches a lot less than Marco is because I really have no interest in watches.
John:
But yeah, if I had to guess what the most standard one, it's silver.
John:
And I do, I'm looking at the website when you're mentioning the Starlight thing.
John:
I'm going to guess that in real life you're going to have a real difficult time telling Starlight from Silver without having them literally next to each other.
Marco:
I hope so, because it does seem like that is a very popular color, and to have a generation where you just can't get that anymore would seem odd.
Marco:
But anyway, you're probably right.
Marco:
Oh, and just also anecdotally, I will sometimes see black stainless steel on higher-end models, but
Marco:
I don't think I've ever seen silver stainless steel besides on my own wrist, which is the one I always get.
Marco:
I don't think I've ever seen anybody else wearing that outside of an Apple conference.
Marco:
And even then it's not common.
Casey:
No snark.
Casey:
How can you tell the difference?
Casey:
Like just looking at the stainless steel versus aluminum.
Casey:
I don't think I would know.
Marco:
You can tell.
Marco:
It's highly polished versus being matte.
Marco:
It's shiny versus matte.
Marco:
It's not even close.
Marco:
And it scratches like hell because it is very polished, but it is a high-polished finish.
Marco:
And so it's like looking in a curved mirror as opposed to the silver looks like an iPhone.
Marco:
So it's a very, very different finish.
Marco:
um but the reason i like the stainless steel first of all i i just i like because it's shiny i can't i'm not gonna candy coat that it is shiny and i like it um but also i find that i like apple watch color schemes that have a lot of contrast between the black top screen crystal and
Marco:
and the case color so the case color should ideally be like bright or light in some way for my preferences that's why a few years back i bought the white ceramic one if they still made white ceramic today now that i'm wearing it like every single day i would probably have bought that this year because i love just that high contrast look
Marco:
I don't like when it looks like just one continuous blob, which is like black watch with black crystal like that.
Marco:
I don't I don't I don't love that.
Marco:
But that is a very popular look.
Marco:
Anyway, so this time I went with stainless steel.
Marco:
But that being said, literally later that day when I was I was running some errands on the mainland that day.
Marco:
And literally later that day, I happened to be in an Apple store picking up
Marco:
some 30 pin dock cables for reasons.
Marco:
I'll get to some other time.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
Which they still sell.
Marco:
Uh, yeah.
Marco:
So I was in an Apple store and I, I happened to see the titanium in the case and I thought, Oh, that actually looks pretty nice.
Marco:
So I don't know what I'm going to do yet.
Marco:
I'm probably going to stick with the steel, which is what I've always had.
Marco:
And the only reason, I'm telling you, I'm not super excited about this generation.
Marco:
The only reason I'm getting it is because the reviews and some more of the photos and videos that are coming out of it are confirming my suspicions that developers of watch apps who are concerned about their design should probably have one of these screens.
Marco:
Because it does seem like there are new layout guides, as I mentioned last week, that you can align text to and everything, but
Marco:
Text isn't the only thing on my screens and I have a lot of controls on the screen.
Marco:
And I also work on a couple of complications for various things.
Marco:
So I just, I kind of want, I need to have one of these screens.
Marco:
And so I, I can't just pass up this whole generation and I could get like a cheap watch and, you know, have like a cheap testing watch.
Marco:
Well, cheap, it's all relative, have a less expensive testing watch.
Marco:
Um, and then have, keep my stainless steel series six, um,
Marco:
But I have so many devices, I don't want to have extras.
Marco:
So that was my thinking there.
Marco:
So I'm just going to replace my Series 6 with a Series 7 in either steel or titanium, whichever one ends up working best for me.
Marco:
And that'll be it this year.
Marco:
And I don't feel good about having spent this much money on something that's not a huge upgrade, but here we are.
Marco:
I did start sleep tracking, but that's going to be probably temporary.
Casey:
Can you unpack this 30-pin adventure, or are you going to just tease us and then walk away from it?
Marco:
Some other time.
Casey:
You're the worst.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let's just move on to some follow-up.
Casey:
Now, this is going to be eating at me the rest of the show.
Casey:
Thank you for that.
John:
No one asked me if I ordered any watches.
John:
No one cares about my watches.
Casey:
You didn't order a watch except maybe for Tina.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I finally used my DTK discount successfully as far as I can tell.
John:
So it was pretty cheap.
John:
Once you take 500 bucks off, she got the gold stainless because that's what her current one is and she likes that.
John:
Cool.
Casey:
I'm sorry, John.
Casey:
Genuinely.
John:
And she did with the dark cherry leather something or other.
John:
That's what she picked as her band choice.
John:
Not that there were many choices, but that's the one.
Casey:
I genuinely dropped the ball on that, John.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
John:
I should have asked you that.
John:
And the shipping dates were bad.
John:
So it's like not coming into like mid-November or end of November.
John:
Who knows what?
Marco:
Yeah, it seemed like my Steel one I got for day one, which I was surprised.
Marco:
I mean, I was hitting refresh over and over again.
Marco:
I was there at minute one.
Marco:
But I was surprised that Steel was available still on day one because that never happens usually.
John:
Yeah, and part of the time barrier was like, like you said, Marco, getting
John:
which one do you want in which style i don't know what it's available right you don't know i don't know and so we had to spend precious minutes like she had to spend precious minutes deciding and i i really emphasize like make sure you decide because i don't want like i can't easily like undo the order with the ddk thing i don't want to have to go through that again so just really decide this is the combination you want and even then it was like
John:
because she was at work at that point i was going through the things and she's like i was like you want the small size right yep this is what you want the material this is the strap size right oh did you know by the way that there is a strap choice do you take the small medium or the medium large oh i don't know go check my existing straps oh they look like small medium right apple care plus or not apple care plus pay all once or pay monthly it's a surprising number of options when you're not the one ordering it and you know but anyway we got through it and in theory our watch is coming someday
Casey:
A Dutch watchdog has found that Apple's App Store payment rules are anti-competitive.
Casey:
So this is kind of in the same spirit as what was going on or what is going on in Japan, amongst other places.
Casey:
And the Dutch Antitrust Authority has found that Apple's rules requiring software developers to use its in-app payment system are anti-competitive and ordered it to make changes.
Casey:
Whoopsie-dipsie.
Marco:
Hey, we'll see where this goes.
John:
I mean, there's been a lot of challenges.
John:
I mean, like every country is doing it now.
John:
There's a lot of peer pressure.
John:
It's like, oh, Japan's doing it.
John:
The U.S.
John:
is doing something.
John:
Everyone is... We've talked about this many times, but this is not what Apple wants.
John:
A bunch of individual countries coming up with their own set of rules.
John:
It's kind of a mess.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean this is why like when – for Apple to continue to invite regulation and court decisions and things like that from governments by their most egregious anti-competitive behavior I think is a strategic mistake because –
Marco:
If you're going to do things that are so egregious that governments will find the need to regulate you, they're not all going to do things the same way.
Marco:
They're not all going to make the same decisions and it's going to be bad for Apple in the long run and probably bad for Apple's users as well because it's going to be this weird fragmented system where certain things are allowed in some places, certain things aren't in other places.
Marco:
It's not a good place to be.
Marco:
Apple's strategy so far has seemed to be
Marco:
well, we can pretty much do whatever we want so we will and shut up.
Marco:
But that's not really going to hold for much longer.
Marco:
It already isn't.
Marco:
And so they're just going to slowly lose control over their own platform in some small and some big ways because they refuse to yield at all.
Marco:
And so people will yield for them.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, it amused me, by the way, if you read this short article, that the complaint was from the people who make Tinder match group, which, I don't know, just struck me kind of funny.
Casey:
There's enough smoke here that there's definitely a fire brewing.
Casey:
And I really think Apple is going to need to act on this.
Casey:
If I were to wager a guess sometime in the next six months, because the...
Casey:
This whole this whole thing is really getting away from them in a very bad way.
Casey:
And Apple does not want all these governments, like you guys said, to dictate the rules for them.
Casey:
They're going to want to get ahead of this and get everyone to just it's OK.
Casey:
We've got this.
Casey:
It's OK.
Casey:
And so I really think that that time is coming.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
Microsoft Store is going to allow third-party app stores.
Casey:
This is a little confusing for me to parse, partially because I haven't used Windows in a long, long time.
Casey:
But if I understand things correctly, in the Microsoft App Store, you can then, from within that, download or will be able to download the Amazon and or Epic Games stores, if I get that right.
Casey:
And then from within there, you can obviously buy and install software.
Casey:
But yeah, they're being a lot more forgiving, which would be nice.
John:
Well, when you're the third place app, the distant third place app store, yeah, this is the kind of things you like.
John:
And Microsoft, you know, this is more blood in the water.
John:
It's like, we'll do what Apple and Google won't do.
John:
We'll let you have your own store within our store.
John:
Hey, why not?
John:
We just want people to buy things from the Microsoft store.
John:
And it's not that weird.
John:
Like if you think about it in the pre-app store world where we didn't have these single company controlled apps,
John:
places where everyone got all their apps, if you got a Mac, you could go download Steam.
John:
And Steam itself was its own little store.
John:
Now imagine instead of just downloading Steam, you got Steam itself from a store because it's basically the equivalent of just downloading it from Valve.
John:
It's not a thing that people are unfamiliar with.
John:
The advent of Steam and these storefronts for vending, in this case specifically games,
John:
is something that people became accustomed to and is its own problem.
John:
Like, Steam wields its own power over the gaming industry in a strange way or whatever.
John:
This is just sort of a, you know, what do you call this?
John:
Nesting dolls.
John:
Matryoshka dolls, whatever.
John:
Yeah, that's right.
John:
That's only the pirated dolls.
John:
Yeah, what is... I'm so old, I can't remember the...
John:
It's YoDog, right?
John:
Yes, yes, yes.
John:
I couldn't decide whether it was HeyDog or YoDog.
John:
YoDog.
John:
So app stores themselves are problematic for reasons that we have discussed at length in this program.
John:
Gaming app stores like Epic Games Store and Steam are also problematic.
John:
And if you nest one inside the other, I think they multiply.
John:
I'll have to consult my mathematics textbook to find out if you multiply the probabilities or do they get raised to the power of.
John:
But anyway...
John:
This this type of thing where Apple is and other game stores like game stores, other app stores like Google and Apple, they're sort of silently agreed upon practices are coming under the eye of various governments.
John:
And there's Microsoft saying we have a thing, a store, too.
John:
And we're nicer than those guys.
John:
Look what we allow.
John:
But I just wanted to underscore that beneath all of that is like, well, OK, so you're allowing this in your store.
John:
But then within Steam and an Epic game store is itself a reaction to Steam flexing its power when Steam was like the biggest and baddest game in town.
John:
Epic was like, we're not like Steam.
John:
We're the good game store.
John:
But anyway, every every one of these game stores just wants to be where Apple and Google are.
John:
So don't forget that as you download your store from your store.
Marco:
it also kind of sucks like as a user like i mean i'm not a windows power user enough these days to care to actually fix this but every single time i boot up my computer my gaming pc i have to dismiss like four different stores login screens oh here's steam now here's gog now here's the whatever the razor thing is oh microsoft has some updates for it's like there's so much crap now it's and i don't even i mean
Marco:
We aren't even necessarily free from this on the Mac in smaller ways.
Marco:
I have my Adobe updater running in the background.
Marco:
Now I have my iZotope updater running in the background.
Marco:
It's like, oh, come on.
Marco:
I hate having to first get a store from my store, and then I get the downloader from my store from my store, and then the downloader gives me my app from my store from my store.
Marco:
And it's like, oh my god, just...
Marco:
Let me buy the app and download the app directly.
Marco:
For God's sake, make this easier.
Marco:
And this is one of the many reasons why I kind of hope we don't enter that world on iOS because we can see on the PC how kind of mediocre and annoying that world becomes.
John:
I mean, the flip side of that is what everyone on a PC would say.
John:
It's like, yeah, but if I want a game on PC, I can go get it wherever it is.
John:
And there is like the war between, you know, Epic and Steam of like trying to get the game developers to sell there and Epic will take a smaller cut, but then they want the exclusives and Steam is flexing its power to take more from game developers and game developers think is worthwhile.
John:
And then it's the question of who gets promoted and all that other stuff.
John:
But as a user, if you're on a PC,
John:
and you want to play what we call a PC game, you can get it.
John:
Whereas if you're on the Mac, you're like, oh, well, if you're on the M1, you know, sorry, Steam hasn't, none of the games have come over to ARM, and 32-bit, deprecating 32-bit killed a bunch of games too.
John:
And, you know, can you even get that game store in your thing?
John:
Like, it's, you get both.
John:
You get...
John:
the freedom to choose from all these different stores but if you really do it sounds like in your case i actually want something from gog and something from steam and something epic now you've got these three storefronts on your computer and in general the way they work is like you can't as far as i know maybe someone who's an expert who does better i don't think you can delete steam and still play games from steam right so if you get a game from steam you say okay well now i'll just uninstall steam because i've got the game
John:
I don't think that's going to go the way you think it's going to go.
John:
And so, of course, they also want to auto-update.
John:
And obviously, being thrown the login screens and stuff like that, I'm sure it's something that you can go into Windows and, as people are saying in the chat, just disable the auto-start items or whatever the equivalent of login items is on Windows, not to be bothered by them.
John:
But yeah, that's the price of access to all the things, is all the things have access to you, too.
Marco:
Having some kind of what in mobile is called sideloading and what in computers is called downloading apps, that is fine in the computer world.
Marco:
Again, I think in mobile, I'm not a huge fan of that prospect.
Marco:
But in the computer world, I'm fine with being able to download software directly from the vendors.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
What I don't like is having increasing amounts of middle people in the way.
Marco:
That sucks.
Marco:
And I...
Marco:
What the industry needs is not more middle people.
Marco:
It's nice to have something that's nicely integrated with the system.
Marco:
We have the App Store, we have the Microsoft whatever store.
Marco:
That's nice for technical convenience sake, but I don't want a whole bunch of...
Marco:
different app stores that i have to make that that are all launching and running in the background and running their own drm schemes and their own auto updater and like it's just it's just a pain and it's burdensome and that's just not that i don't think we're necessarily in a better place like that doesn't make the world better to have four different app stores on windows like that sucks that it's better off having just direct downloads well it makes it better in some ways
John:
I mean, if you think about why Steam became popular, because it was solving a real problem that people had.
John:
Do you remember when PC games were all their own individual installers and how much of a challenge it was to get, say, the three games you want to currently be playing both installed, all three of them installed and working on your Windows PC at the same time?
John:
Because they all have their particular requirements.
John:
Oh, no, that wasn't the problem.
John:
The problem was all their terrible DRM schemes.
John:
that would install root kits on your computer or which which drivers they want to work with or how what their updater is and stuff like so steam came in and say hey you don't have to worry about that you're no longer at the mercy of every single individual game developers attempt to make an installer and an updater steam will handle all that for you and that's why users flock to it and then of course enough users flock to it that it gave valve a tremendous amount of power and that's where these problems all come in it's like
John:
Every one of these things that was introduced was solving a real problem for somebody.
John:
But eventually, if you become the biggest or the only game in town, it's like you start seeing dollar signs.
John:
And now you start turning the screw on everybody.
John:
And developers start to not like you.
John:
And then you realize, hey, we have game players over a barrel because, of course, you need Steam.
John:
Because if you want to play games on a PC, you need Steam.
John:
What are you going to do?
John:
Individual installers for every game?
John:
Ha, ha, ha.
John:
No one wants to go back to that.
John:
So now you start messing with developers and throwing more ads in their face because you show it gets them to buy more stuff, right?
John:
So this stuff does go bad, but in general, it comes from a place of some kind of progress.
John:
Like I remember the first time I used Steam, I'm like, wow, this is so much better than dealing with individual games because every game was different and they were all at a varying quality.
John:
And Steam sort of was a level playing field from the user's perspective.
John:
It was one application, one place to deal with all your game stuff.
John:
um but yeah and then you've got the epic store so now you've got two places and the reason epic store exists is because epic wasn't happy with steam for very good reasons and sometimes users aren't happy with steam so now you've got two and yeah i'm not sure the solution is beyond like altruistic things of like you know what there should be a standardized way to deal with installs and updates and so on and so forth and it should be developed and supported by the os vendor but why are they motivated to do that because if they're going to do a lot why don't they just make their own app store and then they would have all the power and you get an apple or google type scenario more or less
John:
so i'm you know i i think i think this is an inevitable series of events but i think we get there by individual companies doing things that for various for for various moments in time users and developers did like and then it just turns bad and then we get the reaction to that and just the wheel turns whatever the expression might be that's it yeah i got it nailed it casey style
Casey:
Speaking of wheels turning, can we just go back a step?
Casey:
What was your opinion, John, of MTV's Pimp My Ride?
Casey:
Because I feel like you're going to say that you hated it, but I'm hoping against hope that you found something delightful within it.
John:
Can you tell me how this is connected to anything we've discussed so far?
John:
Yo, dog.
John:
Okay, sure.
John:
All right.
John:
I'm not sure I watched any entire episode of Pimp My Ride.
John:
I must have.
John:
I must have seen an entire episode once in a while.
John:
But I mostly know the meme from the internet connected thing and its connection to Pimp My Ride.
John:
I could not have pulled out of a hat if you hadn't reminded me.
Casey:
Oh, it was so delightful.
Casey:
It was trash, but it was so delightful.
Casey:
Did you see it, Marco?
Casey:
Of course not.
Casey:
Oh, God.
John:
Marco hasn't seen it.
John:
Don't you know the meme?
John:
It's a car show.
John:
Well, kind of.
Casey:
Allegedly.
Casey:
Nevertheless.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, we'll move right along.
Casey:
That's a little disappointing, but that's okay.
Casey:
I wanted to share a hilarious and delightful story that a listener sent us.
Casey:
Thomas Q. Brady sent us a link to a blog post that they put up with regard to their adventures with a brand new iPhone 13 Pro.
Casey:
Now, it is worth reading the blog post because I thought it was very, very good and very funny.
Casey:
But the extremely short version is that Thomas was tubing with his family and oopsie-doopsies, his brand new iPhone 13 Pro slips out of his pocket into the water.
Casey:
in like a river or some such.
John:
Can we pause for a moment and think about the idea of I'm going tubing and I'm going to go and I'm going to keep my phone in my pocket right away.
John:
Right away I'm saying maybe this is not the best life choice.
John:
Like I know people always want to be with their phone but when you're going tubing on a river maybe that's the time to think about not bringing your phone with you.
Casey:
This would have been a more appropriate time for a GoPro, but, you know, that's neither here nor there.
Casey:
Nevertheless, Thomas writes, the next morning I took a backup phone to T-Mobile to get a new SIM card.
Casey:
I told the T-Mobile salesperson my tale of woe, and he and his colleagues said, you should talk to that man plus river guy.
Casey:
They told me of a YouTube celebrity that apparently now lives nearby into scuba diving sessions looking for treasure and or people's lost items.
Marco:
This is like the beginning of a movie.
Marco:
It's like, oh, you got to go down to old man Peabody.
John:
It's like, well, there should be a monster in the river that eats him or something.
Casey:
It's so true.
Casey:
But anyway, so long story, slightly shorter.
Casey:
The Man Plus River guy, whose name is Dallas, goes searching and searching and searching.
Casey:
And eventually a scuba tank runs out of air.
Casey:
And he says, oh, the heck with that.
Casey:
I'll grab my snorkel.
Casey:
And then he goes snorkeling to search and search and search and search.
Casey:
And eventually he came up with the phone.
Casey:
But what amazed me was, and this is now reading from Thomas' blog post again,
Casey:
is that the speakers weren't working.
Casey:
I could barely hear anything when I tried to play music or make a phone call.
Casey:
As they've dried out, even those seem to be coming back.
Casey:
The camera lens and screen buttons all fine.
Casey:
I took it to T-Mobile to get the eSIM reactivated and told them what had happened, that it had been underwater for 26 hours.
Casey:
They looked at the water damage sticker that's apparently visible from the SIM tray door.
Casey:
It's a white sticker that turns pink if it gets wet, and that's how they determine water damage.
Casey:
It was white.
Casey:
So, 26 hours underwater.
Casey:
I wasn't entirely clear on how deep, but 26 hours underwater, and it basically works no problem.
Casey:
And so, Thomas goes into a little bit about the, what's the IP rating?
Casey:
I forget what it stands for, but basically the rating as to how it can protect against ingress of dust and water and stuff like that.
Casey:
Is it ingress protection?
Casey:
I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah, like the IP 60, whatever, you know.
Casey:
yeah so the iphone 13 pro is ip68 rated six is the maximum amount which which is according to wikipedia no ingress of dust complete protect complete protection against contact as in so it is dust tight so no dust should be able to get in it and then the eight indicates its water rating eight is the second best which it reads water can enter but only in such a manner that it produces no harmful effects now there are limits to how long it can be underwater and so on and so forth
Casey:
It cannot be blasted by a like powerful jet, which is the most strong rating.
Casey:
But how cool is that?
Casey:
26 hours underwater, some random, well, not randomly, he's a very popular YouTuber, but some YouTuber ends up finding it underwater and the thing is still on and working no problem.
Casey:
I just thought that was such a cool story.
Marco:
Yeah, that's pretty great.
Casey:
And I watched the most recent of the Man Plus River YouTube videos.
Casey:
It is not the video that will presumably eventually go up about Thomas's phone, but it was just a general video about somebody looking for a class ring that was lost in like a lake or something like that.
Casey:
And it was delightful.
Casey:
It was like 15 minutes.
Casey:
And if you have 15 minutes to kill, I recommend it.
Casey:
So you should check that out.
John:
If you're going to lose your phone underwater, it's probably a good idea to do it when it's brand new because that's when all the seals presumably are at their best rather than like a year later when you accidentally left it on the dashboard of your car sitting in the hot sun and like baked all the rings and the rubber is hardening and things are becoming unseated.
Marco:
So there you go.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to RevenueCat for making something that's really hard easy and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Moving right along.
Casey:
Sharon Lynn Falk writes, do you want to handle this, John?
Casey:
This was with regard to larvae in, what was it, like dry pasta?
Casey:
So Sharon writes, any wheat-based product, this is so gross, any wheat-based product can harbor weevil larvae.
Casey:
They will hatch if it gets warm and humid.
Casey:
I learned this living in Florida and turning off the AC when I went up north for three weeks.
Casey:
Now I refrigerate my flour.
Casey:
And Sharon provides a link to PestsHero.com where they talk about what bugs are in my pasta and which ones are safe to eat.
John:
which was super great i don't think the link was from sharon but a lot of people sent in suggestions of different insects i was trying to find a page of list them all you've got your green weevils your rice weevils sugar ants flower beetles think someone had some mediterranean like european moth thing you can read this page and yes it does cover things such as how do i know if there are weevils in my pasta what happens if i cook and eat pasta with weevils in it uh read the page to find out
Casey:
oh god how about if there's any doubt don't yeah seriously yeah that's the good i mean the thing of pasta is not that expensive if you don't want to eat bugs don't but uh they're probably fine oh my god i'm very disturbed right now all right can we move on can we move on please and thank you and let's talk about uh what's going on on monday are you guys doing anything fun
John:
I mean, hopefully.
John:
This is an exciting... For once, the announcement, they send a little picture and a word or whatever to announce the event to various people when it's happening.
John:
And this one is extremely straightforward, I feel like.
John:
The event is called Unleashed, with a period, not an exclamation point, Jaws.
John:
And the little animation that accompanies it is like an Apple logo with...
John:
What look like speed lines kind of coming at you, as Todd Vaziri will tell you, this is not a proper Star Wars-style hyperspace Starfield thing, but it's clearly inspired by a similar thing.
John:
And Jaws, Greg Jawsbiak of Apple, tweeted a little animation with this thing, and the text of his tweet is unleashed!
John:
These next six days are going to speed by.
John:
So...
John:
fairly straightforward no uh complicated reading here apple will announce things that are fast and that's exactly what we expect and they're going to apparently emphasize the fact that they are fast and what is unleashed hopefully the m1 will be unleashed by adding more of it and putting an x on its name or whatever uh so this is exciting this is presumably the mac event that we've all been waiting for we talked a lot about laptops in the last show
John:
Maybe they'll also introduce those AirPods, the regular AirPods that don't go in your ear canal that we talked about for the previous event, but that didn't show up, but still are apparently a real thing.
John:
Who knows?
John:
But all I care about are the Macs.
John:
Bring on the Macs.
John:
Yes, indeed.
Marco:
I'm so excited.
Marco:
This is actually earlier than I would have guessed this event would be.
Marco:
I was thinking more like maybe end of the month.
Marco:
So this is...
Marco:
very promising i mean assuming this is most likely the mac event which you know i think by all means it certainly looks very likely to be the case i am just so looking forward to this you know we talked last week about the laptop rumors in particular and we talked in the past shows it just i i really want to see what what is the next step in the m1 or the apple silicon progress like what how do we broaden these chips into the higher end products
Marco:
You know, I personally have been full time M1 user for almost a year now.
Marco:
And I love this this chip.
Marco:
And this is the lowest end one.
Marco:
Like this is the most likely the slowest and worst Apple Silicon chip that will ever be in a Mac.
John:
It's leashed.
John:
Right.
John:
It's not a leash.
Marco:
It's totally leashed.
Marco:
Well done.
Marco:
You want to get rid of that.
Marco:
And in some ways it is.
Marco:
Like, you know, I've been using 16 gigs of RAM this whole time and I could really use more of that.
Marco:
I talked about, you know, there's only four high speed cores.
Marco:
I would love more than that for the performance cores.
Marco:
I just cannot wait to see, like, what is the story here?
Marco:
And this might not even be the entire story, as we'll talk about next week.
Marco:
You know, whatever we get and then whatever we still need to get.
Marco:
You know, we're expecting things.
Marco:
We're expecting the laptops, basically, the MacBook Pro.
Marco:
What we don't really hear any rumors about, as far as I can tell, for anything imminent, is the Mac Mini that has the bigger chip.
Marco:
We're not hearing anything about Mac Pro options, like the miniature Mac Pro that was rumored with the...
John:
The Mac Mini, there were a set of enhanced Mac Mini rumors.
John:
Remember the one with the magnetic?
John:
I don't know if we talked about it on the show, but it's like skinnier and has a magnetic power cord, just like the new IMAX does.
John:
And it would have an M1X in it.
John:
I don't know if it's rumored for this event, but there were a round of rumors about that.
John:
The Mac Pro, as usual, there's nothing where it's like...
John:
you know other than they're like oh it's a half size one or something something like so the mac pro no one is expecting this event i don't think people are expecting the mini either but at least there's a solid rumor and renderings and feature set that supposedly is in the new mini but yeah this event when they say unleashed like you know they've already done with the m1 max release the max that most people buy the m1 macbook air but if you don't know anything about max you just want a mac
John:
We know you want a laptop because who uses desktops?
John:
Which one should you get?
John:
The M1 MacBook Air.
John:
It's amazing.
John:
Just buy it.
John:
Right.
John:
But for the higher end things, for the people who care about their computers being unleashed, the MacBook Pro is the computer that, you know, it's like Apple sells two Macs, the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro.
John:
And every other Mac is like weird special interest groups like us or have any care about at all.
John:
Right.
John:
And so this is the MacBook Pro event.
John:
And that's all they have to do is put out those MacBook Pros, hopefully, as described in our previous thing.
John:
Everything else, like, oh, I'd like a new Mac Mini.
John:
Apple's like, yeah, everyone always wants a new Mac Mini.
John:
We'll do it someday.
Marco:
Also, I think the large iMac is also a question mark.
Marco:
Yes, yes.
Marco:
Because they do sell a good number of those.
Marco:
I think what we need to complete the Apple Silicon picture is the big iMac, the Pro laptops, and the Pro desktops, whatever that means.
Marco:
I don't know how much of that we're going to get yet,
Marco:
um the if the rumors about the jade c chop and jade c die thing from a few months back if those end up being correct and looking at what they did with the m1 i would assume that the high-end mac mini the macbook pro and the big iMac will all use the same chip
Marco:
whatever the m1x or whatever with the m2x the m plus whatever that's called i'm assuming all three of those product lines use the same processor and then the only question is whatever the mac pro might use which might be like two or four of those same things or whatever
John:
Yeah, and I think it's perfectly fine.
John:
Kind of like it was fine for the M1 to be used everywhere it is, as we pointed out in the past shows.
John:
Every machine that has an M1 is happy to have it and it is appropriate for it, including the iPad.
John:
It's fine.
John:
And those things that you listed, the high-end PowerBook, the iMac, the quote-unquote big iMac, and the faster Mac Mini, those can definitely all be well-served with the variability of the GPU cores.
John:
Again, the rumor is you can get one with more GPU cores and less, right?
John:
But in general, the CPU cores
John:
I don't know, I'll go back to our previous show where we talked about these rumors, right?
John:
That one feature set, including the RAM limits, including the rumored RAM limits, can serve all those machines fine.
John:
Because if you get a big iMac and you're like, oh, but the big iMac can only hold 64 gigs of RAM.
John:
It's like, well, it's not the Mac Pro, and the Mac Pro isn't out yet, but that's fine for the big iMac.
John:
If it has...
John:
32 GPU cores and the normal big set of CPU cores and maxes out at 64 gigs of RAM.
John:
That feature set is also fine for the MacBook Pros and the Mac Mini would love to have.
John:
I mean, I don't know if the Mac Mini will get it or deserves it or whatever you want to say because the Mac Mini is often neglected, but it would fit fine in that machine as well.
John:
um and and it fits with what we know of apple's rollout which is let's just try to use the same chip as in as many places as we can and i think i would be happy with that whole thing but i for this event i'm actually only expecting the laptops and anything else i get is gravy yeah i i think the laptops are obviously the most likely i bet we're gonna get at least one at least either the mac mini or the big iMac and probably the mac mini but we'll see
Casey:
I'd be surprised we got any desktops.
Casey:
I think they are the most likely.
Casey:
I'll be super surprised if we get anything that's not like just straight up computers.
Casey:
You know, I'll be surprised we get AirPods.
Casey:
Personally, I'm hoping for AirPods Pro because I think it's time for me to get a set.
Casey:
And I'm waiting and trying to resist up until the time that there's a new version.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Nevertheless, I...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I have this, what was it?
Casey:
It's a year old or two-year-old 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
What was this?
Casey:
It was 2020, so it's a year old.
Marco:
It was one day before the Apple Silicon transition began.
Casey:
Yeah, basically.
Casey:
That's true, because I got it for that keynote, didn't I?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So anyways, I don't have any problem with my laptop, but I don't even know why I'm more keen to update this than I am my iMac Pro, but I really would like to have a new 13-inch MacBook Pro.
Casey:
I know I've said this several times.
Casey:
I really don't want to give up on ports if I can avoid it.
Casey:
Just like a week or two ago, I had all four ports chugging on something.
Casey:
I think I had power...
Casey:
Ethernet, phone, and there was one other thing I was using at the same time.
Casey:
I can't remember what it was now.
Casey:
But I do occasionally use all four ports, and so I would like to keep all of them.
Casey:
And I would like to be able to do stuff in SwiftUI in less than a calendar year, which would be super cool.
Casey:
But if there was a new iMac Pro, then I'm going to have a real uncomfortable conversation with Aaron about how I'm going to replace my entire computing life in one shot.
Casey:
So we'll see how that goes.
Marco:
I need it for my work.
Casey:
Well, and I can pull that card sometimes, but not always.
Casey:
Nevertheless, you know what?
Casey:
Come to think of it.
Casey:
Have I mentioned recently that you can go to ATP.FM slash join if you would like.
Casey:
Just going to throw that out there.
Casey:
But no, I'm very excited to see what's released next week.
Casey:
I think it should be interesting.
Casey:
I...
Casey:
I am trying not to get my hopes up that we are going to get the, you know, longtime Apple user apology tour that we're all hoping for with, you know, the SD cards and the HDMI ports and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But, oh man, I, I'm just, I'm excited to see what they do here.
Casey:
Cause I feel like we really know so little and we are going to know so much more so soon.
Casey:
So it is not the longest six days of my life, but I am super excited for it.
John:
They're supposed to speed by, they get speed.
John:
It's not that they're going to be long.
Yeah.
John:
I have two big fears about this event one we talked about in the past show which is like are they really going to do the thing with the laptop have they really turned a new leaf and are on a new strategy like the rumors say or is that just not true right so that's my one fear not that I'm into laptops but I feel like I hope that rumor is true and my second fear is very specific my second fear and again I haven't been keeping up with the rumors on this so I don't know if it's founded second fear is that they'll max out at 32 gigs and I'll be super sad because I think that is not appropriate for all these machines maxing out at 32 is not
John:
good well the the current macbook pro the the current big one max out of 64 i i don't think they would they would replace the 16 inch with something that has lower maximum ram specs i i really hope that's true but i'm just like because we have these questions about economically speaking how much ram can they shove in the unified memory thing and we you know we did a lot of stuff with the gpus where i did a bunch of back of the envelope math to show that you know
John:
gpu power is within shouting distance given the size of the rumored things and so on and so forth but i don't know what factors are involved in the ram thing and the fact that the the the fact that the m1 is even available with eight bothers me right because i just feel like it's not appropriate and that makes me think oh maybe it's it's really expensive to do that you know the unified memory architecture and
John:
I have seen a couple of rumors bouncing back and forth over the past months of like, will it be 32, will it be 64?
John:
So those are my two fears.
John:
The laptop things aren't true and they haven't really turned over a new leaf, which will be sad.
John:
Or that the high end, you know, that any of these things, that the laptops, the iMac, the Mac mini, the new unleashed chip is still leashed to 32 gigs.
Casey:
Marco, what would you be most excited to see?
Casey:
Like if we really do get the apology tour, is the SD card that we may or may not be getting the most exciting?
Casey:
Is the death of the touch bar the most exciting?
Casey:
Like if you could choose only one, what would you choose to make you just overjoyed?
Marco:
When the current M1 series of laptops, they basically swapped in the M1 guts and left pretty much everything else the same.
Marco:
And what that has resulted in is a almost ridiculous surplus of battery life.
Marco:
Because they replaced the more power-hungry Intel guts with the more efficient M1 guts, but didn't change the battery sizes.
Marco:
And so as a result, my MacBook Air has ridiculous battery life and also no fan.
Marco:
That's awesome.
Marco:
I love that.
Marco:
My fear is that they will or have taken the opportunity now that they have, quote, surplus battery life.
Marco:
And maybe they decided to make them thinner and lighter and shrink those batteries down a bit.
Marco:
I hope they haven't.
Marco:
Because having this MacBook Air with its ridiculous battery life has made it so that for the first time ever, I rarely need to think about my laptop's battery life.
Marco:
I can bring it, if I'm going on an overnight trip somewhere, or even a weekend trip somewhere, I can bring my MacBook Air, have it just in my backpack, occasionally pull it out and use it, and just never have to think about it and never have to plug it in for that entire trip.
Marco:
If I left it upstairs for a couple days, I know I can go to it and use it, and it'll be fine.
Marco:
It won't be discharged, or it won't be at like 10%.
Marco:
It's been amazing having a laptop that has battery life that's more like an iPad in that way.
Marco:
You can kind of just not think about it for a while.
Marco:
Actually, it's honestly better life than my iPad.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
And so I hope whatever they've done with this next generation of laptops that we hope is about to come out, obviously I hope they're good.
Marco:
And we went through all last week all the different things that we hope they come with and everything.
Marco:
And that all sounds great.
Marco:
But I hope they haven't shrunk the batteries by too much.
Marco:
I'm sure they've shrunk them by a little bit.
Marco:
I hope they haven't shrunk them by too much because this is such a great...
Marco:
like situation we have now with these laptops where we finally have great battery life for the first time, literally ever in a laptop, all of their claims in the past have, they've never panned out to be great battery life in a laptop ever, ever, ever.
Marco:
They've always been okay.
Marco:
Maybe decent.
Marco:
Some of them have been pretty poor, but,
Marco:
It's never been great.
Marco:
Now it really is.
Marco:
And I hope this wasn't a one-time fluke, like, during this transition.
Marco:
I hope they actually keep this standard up of having this good a battery life.
Marco:
So that's, honestly, that would be, like, my stretch goal of what I hope to see.
Marco:
That's assuming they haven't, you know, screwed up anything else.
Marco:
But I think, you know, when Apple designed these last-generational laptops for the 2016 release,
Marco:
And that was a long time ago.
Marco:
That was deep into the unedited Johnny Ive era.
Marco:
That was, I think, some of their worst products came out of that era.
Marco:
And this is a very different time.
Marco:
Again, that was 2016 that those came out.
Marco:
So this is significantly later.
Marco:
And hopefully they have learned.
Marco:
And the products they have designed more recently than that
Marco:
have pretty much gone on an upward trend.
Marco:
They've been better by a lot.
Marco:
And so I expect great things here.
Marco:
I don't expect this to be a compromised product line or a controversial one.
Marco:
I expect this to be great and boring.
Marco:
It should be amazing and...
Marco:
And it should not have any kind of massive drama.
Marco:
It shouldn't require the bags full of dongles that we've all been carrying.
Marco:
They shouldn't have any kind of massive missteps like the butterfly keyboard or the touch bar.
Marco:
I expect them to be really great laptops that are just normal.
Marco:
Once you buy them and you're over the newness of it, it should just feel like a great normal laptop.
Marco:
You shouldn't have to think about any XYZ part of it that's stabbing you in the back every time you use it.
Marco:
It should just be a great computer.
Marco:
That's what they used to release on a routine basis.
Marco:
Now, I'm pretty sure I'm confident that they have the skills and the direction and the humility in this area to do it right this time.
Marco:
So that's what I'm looking forward to also.
John:
I have some confidence that they're not going to mess with the battery too much, if only because they're with the Unleash thing.
John:
I hope they're really putting in enough work.
John:
hardware in there that at maximum tilt where everything going off it will really eat battery right and so i think they'll still have great battery life for people who are just tooling around on them or whatever but if you really want to exercise all the stuff they put in i think they're still going to have to put in similarly sized batteries just to handle that you know the the aggressive case maybe not so much on the 14 but certainly on the 16 so i and and looking at the rumor renders who knows how accurate they are
John:
if it's thinner by a millimeter it's fine but i feel like and you mentioned they kept the battery the same size the macbook here i think they might have increased it a little bit because the like the the logic boards shrink a little bit for the these arm things as well they were already tiny with the intel things but they're even tinier now because everything is shoved into the system on the chip right and that makes actually makes a little more room for battery so who knows how it'll come out if if the rumored ports are true they're going to eat in some space but then logic board is going to be smaller so you get some space back so
John:
I think also part of the supposed new ethos is not just give people ports the need, but also let's get off that thin and light thing.
John:
And arguably, Apple has learned that lesson, even on the laptops a little bit with like the discontinuation of the MacBook One and the fact that over the past few years, like the new 16 inch MacBook Pro is
John:
They didn't lean heavily on even making that thinner.
John:
Not that they really could with the Intel chips.
John:
But anyway, if they were going to lean on something to make it thinner, I feel like we'll see that in the M2 MacBook Air next year.
John:
Because that's the machine to do that on.
John:
That makes sense.
John:
But for the big honking 16-inch that's going to be unleashed, I hope they still stick with essentially the biggest battery they can legally fly on a plane with.
Casey:
I forgot about that.
Marco:
Actually, Casey, I do have an answer to your question that's not crappy.
Marco:
What would be my most mind-blowing thing is if the 14-inch is fanless.
John:
that's interesting i really don't expect that's not appropriate is it you think that's appropriate for the 14 inch macbook pro to be fanless i don't think they will do it but but i i would love it if they did i mean you just want an m2 macbook air like because if you want a fanless like i if it's going to be unleashed part of the leash is the lack of a fan because you have thermal throttling and you can't clock it as high or whatever unleashed means you have a fan
John:
So if you don't want a fan in your thing, Apple will have computers you can buy, but I really hope the 14-inch has a fan.
Marco:
A quiet one, but... The M1 MacBook Air, which is fanless, and it's the only M1 computer that is fanless, it actually is not that much less performant than the ones with fans in actual use.
Marco:
If you look at the actual benchmarks and workload and load testing and thermal testing...
Marco:
It actually doesn't get that much slower than the Mac Mini or the 13-inch MacBook Pro that has it now.
John:
It doesn't have 32 GPU cores.
John:
I feel like the delta between full tilt and idling is going to be way bigger for these things.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
And also, in all fairness, the Mac Mini that I've been using as my desktop for most of the last year, it has a fan, and I've never heard it.
Marco:
And so maybe this is just wishful thinking.
Marco:
But the MacBook Air that is fanless...
Marco:
As we mentioned, that's an old case design.
Marco:
That design was never made to be fanless.
Marco:
And what they did – what they had to do to make it fanless – so there's these like regulations with safety like with laptops in certain countries that the bottom of the laptop that touches your skin in much common use when it's on your lap –
Marco:
Uh, it, that can't get above a certain temperature with sustained use just for like safety and comfort reasons and certain regulatory reasons.
Marco:
And so the most obvious way, if you were going to cool a laptop down passively and you have this giant metal underside of it, the most obvious thing to do to cool would be to bond the heat generating surface of the processor to
Marco:
to that metal surface that because it's like a giant metal heat sink basically as the exterior casing of the laptop but because of those thermal limits for comfort and health and stuff you can't really do that so what they did with the macbook air if you look at the teardowns of it it basically has like an air gap like there is a heat sink inside the laptop that does not touch the exterior of the case it just basically heats up the heat sink and then the air that's in there
Marco:
But air is an insulator, largely thermally.
Marco:
It's not a great way to cool things passively.
Marco:
So if they redesigned the case of the laptop, I think there are other places they could dissipate heat.
Marco:
Maybe the screen lid.
Marco:
Maybe some parts of the top decking that are away from the keyboard.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
What I'm saying is the M1 MacBook Air, which is fanless, is in an enclosure that was never meant to be fanless.
Marco:
If they design a new enclosure with that from the start as a goal, they could do it differently and they could potentially dissipate much more heat.
Marco:
Again, I don't think they're doing this for the 14-inch.
Marco:
I don't think they would.
Marco:
But I would love it if they did.
John:
I mean, again, you just described the M2 MacBook Air rumor.
John:
It's going to be a case designed to be fanless from day one.
John:
It's going to have higher thermal limits than the current one because it's purpose-built for it.
John:
It'll probably also be thinner and lighter.
John:
And the M2, if they crank it up, might even dissipate more heat than the M1 does just because now they have the headroom because they have a better case.
John:
But we'll see.
John:
There's only so many places you can chuck that.
John:
The place I mainly remember the heat going is...
John:
especially with like the original like powerbook g4 and stuff is would be the piece of metal between the function keys and the screen like the piece of metal on the on the lower part of the case that would get so hot which it's basically the right place to do it because you tend not to touch there and it's not touching your leg it's radiating into the air but man that thing would get probably even on modern laptops if you just reach slightly above the keyboard to that metal yeah if you're really working your laptop that'll get warm
Casey:
I would love to have, first of all, no regressions, because you never know with Apple.
Casey:
Modern Apple of the last year or two doesn't seem to want to step backwards like Apple of a few years ago often did.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I would like no regressions.
Casey:
But the other thing I think I would like in the spirit of Unleashed is...
Casey:
Let's get rid of those limitations that seem silly at a glance, that seem to be holdovers from the M1 seeming to be a largely iOS processor built for iOS.
Casey:
And so an example of this is the limit of 32 gigs RAM.
Casey:
No, 16 gigs RAM.
Casey:
I'm
John:
M1 and and I believe it's still true that it's only one external display except maybe the Mac mini is that right or did I make no because you can like that's what they say on their specs page but it's so easy to make to connect more than one monitor with these various adapters and dongles and stuff which is not great but it's not an actual limitation
Casey:
It's a compromise, it seems, right, that you need to go like USB-C to HDMI and HDMI to a monitor and then you can go direct USB-C to a different monitor or whatever.
John:
Yeah, there are other ways to do it, but it's more annoying than it should be for sure.
Casey:
Yeah, and so I feel like those seemingly arbitrary limitations or the limitations that seem to be because it was born as an iOS chip.
Casey:
I would really love for those to go away.
Casey:
It's not like I almost never connect my laptop to a monitor.
Casey:
And in fact, if I do, it's usually sidecar.
Casey:
It's not a physical monitor at all.
Casey:
And actually, if I ever do, it's usually a television because I'm using it to watch a movie when I'm traveling or something like that.
Casey:
So it's not something that would really fix a need for me, but it's just in principle something that I think is unfortunate.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And I haven't lived with 16 gigs Ram in a long time.
Casey:
And I know that it's not, you know, it's not all apples to apples on the M one max, but I would really, really find it difficult to buy a professional and allegedly professional computer in 2021 and late 2021 with only 16 gigs Ram.
Casey:
Like I feel like I would want at least 32, maybe even like John was saying 64, I don't know.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
So, yeah, I think those seemingly arbitrary limitations is what I would love to see go away.
Casey:
And in two ports, I'd like to see more than two ports.
Casey:
Again, a seemingly arbitrary limitation that is applicable to the laptops, at least, that I would like to see go away.
Casey:
And if they can accomplish that, if this is really a chip that is built for desktops, or at least behaves like it, whether or not that's the actual history of it, I think that would make me the most happy.
Casey:
John, do you have any thoughts on this?
Casey:
I know you love laptops so, so much.
John:
You know, I think I expressed everything I wanted to say last week.
John:
I just hope that the rumors about the new ethos are true and that these laptops really embody them.
John:
In terms of limitations of the system on a chip, there's another thing we mentioned briefly last time and I'll reiterate now.
John:
the expectation and I think it's a reasonable one is that these are not like this is this is like it's the stuff from the M1 but more of it right so it's not like oh it's totally different whatever they call it whatever they end up calling it don't get distracted by the names but I keep referring to like M1X implying it's like it's M1 guts but more stuff and on that end the idea that they're going to
John:
fix weird limitations that were present in the m1 and they'll fix them in these i'm not sure that we should be expecting that just because like this is following this is what intel has always done like the first chips that come out are not the zeons with like the new cores of the new architecture it's the smaller and cheaper ones and they build up to the zeons and so that's what apple's been doing you release the small one with the m1 cores and all that other stuff and then this one is going to be the big one but it's going to have the same or similar m1 cores and stuff and i would imagine the same or similar
John:
um io or whatever whatever it is that's stopping them from doing multiple displays easily hopefully that's not something that's inherent in the architecture and hopefully it was just that you know they would have added added needed to add more you know lanes to some bus somewhere or something and that'll be solved by this one um
John:
If the chips in these unleashed things really are like, oh, all new cores, if it's like the A15 cores, for example, or the A15 GPU cores, which, as we covered in past shows, are actually different as well, I will be very surprised by that.
John:
And what it will do is it will make the M1 seem like this weird stopgap, right?
John:
They just had to get something out the door ASAP, and so they gave you the M1.
John:
But really, they were working on these unleashed ones that essentially have A15 cores in them.
John:
I don't expect that right now.
John:
I'm still fully expecting these to be M1, but more, which will be great.
John:
M1's a great chip.
John:
But I think that kind of dictates the feature set, whatever stuff that was, if it is M1 guts, whatever stuff they planned on with the M1 guts, you're going to get that, but just more of those guts.
Casey:
So, as a final question before we move on, and let's start with John, what is this chip going to be called?
Casey:
Just for bragging rights, and assuming there's only one chip, which maybe there won't be, but what are they going to call this chip that they're announcing Monday?
John:
I mean, I, again, have not been keeping up, so I'm just going to go with the boring old M1X.
John:
We're already trying to make the shirt for it, so...
John:
Please let it be called M1X because it'll save us a little bit of work.
John:
But yeah, Apple can call it whatever the hell they want, but M1X is what I'm thinking of it as in my mind for the reasons I just stated that I expect it to be the M1, but extra.
Casey:
Marco?
Marco:
I'm also going M1X because, you know, we talked about this before.
Marco:
You know, a lot of people think, oh, maybe this should be the M2, the M3, but I think that's what future year's chip lines will be.
Marco:
I don't think the...
Marco:
you know bigger core version of the m1 will be called the m2 i think the m2 is next year's chips or you know it's like the chips that come out next spring that are based on the a15 or whatever um i mean and it's possible you know one thing that we haven't talked about it is possible that they might skip m1x and
Marco:
And these new chips might be M2-based in their naming because maybe the new chips will use A15 cores instead of the A14-based cores that are in the M1.
Marco:
So it's possible that M1X might never exist.
Marco:
and that maybe the M2 goes in most of these things, or maybe they start out with M2X, and then we get the M2 in the spring with the MacBook Air update that's rumored.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But I think the most likely outcome here is this is the M1X, and it's based on the M1 cores from last year, but more of them in larger chips, and that the cores that are based on the A15 updates this year are possibly coming in future products.
Casey:
I think it's going to be M2 or M2X or something M2 derived.
Casey:
And I'm saying that for a couple of reasons.
Casey:
First of all, the M1 was roundabouts of this time last year.
Casey:
And second of all, the A15, right, in the new phones?
Casey:
There's so many of them.
Casey:
I can't keep track of them.
Casey:
So the A15 in the new phones...
Casey:
as we've said plenty of times, is not an earth-shattering difference from the 14 that preceded it.
Casey:
And what if the chip team, which we know has suffered some losses over the years, what if they were focused on these new chips for these new computers?
Casey:
And so I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this is going to be a bespoke computer chip, not just something that was derived from an iPad or an iPhone chip.
Casey:
And it will be called M2 or M2X or something along those lines.
John:
Speaking of the A15, one thing that is a possibility here is like because the Macs are in such low volume compared to the phones, it's possible that these unleashed chips, whatever cores they use, might use the new N5P or whatever, like the new refined TSMC 5 nanometer process that Apple is using for the phone chips.
John:
And I say that just because the volume is so low.
John:
Why not?
John:
You can just carve out a tiny little sliver of spare capacity.
John:
I think I just saw some rumor that Apple was stepping down its iPhone orders because of whatever.
John:
You don't need much of a percentage miss on iPhone prediction to say, oh, now we have enough capacity to cover all the MacBook Pros.
John:
Because most people don't buy MacBook Pros.
John:
They buy the cheap laptops.
John:
Those are the big sellers.
John:
And in the grand scheme of things, the numbers are so small compared to
John:
iPhones that I really do hope that these chips are built on the new process, because as we talked about last week, part of what makes the A15 good is like, oh, you get a free five, whatever it was, you know, five or six percent clock speed increase for no increase in power because we improved the process.
John:
That's great.
John:
That is a great example of Unleashed.
John:
Oh, we get speed for free and we don't burn any additional heat?
John:
Yes, please.
John:
Put that in the MacBook Pros and then also crank it up even higher.
John:
So I really hope these use the new process just to, you know, goose them a little bit more, regardless of what cores they use.
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right, Marco, you have in the show notes something very interesting.
Casey:
Marco's new Dropbox setup.
Casey:
Tell me about this.
Marco:
Yeah, this is a pleasant little surprise.
Marco:
People a few weeks ago started recommending to me this new Dropbox client called Maestral.
Marco:
And it is an open source Dropbox app that runs on Macs and Linux.
Marco:
I've been using it myself.
Marco:
I uninstalled Dropbox from my Macs and I've been using it on Mac and also on Linux on a server that I run that hosts my blog because it's a Dropbox based blog engine.
Marco:
And Dropbox forever ago, they had a Linux CLI version of their client.
Marco:
It broke constantly and my blog just hasn't worked for a while.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
had to like write things by rsync and scp and it's been a mess and and uh so anyway so i i have i've had this running now for the last couple of weeks and here's some reasons why you might want maestral so first of all it is very very basic it does not support some of dropbox's more modern and you know broad or esoteric features that if you first got to dropbox
Marco:
because it was a folder that syncs, this does everything you want.
Marco:
But if you came to Dropbox for its collaboration features and, hey, let me suck all the pictures off of every device you plug in, that kind of stuff, I don't think it does any of that stuff.
Marco:
But what's great about this, so first of all, Dropbox's native app, as far as I'm aware, is still not Apple Silicon compatible.
Marco:
Or not compatible, rather, but it still runs in Rosetta.
Marco:
It still is not compiled for Apple Silicon.
Marco:
Again, I could be wrong.
Marco:
They always say, oh, there's a beta.
Marco:
You go here.
Marco:
And then I've tried that, and it's still always running Intel binaries.
Marco:
So the Dropbox app on your Mac today, if you have an M1 Mac, you're running Rosetta.
Marco:
That might be the only Rosetta app you're still running, at least continuously.
Marco:
So that's overhead number one.
Marco:
Number two, Dropbox recently is an Electron app.
Marco:
So as we've discussed, that has a very large disk and memory footprint.
Marco:
To give you some idea, after I did my laptop first, and then I had Dropbox running on my desktop, and I restarted both machines, they were both fully synced, and their memory footprint, Dropbox was using 740 megs of RAM.
Marco:
my goodness and maestro was using 118 um the dropbox app disk space wise was 421 megs maestro's app is 45 megs so it's 10 times smaller on disk and what is it like five times smaller in ram it is very lightweight and that to me for something that is running continuously
Marco:
On my Mac, on all my Macs all the time, it feels like I have removed a small burden that was just constantly, you know, pegging one CPU core for some reason or, you know, just the amount of RAM that's using is inexcusable, right?
Marco:
So MyStroll is great for that.
Marco:
It is Apple Silicon native as well as Intel native.
Marco:
The Linux version I'm now running is also great.
Marco:
It was super easy to install.
Marco:
It's a Python-based thing, so you need to install some weird Python stuff.
Marco:
But, you know, it was in Modern Package Manager, so it's fine.
Marco:
And it's configurable.
Marco:
You can tell it where to put the folder and everything.
Marco:
The only things I really found that were lacking about it, it didn't transfer over things like whether my shell scripts were executable and certain, whatever extended attributes on Macs
Marco:
tell it like this this bundle is actually something that you shouldn't show the file extension on so like the like my any logic file i have in there will have will show the dot logic x extension that normally shouldn't be shown um so there might be like some extended attribute stuff that it's not transferring properly but as a like file transfer thing it's been fine it's it's been fast um you know the shared folders update just fine and
Marco:
I haven't found, I don't think it has any kind of like right click for share link integration in Finder.
Marco:
So that is one downside.
Marco:
If you use that a lot, personally, I don't need that very often.
Marco:
When that happens, I can just go to the Dropbox website and just get the share link there if I really need it.
Marco:
So it isn't that big of a loss for me.
Marco:
But it's been great.
Marco:
I feel like my computer, I mean, this is probably psychological, but I feel like my computers are faster and less burdened.
Marco:
If nothing else,
Marco:
I trust this.
Marco:
It's a very simple open source app.
Marco:
And Dropbox with their own client software, I do not trust them at all.
Marco:
The Dropbox app has declined over the years to be both technically less sound and far less efficient.
Marco:
And also to be creepy and to try to take over more and more parts of my system in weird ways.
Marco:
They try to play tricks to get you to give them your root password.
Marco:
They play tricks with accessibility stuff.
Marco:
It's weird what they do.
Marco:
And we've talked before.
Marco:
I really have been so turned off by what Dropbox has done with their client apps in recent years.
Marco:
and Maestro really removes most of that.
Marco:
There's nothing bad about Maestro at all.
Marco:
It works well.
Marco:
The things it doesn't support are things I don't really use, and so it's great.
Marco:
I can recommend it.
John:
Looking at their Linux documentation, and they talk about raising the limits for iNotify, which lets me know that they're using iNotify for their change detection, right?
Marco:
Oh, by the way, if you don't have iNotify installed, it won't install it for you.
Marco:
So install iNotify tools in your Linux box before you install Maestro.
Marco:
Learn that one the hard way.
John:
This is a problem I think we talked about years ago, or maybe I wrote about in my Mac OS X articles, like,
John:
The problem you're faced with is, let me know when something happens with these files.
John:
And it's a lot of files.
John:
And you could do it with polling, which is just, I'll just check constantly.
John:
Did anything change?
John:
Did anything change?
John:
Did anything change?
John:
And that is incredibly inefficient and destroys your battery.
John:
And you don't want to do that.
John:
Nobody likes polling.
John:
So you need some sign of OS facility that says, how can I tell when crap has changed in the file system without constantly polling?
John:
iNotify is one of the many features that does that on Linux.
John:
I guess it's the one they chose here.
John:
It's fairly modern.
John:
And it basically lets the kernel know because all local IO goes through the kernel.
John:
And so you can say, hey, kernel, if anyone does anything to any files anywhere, you're going to be involved in it.
John:
And so just so you know, this set of files...
John:
Tell me if anything happens with them.
John:
Call me back, you know, whatever.
John:
And so now you don't have to pull, you just have to wait.
John:
Anybody who does anything to the file system, their code will eventually enter the kernel and the kernel will say, oh, I've got, if this is one of those files you're supposed to be watching, oh, then send that notification.
John:
So it's efficient.
John:
It's good, right?
John:
But as you can imagine, you can't tell the kernel, hey, kernel, if anything happens to any of these millions of files, let me know.
John:
Because now the kernel's like, oh, you know.
John:
I have to keep track of these millions of files.
John:
And every time I do anything to a file, I have to check if it's on this list of millions and it's a paint, you know.
John:
So there are limits in the kernel.
John:
There is not unlimited kernel memory, lots of fixed buffers or whatever.
John:
So that's why there is a limit in Linux that you can adjust to say, how many events am I allowed to have?
John:
How long can the queue be?
John:
How many things can we watch?
John:
So on and so forth.
John:
So if you have a really big Dropbox, as this documentation says, you may need to adjust those.
John:
The reason I bring all this up is on the Mac, there is no iNotify.
John:
The Mac has its own multiple facilities for getting changes about files.
John:
One of them is FSEvents, which is what Spotlight uses and I think Dropbox uses as well.
John:
There's also KQ, which is kernel queue, short for kernel queue, which is similar to iNotify.
John:
There's at least one other facility that I'm not remembering the name of.
John:
But one of the sins of Dropbox on macOS is that historically, and I think still, it has done what is described as drinking from the FS events firehose, which is it just kind of wants to say, I'm going to hook into FS events and I just want to see everything that happens.
John:
in the in the sort of the least discriminating way possible fs events isn't that granular but if like instead of it saying instead of saying just tell me what happens to the dropbox folder it's like nope i'm going to watch the firehose and so literally every single piece of file io that happens in the entire system the dropbox application at least in the past and i'm not sure about right now in theory had to watch at least go by and go nope not interested in that one nope that's not for me that's not in the dropbox folder nope not for me not for me
John:
And that can be expensive, even though it's mostly just like seeing notifications go by, getting sent to it and disregarding them.
John:
That's why you might, if you go into activity monitor, see like DBS events D or whatever the hell that process is called, not burning your CPU, but using CPU.
John:
And you're like, Dropbox isn't doing anything.
John:
Why is it using any CPU?
John:
Oh, it's watching every single file system event go by.
John:
So I do wonder...
John:
what this apparently python based thing uses on mac os to watch for events it's probably not polling because that would be terrible it could be using fs events in a more limited fashion it could be using kq for all i know or it could be using that other one that i can't remember that that mac os has and that like if you're not a programmer now to think about these things but it's like oh i just want to fold to the syncs isn't that easy this particular problem of
John:
hey let me know when something happens so i can do a thing is actually one of the harder problems because if you have millions of files in your dropbox your choices are like the naive choice of like oh i'll just check all the files well checking a million files is incredibly expensive when you're done checking you just got to start checking again because by the time it took you to check tons of things could have happened that's incredibly inefficient so you have to use some kind of
John:
OS provided facility for checking for changes without polling.
John:
All of them have limitations and caveats and costs to using them.
John:
It's better than polling.
John:
It's better.
John:
It's not as costly as polling, but there is some cost.
John:
And so that is one of the main challenges of making a good
John:
magic folder that syncs across the network is finding a a you know efficient way to check and also you want it to be reliable you don't want to miss events if marco you know put something in the folder and says like and and then he sees the little you know maestral thing sync uh and it's like oh great it synced my change and it's done but what if it didn't what if it missed something because it's event watching mechanism missed that event or it got dropped off a queue or whatever like that is the hard problem here and so marco said he trusts this and i think what he meant was
John:
I trust it not to be creepy and do creepy things, but I'm not sure if I trust it to not accidentally miss a file.
John:
As awful as Dropbox is, it has so many users and it's such a big company, I have some confidence that if there's some systemic problem with their missing updates or whatever, they'll notice before I do and hopefully get it fixed.
John:
Whereas this thing, if it's missing and or mangling files in some subtle way, I'm not sure.
John:
I might be the first person to discover that and I don't want to be that person.
Casey:
Still, it's interesting, though.
Casey:
And if I was running Dropbox on my machine, I would definitely be installing this right now.
Casey:
Just very quickly, if you happen to be one of the 10 people who have Synologies that listen to this show, what I've been doing... Oh, God, you really did get a fiber slap.
Yeah.
Casey:
Is that just for Synology or is that FFMPEG 2?
Casey:
No, just Synology.
Casey:
God, I cannot believe you actually got a fiber slab.
Casey:
Anyway, if you happen to be one of the lucky people that own a Synology, then you can use Synology Drive in combination with Cloud Sync, I think.
Casey:
One of Synology's major problems is that they...
Casey:
have terrible names for things and then rename them to similar things 85 times a year.
Casey:
But suffice to say Synology Drive is like Dropbox, but it's run in your own little private cloud.
Casey:
And then you can have the Synology sync with your actual Dropbox such that your actual Dropbox is a subfolder within your Synology Drive.
Casey:
And that's what I've been doing for like two or three years now.
Casey:
at the suggestion of a listener, and it's been working great.
Casey:
So you can also take that approach where you don't have to have anything Dropbox at all happening directly on your computer.
Casey:
It's just pushed off to the Synology to handle it for you, which I also recommend.
Casey:
But this Maestral thing is certainly a lot more accessible for most of us.
Casey:
So that's a top tip.
John:
That Synology thing is probably using iNotify as well.
John:
That tends to be the most modern.
John:
Maybe iNotify is on macOS now.
John:
Maybe that's the one I can't remember.
John:
Someone suggested ePoll, but I think that's just Linux.
John:
Anyway, it's not either here nor there.
John:
I'm not saying any one of these mechanisms is bad or good.
John:
You know, you should or shouldn't be using FS events.
John:
You should or shouldn't be using iNotify or KQ or ePoll or whatever.
John:
You just need one of them.
John:
But all of them...
John:
are tricky like it's not it's not straightforward to make sure that you are efficient and reliable and you know don't have weird corner cases or bugs and stuff like that and in the magic folder that syncs it's really easy to end up with corner cases and this is kind of like the the thing that merlin always harps on about if you have a dropbox with 100 files in it you're fine no matter what like it's fine but if you have a dropbox with four million files and like terabytes of data and you're using selective sync suddenly the problem gets a lot harder and
John:
And the odds of you encountering an issue go up a lot.
John:
Like almost any of these systems we describe will work fine if you are a light user of folders that sync.
John:
But I don't know how much you guys use, but I've definitely been pushing up against not being particularly light user of Dropbox.
John:
I don't like it, but that's just the world we live in.
John:
I keep putting more and more stuff in Dropbox, which I'm sure Dropbox loves because it's convenient to have it accessible everywhere.
John:
And because I still don't trust iCloud Drive.
Marco:
So, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, for whatever it's worth, my Dropbox is just under 7 gigs.
Marco:
And it's 13,000 individual items.
Marco:
Because the reason why, my entire blog CMS is hosted in my Dropbox.
Marco:
So there's at least one text file for every single post that's ever been on my site.
Marco:
And so there's a lot of files and folders and images and stuff like that there.
Marco:
But I can say this worked really well for...
Marco:
13 000 files that are seven gigs um one other thing that i forgot to point out that you might want to use maestral is that the way it works you know the mechanism by which it works is it just using dropbox's api and as a result of that dropbox recently introduced changes to their plans and stuff to make more people buy the paid version that the free versions now have like a computer limit of how many computers that can be installed on before you have to upgrade to the paid plan space regardless and
Marco:
And this does not count towards that limit because it's just an API client.
Marco:
I don't know how long Dropbox is going to let that go.
Marco:
They might have a problem with that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But it's probably not going to be a big enough deal for them to care.
Marco:
So if you are running against the limit of your device count on a free Dropbox plan, this might help you out there as well.
John:
so someone in the chat room posted some links to the source and they have an unfortunately named file called polling.py but it's in an fsevents subdirectory so it looks like they're using fs and some mac os apparently they're using this watchdog python module that uses i notify on linux on mac it can use fsevents or kq and you can choose the implementation if you want but i'm assuming based on the directory name that they're choosing fsevents which is
John:
Honestly, probably a reasonable solution, although Mac OS, I feel like FS events is the most likely to continue working thing.
John:
And I know I say that and then people like, oh, what about the bug when you switch user accounts on the Mac and then all of a sudden Spotlight stopped working?
John:
Yeah, FS events does occasionally have issues or like, oh, I can't search my mail because FS events is host in some weird way.
John:
FSNS probably is not as reliable as iNotify on Linux is.
John:
But given the choices available, I think FSNS was probably the right choice.
Marco:
Oh, also, I had this on my desktop, which is a multi-user desktop.
Marco:
I have an account on this, and so does TIFF.
Marco:
We both do our podcasting from this.
Marco:
So she has Dropbox installed on her account so that she can drop her podcast files into it to transmit to ongoing needs.
Marco:
And I have MyStroll installed on both accounts.
Marco:
And it works great to sync both of them.
Marco:
Mine with my Dropbox, hers with her Dropbox.
Marco:
Never any problems there either.
Marco:
So I can say once again, here's another great thing about it.
Marco:
Works fine on multi-user Mac OS, which is not something I can say for lots of things, including watch unlock.
Marco:
Mac OS itself barely works, but damn it, Maestro does.
Marco:
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Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Derek Aldridge writes, you commented on a recent show that one of the hardest tasks in computer science is creating an accurate progress bar.
Casey:
I've watched a lot of bad progress bars over the years, so I believe that it must be really difficult to do well.
Casey:
But why is it so difficult?
Casey:
uh you know i was thinking about this before we recorded and the the answer i wanted to use was going to rely on like spinning platter hard drives and that's obviously not something we need to worry about quite as often anymore but i mean look at if you were to download something from the internet how how do you know how long that's going to take if it's going at a megabyte a second now will it be a megabyte a second in in 10 seconds
Casey:
What if it goes from a megabyte a second to 100 megabytes a second to one tenth of a megabyte per second?
Casey:
And there's no real way to predict that.
Casey:
And that's just one silly example of why, especially when you have any sort of input or output, you know, any sort of I.O., it gets really hard really quick and you can't really reliably make predictions.
Casey:
But I don't know, John, I'm assuming you put this in here.
Casey:
Do you have a more scientific answer than that?
John:
Yeah, that's the type of question that if you're a user of a thing, it seems mysterious and weird.
John:
It seems like such a simple thing.
John:
I just want to see a progress bar and I want it to fill in some reasonable progression.
John:
I don't think people demand, like you were suggesting, that there are no jumps or stutters or whatever.
John:
But progress bars are so bad.
John:
They're not even close to being correct.
John:
uh that it seems like you know they'll spend an hour for the first two pixels and then jump to the end in two seconds like that's that's really far off and not not a something that you can blame on like variability of like uh disk speed or internet connection right but the reason it seems weird to people is it just seems like it should be a straightforward thing and the way
John:
It doesn't seem weird to programmers because if you've ever had to program a progress bar, you immediately understand why they are crappy.
John:
Right.
John:
Because what you're asked to do with a progress bar is essentially, like I said, know the future and you can't know the future.
John:
Right.
John:
And you like you don't know.
John:
Not only can you not know the future about how things are going to go.
John:
Very often you can't even know what it is you're going to be asked to do.
John:
Think of like an installer or something, right?
John:
The installer knows roughly what it has to do, but if there's any step in the installer that involves like cleaning things up or preparing the way for a thing or whatever, you don't know what you're going to be faced with.
John:
Say you are upgrading something and you have to clean up an old version, right?
John:
You don't know where the old version is installed or if there are seven old versions that you have to get to.
John:
You don't even know how much work you have to do yet, right?
John:
So very often the first job to make a progress bar is like, well, if I want to make this progress bar reasonable at all, I need to essentially do a pre-flight and say, how much work is there for me to do?
John:
I know my job is uninstall X and install Y.
John:
But how big is X?
John:
And where is X?
John:
And how fast is the disk that X is on?
John:
Is X even present at all?
John:
Are there 17 copies of X, right?
John:
I don't know any of these things.
John:
I don't even know what I have to do yet.
John:
And so you'd have to go out and wander and say, okay...
John:
Should I take the time to like or say, you know, your job is to like delete a bunch of stuff.
John:
Should I take the time like the finder seems to and count how many files are in the trash first before I even start the progress bar?
John:
Because otherwise, like empty trash is a good example.
John:
Oh, you should know what you have to do.
John:
Why don't you just measure the speed of the disk and just do it?
John:
It's like, well, how many files are in the trash?
John:
Okay.
John:
Counting the files in the trash can be really fast.
John:
Okay.
John:
Or you might have literally 4 million files in the trash.
John:
Counting 4 million files takes a non-zero amount of time.
John:
Now, how do you show the progress bar for counting 4 million files?
John:
You probably don't because you don't know how many you're counting.
John:
So how can you put up a progress bar?
John:
You have to count before you can even know how to put the progress bar.
John:
And this cycle just repeats and it's just a fractal of itself.
John:
It's just nested thing within thing.
John:
You don't even know what you have to do, let alone how long it will take to do it.
John:
Now try making a progress bar.
John:
Like the boot process of a computer is similar, which is why for various times in the history of macOS, macOS has essentially had a progress bar that's just like, look, don't pay any attention to what we're actually doing during the boot.
John:
Just show a progress bar that lasts roughly the length of time the last boot process lasted.
John:
And if we get close to the end and we're not done yet, just make it slow down.
John:
Like it's totally fake.
John:
Like they don't even try because what you will find if you try to program this is,
John:
Pre-flight is often the most expensive thing you're going to do, and it's better not to pre-flight, and it's like, don't prepare to go, just go.
John:
Don't prepare to move out, just move out from Spaceballs or whatever, right?
John:
And that's often what they do.
John:
They say, I'm not going to try to prepare, because I know if I have to count up all the things,
John:
or meticulously figure out the list of things that I have to do, that might take longer than doing the thing.
John:
And no one wants to wait twice as long.
John:
So the progress bar can be slightly more accurate.
John:
Just start going and just start filling the progress bar.
John:
And, you know, if there are five steps in this installation progress, then have the progress bar.
John:
I've done step one.
John:
I've done step two.
John:
It doesn't matter if step three takes two hours and step one and two take 30 seconds.
John:
This is just how we decided to do it.
John:
You know why?
John:
Because we can't pre-flight this crap.
John:
uh and you know so it's it is understandable as soon as you try to implement it but from a user perspective it's like doesn't the computer know what it's doing or how long it's going to take and the answer is no the computer doesn't know because humans don't know because it's unknowable and figuring it out knowing it is often one of the most expensive things you can do and just slows everything down nobody wants that so that's why i don't use empty trash in the finder i use r minus rf from the command line because r minus rf does not pre-flight that crap
Casey:
That's the most John thing I've ever heard.
Marco:
I would also add other reasons that progress bars are often so bad.
Marco:
There's a lot of, these days, network involvement in the things that we are waiting on progress bars for.
Marco:
And not only are networks potentially fickle and unreliable, things might fail in the middle and have to be retried.
Marco:
Bits of data might not make it and have to be resent.
Marco:
Things might time out.
Marco:
But also...
Marco:
when you're operating over the network, you're dealing with, you know, two unreliable conditions, your end of the network where you might be like moving with a cellular connection or even just moving throughout your house on, you know, some weird wifi setup or, you know, somebody might turn a microwave on next door and blast out the 2.4 gigahertz spectrum.
Marco:
And then that makes all your devices like reconnect and have problems.
Marco:
So there's, you know, you have your own unreliable network and then you have whatever's going on between you and whatever server you're talking to.
Marco:
And then that server could have spiky performance depending on the load that it's bearing at the time.
Marco:
So there's all sorts of unreliability there.
Marco:
And then finally, I would add, to provide a progress report back to the user is more code.
Marco:
For most operations that you would write as a programmer that you might want to display a progress bar for, many of those operations, in order to make them get progress updates and display them to the user, that's significantly more code and sometimes more complicated code than just in the code just saying, all right, fetch this file, now write it out here.
Marco:
And then fetch this file, then write it out here.
Marco:
To do that while also providing progress on that transaction or on whatever operation you're doing,
Marco:
is more work and more complexity.
Marco:
And for most things, that's not worth it.
Marco:
Unless something's going to take a reasonably long time every time.
Marco:
And so most programmers just kind of skip that part and just say, all right, write the file here and tell me when you're done.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
So those are some of the many reasons why this is hard.
John:
Some common programming practice, which I think is a pretty good one, is do a thing and then basically say, if I start doing a thing and it turns out it's taking more than X seconds, now go and throw up a progress bar, which I think is usually a good UI.
John:
Because if it happens instantly, very often, especially in the olden days, but maybe less so now,
John:
it would take more time to instantiate, create, and display the window with the progress bar in it than it would do to do the actual thing.
John:
So lots of, still to this day, lots of applications, lots of, I think, good Mac applications will just try to do a thing when you ask.
John:
And only after 1.7 seconds elapses or whatever their timeout is, they'll say, this is obviously going to take more than 1.7 seconds.
John:
So...
John:
Throw up a window, put a progress bar on it or whatever.
John:
And I think that's right.
John:
Like it's kind of once you pass that threshold of this happens instantly, you need to give some kind of feedback.
John:
But if you tried to throw the progress bar every time, it could be like visual noise.
John:
If the operation is so fast that by the time the progress bar is drawn on the screen, it just zips to 100 percent and disappears.
John:
That's wasting everybody's time.
John:
And it's.
John:
flashing crap on the screen.
John:
One more question in the chat room about this was in the specific case of counting up files, like why doesn't every directory just keep track of how many files are in it and so on up the tree so that you would never need to count files.
John:
You would just ask the top level directory, hey, how many files are under you?
John:
Sounds like it makes a lot of sense, again, until you try implementing a file system.
John:
That's actually pretty hard to do.
John:
Because that would mean that every time something adds or removes a file, everyone's fighting over updating the count of files, and you really need that not to get out of sync, because if it's out of sync, it's useless to you.
John:
You need it to be in sync all the time, but you don't want to pay the contention overwrite for it.
John:
That said, APFS, as we have discussed on past shows many years ago, has this feature, ostensibly, where it does have a way to keep track on a per-directory basis how many files are in it.
John:
Remember, we were talking about when this feature was rolling out, it's like, this will be great, because now...
John:
When we go to the storage screen on iOS, it won't take a year and a day to show us what's using all the storage because it won't have to like crawl the whole file system.
John:
It'll just know this.
John:
I don't know what happened to that feature.
John:
I'm not, macOS doesn't seem to use it.
John:
I think it's still there.
John:
Maybe, I mean, iOS's storage screen also is just as slow as it ever was.
John:
Maybe for other reasons, I think that is still a feature of APFS.
John:
Like part of the great features that is like, we found a way to do this that doesn't cause huge amounts of contention and it actually has adequate performance.
John:
So we're going to, and what that means is you can do this fast,
John:
you know, fast directory file count thing.
John:
I think it's there.
John:
I think the APIs are still for it.
John:
Probably someone will find it and send it to us and we'll have it in the show notes next week or whatever.
John:
But the bottom line is,
John:
If the OSs and the software don't use it, if the common APIs don't use it, it doesn't really matter that feature.
John:
So if that feature does exist and is reliable, I really hope more parts of macOS and iOS start using it.
John:
If it's not reliable, please continue not to use it.
John:
Because it's really important for the answer to the question of how many files in this directory to be accurate.
John:
Not so much for the emptying the trash finder.
John:
Just empty it, please.
Casey:
all right tom jacobe writes what's a good car blog to read to keep up with the latest in car technology preferably one that plays nice with my favorite rss reader net newswire i don't really read any to be honest with you i just get my news through you know people uh in in slacks or through twitter i'm assuming john that you have some good answers for this though so tell me please
John:
really we've answered this one a couple times that people have asked every few years like i'm still a old fuddy-duddy i still get car and driver magazine on paper and i read it on paper and i like it um car and driver does have a website and they do have an rss feed but it's not good it's not a good rss feed uh it like it has like the title and then like not even a description but it's got the title and maybe a few words and then a link to the article so it's
John:
technically it works within that newswire um but yeah if you're looking for a car magazine uh i like car and driver um jalopnik is another website that i often find myself going to but honestly i don't know enough about the website to recommend it specifically i just do know that on twitter kind of like casey i see links there occasionally and i go and read them but in terms of the writing about cars that i can relate to that i think is
John:
Not entirely scummy and slightly less... Anyway, I don't... Anyway, Car and Driver.
John:
That's my suggestion.
John:
They have a website.
John:
Check it out.
Casey:
I used to read Autoblog years and years and years ago and then mostly gave up on it.
Casey:
And if I were to choose one, I'd probably choose Jalopnik, but...
Casey:
But I don't really read anything with regularity.
Casey:
I do watch a couple of YouTube channels.
Casey:
I've given up on Doug DeMuro.
Casey:
I just found that I didn't really like his style anymore.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
Straight Pipes is pretty good.
Casey:
Savage Geese is good.
Casey:
I personally really like regular car reviews.
Casey:
I know that that is a very polarizing channel.
Casey:
Not everyone will like it, but I really, really enjoy it.
John:
um those are three off the top of my head that i can think of uh but i don't know john do you have any that you would like to add i know you do a lot of there's a lot of rebuild ones that you enjoy but um yeah um alex alex on autos is uh less objectionable let's say than even savage geese i would say i enjoy savage geese as well but their their opinions don't always match up with mine but alex on auto is very sort of straightforward it's kind of what i think it was like a spiritual successor to uh motor uh yeah
John:
motor week owing smells maryland 21117 yeah that's motor week is still on it's still on it's still doing it but if you wanted to see like a youtube eyes version of that alex on autos he does very thorough very long explorations of cars he's got his own weird opinions as well but it's less about him and his personality and i think his format is more like motor week it's just like look we're gonna we're gonna sit in all the seats we're gonna look at all the things and it's you know anyway
John:
Doug DeMiro is definitely a thing.
John:
Very often I just go in there to see the cars, but yeah, he's definitely got a shtick.
John:
539... I can never remember the stupid channel.
John:
What's the... 539... M539 Restorations?
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
That's my guy.
John:
That's my... The one and only car rebuilding channel that I've endorsed.
John:
It's the guy.
John:
I think he's like...
John:
Is he Croatian or Slovenian or something?
John:
But he lives in Germany.
John:
M539 is because he likes the, what's the?
Casey:
E39 M5.
John:
Yeah, the E39 M5 is his big car.
John:
He's got a bunch of them, but he rebuilds old BMWs.
John:
He is amazing and great, and I love all his rebuilding, and I know so much about everything that will fail on BMWs now.
Casey:
Which is basically everything.
John:
Many things.
John:
Oh, BMWs from the 80s and 90s, that is.
Casey:
Marco, I know you're going to have a lot of answers for this, so please do share.
Marco:
Yeah, okay.
Marco:
I have never read a car blog on a regular basis.
Marco:
I think what keeps me out of needing to be in that world or wanting to be in that world is I love my electric vehicle transition so much.
Marco:
I don't really care about what goes on in the non-electric world because I care a lot about the electric vehicle options out there.
Marco:
But the problem is most of the electric vehicle coverage out there is about Tesla.
Marco:
And even though I love my Tesla car to drive, the last thing I want to do is follow Tesla news and discussions.
Marco:
That's a that's a garbage fire.
Marco:
So I don't I don't want to go anywhere near that.
Marco:
And so there's just not much for me there most of the time.
Casey:
of course all right and moving right along let's see we've got next sean cohen writes hey question for john he always talks about his old hardware going up into the attic how often does he power anything on check check that it worked etc i've had my own experiences re recapping classic mac hardware reflowing solder joints refreshing heat sinks and so on does john actually maintain all of his hardware smiley face
John:
Apparently we're doing all repeat questions this week.
John:
Yeah, this is another one we answer every few years.
John:
It's time for it to come up again.
John:
We have to re-sortle the question.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The answer to the question is no, I absolutely do not maintain it.
John:
Things are in the attic.
John:
Surely some huge percentage of it just all have blown capacitors and are leaking all over the place.
John:
Occasionally I do take things out and turn them on and test them.
John:
And so far I've been lucky, but I do absolutely nothing to maintain them other than trying to do...
John:
the minimum possible climate control to my attic where they are because it is a finished space but it is not heated or cooled other than through it by windows and my efforts so yeah everything up there is just slowly rotting and when i finally move out of this place or deal with that stuff it's going to be a bloodbath
Casey:
Delightful.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thank you so much to our sponsors this week.
Marco:
Mac Weldon, Hover, and Revenue Cat.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes At ATP.FM
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Tech podcast so long.
Casey:
Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh.
Casey:
I've been really excited for this.
Casey:
John, what's up with your winter hats?
John:
I have a winter hat.
John:
I don't know where it came from.
John:
It might have been my dad's.
John:
It is...
Casey:
Oh my gosh, John.
John:
A lot of things in my life I feel like I own, I don't know where they came from.
John:
And they also might have been my dad's, but they're just, they're old and I don't remember.
John:
It's what I used to call a chicken hat.
John:
Do you know what kind of hat I'm talking about?
Casey:
No.
John:
No?
John:
If you look at it from the side, it's kind of like, let's see.
John:
It's got angled sides and a flat top, right?
John:
What?
John:
So it's like, think of a house.
Casey:
What are you talking about?
John:
Think of a house, right?
John:
It's a square with a triangle on top of it, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Cut off the tip of the triangle on top.
John:
That shape you've got now, that's the shape of the hat.
John:
And when you put it on, if you look at someone on the side, you will see that shape.
Marco:
Wait, so does it have a rigid shape, or is that just like cloth that drapes over your head?
John:
It's just cloth, but that's the shape the cloth is.
John:
You've probably seen this hat.
Casey:
I don't feel like I've ever seen this.
John:
I'm going to need a picture.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, we are definitely going to need a picture.
John:
I have to Google for winter.
John:
It's not actually called a chicken hat, so I have to just Google winter hat and try to find.
Casey:
Winter hat that looks like a house.
Casey:
I hear that if you just type something into Google and not think about it.
John:
Yeah, I should try that.
John:
Winter hat.
Marco:
this is great program it doesn't look like it's a shape like a house the chat room is going through actual pictures of chicken hats and it's probably not what you're i know i know if i that chicken hat it is not going to how old would you say if if you if you might have gotten this hat from your dad how old do you think your current hat is
Marco:
I don't know how time works, maybe 20 years, 25.
Marco:
And you have and are still wearing a possibly 20-year-old winter hat?
John:
All right.
John:
Well, so anyway, the shape is not that important.
John:
I'm just trying to describe the current hat that I have.
John:
You'll see why in a second, right?
John:
So this is the type of hat it is.
John:
I never really liked this kind of hat.
John:
I associated with my dad because he used to wear a chicken hat when we skied.
John:
again it's not called a chicken um or maybe a rooster hat or whatever but anyway this so somehow i came into possession of this green hat and it's made of like kind of a felty type uh not fleece but kind of fleecy turtle furry type material and given that it's 25 years old and has not pilled i'm going to say it's very resistant to pilling because i don't i don't know how it hasn't pilled but it hasn't but here is the key point about this hat
John:
If I was to give you this hat and you were to put it between your fingers and squeeze it, it's like an inch thick with the two halves of the hat together.
John:
An inch thick and squishy.
John:
It is a thick hat.
John:
No, we're not starting that again.
John:
It is not...
John:
that you can't see through it it doesn't have a mesh that you can see through again it's like fleecy type of material if i think if you shoved it up to your face and tried to blow through it no air would come out the other side it is extremely thick which means that it's warm uh and i'm cold all the time so i want a warm hat i'm going to pull this over my head down over my ears and i want it to insulate them from the cold so thickness is a super duper important feature and
John:
And, you know, I've had this hat for years.
John:
I'm like, you know, I should try to find a... Again, I'm not trying to replace it.
John:
I should try to find a backup for this hat, right?
John:
So I started looking around for winter hats a few years ago.
John:
And every single hat I found is like the thickness of my sock.
John:
and pretty much as as like wind and like weatherproof it's like i can see through this hat like i can literally see sunlight through this hat when i hold it up to the light in the store i'm gonna put this on my head it's so thin it's like paper thin and you know like like that's not gonna be warm i need something that is thick and thick is thick and squishy is nice too like it's comfortable it's comfy to be i don't want a skin thin thing
John:
um and i know i'm not at the majority most people don't want a thick hat because then their head gets all sweaty and it's gross like i get that i understand why this is not the popular hat but somehow somewhere someone i think related to i think we got this hat from rei maybe because i did a lot of investigating to try to find this hat at one point made thick hats
John:
uh and so now i've been on this multi-year in the background type of thing where if i'm ever in a store and they have winter hats i go over to them and i squeeze them all and go nope thin thin thin thin thin thin nope nobody makes a thick hat and i just move on and i bought a bunch of additional hats like beanies and knit hats and all this other stuff and like buying them from amazon based on reports of how thick they might be and
John:
They just were all incredibly thin.
John:
I went to L.L.
John:
Bean.
John:
I've been to all the various stores in person.
John:
Not like I'm hunting with this hat because I still have my other hat, but now I'm living in fear of losing it because if I lose this hat, like that's it.
John:
I can never buy a winter hat again.
John:
And I'm not even picking about style.
John:
I don't need it to be a chicken hat.
John:
I don't need anything about it.
John:
I'm like, I just need it to be a thick hat.
John:
And there is literally nothing.
John:
And so it's very disappointing to me.
Marco:
So first of all, I'm going to guess that this hat is somehow magic.
Marco:
That it is going to be bound to you forever and that you cannot lose it.
Marco:
Because I don't know anybody who could keep a winter hat or any winter clothing item that is a hat or glove category and not lose it for 20 years.
Marco:
Because these things rarely wear out.
Marco:
I think they get lost long before that.
Marco:
So the fact that you've had this for possibly up to 20 years and you haven't lost it yet, I think you're good on that.
Marco:
I don't think you're going to lose it.
John:
I mean, I don't tend to lose things, but, you know, I think maybe part of what precipitated this is like, you know, like if it's going to get lost, it's going to get lost essentially in the house.
John:
It's like, well, it's getting cold again.
John:
Let me go find my winter hat.
John:
And you realize I don't know where in the house the winter hat is.
John:
And then you've got too much crap in your house and you can't find it.
John:
So I think that is the scenario that prompted me to say I should really have a backup.
John:
I did eventually find it and I'm
John:
pretty sure i know where it is now i haven't taken it out yet because obviously it's still like 70 degrees here and i don't need a winter hat um but you you know you're right that i am not the type of person who loses things often so it's not an imminent danger but after 20 plus years i feel like i'm pressing my luck
Marco:
So I would say also the two areas you might want to look at are number one, wool area.
Marco:
I like the SmartWool brand for both hats and gloves.
Marco:
They're not super thick, but they are warmer than you expect because they do – I assume you're using merino or some kind of like nice wool because I usually get itchy with most wool and I don't with that.
Marco:
this is not wool and i don't want wool well but i'm saying like that's that's an option for you know higher weight to thickness ratio um another thing to consider is if you look at the fleece category of hats there's many of them that tends to be warmer also because it is substantially less breathable than these kind of looser knits that you tend to see like on the on the most common like you know winter beanies or whatever whatever they're called the part that has like you know they pull down you fold up the little flap
Marco:
usually like the fleece versions of them are significantly warmer so i don't know if you're going to find one that is the thickness that you want but you can probably achieve similar warmth with some different fabric choices yeah i mean i just posted in the chat i found the shape of the hat it's the wrong material the wrong color everything about it is wrong but this is the shape
John:
And I found it by searching for 80s wool, 80s ski hat.
John:
And I came up with 80s wool ski hat.
John:
So maybe it totally wasn't 80s thing.
John:
So anyway, look in the chat.
John:
Do you see that shape?
Casey:
Yeah, I've seen this before.
John:
And the whole idea is that like your nose would be facing either the left or the right.
John:
Right.
John:
That's how you put it on.
John:
You don't put it on sideways.
John:
Right.
John:
And this is, you know, this is totally wrong because this is like a knit hat, you know, whatever.
Casey:
So I was going to say, if only you knew someone perhaps extremely well that knits constantly, maybe you could make a custom bespoke request.
John:
You know, I don't want knit because knit is just full of holes.
John:
Yeah, that's the whole thing.
John:
This, by the way, is this is the more extreme chicken hat.
John:
This is not the shape of my hat.
John:
I just put it in the chat.
John:
But this is the more extreme chicken hat.
John:
And now you can see why it would be called a chicken hat.
John:
I guess, yeah.
John:
More like a rooster or whatever.
John:
I don't know.
John:
This is my name for it, but this is more exaggerated.
John:
You can see how it's got little things that poke out of it, but it's still basically a triangle.
John:
The first one I sent you is more like the shape of my hat.
Marco:
We're going to need a picture of you in the hat.
John:
I'm sure you've seen me in this hat.
John:
You probably have seen me in this hat.
John:
It's very nondescript.
John:
It's like dark green in that it's all there is to it.
John:
There is no texturing or coloring or anything like that.
John:
It's just a dark green hat.
John:
i have hundreds of pictures of me in it i'm sure because it's literally the only hat i ever wear in the winter good um find one and we'll make it the show the chapter art for this chapter if you can get it to me by tomorrow morning um my by the way this is not my ski hat when i went skiing what i would wear i went through a series of hats for skiing but i eventually settled on a hat that looks like i mean this is not really what it looks like but i will
John:
i'll send this to you uh my ski hat not stylish but it is basically has it has a baseball brim and ear flaps it's this shape that i just put in the chat do you see that yeah um and that i used because the brim serves the purpose of stopping falling snow and sun shielding and my ski goggles are going to the ear flaps keep my ears long and my ski hat which i still have somewhere even though i haven't seen ages
John:
Like it's actually insulated like a winter jacket.
John:
Like it's made like a winter jacket where it's like, you know, ripstop nylon with insulation between it on all the different layers.
John:
And underneath this hat, I would wear a fleece headband.
John:
So it's fleece headband, ski hat, goggles over the hat to hold the hat to your head.
John:
This was the days before anyone wore helmets.
John:
I probably should have been because it's amazing that I'm alive.
John:
But that's my ski hat.
John:
And I still have that somewhere.
Marco:
So have you considered a multi-hat approach?
John:
how would that oh i take multiple thin hats and just shoving them on top of each other that'd be a mess like i'm trying to avoid the whole thing of like i don't want anything that's itchy i don't want anything that's weird like the beauty of the big thick hat is just you just pull it over your head and it slides right on and it goes off and it's it's soft and it's squishy and it's warm and it blocks the wind and it has no moving parts like it is not there are no drawstrings there's no seams that are all like i'm sure there are somewhere but there's no sort of visible seams or other things that get in the way it's just
John:
A green chicken hat.