Xcode X
Marco:
Do we have to learn what Web3 is, or can we just ignore this and let it pass?
John:
I mean, I don't think we can necessarily ignore it because it's a threat.
John:
Whoa, whoa, whoa, it's like that.
John:
I don't think we need to do anything to stop it, but it's stupid, and people have money and interest behind it.
John:
So when stupid ideas have money and interest behind them, we should probably...
John:
know enough about it to give it the finger.
Casey:
This is one of those times where, and I think I've talked about this perhaps here, certainly on Analog.
Casey:
You know, one of the things I really respect about Jason Snell, and actually you as well, John, is that you guys are...
Casey:
You have a little more experience in life than I do.
Casey:
I'm trying to put this gently.
Casey:
And yet you both are very good about keeping your opinions fluid in a way that I fear I'm getting worse at as I get older.
Casey:
And I'm trying really hard to be better at not dismissing something out of hand simply because it seems kind of kooky and bananas.
Casey:
But this Web3 stuff, it's stupid.
Casey:
I don't like it.
Marco:
Well, I'm trying to figure out what exactly it has to do with the web.
Casey:
No, that's fair.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
I agree.
Marco:
Like, it seems... I kind of... I know, like, trying to battle the tide on what terminology people are using for something new is usually a losing battle, and there's no, like... It's like people trying to call these netcasts, you know, or like... You know, I think the use of the term Web3...
Marco:
I don't see how what is going on in the world of like crypto crap has anything to do with the rest of the internet.
Marco:
Like, it seems like it's not Web3.
Marco:
It's, you know, gambling 25.
Marco:
Like, it's spectacular.
John:
speculative volatile investments you know 17 000 like how many of these have we had but web 3 is web 3 is not the same thing as just blockchain nft it's blockchain stuff applied to a web-like environment like it makes sense they would try to call it web 3 like i i think it's stupid that they're squatting on that term and i think web 2.0 is also a stupid term but whatever like the whole idea is that you know the stuff that we do on the web imagine if we could do that similar stuff but differently on top of blockchain right
John:
And that's why they call it Web3, because they want this particular application of blockchain to make people think it's like the web, but you'll have more ownership of stuff or whatever.
John:
But it's different than NFTs or cryptocurrency, which are also applications of blockchain.
Yeah.
John:
The fact that you say, oh, it doesn't have anything to do with the web.
John:
Well, they all have something to do with the web.
John:
Like all the things, like NFTs use URLs for things, URLs to go through the web.
John:
And cryptocurrency, if anyone's doing stuff with that, it's probably HTTP-based APIs.
John:
Like the web is fairly inescapable.
John:
So there's not much that...
John:
But you're right that it isn't the web.
John:
It's not like, oh, it's HTTP 2.0.
John:
That protocol is an advancement in web technologies.
John:
But anything that doesn't change HTTP, anything that doesn't become an essential part of a web browser probably isn't part of the web proper.
John:
But if you're doing web-like stuff, if you're using blockchain to, in theory, let people do web-like stuff in a different way,
John:
make some vague kind of sense that you would try to get the name web3 and get people to use it but of course this like all the other things is uh aside from uh scamming people out of money and aside from figuring out how to make money off of uh suckers uh no one needs to care about this and until and unless it rises to the level of something useful right so think about i don't know
John:
For a long time, people didn't have to care about BitTorrent until eventually BitTorrent found a useful application, which is piracy.
John:
And also downloading Linux ISOs.
John:
I know.
Marco:
And downloading... I've done both of those things with BitTorrent, but a lot more of one than the other.
John:
Marco really likes Linux.
John:
Steam uses a peer-to-peer protocol, but I think World of Warcraft was one of the first games to use the literal BitTorrent protocol to help downloads of the game go faster.
Yeah.
John:
But yeah, like you need an application of this technology that regular people find useful.
John:
And so far, the only application of these blockchain technologies are things that people who want to make money fast find useful.
Marco:
Yeah, it seems like, I mean, we've talked about this before, like how, you know, there's this kind of like
Marco:
psychological hack that like when when a certain type of person let's face it usually dudes uh get faced with the prospect of being able to make money from other money as opposed to like doing something and making something um it seems to hack their brain in a way it's like a drug and the effects that it just it breaks people's brain and
Marco:
in in such a you know weird like drug-like or cult-like or religion-like way that they just get so obsessed and and they can't like they see it this is going to do everything and save everybody and do everything for everyone and you know they can't see that it's like oh this is actually just a you know pump and dump ponzi kind of scheme or a like you know speculative volatile investment kind of thing or you know wait we just invented you know an interesting technology but use it only for these horrible things that
Marco:
And there's this whole culture around like obsessing over it and and claiming this is going to be the next big thing.
Marco:
But like a lot of people claim a lot of things are going to be the next big thing.
Marco:
And most of them don't actually reach that point.
John:
I mean, but you just said it like part of the enthusiasm is part of this whole the whole grift.
John:
You need to get more people.
John:
to come in and be investors.
John:
You need the greater fool to come in later and put their money in.
John:
Otherwise, you don't make any money.
John:
So the outsized enthusiasm for whatever it is that you're doing is part of the system.
John:
It's not like, oh, and they become obsessed with it.
John:
They don't become obsessed with it.
John:
Being obsessed with it is what you have to do to make the thing a success, a financial success for you.
John:
And each group of people that comes in, if they come in and go, oh, yeah, we're not enthusiastic about it.
John:
Then they're they're the last one holding the bag.
John:
So they also need to be super enthusiastic about it to get other people to come in.
John:
You know, so, yeah, some people are really are obsessed with it and like, oh, this is going to change everything.
John:
And we're going to all going to own our information and we'll get out from under the thumb of, you know, the big tech companies.
John:
And yes, there are there are definitely true believers.
John:
But there are but it's hard to distinguish the true believers from the people who just are, you know, turning the crank on the machine that they think will hopefully make them money.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It seems very irrelevant to my life right now, but that doesn't mean it will be forever.
John:
Yeah, that's what you should be watching for.
John:
It's like, when does this become relevant?
John:
Oh, here's something useful that can be done in a better way than it could be done before.
John:
And so far, that has mostly not happened except for you can definitely do crime better and you can do scams better, right?
John:
So those are the two applications where people go, well, this is way better than it used to be.
John:
We used the ransomware people.
John:
It was so hard to get the money.
John:
Now it's way easier.
Casey:
uh let's do some follow-up and uh i actually wanted to very quickly mention since it is the holidays this is our christmas spectacular in as much as we have a christmas spectacular anyways uh i thought uh you know since we missed talking about it at thanksgiving it seemed like uh now is as good a time as any to just briefly thank all of our members uh who have made it much much less stressful to do this show insofar as worrying about sponsorships and things of that nature and
Casey:
I'm not going to belabor the point, but all of you that have become members over the last year and a half, it has really made a tangible and demonstrable difference, certainly to my life, and I think it's fair to say to all three of our lives.
Casey:
So I just wanted to very briefly and quickly mention all of you.
Casey:
It is very kind of you to have even tried it once, much less the many of you that have stuck around.
Casey:
So thank you to all of you.
Casey:
And if this sounds interesting to you, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Yeah, thank you very much.
Marco:
Casey's gloss over it quickly, and I won't spend too much time on it, but the ad market has its ups and downs.
Marco:
We've talked about this before, and it used to hurt a lot whenever we would have a spot that didn't sell in an episode, or we'd have to offer a discount to get something sold at the last minute or something.
Marco:
That would hurt a lot more in the past, but now that we have...
Marco:
something to fall back on we have a we have diversified income we have you know this chunk from members and this chunk from advertisers it hurts a lot less when the ad market has its dips or its little flukes and and so it's it makes it easier to take and it gives us pleasure to be able to you know also have this kind of like fun premium product that we can you know we give you you know we give members the you know the the um
Marco:
add free feed and we have the bootleg bonus for the members and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's like, it's kind of fun to have these, this like, you know, little club for people who want a little bit extra and also to, you know, just smooth out the market fluctuations of ad of the advertising business.
Marco:
And so thank you very much.
Marco:
And anybody who, who chooses not to be a member, that's fine.
Marco:
You know, we're not going to like make you feel bad about it.
Marco:
Anybody who does choose to be a member, thank you for, for what you're doing.
Marco:
And we'll, we'll keep trying to make it awesome for you.
John:
Members hate it when we talk about membership on the members-only feed.
John:
I thanked them.
John:
I know, but they don't want to be thanked.
John:
They don't want to hear anything about membership.
John:
The whole point of Penguin is I don't want to hear you talk about membership.
John:
We're sorry for talking about membership, but we thank you very much for your membership.
John:
I'm not sorry.
Casey:
Neither am I.
Casey:
All right, hey, my desk setup has changed yet again.
Casey:
I feel like it needs to every week.
Casey:
Otherwise, it just wouldn't be an episode of ATP at this point.
Casey:
What happened?
Casey:
No, no, it's nothing bad.
Casey:
It's nothing bad.
John:
Did something else die or get flooded?
John:
The glass desk finally cracked.
Casey:
Yeah, with the weight of all these monitors I now have on it, it is possible.
Marco:
How many monitors do you now have that are not the XDR?
Casey:
First of all, they're not the XDR.
Casey:
Four, but one of them just arrived in California today.
Casey:
So hopefully it will be repaired before I turn 40.
Casey:
But anyways, as of a few days ago, thanks to my buddy Ian Fuchs at Cult of Mac, he had an extra A-Logic Thunderbolt 4 Blaze hub laying around.
Casey:
And it just occurred to me like an hour ago, this is in many ways the USB-C hub that Marco has always wanted.
Casey:
And it didn't even occur to me that it landed on my desk with little to no fanfare.
Casey:
But
Marco:
I actually have three very similar ones.
Casey:
Okay, so there you go.
Casey:
So if you're not familiar, because I wasn't familiar, it is a USB-C slash Thunderbolt 4 port that connects from the device to the computer.
Casey:
And that is on physically the front of the little box.
Casey:
And the box is very small.
Casey:
It's surprisingly small.
Casey:
It's a little bit bigger than a deck of cards, but not...
Casey:
Not too much so.
Casey:
Anyway, so on the front, there's a traditional USB-A and then the connector to connect to your computer that is Thunderbolt 4.
Casey:
And it does provide 60 watts of power delivery, which is less than I would want for my particular laptop.
Casey:
But for 99% of the time, it's fine.
Casey:
I'm not doing anything to really need more power, or at least not that I'm aware of.
Casey:
And then on the back, there's three USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports.
Casey:
So right now I have two of them used by a USB-C to display port connector for the two LG 4K, you know, temporary but probably forever monitors that I have.
Casey:
And then one of them for a USB-C to Ethernet adapter.
Casey:
However, because I have not yet recorded with this whole setup and I don't trust anything anymore, for Marco's benefit, you're welcome, darling.
Casey:
I have plugged the Ethernet directly into the computer.
Casey:
I have plugged the MixPre 3 directly into the computer.
Casey:
I have also plugged in the MagSafe connection that I usually just leave dangling because I have the power delivery via the device.
Casey:
So that is plugged in directly to the computer.
Casey:
So even if everything took a dump at the same time, it shouldn't be a problem and shouldn't interrupt the recording.
Casey:
But I just wanted to take note that I have switched up my setup yet again.
Casey:
And we're sitting here now.
Casey:
Next week, it should be normal.
Casey:
Like, it should be the new normal.
Casey:
Sure, right.
John:
you changed your desktop but all you did was get like basically a usb hub that's not changing your setup you got one new peripheral hey man it's a it's a it's a whole corner like how did this change you have the same number of monitors you're using the same computer using the same input devices like how did this change anything about yourself empirically barely at all they thought the big difference would have been if i had left the ethernet plugged into the box but i didn't trust it quite yet
Marco:
No, this new category of Thunderbolt hubs, these just came out maybe six months ago at the most.
Marco:
And a bunch of different companies seem to be making the exact same product, presumably using the same Intel chipset or something.
Marco:
So, yeah, it's one Thunderbolt 4 in...
Marco:
three thunderbolt fours out and also usually a usb a port or four um so this uh a logic this is the first time i've heard of this brand but this is one um uh owc aka max sales also makes one it's basically the exact same product for basically the exact same price
Marco:
And then CalDigit, this is their element hub that we talked about a while back, except the CalDigit element hub has four USB-A ports, which is kind of convenient instead of just the one.
Marco:
But they're all basically seemingly the same product with the same specs with that one exception of the number of USB-A ports.
Marco:
I have two of those CalDigit Element Hubs in various testing and occasional roles right now.
Marco:
I haven't made them permanent yet.
Marco:
And I have one of the CalDigit TS3 Plus that we talked about a long time ago.
Marco:
So right now, we started doing YouTube Minecraft streams as a family, and
Marco:
i'll talk about some other time it's not really that interesting right now but um except that we started doing it and you should go watch it we're on twitch we're called team armons and it's fun we're also on youtube if you want to see them there um but the the technical side of it i'll outline it some other time um but the uh caldigit ts3 plus i am using in that setup and plugging in just a ton of usb devices to it and using a ton of bandwidth and it all comes through one thunderbolt port and it's fantastic and
Marco:
um i tried doing the same thing on the element hub which is you know their version of this with more usba ports and i had problems with my uh elgato you know video capture hdmi capture thingies uh whatever they're called the hd60s
Marco:
plus i think anyway um i had problems running those through the element hub that i didn't have running them through the ts3 plus and so that makes me kind of think like i wonder if something's up with these hubs maybe like the maybe os's need need like a couple more updates before they're very well supported in some edge cases or maybe like the chipset has some limitation i'm unaware of because the tf3 plus is a much older device using presumably a much older chipset but anyway
Marco:
These are great.
Marco:
The only thing that I, my only big complaint about this new class of Thunderbolt hubs, which finally has given me what I want in the sense of like, take one Thunderbolt port and make more Thunderbolt ports with it.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
The only downside is that their power adapters are like three times bigger than the hub.
Casey:
Yes, yes, that's absolutely true.
Marco:
They're delivering 60 watts of power, but that's often 60 watts to the laptop.
Marco:
You also have to provide, I think, at least 15 watts per port for Thunderbolt for the devices that are plugged into it.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
you have combined a pretty large amount of power.
Marco:
You're talking, you know, 90, 100 watts easily for that power brick to be delivering.
Marco:
And so it's one of those, like, big black rectangles that has the C13 plug on one end and the DC out on the other end.
Marco:
And so you have, you know, one of those, like, floating black blocks that is somewhere between the outlet and this thing that you have to put somewhere or if I go to the bottom of your desk or something.
Marco:
And it's just... I wish they would... Like...
Marco:
can we maybe we can get like a law passed that says that your product photography of your of your electronic device must include the power supply in the photo because this looks so small and elegant like so many things in our modern technology lives but oh it's only small and elegant because they outsourced this giant ugly part of it to this thing that's going to sit outside of it and like either build it in or include that in the pictures
Casey:
Yeah, agreed.
Casey:
But I do like this device.
Casey:
I mean, granted, I like it in part because it was free, but I do like it.
Casey:
And it is simplifying my connection situation because, you know, before I had, you know, two physical connections, one per monitor, not to mention the Ethernet connector and power.
Casey:
Now all of that in general use, you know, podcasting aside, has dropped down to just the one connection, just from the computer to the hub.
Casey:
And then everything else is taken care of from there, which is really nice.
Casey:
uh this is part of the reason why all snark aside this part of reason why i liked the lg5k in the four minutes that it stayed working was because it did similar things and it it handled uh like i think it has three additional usbc ports on the back other than the one it's that's used for transmitting data to to the computer so it worked out real well when it was working so anyway i just wanted to give a quick update i will i'm sure i will fabricate some sort of reason to bring this up again next week moving right along
Marco:
By the way, user Tom Hartnett in the chat asked, what is a C13 plug?
Marco:
This is a good question.
Marco:
This is a nice little hack that I... Not a hack, but a nice little tip that I came upon recently.
Marco:
So C13, it's that three-prong AC plug that...
Marco:
you plug one end of it into the wall and you put the other end into like a desktop PC power supply or lots of other electronics.
Marco:
It has, you know, the three big AC pins arranged like a little triangle.
Marco:
Every desktop PC power supply forever has used one of these.
Marco:
That's called a C13.
Marco:
And like, well, I think the other end is a C14, but like the wire end of it is the C13.
Marco:
And the good thing is because this is a standard used in so many things, including the wall to big power block,
Marco:
cable of almost everything that uses a big power block therefore you can go on like amazon or whatever and get standard cables that have that same end so you can do things like get a really short one or get a really long one depending on what your needs are to help clean up your cables or you can get splitters or you can get a cable that has one wall plug and comes out to three c13 plugs
Marco:
So if you have to power like multiple devices in the same location, you can run it all through one plug.
Marco:
Now, of course, be careful.
Marco:
Don't overload your wiring or your circuits.
Marco:
Be safe about that stuff.
Marco:
But most of the things that use these plugs are not like super high water devices.
Marco:
So for instance, one of the things we use this for
Marco:
as part of my youtube streaming setup for our games we each have a gaming pc and there are these razor blade 15 inch gaming pcs that each have one of those tremendous black power supply things and each of them takes a c13 and we
Marco:
all want to play in the same location and there's one outlet nearby well a nice clean way to clean up those cables is to have a c uh you know regular ac you know nema 15 whatever regular us ac plug on one end and it splits into three c13s and i plug it in boom boom boom to the three power supplies for the laptops and have them all running through one outlet and because the combined wattage of those is only about 600 watts at peak it's still very much within all the limits of everything that's rated for and so it works out very well so
Marco:
Hot little tip, if you want to clean up some of your wiring, you probably have like 15 of those, you know, wall AC to C13 black cables like in your cable drawer that are all the same length and you don't need them.
Marco:
Throw them all away and buy some that are like exactly the lengths you need.
Marco:
It's so much nicer.
John:
Nobody has those cables anymore because nobody has desktop PCs anymore.
Casey:
I don't know, man.
Casey:
The power supply, like Mark was saying, the power supply for this breakout box uses it.
John:
I'm surprised.
John:
I'm surprised it didn't use the, I don't know what the name of it is, but you know the one that looks like a three-leaf clover?
John:
You know that one?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Those are on, like, I think PlayStations, right?
Marco:
They use those?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Lots of things that are smaller.
John:
Like, I imagine a power brick.
John:
Why would a power brick have this giant thing on it?
John:
But I guess so.
Marco:
It does.
Marco:
And that little, the three-leaf clover one is, I forget, I don't know the name of that one, but that's also a standard thing.
Marco:
c5 it looks like yeah yeah like and so you could you know you could do similar things if you happen to have multiple devices that use that or you know you want to get different cable lanes all of those things are all standards and there's the two leaf the two leaf clover the one that looks like the three leaf clover but it's just the two side by side yeah the apple tv plug yeah there you go the apple apple tv plug yeah yeah that's c7 and you know what apple tv does they put the power supply in the computer or in the box just like mac minis same thing it's really nice
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
We have some file system related news from Squozen.
Casey:
Tell us about this, John.
John:
There's a couple of people pointing out limitations in the weird synology that Marco bought that he talked about last episode.
John:
Apparently, according to Squozen, the J-series synologies cannot use BTRFS.
John:
They're EXT4 only.
Casey:
Does that count?
Casey:
It was FS.
Casey:
That's an abbreviation.
Casey:
Does that count?
John:
It's a file system.
John:
Yeah.
John:
All right.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
I mean, I didn't look this up, but I will trust Squozen.
John:
But if that's true, that means the answer to the question I asked last week, Marco, what file system did you use?
John:
He is not using BTRFS or ButterFS, if you would like to call it that.
John:
I don't know why they would...
John:
Maybe there's like a CPU limitation and BTRFS is more CPU intense.
John:
I don't even know.
John:
But anyway, I thought, huh, that's kind of weird.
John:
But then Matt Sullivan had another limitation of this J-series thing.
John:
Apparently, Marco's new Synology has a max storage capacity of 64 terabytes.
John:
So currently he's using two 18 terabyte drives.
John:
that sums up to 36 terabytes, which is more than half of the 64 terabyte max.
John:
So you can't get two more 18 terabyte drives and put them in here, apparently.
John:
Or I guess you could, but maybe you can't address all the space.
Marco:
I would be surprised if that's really the limit.
Marco:
So what probably happened, what I'm guessing, is when they were testing and qualifying this unit, the biggest hardware you could get was 16 terabytes.
Marco:
It has four bays.
Marco:
So they're like, all right, we tested it with four 16 terabyte disks.
Marco:
That's 64 terabytes.
Marco:
That seems to work, so we'll say that's the limit.
Marco:
Since then, 18 terabyte disks came out and they still work just fine.
Marco:
So probably I bet I could put in two more 18s and it would address all whatever, you know, 72.
John:
Maybe, but you did say that the quota thing wouldn't let you set quotas higher than four gigabytes.
John:
Four terabytes, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, but again, that seemed like a software thing.
Marco:
And I would actually guess that the lack of ButterFS support might, you know, this J series of these 2020 model synologies, I think they have a different processor architecture.
Marco:
Like I think the new ones are all these fancy ARM chips.
Marco:
I think this uses some kind of low-end Intel thing.
John:
Yeah, it's like real tech something.
John:
I looked that up last week, and I was like, huh, it's not even an Intel chip or anything.
John:
It was real tech something something.
John:
But still, these are all Linux.
John:
Linux is running on it, right?
John:
And BTRFS is part of Linux, and I can't imagine the processor would stop using it.
John:
I have to think it has to do with that.
Marco:
I don't think it would be like the processor can't do it.
Marco:
I think it's that like maybe Synology doesn't have their, like maybe they forked their software stack and like when they change architectures and they're just not going to update the software on this to that level or they don't want to test that package on this old processor or on this low end product or whatever.
John:
When BTRFS first came to Synology, it was a question of like, oh, will our old ones be able to do it?
John:
And for a while, I think they couldn't, but then eventually they could.
John:
So maybe this will change in the future.
John:
But anyway, there you go.
Casey:
Continuing on, there's a quote in the show notes that none of you can see, but the quote is as follows.
Casey:
The hatch just blew.
Casey:
And that's about all I know.
John:
What is that from?
John:
Titanic?
John:
I don't know.
John:
No, Marco's not going to know it.
John:
Casey, you're only helping.
John:
Lost?
John:
They have a hatch there.
Casey:
I assume Marco put this in.
Casey:
Oh, this is a John reference?
John:
Was Marco going to put in a movie reference?
John:
He's seen like three movies and he doesn't remember them.
Casey:
I thought it was like a quotation from you or Tiff or something like that.
Casey:
Or from Marco or Tiff or something like that.
John:
It's a line from a movie I guess neither one of you have seen.
John:
That's fine.
Casey:
Which one?
John:
The Right Stuff.
Casey:
I have seen it, but it's been forever and a day.
John:
Wasn't that a song?
John:
Anyway, this is about Marco's jugs of water.
John:
Many people wrote in, surprisingly, in addition to all of the sand driving and off-roading tips, lots of people wrote in to say, hey...
John:
I had water in one of those one-gallon U.S.
John:
milk jug things in some location in my house, and it spontaneously started leaking.
John:
And lots of people said, and it wasn't hot in there, and it wasn't cold, and it wasn't weird.
John:
It was just plain old room temperature place.
John:
Basically, the bottom line is that these water jugs that are, you know, gallon milk jugs or whatever, whatever they're made from nowadays...
John:
they don't stand up to long-term storage.
John:
If you put liquid in them, even if it's just plain water and you put it anywhere, eventually they will spring a leak.
John:
So that makes much more sense to me than Marco's theory that his SSDs were getting so hot in his little unventilated closet that somehow it was like melting the jug or whatever.
John:
Apparently these things are just not made to be permanent storage units for liquid.
John:
They're made to last just long enough for the expiration date of the milk and then they just go kablooey.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I was curious.
Marco:
So like when you when you go to the store to buy distilled water, it has expiration dates on it.
Marco:
And I've always wondered why.
Marco:
And maybe this is the reason.
Marco:
Like maybe it's because like they just know the container might leak a few months after this date.
Marco:
And so you might as well just get rid of it from the stores and not cause problems.
John:
one person also had a theory of why it was like indented um the idea is that they get like a pinhole leak and water can seep out of the pinhole leak but air can't get back in so as water seeps out but air doesn't get back in it sort of implodes the uh the container that doesn't seem right to me i mean it could be but that doesn't seem right it was a theory presented an email i passed no judgment on it other than to say at least it's a theory that you can test about the explanation for the dented part of the thing
Marco:
It's just like breathable fabrics.
Marco:
It's like where it kind of seems impossible.
Marco:
Like, wait, you're going to keep my warmth in, but you're going to somehow let sweat not happen.
Marco:
Like, how is this going to work?
Marco:
And you're also keep rain out.
John:
I think the moral of the story is if you need to store water for any period of time in your house, more than, you know, more than just like a few days or a week or whatever, do not use essentially disposable gallon milk or water jugs from the supermarket.
John:
Turns out.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Very quick clarification with regard to the forthcoming LG or maybe Apple display featuring some sort of Apple Silicon.
Casey:
Back in July, 9to5Mac had an article about this and a brief quotation from that article.
Casey:
However, 9to5Mac has now learned from sources familiar with Matter that Apple is internally testing a new external display with a dedicated A13 chip and also neural engine.
Casey:
So I bring this up to clarify what people are thinking, or at least what 9to5Mac is thinking.
Casey:
is inside these displays.
John:
And again, I've never seen a real good theory offered for what the SOC inside here would be doing.
John:
I mean, A13 is like, well, it's what we've got on hand.
John:
It's a chip that we've made and it can do what we need it to do.
John:
But what do you need it to do exactly?
John:
uh is it going to run face time face recognition is it going to be a helper gpu somehow is it just going to run the display is it going to run a fancy compression decompression algorithm for the signaling to use some weird custom thing like it's a general purpose you know an a13 can do all sorts of things it's got video encoders and decoders it's got all sorts of stuff in there but but i don't think any of the rumors have said and here's what they're using it for and why they're using an a13 and not some other chip so yeah yeah
John:
Still kind of mysterious to me.
John:
I'll have to wait and see when they release these displays.
John:
If they have some kind of chip in them, they can explain, what is it doing for us?
John:
And the thing with the A13 is you get the A13 and you get everything that's in it.
John:
So whether or not you're using that neural engine, it's in there.
John:
Whether or not you're using an H.264 or H.265 encoder decoder, they're in there, right?
John:
That's the deal, right?
John:
And surely if they put a chip like that in there, they're not going to use every single part of the chip because some parts of it just are not irrelevant.
John:
Like...
John:
Maybe the secure enclave isn't relevant or maybe it is relevant if they're doing face ID on it or, you know, maybe the SIMD engine is or isn't relevant.
John:
I don't know.
John:
We'll wait and see.
John:
But honestly, I kind of hate these rumors.
John:
It's like, Apple, you're overcomplicating and we just want a monitor.
John:
We don't need an A13 in there.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, my guess, if this is real and if these monitors do, A, come out ever, and B, have something like an A13 chip in them, I'm guessing the role it plays is something really boring that we might not even – it might not even be obvious in their announcement and release.
Marco:
And they might only find on teardown, like, wait, there's an A13 in here doing something.
Marco:
So things like that, it could be – obviously it could be more public things like Face ID.
Marco:
I think it's more likely to be something like maybe they're doing a custom compression algorithm to fit 120 hertz over the cable, bandwidth-wise, and the A13 decodes it.
Marco:
I don't think it would be something like an integrated GPU because the A13 is too old for that.
Marco:
For a large new screen that might come out in a year or two, the A13 seems like it would be grossly underpowered to be the GPU for that screen.
Marco:
So it probably is not that.
Marco:
So it's probably some other like boring thing, a timing controller to glue two panels together logically, you know, something like that.
Marco:
I don't know enough about it to really speculate on anything more specific than that, but I'm guessing it's going to be something boring if it's anything at all.
Casey:
agree with that tangential question we haven't had anyone write in with the mathematics behind 120 hertz at 5k but i think the three of us tentatively agree that it seems like it's too much for thunderbolt 4 as it exists today that's not a fact it's just our theory so let's assume though that it is fact let's assume for the sake of conversation that 5k 120 hertz is too much data you can't carry it over thunderbolt
Casey:
And I know both of you have mentioned some sort of compression just moments ago.
John:
And chroma subsampling, which we need to point out.
John:
We went to the thing with chroma subsampling, which is essentially throwing away information that you're not going to get back because it's perceptually not interesting.
John:
With chroma subsampling, you can definitely fit it, but you are starting to lose stuff that you will miss if you're looking at text on a computer screen that you wouldn't miss if you were looking at a TV show.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So for the sake of discussion, let's say that Apple is not satisfied with any mechanism that has it on a single cable.
Casey:
Do either of you envision a world where there's like some new XDR, maybe it's 5K, maybe it's 6K at 120 hertz, who knows?
Casey:
But one way or another, it requires two physical cables to plug into a Mac.
Casey:
Do you see that as even a possibility that Apple would consider it?
John:
on the mac pro yeah if it was 8k if it was an 8k screen at 120 hertz on the mac pro and it took two cables that's the only machine that apple would find two cables except the one because it's the whole point is it's a giant monster like it's a huge thing everything about it is big it's got all sorts of ports and whatever and if if the only way you can get 8k 120 hertz hdr blah blah blah on the big giant you know
John:
mac pro thing is with two cables then yeah apple would do two cables obviously they would want to avoid it but i think that is a bridge they would definitely cross on the mac pro if if indeed they're trying to even make an 8k if they're still making 6k then they don't have to worry about it i'm gonna say no i i don't think apple would ever do two cables modern apple at least as we know as we know them today i think they would they would either wait you know years until the next standard came out and use that the question is are they are they waiting or does it just take them that long
Marco:
well yeah right so yeah so either they would just wait till the next highest bandwidth standard comes out and and you know use that and and leave this massive hole in the market until then or they would develop their own custom connector and cable that you know maybe logically it would just be two thunderbolt four you know channels in the cable but i think they they would go their own way before they would do a two cable uh solution
John:
Well, if they did, when I say two cables, yes.
John:
If they make it like a single thicker cable that inside it has two cables, I'm going to still call that the two cable solution.
John:
Basically, the idea is like, are you implementing something yourself?
John:
Because a lot of these things already support two cables.
John:
Like if I did a 5K iMac, I think internally, essentially, it had quote-unquote two cables, like two data paths, right?
Marco:
That's why I had a custom timing controller, RT-Con.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
So, like, if they do that, you know, the advantage of just taking two Thunderbolt tables and wrapping them in a bigger rubber thing is, like, you don't have to come up with new protocols.
John:
You don't have to, like, you don't have to invent anything.
John:
That is, you know, PCs do that today.
John:
Like, and Apple itself has done it internally.
John:
So it's not as big a lift, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
But honestly, I don't I haven't even seen any rumors of 8K.
John:
So I feel like and also I think 120 hertz is probably the least relevant to the Mac Pro, believe it or not.
John:
Right.
John:
Like it's more like a consumer facing thing where everything gets smooth, whereas there's not a lot of like video mastering done at frame rates higher than 60.
John:
Right.
John:
Probably not even higher than 30 most of the time.
John:
Again, unless you're Peter Jackson, like high frame rate movies didn't seem to catch on.
John:
So I think there's actually less of a demand at the highest of the high end for Apple to field a, you know, 120 hertz monitor.
John:
And if they just did 8K at 60, I don't think you need any new tech with that except for maybe DisplayPort 2.0.
John:
Yeah.
John:
new standards come out all the time um you know in thunderbolt 4 even though i saw some people fretting about thunderbolt 3 versus or remember thunderbolt 4 is no faster than thunderbolt 3 all it is is thunderbolt 3 with more requirements to support like whatever the latest usb4 stuff is like it's not it's 40 gigabits per second on both right thunderbolt 5 the rumors of that is that is significantly faster um and that would take care of all of apple's needs as well so
John:
It's just a question of how long these things take.
John:
Like Intel was presenting some behind closed doors thing that had some slides about Thunderbolt 5, which means Thunderbolt 5 could show up.
John:
I don't know what the timeline is, but it could show up in a year or two years.
John:
And, you know, someday some Mac Pro will have Thunderbolt 5.
John:
And maybe that's the time Apple chooses, like Margaret was saying.
John:
OK, now's the time to go 8K and now's the time to go high frame rate because Thunderbolt 5 can handle it.
Marco:
If that's anywhere near on the horizon, they'll just wait for that before they do anything like that.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
Was there not a, like, cinema display?
Casey:
Wasn't it the Thunderbolt?
Casey:
Oh, no, the Thunderbolt display had, like, MagSafe and data.
Casey:
Is that what I'm thinking of?
John:
It was still, quote-unquote, one cable, but inside that cable was, like, five other cables.
Marco:
That was DVI back then.
John:
I have the monitor to work.
John:
The 24-inch Apple LED cinema display has a MagSafe connector, a USB-A plug, and the video connection, which I think is Thunderbolt 2.
Marco:
two looks like mini uh display port the first one was yeah the first one was just mini display port and then they later made the thunderbolt display that's what i'm which they upgraded the port to thunderbolt and and i and they might have had to i think that that let them drop the um usb source cable yeah the 27 inch was the thunderbolt one i have that upstairs yeah
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
That's the only example I could think of where they had two connection points, but one of them was power and one of them was data.
Casey:
So you could excuse that, I guess, although I still concur that I don't see that happening in today's Apple.
John:
So Apple DisplayPort was the Apple proprietary one, which…
John:
still was kind of dvi with extra wires in it but it wasn't so clearly we just took multiple cables and wrapped them in a round thing and then for the thunderbolt display and the the led cinema display they didn't want to make another adc they didn't want to make another new thing so they said well well you know we need all these things let's just wrap all the cables together with the existing standards so that usba cable was a straight through usba thing that connected to usb interface on the display and
John:
you know the display port or thunderbolt one went straight through right and so that you know that's i think that is a more of a modern apple solution adc was the last gasp of apple saying we can make our own ports and our own protocols because adc was great adc was one cable to your you know apple cinema display that gave everything power data and video sound familiar
John:
But that didn't exist.
John:
They had to create it themselves.
John:
And yes, granted, it was just kind of DVI with a bunch of other stuff mixed in.
John:
But they made their own connector and their own protocols to handle all of that.
John:
I don't think Apple wants to do that anymore.
John:
And they don't really need to.
John:
Thunderbolt basically handles all of that for them with the DisplayPort tunneling and all that other stuff.
John:
So they'll just sort of, you know, keep up with the latest Thunderbolt standards and use them when they're ready.
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:
It's just a fantastic service, and it takes away such a big pain point for developers.
Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much to RevenueCat for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, we have a couple of quick clarifications with regard to attention-aware features.
Casey:
I think Marco made a mostly offhanded remark about how, I believe, Marco, you had said you typically turn off the attention-aware checkbox or whatever.
Casey:
And I forget exactly the justification you used, but a friend of the show, Guy Rambeau, wrote to say,
Casey:
That to Guy, and I agree with him, the most important aspect of the attention-aware setting is that the iPhone will not dim the display while you're actively looking at it.
Casey:
So, for example, if you're reading a long piece of text or watching something, it won't dim the display because it's looking at where your eyes are looking and it sees that your eyes are looking at the screen.
Casey:
Additionally, the thing where it requires attention to expand notifications can be disabled on a per app basis in notification settings.
Casey:
That was news to me.
Casey:
I did not know that was the case.
Casey:
So to recap, if your phone is sitting upright and using the default settings and you get a notification, it'll show like messages and it might even show who it's from, but it won't show the text of the message.
Casey:
until it unlocks by you looking at the phone.
Casey:
So you might not have touched the phone, you've just looked at it, but it does the Face ID dance and it unlocks and then it shows you the preview.
Casey:
Well, apparently on a per app basis, I didn't verify this, but according to Guy, who knows his stuff, that you can actually turn that on and off per app, which is pretty cool.
Casey:
I just had no idea.
John:
And the attention aware stuff, I actually turned off the attention setting for face ID unlock for my mother because she has vision problems.
John:
And apparently her vision problems make it hard, make it more difficult for the phone to tell that she's looking at it.
John:
Or maybe she's looking like not directly at it.
John:
Because the whole point of the attention thing is you can if you look like.
John:
you know, to the left of your phone, it won't unlock, right?
John:
You have to be looking at your phone.
John:
So it's trying to kind of tell where you're looking, not just that your eyes are open and you exist and have a matching face.
John:
And I think it was causing face ID to fail for my mother a lot of the time.
John:
So I just turned off the attention thing.
John:
And I think the success rate has gone up and, you know, she doesn't need the additional security for a face ID unlock, I don't think.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Marco, you have a new iPhone case?
Marco:
I sure do, and I think this is the winner.
Marco:
So thank you to Oliver Ames, who wrote on Twitter the other day.
Marco:
I got this gummy clear case that has MagSafe.
Marco:
It is fantastic.
Marco:
And it is the Spigen brand, which is a pretty common phone case brand as far as I know.
Marco:
Ultra hybrid mag anti-yellowing technology compatible with MagSafe and...
Marco:
This case is, so far, fantastic.
Marco:
So it combines the, like, you know, kind of gummy clear case finish that I liked from the other case I had before with the, you know, big white, obviously very visible because it's in a clear case, MagSafe magnet, very similar looking to Apple's clear case, but with the squishy, you know, finish instead of the hard.
John:
So Apple's isn't squishy.
John:
Because I would say, if you like this case, why don't you just get the Apple one?
Marco:
Apple's clear case is a very hard plastic.
Marco:
It's not at all flexible or grippy.
John:
The Apple clear case does have the naked butt, though.
John:
I know you'll like that.
Marco:
What's great about this case, it's overall fairly similar to what I had before.
Marco:
There's a couple of minor regressions.
Marco:
One is that on the back corners of the case that are not the camera bump, they have these little raised ridges on the corners to try to make it sit more evenly on the desk.
Marco:
I don't love those.
Marco:
I got used to them after a day, but at first the feel of those was off-putting as I would feel the back of my phone when it's not smooth on the corners.
Marco:
You feel those scrapey corners.
Marco:
That's not great.
Marco:
The other thing I don't like about it is that
Marco:
On the top ridge of the case, like right around the top left corner of the phone, like on that part of it, it says it's printed on the case, air cushion technology.
Marco:
And it has a little triangle that's pointed towards the corner, showing, I guess, these little bubble square things on the corners of the case.
Marco:
So I don't usually see this because it's on the edge.
Marco:
It's on the vertical part of the case, not the big flat part.
Marco:
But I don't know why they had to print that.
Marco:
That's stupid.
John:
Same reason they had to cut a hole in the side of a Nike Air Jordan so you could see the air thing.
John:
Because when the air thing was in there, but you couldn't see it, it didn't matter.
John:
You really need to know the air cushion is there.
Casey:
That's a deep cut, but oh yeah.
Marco:
But anyway, other than the air cushion technology printing on the corner and those weird little corner things on the back, this is great.
Marco:
And I'm very happy with this case.
Marco:
I've kept it on now for about a week, maybe.
Marco:
And I've gone through a lot.
Marco:
The MagSafe is great.
Marco:
It's nice and strong.
Marco:
The finish of the case feels well.
Marco:
It has that same grip that I love from the other squishy clear case.
Marco:
So overall, this is great.
Marco:
And it was only 20 bucks.
Marco:
So the clear winner for my iPhone case saga.
Marco:
The new clear winner, rather.
Marco:
And yeah, I'm very happy with it.
Marco:
So thanks to Oliver Ames and to Spigen.
John:
I can't believe you can handle those Ridge things in the corner.
John:
That would be a deal breaker for me.
Marco:
It almost was.
Marco:
Like the very first day, I'm like, oh, no, I don't know if I can live with this.
Marco:
But then, you know, after a day, I ignored them.
Marco:
You can probably shave them off.
Marco:
I thought of it.
Marco:
I mean, hey, for 20 bucks, I might try it.
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's just rubbery plastic.
John:
Get a razor blade.
John:
Be real careful and you can, you know.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All righty.
Casey:
Let's move right along.
Casey:
And macOS 12.2 beta is out.
Casey:
And there's a couple of interesting things here.
Casey:
I'm going to start with the thing that I think will take less time.
Casey:
There is supposedly improved scrolling in Safari with ProMotion, which is exciting.
Casey:
So I guess, you know, 120 hertz scrolling in Safari.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So that's cool.
Casey:
I like that.
John:
Yeah, I keep hearing stories about, you know, improvements to scrolling in Safari.
John:
And I was like, didn't they fix that in 12.1?
John:
But in all these things, it's like under certain circumstances, depending on what the application is doing, whether it asks to have a maximum frame rate of 120 or not.
John:
But it sounds like in 12.2, maybe it's just like any web page.
John:
When you scroll it, it'll do 120 hertz.
John:
We'll find out when it gets released.
Casey:
And that's not in Purple Safari yet?
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
Okay, fair enough.
John:
I don't have a high refresh screen.
John:
I can't test any of this stuff.
Casey:
Yeah, well, and so actually I wanted to ask, Marco, I guess you're not often living on the onboard display of your new fancy MacBook Pro, but...
Casey:
When I use my new fancy onboard display on my MacBook Pro, I feel like I don't notice the 120 hertz that often, which we've talked about.
Casey:
I think the only place I regularly notice it is when I'm doing the three-finger swipey left and right to go between spaces because I know a monster and I believe in spaces.
Casey:
But I was wondering, first of all, Marco, do you notice it at all today?
Casey:
And the real question I wanted to ask both of you, actually, is what do you think the real advantage of variable refresh rate is?
Casey:
Because the more I think about it, the more I think, for my use anyway...
Casey:
I think the best thing that variable refresh rate gets me is potentially longer battery life if they can crank the, you know, which I believe they crank the refresh rate way down when possible.
Casey:
And that seems to me to be the real winner.
Casey:
You know, I can't give numbers about this.
Casey:
I've never like tried to force it to stay at 120 hertz or anything like that.
Casey:
But it seems like that's what's great about these displays.
Casey:
And even though I like the 120 hertz, I don't even care about that as much as I care about, you know, the potential for more battery life.
Casey:
But Marco, do you notice it?
Casey:
What do you think is the real advantage here?
Casey:
Tell me your thoughts.
Marco:
i really don't notice it i really don't like i i mentioned i think last episode that i i noticed it like once while scrolling a column and tweet bot but otherwise like i i really don't notice it much and maybe part of that is that i i'm not seeing it in safari yet on that computer um because i i do see that computer uh the the 14 inch is what i'm usually using as a laptop so
Marco:
And it's upstairs.
Marco:
I mentioned it has basically replaced my iPad that I was using as like an upstairs slash kitchen computer for most of the time.
Marco:
It's also, you know, doing FaceTime calls for workouts and stuff like that.
Marco:
So that computer bounces around the house.
Marco:
It is wonderful for that purpose.
Marco:
So wonderful, in fact, that I did end up selling my MacBook Air, my M1 MacBook Air, which I loved.
Marco:
But this is just better, you know, in every possible way.
Marco:
So overall, it's the 120 hertz thing.
Marco:
I really don't notice it, honestly.
Marco:
That's why, like, if there was an XDR released next year that supports 120Hz somehow over a cable, I don't think I would be that tempted to upgrade to it unless there were other major gains to it.
Marco:
Because, frankly, it's something that...
Marco:
I notice a lot on touch devices, but I don't notice it a lot on Macs because it makes sense.
Marco:
Touch devices, you're doing a lot of direct manipulation with your finger against that screen, pushing around the content.
Marco:
That's something that...
Marco:
I think you're going to notice a lot.
Marco:
As we mentioned when the new iPhones came out, it makes so much sense on a touch device, and you really do notice it a lot on iPhones and iPads.
Marco:
But on the Mac, you're not usually doing that kind of direct manipulation.
Marco:
You're not scrolling directly with your finger and everything.
Marco:
Even when you scroll with the mouse or a trackpad,
Marco:
you're limited by the sample rates of those devices and whatever the pipeline is between that and the computer.
Marco:
So you're not really getting that same kind of direct feedback.
Marco:
So ultimately, I'm not finding a lot of must-have value in 120 hertz on the Mac yet.
Marco:
Maybe in the future that'll change, but for now, I'm glad I have it in case it becomes useful, but I wouldn't make major decisions based solely on the availability of that feature.
John:
As a longtime Mac user, you're killing me with this whole like, oh, the Mac doesn't have direct manipulation.
John:
Because like when the Mac was introduced, the whole point of the Mac was, hey, it has direct manipulation.
John:
You don't have to like issue a command to specify what thing you want to act on and then issue a second command to specify the action.
John:
You just grab the damn file.
John:
It's direct manipulation.
John:
Now in the modern smartphone era, and in particular on this program, we've had many past episodes where we say, well, the Mac doesn't have direct manipulation like the phone does.
John:
I mean, you don't touch the screen.
John:
I know what you mean, but terminology marks on it.
John:
I would still say that they both have direct manipulation, but one does not have a touchscreen.
John:
That is definitely true.
John:
When we talked about promotion on the iPhones originally, I think one of the points we brought up was you're more likely to try to read something while it's scrolling on a phone because of that sort of...
John:
whether it's doom scrolling or not.
John:
The whole notion that you're staring straight at it, it's right in front of your face and your thumb is scrolling.
John:
And while you're doing that, you may also be trying to read it.
John:
And 120 hearts makes it way more readable while things scroll instead of it just blurring and your eyes going, oh, I can't read it anymore because I scrolled too fast, right?
John:
Whereas on the Mac, I think we're accustomed to whether it's hitting page down or, you know, there was a time, I don't know if it's still possible, but there was a time where I kept setting the...
John:
hidden preference on the mac to say when i hit page down don't animate from where you are to one page lower just immediately go there because that's the way page down used to work and it is faster and it's like i don't need the animation i don't need to see the text flying by at the speed of light right i can't read it when it goes by anyway i'm not confused by the fact that the this the display just updated immediately i know i hit page down i understand that it is a page down right
John:
but that is not the default and it may be difficult to get that back and it scrolls really, really fast.
John:
But anyway, all this to say is on the Mac, I think we're not accustomed to trying to read while we scroll.
John:
I think it's more like read because you have so much more to read.
John:
You can, you know, on most Mac displays, you can get more or less a full page or almost a full page worth of text in the vertical space.
John:
And then when you want to go see more, maybe you hit page down or click in the scroll bar area if you have your scroll bars visible like an old person like me.
John:
Um, and then you just let it go by and then you read.
John:
So you're less likely to try to read it in motion.
John:
So the 120 Hertz, I think the main advantage it has other than maybe looking nicer to something is that things are more legible while they're in motion.
John:
And I think there is less need for things to be legible while they're in motion based on our, you know, habits of using the Mac.
John:
And then, of course, Casey brought a battery life, which is probably the biggest saving for anything that is portable or battery powered.
John:
But I would also throw in a variable refresh rate lets you view video at while refreshing the screen at the frame rate of the video.
John:
Right.
John:
So if the video is 24 or 30 frames per second, you can update the screen at exactly 24 or 30 frames per second.
John:
If you're watching content whose frame rate is not an even does not, you know,
John:
divide nicely into 60 hertz um if you have a fixed refresh screen like most people do it's updating at 60 hertz all the time and it can be difficult to get the motion to look right if you're looking at some content that's an odd frame rate that doesn't divide nicely into 60 or you know not divide nicely i'm not saying this right but like
John:
how long do you show frame one and how long do you show frame two and how long do you show frame three, right?
John:
And you have to, you know, if you're doing it 30 frames per second, it's easy.
John:
You show frame one for two screen refreshes, frame two for another two screen refreshes, right?
John:
That's 30, right?
John:
It's an, it's an even multiple of 60 or whatever, but 24 doesn't work out that well.
John:
Um,
John:
if you're seeing 24 frames per second, how long do you show frame number one?
John:
You have to do, there's all sorts of things of like, how to decide, you know, how many refresh cycles to show each frame to try to make the motion smooth.
John:
The bottom line is you can't show it for half a frame.
John:
You have to show it for, you know, two frames or three frames or four frames, but you can't show it for 2.1 frames, right?
John:
And that can screw up with the motion.
John:
But if you have a variable refresh screen, you can just refresh the screen 24 times a second, and that will make the motion look smooth.
John:
There are other problems with motion and LED and persistence and all sorts of other issues having to do with display.
John:
But that is, I think, the third main advantage of variable refresh.
John:
Setting aside battery, which is important for anything that's on a battery, and setting aside high refresh, which is important if you're trying to make things legible while they're in motion or you just want them to be smooth and cool looking.
Casey:
The other big news that came out from the 12.2 beta is that according to 9to5Mac, Apple is rebuilding Apple Music as a full native app.
Casey:
Holy jamoles.
John:
Asterisk, asterisk, asterisk.
John:
I did not install this beta, but I almost did because I was so frustrated by all these stories saying, oh, is there going to be a native app now?
John:
And finally someone put up screenshots and it was like...
John:
Like, so maybe they just took the existing app, which is music, which used to be iTunes with his guts ripped out.
John:
And some things that used to be web views now maybe aren't web views, but it's such a hodgepodge.
John:
Like, if you remember the original iTunes, it was like...
John:
It would make requests to the server to get XML.
John:
And then based on that XML, it would render a UI.
John:
And then, you know, it eventually changed to be like to use, I think, WebKit to render web views.
John:
And there were native views mixed in there.
John:
So this quote unquote new version of music looks an awful lot like the old one.
John:
And maybe some things that used to be web views aren't anymore, but it still doesn't.
John:
seemed to me to be the thing that we all want which is imagine if music was a new app i'm not going to say written from scratch because that's not necessarily what we want we just want an app that we look at and say this is a good app for listening to music and itunes eventually became not that and music continues to be not that oh it's so not that
John:
To give an example of what we're looking for, Notes.
John:
We talk about the Notes app.
John:
For a while, Notes was unspectacular, but not that great.
John:
And then they basically redid Notes.
John:
And the new Notes app is not the world's most feature-rich application, but it got way better.
John:
And if you look at Notes and you say, that's a pretty good Notes application.
John:
It's sad that from our perspective, the way that we judge applications is like...
John:
you know, if there was a really good single person development shop and they made an app, would it be like this?
John:
And Notes looks like that.
John:
Notes is like, you know, one really good independent developer made a Notes app.
John:
And if they put out Notes, we'd be like, hey, that's a pretty cool app, right?
John:
And now that's the bar that we're setting for Apple, this trillion dollar company, to hit is like, can this big company make an app as good as a single really good independent Mac developer who cares about it?
John:
Because that's...
John:
And that shouldn't be the bar.
John:
The bar should be, well, of course, Apple can do things way better than any single developer or small development team or whatever.
John:
But at this point, we hope every sort of built-in native app, not everyone, but like the built-in apps that Apple ships, a lot of them are not up to the level of small independent developer team that's really good at the Mac.
John:
Some of them surpass it.
John:
Obviously, no small individual developer can make Safari.
John:
Like, that's too big.
John:
Being a web browser is an incredibly hard problem.
John:
Many people have tried.
John:
People continue to try.
John:
Safari is actually pretty darn good, right?
John:
But things like notes or terminal...
John:
Or I would say even the music app, because there are independent developers who make music player apps, most of which are better in fundamental ways than music, if only in fewer bugs, right?
John:
And faster and less cruft and less ancient history.
John:
So I don't know if this macOS 12.2 beta is going to bring us a music app that will be any more satisfactory than it is now.
John:
But maybe things are moving in the right direction.
John:
I guess we'll have to wait and see.
John:
I still didn't install the beta, so I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't have high hopes for this being a meaningful change because if you actually read the article and see what they're actually changing and it's using this web backend still and it's just like the rendering layer on top of the web backend in the app is going from basically a giant web view to something more native –
Marco:
Well, that's fine, but all Apple devices that are remotely modern are able to render the contents of a web view very quickly and responsibly.
Marco:
And it's possible to make great UIs in a web view with care and with effort.
Marco:
The shortcoming we've had with the music app and similar apps from Apple recently is that the care and effort aren't there and that the services backing them are spotty and inconsistent and not very good.
Marco:
And I don't see how this changes any of that.
Marco:
Except maybe they're putting more effort into it.
Marco:
But all right.
Marco:
I mean, that's good.
Marco:
The effort they've gotten so far in the last decade has been somewhat minimal and very misguided.
Marco:
As a daily user of the app that was previously known as iTunes and is now known as Music on the Mac, this app is only getting buggier and buggier and harder to use for its original purpose of, I have music in these MP3 files.
Marco:
Please play them.
Marco:
And more confusing, too.
John:
Like, there's so many places in the UI where, like, there's so many different ways to view music.
John:
And what you can do from each of the views is just, like, it's historical.
John:
It's an accident of history.
John:
What can I do from this view?
John:
It's like, well, you have to understand when this view was created and what it used to look like and what view it replaced.
John:
And why is this under the right-click menu and this under the three dots menu and this not available at all in this view?
John:
And, like...
John:
it's you know when when itunes started it had like a list view and that list view was used all over the app anytime you looked at a playlist you looked in the browser like it was the list view and whatever you could do from the list view you could do from the list view now music has like 17 different views all of which are subtly different from each other very often i'm like is this feature not in the music app anymore but it's like no you have to be in just this right view and remember it's not under right click you have to click over here but then it's under the three dots but you have to click in this area and it's
John:
Lots of mystery meat navigation, lots of like, I wonder what will happen if I click here.
John:
Can I hit the delete key?
John:
Can I drag this?
John:
You know, it's just it's incredibly confusing.
John:
It is like a house that's been added on to.
John:
And, you know, it's like a house that was gutted because they took out, you know, we were begging for them to take out all the baggage, you know, and like some of the baggage ended up in Finder for like the syncing stuff.
John:
And obviously they took out podcasts and the TV stuff came out of it.
John:
And I think that was a move in the right direction.
John:
But still what you're left with is a house that was recently gutted that has been added on to 17 different times.
John:
And every new view they added to music, isn't this new modern view?
John:
Doesn't it look so much better than that old crufty one?
John:
It just makes me wish we could go back to just having one list view that had all the features on it that worked consistently and fast.
Marco:
Yeah, because that's... I often think back in the stone ages when I used to use a PC and I used Winamp as my player,
Marco:
I would be able to hit the J key, which would open up the jump box, I guess.
Marco:
And I could just hit J and start typing, and it was like a quick search.
Marco:
And you could jump right to whatever you were looking for.
Marco:
And that navigation was so fast.
Marco:
Now, granted, my collection was a lot smaller back then and had way less fish, but it was so incredibly fast and easy to navigate.
Marco:
Everything the app could do was...
Marco:
Visible or findable.
Marco:
It was findable, at least, very quickly.
Marco:
It was fast as hell.
Marco:
And that was, what, 20 years ago?
Marco:
I feel like this is one area where what we have now, if you look at the capabilities, I mean...
Marco:
You can't even imagine back then.
Marco:
If you would have told me 20 years ago that in the year 2021, I could pay some small, very small, relatively speaking, some small monthly fee and be able to legally and pretty much instantly listen to any music.
Marco:
Anything that was available from any major label or many indie labels.
Marco:
Most available released music, I could just...
Marco:
Type in the name of... Or even just shout into the air and something would start playing.
Marco:
That would be incredible.
Marco:
But everything should be better than it was 20 years ago.
Marco:
It shouldn't be like, well, we're better in certain areas, but in some really...
Marco:
core critical areas, things have gotten worse.
Marco:
Like, yeah, we have these amazing capabilities.
Marco:
We now have effectively infinite storage space or we can stream things whenever we want and not even use any of our local storage space.
Marco:
So we have all this amazing technological capability.
Marco:
But a lot of these basics of, you know, can I just quickly get to the thing I'm looking for and play it?
Marco:
Or can I star rate something in my list and not have it three seconds later jump to the bottom of the list because something changed in the list and it did a table reload?
Marco:
The basics are getting worse.
John:
Or like show me where this file is in the Finder, right?
John:
It's a file that I download.
John:
Let's say it's a podcast file in the podcast app and I've downloaded it.
John:
I'm just so accustomed to be able to say reveal in Finder because maybe you want to pull that MP3 file out and do something with it or whatever.
John:
And everything is in containers now.
Casey:
This drives me nuts about photos all the time.
Casey:
I want to get to the – because I'll use photos.
Casey:
I like photos.
Casey:
No, no, but a lot of times I want to get to the original file.
Casey:
Now, truth be told, I really don't need to.
Casey:
I can just copy in photos and it does the right thing.
Casey:
But muscle memory, and because I'm an old man, it makes me want to get to the original file.
Casey:
And every time I go looking and looking and looking, trying to find the show in Finder option somewhere and can never find it, only to remember, no, this is its own magical container.
Casey:
I just need to copy and paste it.
John:
you can do export on modified original and in photos you can always do export on modified original photos is much better to give an example of an app photos basically has one view with all the features on it where you can show different size thumbnails itunes or music does not it has many different layers of views some of them let you reveal and find or something done in the podcast app since it's an entire quote-unquote entirely new app is really stingy about revealing and finder because it really just doesn't want you to know where those files are at all
Casey:
You know, it's funny, Marco, a minute ago you said you can listen to almost any music you want instantly.
Casey:
That confirms for me that you must be a Spotify user because I can tell you that nothing in Apple Music happens instantly.
Casey:
It is so dog slow and it still drives me nuts.
Casey:
For the most part, I'm
Casey:
I'm fine on Apple Music.
Casey:
We've labored this point in the past.
Casey:
I'm not going to build on it now.
Casey:
But it is so dog-slow by comparison to Spotify.
Casey:
It is infuriating.
Casey:
As much as I love to poop on Apple services, which is one of my favorite pastimes these days, it is so bananas to me that iMessage, for me anyway, is extremely reliable and almost always instant instant.
Casey:
And iCloud is, for me anyways, extremely reliable and almost always instant.
Casey:
But holy cow, Apple Music is so slow and so inconsistent and fails so frequently.
Casey:
I don't understand.
Casey:
Does Apple issue a direct...
Marco:
like fiber optic line directly from the spaceship to every employee's house like especially for the last year and a half when they've all been home how do they not run into this and get infuriated by it i don't understand it it's so frustrating yeah i'm with you it and and i'm actually not usually using spotify because their app is garbage and i don't usually need to stream music like usually i'm listening to my own collection and that's all in in apple music because you know itunes um but
Marco:
It is so frustrating to me whenever I have Apple Music do some kind of weird failure.
Marco:
This integrates with so many other of Apple's weak points.
Marco:
Siri, web services, it's all interconnected with the experience of using Apple Music.
Marco:
And it's frustrating because Apple makes such amazing stuff in so many areas.
Marco:
And it's not that they don't have...
Marco:
the talent or the resources to do this well they easily have the resources and if they don't already have the talent which i think is unlikely i think they probably do already have the talent but you know they could get the talent and chances are they probably already have it and it's just not being managed correctly to to achieve greatness in these areas for some reason and i'm you know we don't know enough about their structure to say why exactly but
Marco:
I bet a lot of it is historic, you know, in the sense that there was a lot of, like, weird cruft and baggage coming from the iTunes era, you know, trying to modernize that over time and everything.
Marco:
But, I mean, jeez, what year is it?
Marco:
Like, enough is enough.
Marco:
Like, there's no good excuse whatsoever.
Marco:
for why Apple Music and Siri and the music apps, why these things are still mediocre.
Marco:
There is no good excuse.
Marco:
I'm sure everyone in the company has their reasons.
Marco:
Either they are delusional and think they are extremely competitive, which would be truly delusional, honestly.
Marco:
Or they think they have good reasons for why they have to be the way they are.
Marco:
And I'm telling you there's no good reason.
Marco:
I'm sure they have lots of bad ones, but there's no good reason.
Marco:
It's mismanagement, simple as that.
Marco:
And that is something they can fix.
Marco:
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Casey:
So in the tradition of ATP, we've had something in the show notes for what feels like a year or two now.
Casey:
I think it's actually been a few months.
Casey:
But it was something that I hadn't noticed until I saw it in the show notes.
Casey:
And it was a very delightful article that was a pretty quick read.
Casey:
And it's called File Not Found, A Generation That Grew Up With Google Is Forcing Professors to Rethink Their Lesson Plans.
Casey:
And this is by Monica Chin.
Casey:
The short, short version of this article is college professors are realizing that kids in college today
Casey:
They genuinely don't really understand what a file is or where one can find a file like this is not them trying to be like too cool for school or anything.
Casey:
They really just don't have any experience with this and don't don't understand it.
Casey:
So here's a few quotes that I think John has pulled.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Garland thought it would be an easy fix.
Casey:
She asked each student where they'd save their project.
Casey:
Could they be on the desktop, perhaps in the shared drive?
Casey:
But over and over, she was met with confusion.
Casey:
Quote, what are you talking about?
Casey:
Quote, multiple students inquired.
Casey:
Not only did they not know where their files were saved, they didn't understand the question.
Casey:
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years.
Casey:
The concept of file folders and directories essential to previous generations understanding of computers is gibberish to many modern students.
John:
They're modeling turbines and not turbines, by the way, but that's fine.
John:
I was wondering about that pronunciation.
Casey:
Fine, whatever, whatever, whatever.
Casey:
Sorry I dropped the E, guys.
Casey:
Anyway, the point is I'm withering away to dust and dying as we speak because, oh my gosh, I've never felt more old.
John:
Well, I don't think you need to.
John:
Part of the reason I put this thing in, this article in here, is because I –
John:
feel like this they like this is it sounds like it's depressing our like all the kids these days they grow up in the school system and they use google docs because google really dominates the school system and everyone knows in google docs you never need to save because it's just always saving right and you know you don't really have to deal with the file system and you don't even have to pick where you save things and yes you can make folders and organize things in google drive but a lot of people don't do that and apparently for this lesson plan they were having actual files with whatever this weird modeling software is and the kids couldn't handle it right
John:
And so it seems like, oh, the kids these days, right?
John:
They don't understand, you know, files and folders, and now we're old.
John:
But I think the, I mean, this is not exactly an exhaustively researched thing.
John:
It's just a fun article with some anecdotes from people.
John:
So I'm going to counter it with my own fun anecdotes from me.
Yeah.
John:
The even sadder reality is there has never been a point in the history of personal computers where the average person has understand files and folders.
John:
It is not worse now than it used to be.
John:
It has always been this bad.
John:
Yes, even college students.
John:
Yes, even smart people.
John:
No, because I've been helping people with computers my whole life, you know, starting from the very first computer that had icons, files and folders that anyone was likely to see in the 80s.
John:
Right.
John:
Some people get it and some people don't.
John:
And I don't think those percentages have changed and maybe will ever change.
John:
And it's not because it's a complicated concept.
John:
It's just you have always been able to get by without ever really grokking this at a fundamental level.
John:
You could use a Mac, a Windows 95 PC or whatever.
John:
with just enough understanding to get the thing done that you wanted to get done and you may think well isn't it even less necessary today because google docs autosaves and all that other stuff i don't think so at least not on personal computers maybe on phones you could say but even phones and you know ipads you've got the files thing or whatever like no matter what the computing device is
John:
There is still a file system under there, and there is sometimes you have to deal with it, but you can get by without really ever understanding or engaging with it at anything below a surface level, right?
John:
And that leads to situations that has always led to situations where, you know, where did you save your file?
John:
Oh, I don't remember.
John:
That's not a thing that happened because of Google, right?
John:
People have always been saving their things and not knowing where they saved it, right?
John:
The only thing that has ever saved them is well-written applications that, you know, that remember the last directory that the open save dialog box was on.
John:
And so when they hit open, it's right, you know, they don't know where it is, but wherever they hit save, when they hit open, it opens to the same place and they can find it again.
John:
Or the thing that we've talked about on this show a million times and everyone is familiar with, why does everyone say everything on a desktop?
John:
It's the one place, quote unquote, in the file system that people feel comfortable that they can find because it's literally on the screen in their face, right?
John:
And that's why people have crap all over their desktops.
John:
you know that's one of these sort of uh coping mechanisms let's say for people who don't understand or want to engage with the file system is i don't know about all that mumbo-jumbo but i know what the desktop is i can see it right here and i put stuff on the desktop it's on the desktop and i always know in an open save dog box i figured out on whatever operating system i'm using how to get to the desktop which is the one place that i know about and that's where i put my crap and then i see it on the screen right and
John:
and that's enough for people to get by that's why people things are all the top levels everyone's google drive it's whatever the default save location is that's where the stuff is and when they go look for it some people also learn you can start by date and then you'll find your thing and honestly i'm not saying this is bad and people are bad for doing this it's just that this is like water has has found its level right and
John:
You don't need to ever really, really understand the file system if you don't ever need to engage with it at anything more than just this very surface level.
John:
And that will always lead to situations like this.
John:
Oh, it's the first time you're using this, whatever the simulation software is, which is surely not a consumer application.
John:
It's some weird academic thing or something from industry and industry.
John:
it expects you to understand the file system and it's maybe not going to be, you know, have its preferences set up to spring you back to the last directory where you saved files or maybe it's on a communal computer where someone saved in a different location or maybe, you know, all the students are saving into their shared drive and they don't understand this and they just can't find their file or, you know, and there will always be kids who I used Google Docs my whole life but I never had to deal with a file.
John:
It's just, you know, it was always just there in my Google Docs and I saw the icon because it always shows the most recent three things I worked on and, you know,
John:
I would never blame modern technology for making people more ignorant of this.
John:
And I think fundamentally, we have never lived in a world where it has been necessary for some percentage of people, for most people.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know what the percentage is.
John:
I can't give you numbers here, but like whatever percentage has been able to get by without knowing this, I feel like that percentage has been more or less the same and continues to be the same.
John:
And it's a pretty big percentage.
John:
And even though it's unfathomable for us computer nerds who, you know, understand the file system and don't think it's that complicated and is a fundamental way that we organize things.
John:
That's just us.
John:
There's a whole other swath of the world that has never needed to know that and never will need to know it.
John:
And if they don't need to know it, then they won't know it because they're not into it.
Casey:
You know, I've told this story many times before, I think including on this very program, but I was a very...
Casey:
frustrating kid for at least probably my whole upbringing but at least a small portion of my life because i really wanted to play games on the family computer and i just didn't understand how to use dos and john can you please hold your snark about how barbaric dos is just for a few minutes here
Casey:
And I always needed my dad's help.
Casey:
And dad, for all of his great qualities, patience has never been one of them.
Casey:
And eventually he threw me the manual to DOS and said, just read this and you'll figure it out, which is really not great parenting.
Casey:
But as it turns out, that set me on the course to talk to you two every week all these years later.
Casey:
And on a lark, I think because of a CocoConf keynote I did several years back now,
Casey:
I found and purchased with real money a physical copy of the Disk Operating System version 3.30 user's guide.
Casey:
And on page 6-3, I've been trying to find a PDF for this.
Casey:
And the only PDF I found is a different version of this guide that doesn't have all these ridiculous things I'm about to describe.
Casey:
But on page six, hyphen three, it's in the section organizing files.
Casey:
It says the title is your fixed disk and electronic filing cabinet.
Casey:
And there's a little goofy diagram of, of a filing cabinet with files pulled out.
Casey:
And then there's a different diagram on the next page of your root directory, which is like a,
Casey:
hallway with doors off of it and then you're building rooms off of the room and it's just the most preposterous like chintzy and weird and cutesy diagrams to help you understand how to use your file system and it's so ridiculous especially looking at this at my position that i'm in now but it is also quite hilarious and if i can find an electronic version i will put it in the show notes but i don't think such a thing exists unfortunately
John:
That's part of the reason people have trouble with the file system, even though, again, computer nerds don't.
John:
It's really simple.
John:
What's the problem?
John:
Like that book, more so in the 80s, but a lot of the times things like that book are trying to give a metaphor by comparing it to something that people understand.
John:
Oh, it's like a hallway with doors off of it, and it's like a filing cabinet, and all these type of things.
John:
They're assuming the reader is familiar with this thing in the real world, and they say, well, this is like that, but in the computer.
John:
And, you know, it's the whole desktop metaphor and having folder icons and the trash can and, you know.
John:
But it breaks down surprisingly fast, right?
John:
In the real world, we do not literally put other folders inside folders that, like, you can't put a bigger folder inside a smaller folder.
John:
Like, this folder has two items in it, but inside it is one folder that has 10,000 items.
John:
Nothing in the real world is like that.
John:
Like, maybe the TARDIS, right, from Doctor Who, right?
John:
It's not, that's not, you know...
John:
not how it works at all but that's how it works on the computer and we have no problem with that because we're not constantly it's like learning a language fluently you're not constantly translating from the computer metaphor to the real world one to understand when you understand the file system and
John:
quote-unquote, files and folders on a computer, you understand it for what it is.
John:
You don't understand it because it's like a filing cabinet.
John:
It's not like a filing cabinet.
John:
It's not like a hallway with doors on it.
John:
It's not a big truck, right?
John:
It's a series of tubes.
John:
It's...
John:
And it's not very difficult to understand, but all of those attempts to explain it to people in terms of folders within folders or filing cabinets or houses with rooms all fall down really quickly, especially in the modern age where we have millions of files.
John:
And just it's like either it is worth your while to – I keep going back to the word grok.
John:
Either it is worth your while to grok this for what you do with computers or it's not worth your while because you never actually need to know it.
Yeah.
John:
Or maybe, you know, when I took that one astrophysics class, I had to learn the file system because there was some annoying software they used, and I learned it for that.
John:
But then after that, I forgot about it again.
John:
Like, not everyone is going to be as into your hobby as you are, right?
John:
In the same way that people who are into repairing their own cars can't believe that people can't identify the major parts of an internal combustion engine and don't know how to change their oil.
John:
But it's like...
John:
never need to know that it doesn't come up in my life and i'm not interested in it and i can get by without knowing it and that is true of basic file system knowledge for computers uh and it always has been true and i think it will continue to be true i mean maybe over time it's becoming more true again phone is really takes you farther away from that but
John:
Still, for my entire lifetime, there are major classes of people who absolutely do need to know about it.
John:
Programmers, for example, any kind of programmer, you cannot avoid dealing with the file system.
John:
You can argue whether this is right or wrong, but we still organize source code files into subdirectories.
John:
And the web is very fundamentally based on, you know, if you're running any kind of web servers or web server, you're probably going to have to know files in directory because they're a very important part of how things are served and how code is organized.
John:
how classes are like it's unavoidable if you are a programmer and that hasn't changed right so there will always be people who really do need to understand this as like a just baseline like it's like knowing how to read and also understanding the file system because you will not get far as a programmer without understanding the file system that would be super confusing um
John:
Well, I wonder if that's always going to be true.
John:
No, I don't think it's always going to be true, but it still is.
John:
And what I'm saying is that has not made any progress.
John:
In my entire lifetime, you need to know about the file system just as much now as you did in the 80s.
Marco:
I mean, there's so many angles on this.
Marco:
I mean, number one, going back a second, to use a file cabinet metaphor...
Marco:
I am almost 40, and I've never used a file cabinet or file folders at my jobs.
John:
You haven't had many, like, normal jobs.
Marco:
Well, fair enough.
Marco:
But there's a lot of people younger than me now in the sense that, like, young people don't understand, like, file folder metaphors.
Marco:
Well, of course not.
Marco:
If people who are 40 have never used file folders, what do you think someone who's 20 is going to have it?
Marco:
Like, what context do they have, right?
Marco:
What?
John:
But it doesn't make any sense because there's not another file cabinet inside any of the folders in my filing cabinet.
Marco:
But still, the point is like, I think in the early days of computers, I think we, because computers were so new to people and because older people in particular seem to be very intimidated by them because they had their way of working for their whole career and all of a sudden you try to change it in pretty big ways, that's hard for people to adopt.
Marco:
And
Marco:
First, we made these file and folder metaphors so we weren't dealing with just sectors on disk.
Marco:
So that's part one.
Marco:
And then you start dealing with, okay, well, now we have a GUI and we're going to visually arrange these things and have your spatial finder that you love so much and have spatial visual ways to navigate and organize things.
Marco:
And that'll help.
Marco:
And then as computer technology went on,
Marco:
The need for the file folder metaphor made less and less sense as more and more people just natively understood computers and didn't necessarily, like me, didn't necessarily understand file folders on paper as the thing that they were trying to emulate.
Marco:
And then we started making computers so easy that we started hiding the file system.
Marco:
So rather than trying to, you know, assume people would know this and this would be like, you know, the main interface to computers as it was like with, you know, say, you know, the original Mac, obviously like the file system was the main interface of the computer in the sense that it was, it was the, here's finder, here's this visual thing and here are your files, do stuff with them, you know.
Marco:
And over time, we've shifted more and more away from that, more towards not only, you know, at the app-based metaphor, you know, the app as the container where the app manages the storage in some managed way, things like Apple Notes or Apple Photos, stuff like that.
John:
Oh, interestingly, the apps are all arranged in spatially and into folder.
John:
They even call them folders.
John:
Like, I wonder if young people wonder, like, why the hell they called folders?
John:
Like when you put, you know, icons on your phone and you lump them together, that's called a folder.
John:
It looks nothing like a folder.
John:
It doesn't even, they don't even attempt to make it look like a folder.
John:
But we call it that because, and you're right, it's totally app driven.
John:
What do you see in that screen?
John:
You don't see files, you see apps.
John:
But those apps, A, can be arranged spatially and B, can be put into folders, not multiple folders, just one level of them.
John:
But so it's like, it's like at ease or Microsoft Bob, like it's the,
John:
it's the play school play school version of the file system for your apps right and it doesn't have much of a connection at all with the actual file system but still whatever the fundamental thing that you're dealing with you don't have to know anything about how they're organized you don't have to organize them at all but you can organize them and the thing you organize them to are called folders kind of like the same reason like in the contacts app they're called contact cards why are they called cards if you've never seen a real rolodex
John:
Like, they don't look like cards anymore, but they're called that.
John:
They're called contact cards because that's what they used to be in a Rolodex.
John:
They were like literal paper cards.
John:
And that is so long gone that nobody, you know, it's just one of those, it's not a skeuomorph, because that's a physical thing, but it's a terminology skeuomorph, like a leftover from a bygone era that no longer serves a purpose, that is only there for historical reasons.
John:
They're called contact cards, and the things on Springboard are called folders.
Yeah.
Marco:
yeah but i i think you know so we we went through this period where you know for for what was relatively speaking uh you know a brief period of the computing revolution files and folders mattered a lot because that was like the only way that you could organize your data on a computer you had to know how to find files where to put files you know back in in the dos and early windows and early mac days you had to interact with it but
Marco:
Over time, we removed the need in many ways and the ability in many ways to interact with it.
Marco:
And then what developed later were web apps where now your data is somewhere else entirely and you can't manage it with the file system on your computer because it's all in a web app.
Marco:
And the rise of both web and local search as one of the main ways you find stuff.
Marco:
Keep in mind, you couldn't just... Quicksilver and Spotlight and whatever the heck the Windows search thing is called where you start typing into the start bar now, those things didn't exist 15 or 20 years ago.
Marco:
There was a very long period where...
Marco:
The idea of searching for files on your computer was nowhere near instant.
Marco:
It was something that you were expected not to have to do very often because it would take seconds or minutes to actually search in some rudimentary way for a file name portion rather than what you can do now if you just hit command space and start typing something and you're probably going to find the file you're looking for within a few seconds.
Marco:
Now, search is so universal that you can save files pretty much anywhere on your computer, if you are still doing that and not using a web app or a managed shoebox kind of app.
Marco:
You can save files pretty much anywhere, and you're going to find them really fast, no matter where they are.
Marco:
So you don't have to know
John:
that search where you just mentioned that was the first like this article this is one of again it's a silly article or whatever but like the first wave of these articles the same type of thing of kids these days don't understand the file system and you want to know why like the ant the the culprit what wasn't google docs back then and the fact that like it auto saves and you don't have the concept of files it was search it was like in this age of search no one will need to organize things anymore because they'll just search for it and lots of people wrote that article and i think this is just a modernized version of
John:
in this age of google docs who has any concept of saving a file on a location you just open a window and start typing i mean like without looking either one of you where is our atp topics uh google doc it's a bookmark in google drive like no but like where is it like because you can organize things in google drive you can make folders and stuff is it in whose whose google drive is it in is it in a subfolder and what does that subfolder call none of us know no one none of us need to know
John:
do i have a google drive i don't even know that's what i'm saying like so there's always something that's going to be held up as like this is the thing that makes people not understand the file system but like i said i'm here to tell you that even when there was nothing you know there was no google search there was no people still didn't understand the file system that's what made computers hard and as you're saying like when we introduce things that let people be able to use computers
Marco:
in a more sophisticated way without understanding the file system still the same number of people didn't understand the file system it just let them accomplish more right yeah but so two other things i wanted i wanted to point out here so number one i think when we say something like you know the kids these these days don't know this
Marco:
It's not that they are somehow... They'll never learn it or they're not able to learn it.
Marco:
They just haven't had to learn it yet.
Marco:
And as soon as you give them a reason or need to learn it, they'll learn it.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
I wouldn't say this is anything that we necessarily have to worry about.
Marco:
If you replace...
Marco:
the file system with something like assembly language.
Marco:
Well, yeah, most people don't need to know assembly language.
Marco:
And when we first came up with, you know, higher level languages, a lot of programmers were like, well, no one even knows assembly anymore.
Marco:
This is ridiculous.
Marco:
How is anybody ever going to be a good programmer?
Marco:
Because now they don't even know assembly.
Marco:
And yeah, you know what?
Marco:
They didn't need to.
Marco:
Or,
Marco:
So, you know, in some ways, sometimes that happens.
Marco:
Sometimes it goes the other way.
Marco:
Sometimes, you know, it's, you hear stories like, well, the kids these days, they're only learning how to use iPads.
Marco:
They're not even going to know how to use computers.
Marco:
And I thought that's, I thought, I was afraid that would happen, you know, to, to, you know, in our family, to our son.
Marco:
I was thinking like, man, I should probably like teach him how to use like a full-size computer of some sort, PC or Mac, whatever, so that he can start coding and, you know, get into better games and stuff because he's doing everything on his iPad.
Marco:
Well, you know what?
Marco:
As soon as he wanted to play a computer game, he learned how to use a computer.
Marco:
And it took him like three seconds to pick it up.
Marco:
And he picked it up and he's flying now.
Marco:
No time at all.
Marco:
Same skill level.
Marco:
Everything.
Marco:
He started coding recently.
Marco:
First on his iPad.
Marco:
And then I showed him some stuff to do on the computer.
Marco:
By the way, Pico 8.
Marco:
Really cool.
Marco:
Showed him that.
Marco:
He did it in two seconds.
Marco:
Figured it all out.
Marco:
Kids, they don't know what they haven't needed to know yet.
Marco:
Obviously.
Marco:
But as soon as they need to know it for something, they'll learn it.
Marco:
It's fine.
John:
And also on iPad, you've got things like Swift Playgrounds 4 or whatever.
John:
It's not like the iPad.
Marco:
Right, and that's what I want to talk about next, actually.
Marco:
So Swift Playgrounds 4, we didn't talk about this last week because we had too much other stuff, as we tend to do.
Marco:
But Swift Playgrounds 4 came out and...
Marco:
it's incredible.
Marco:
Like it's the things you can do with switch.
Marco:
So this, this is the, this is the updates of playgrounds that they, I think originally talked about, was it WVDC, but they, this is the one that lets you actually build and submit apps to the app store.
Marco:
So that's a, that's a pretty big deal.
Marco:
Like you, you literally can do it all on the iPad.
Marco:
And obviously there's a bunch of limitations, you know, chief of which is that you can't use any objective C code.
Marco:
So that's, that's, you know, limiting in certain ways.
Marco:
is that a bug or a feature well but it's in practice it's going to be a little bit limiting but the point is so here is this complete development environment that it's not as full featured as desktop xcode or as you know other you know pc and mac based environments but it is like a full-blown app development environment just with a lot of limitations but you can make full apps on an ipad and that is programming
Marco:
That could become professional programming.
Marco:
I'm sure somebody.
Marco:
There probably already are, but there will be people who are doing their full-time job that way.
Marco:
It's not going to be the main way people do their full-time programming jobs for a while, if ever, but there are going to already, if not already, there's going to be people who are doing full-time programming work from an iPad, from that environment, and that environment has no access to the file system.
Marco:
So I can't say for sure that programmers will always need file system access because here's a brand new environment that doesn't really expose that to you at all.
Marco:
It does, though, because you can organize your source files.
John:
Sort of.
John:
They're more groups.
John:
You could have all your source files at the top level.
John:
Some people do that.
John:
But eventually, if you want to organize your source files, you will take subdirectories.
John:
And if you want to understand version control, version control deals with files and directories.
John:
You're going to have to know it eventually.
John:
It's not supported.
John:
And actually, that's one thing that I think... But version control is not supported?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Oh, that's terrible.
Marco:
Well, they need to fix that.
Marco:
I told them that.
John:
I mean, they will eventually.
John:
It's called Playgrounds.
John:
It's not called Xcode for iPad, right?
John:
But it is advancing by leaps and bounds.
Marco:
If you look at this, though, you can take those project files and migrate them back and forth to desktops and you can open them up in Swift Playgrounds on a Mac and you can manipulate them on the Mac and you can ship them back to the iPad back and forth.
Marco:
So it would not surprise me
Marco:
If this is like, you know, Xcode X, for lack of a better name, like the way they remade Final Cut Pro to Final Cut Pro X or X, however that one was pronounced, it wouldn't surprise me if this, after a long time, I don't think this is going to be a soon thing, but I think on a long-term basis,
Marco:
The next Xcode might be just this brought forward in a lot of ways.
Marco:
The next Xcode project format is probably going to be this project format.
Marco:
All the things that this can't do today are probably things that future Xcode won't do.
Marco:
With the exception of things that are more likely to be obvious developer needs forever.
Marco:
Like version control, right.
Marco:
Pretty sure it's still going to be there.
Marco:
But I'm guessing that this is the direction this is going.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I wouldn't assume that even programmers would necessarily need file system access.
Marco:
Like, we're moving towards worlds of many more, you know, packages and pre-made modules being used.
Marco:
You know, right now, today, you and I, us, you know, old programmers, we think, of course, you would always use a file system in the same way that people who were older than us doing programming a long time ago said, of course, you would need assembly language for everything at some point.
Marco:
And here I am as a programmer in 2021 and I have never used assembly language except for one class in college that taught me how to use assembly language.
Marco:
I've never used it in a real program like after that.
Marco:
And I've never had to and I never will as far as I can tell like based on my career and what we actually do these days.
Marco:
I'll probably never need that.
Marco:
Access to like, you know, file system stuff and dealing with and organizing files in, you know, non-trivial hierarchies besides like, you know, a single level grouping like we have now, that might just be stuff that people in current and future generations just never need to deal with because we've just moved in different directions.
John:
Well, let's say your example of assembly is a good one.
John:
It's why I emphasize the point that for my entire life and career, programmers have had to deal with the file system.
John:
Whereas for my entire life and career, programmers have not always had to deal with assembly because they did way back when and they do way less now.
John:
But the file system has been a constant.
John:
And as I said, I'm not saying, again, infinite timescale.
John:
Eventually, yes, we will hopefully move farther away from it, even for programmers.
John:
But I think no time soon is that gonna happen, right?
John:
Because just everything you described, Swift package manager, packages are a structure of files and directories, right?
John:
Version control, frameworks, everything having to do with programming.
John:
And by the way, writing programs that manipulate files in the file system, because yes, the file system's underneath it.
John:
The whole operating system is running off a file system.
John:
All those containers and all that other stuff are in a file system, right?
John:
fundamentally understanding files and folders and how they nest which is not a complicated concept people think it's we're talking about something complicated it's not it's the simple thing that you understand that you know maybe a little bit of nuances of like if you're in a ch root environment like where is the root of the file system what do you have visibility into what is the security model it gets actually gets more complicated on the phone than on the mac these days because the mac has just basic
John:
unix permissions and all that other stuff whereas everything on the phone is sandbox everything on the phone has a constrained view of the world at a fundamental level right which is harder to understand than the relatively open file system on a pc but just the basic idea of like hey uh when i'm you know i guess it's not the same thing with because we're not talking about objective c but like an import statement in objective c uh
John:
where is the framework that i'm importing i know there's some magic there with search paths but again search paths and you know ld load path and the dynamic linker and where does it find packages and whatever it's like oh well it'll just all take care of that for me yeah most of the time it will take care of that for you until it doesn't at which point you kind of have to know where things are and you have to understand file system at the very basic level to do that and even if you're just organizing your source files uh you know you might not even know that those things in the sidebar you know maybe they'll use a folder icon maybe they won't
John:
uh maybe you'll dimly understand that you're organizing things into a hierarchy maybe you won't uh and maybe that won't be reflected on disk as actual files maybe they'll all be in the data this doesn't really matter those are implementation details the whole point is just understanding that what is a directory and what is a file and what is their relationship between them how can i navigate amongst them how can i reference them how can i refer to them and the web helps with that too like
John:
URLs have a bunch of slashes in them do those mean that those are files or directories on a file system somewhere maybe maybe not but conceptually usually not right but conceptually they do work that way and for you know for many years I should try this in Safari for many years you could go to a website and now it's probably broken now it's got to be broken let's see
John:
uh yeah it doesn't work anymore for many years in safari before they really went hog wild on that menu bar you could do the same thing you do in the finder so if you go to finder and you go to like a list view window and you hold on the command key and you click on the title of the window you will see you know the path to the root of your system right uh
John:
um used to be able to do that in safari you could hold down the command key and click on what what used to be back when safari had the title like the title tag the content of the title tag was the title bar in safari you could command click on that and you could go you know it would show you the hierarchy of the website that you're on right like if i go to let me see
John:
you got to find a website that has any hierarchy probably our website doesn't let's see it does thank you very much well is anything more than two levels deep uh no no because everyone does like controller action id now so that's nothing's more than two levels deep anyway if you if you were to go to atp.fm slash slash join is top level slash store is top level let me see apple have something
John:
overcast has a few overcast.fm slash account slash a bunch of stuff all right here you go apple.com slash shop slash mac slash accessories right if i was to command click on an old version of safari it would give me a pop-up menu that this first item was apple.com slash shop slash mac then it would be apple.com slash shop and then it would be apple.com as if those were directories you know because it's laid out like it's the concept we're talking about those aren't obviously probably real directories anyway right but conceptually
John:
the idea that a string, what is a path?
John:
You know, the path portion of URL is called the path portion.
John:
It's, you know, even though we know it's probably not a real set of files and directories, conceptually, that's how we describe resources on the internet, including local resources, including things in a sidebar in Xcode, even though on an iPad, we have no idea.
John:
We can't, you know, reach out and touch a file system.
John:
But the iPad does have an app called Files that shows a bunch of folders.
John:
And yes, it's complicated by sandboxing and containers and all sorts of other things.
John:
But
John:
conceptually it works that way and even conceptually springboard and the folders that are there like someone pointed out in the chat room uh the original mac file system called mfs did not allow multiple levels of nesting it was very primitive um you know this is on like a 400k floppy disk so there wasn't uh that much need for that eventually hfs came that's what you know if you're wondering what hfs uh you know it supplanted mfs hfs the h is stands stands for hierarchical if i'm putting extra silver oh wow sorry um because you could have more than one level and it was you know
John:
a better file system so mfs didn't last very long i don't know what the timeline is on mfs but um yeah i think these concepts are still there it's kind of like this kind of reminds me of one of those things in terms of programming we talk a lot about um maybe not so much these days but you still hear it occasionally uh why do we use monospace fonts in our text editors in programming right like why don't we use styled text like bold italic proportional fonts
John:
uh and technically there's not really a reason for for that but culturally we still are acting like you know you have to use a monospace font and of course it of course it has to be plain text right why does it have to be plain text well plain text is simple we don't need anything more than plain text or whatever but
John:
it's the same thing with the file system could programmers eventually not have to know about the file system maybe but so far there hasn't been enough of a reason for us to go there to do that which is why like i said and in contrast to assembly which we flee and we ran away from as fast as we could because it's really hard to deal with and now very very few people need to deal with assembly the same number of programmers need to deal with the
John:
file system in some fundamental level as they always have and so it's on a much longer timeline getting getting away from the file system getting away from plain text for source files uh that seems like it's going to take probably longer than all of our lifetimes which is fine with me and you know infinite timescale eventually we'll get away from it but it seems like both of those things have legs
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Green Chef, Stream, and Revenue Cat.
Marco:
And thanks to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
Big thank you once again to our awesome members.
Marco:
You can join and become one of them at 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-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
Here's what we're going to do.
Casey:
We're going to do two AskATPs since we ran out of time, but one of them is going to be fast.
Casey:
Watch this.
Casey:
Rob Knight asks, I keep mistaking newer Corvettes for fancy European cars.
Casey:
When do Corvettes start looking like Lamborghinis?
Casey:
I'm not generally interested in fancy cars, but I live adjacent to Silicon Valley, so I've seen my fair share of expensive European cars.
Casey:
Lately, I've been surprised by how often I think I'm approaching a fancy European car.
Casey:
And it turns out to be a Corvette.
Casey:
How do you all feel about Corvettes looking like fancy European cars?
Casey:
So what you're looking at is almost surely the C8 Corvette, that would be the eighth generation Corvette, which on an infinite timeline, the Corvette did go mid-engine, as has been foretold for literally like 40 or 50 years.
Casey:
And so, yeah, what's different about this is that the engine is between the axles.
Casey:
It is sort of kind of in the back, but strictly speaking, it's in the middle of the car because it's in front of the rear axle.
Casey:
And they look way different.
Casey:
They look much more like a Lamborghini or Ferrari or something like that.
Casey:
And from everything I have read and watched and heard, et cetera, given how expensive they are, which is I think they start at like $60,000 and can easily run up toward $100,000.
Casey:
But given how expensive they are, the performance per dollar, if you will, is just off the charts.
Casey:
And they are phenomenally fast and phenomenally good, despite being for the market reasonably cheap.
Casey:
Now, this is where John, I'm sure, will complain in a moment about the C8 Corvette, so please carry on.
John:
If you think the Corvette looks like a Lamborghini, I really question how discerning you are about what cars look like.
John:
Ouch.
Yeah.
John:
it is because no, not that I'm, you know, if you, if you're not into cars, yeah, lots of cars look the same.
John:
And yes, of course they look the same.
John:
But if you are into cars and you think that Corvette looks like a Lamborghini, I'm now I'm thinking like, like it just, it doesn't like if you are, if, if you are into cars and you know what a lot of different cars look like, and you are very familiar with the different sizes and shapes of different makes and models of cars, it's,
John:
there's no confusing i understand what you're saying like mid-engine proportions from a distance it can look like and i have this found on myself when i'm looking at fancy cars and traffic i always have like fancy car peripheral vision right in the distance on the highway like oh is that a and then as soon as i glance over it and you know swivel my pupils over it's like oh it's a corvette right because it does because it's a mid-engine car you might think is that a fright no no it's a corvette
John:
And this is to the credit of the Corvette designers.
John:
Through many years and many iterations, they've managed to keep Corvettes.
John:
They've managed to keep a family resemblance through the line of Corvettes.
John:
It has changed very much over the years.
John:
But when I look at it, I can say it's clear that that's a Corvette.
John:
that it still looks like a Corvette, which means it doesn't look like a Lamborghini.
John:
I don't think you need to see them next to each other, but if you saw literally any Lamborghini and literally any Corvette next to each other, like modern ones, right, they don't actually look the same.
John:
Yes, they're mid-engine, and they have mid-engine proportions.
John:
They don't actually.
John:
I was trying to think of an analogy of, like, just I couldn't think of a good one.
John:
They're so fundamental.
John:
It's kind of like if you think, oh, the Mac and Windows 95 look the same.
John:
regardless of which one you thought was better or worse or ugly or not ugly oh they will have windows and little window controls and a mouse pointer and folders and menus it's the same no like a mac user would say if you can't see the difference between windows 95 and macOS i'm saying just aesthetically forget about user interface ease of use you know but i'm just aesthetically in a screenshot there's that's how different i feel like the c8 corvette is from any modern lamborghini it's like windows 95 and the mac and i'll let you decide which is which
John:
Wow.
John:
Hot dog stand.
John:
All right.
John:
That was Windows 3.1.
Casey:
You realize that, Rob, in the question, Rob said, and I quote, I'm not generally interested in fancy cars.
Casey:
So you shouldn't beat up on poor Rob.
John:
Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying.
John:
Like, if you, you know, if...
John:
For someone who doesn't know about a topic, if I look at five different racehorses, I don't know anything about racehorses.
John:
They all look just like horses.
John:
I mean, I can tell they're different colors maybe, but that's about it, right?
John:
And I can tell a racehorse from like a horse that pulls the carriage around Central Park.
John:
I can tell the difference between those two, right?
John:
But beyond that.
John:
nuances of like oh you know this is a horse from this line or this is an arabian horse versus a russian horse i can't tell those you know it doesn't make a difference to me so but if you were into horses you could tell and it would be super obvious and if you were into cars corvette does not look like a lamborghini and vice versa
Casey:
Juno Orion asks, since we seem to agree that Apple should not make a car, what's the next product they should focus a lot of R&D on in order to not make?
Casey:
I love the way that was phrased.
Casey:
There are three options for you, gentlemen.
John:
I want to emphasize, by the way, that we have a lot of these questions.
John:
I appreciate the fact that when they have these questions like, oh, Apple's doing these things, they don't just ask an open-ended question of like, what should Apple do next instead of the car?
John:
No, people have a limited list of options that you will now choose from these three options.
John:
And that really does focus us.
John:
uh and not just you know have to be like oh you can make anything you want like the last one is like if they could buy a company they buy like a camera company or i forget what the other one is like a game company or something else really narrows the question down so i appreciate that but that being said let us hear what juno's options are for the three things that apple can make instead of a car
Casey:
Spoiler alert, I don't really love any of them, but here we go.
Casey:
A sophisticated, easy-to-fly camera drone with 3D scanning capabilities.
Casey:
That's option one.
Casey:
Option two, a user-friendly 3D printer with a built-in quote-unquote object store like the App Store, but for things you can print.
John:
Not an object store like CloudKit or whatever, or like a non-SQL database, right?
John:
No SQL database.
John:
An object store as in a store, like a storefront where you buy things, where you could buy 3D objects.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then finally, in door number three, behind door number three, a smart TV with great audio capabilities that can be used as the main quote-unquote dashboard for controlling your smart home.
Casey:
When I read this originally, I thought, ooh, definitely drone.
Casey:
I think that'd be super cool.
Casey:
And maybe this is Apple at its best, to be honest with you.
Casey:
I can't think of what...
Casey:
i really wish my drone had that i that would require apple special sauce like i wish it had the uh collision detection that marcos does but it's because i have the little baby one and so that's why it doesn't it's reasonably easy to fly though mine didn't detect a roof no i did detect it that's why i played dead exactly right oh no i'm gonna crash
John:
That's like those bees that dropped as soon as the video was going around recently of like a bunch of bees flying around.
John:
And when you turn the lights off, they just stop, drop dead out of the air.
John:
They just immediately stop flying and fall to the ground in a straight line.
John:
No, I have not seen that.
John:
That's what you're droned in on the roof.
Casey:
Yeah, pretty much.
Casey:
So, yeah, so that was my gut reaction was, yes, definitely the drone, because because, yeah, that would that would be great.
Casey:
But again, I don't know what special sauce Apple would really bring to that.
Casey:
And I don't personally see what 3D scanning really does for me, but maybe I'm just not creative enough.
Casey:
So leaving the 3D printer in smart TV.
Casey:
I don't know, maybe it's just because I've got such a burr up my keister about monitor-related things.
Casey:
But even though I don't particularly want a dashboard for controlling my smart home, I think just having an Apple-branded TV with really solid audio would be really cool.
Casey:
We bought a new... I can't remember if I brought this up on the show, but we bought a new bedroom TV...
Casey:
Recently, actually, this is going to drive Syracuse up a wall.
Casey:
We bought a new bedroom TV recently, and this TV's purpose is to maybe once a week at most show video and play a little bit of audio.
Casey:
It is very infrequently used.
Casey:
We have it for reasons that are uninteresting, but we need something to show video and play audio, and it does not have to be fancy.
Casey:
So we bought a $150 or $200 4K Scepter TV.
Casey:
that uh immediately got mounted on the wall and it sounds like garbage sounds like a made-up brand no it's it's this is our second scepter is it the james bond villain company no yeah yeah yeah that's that's specter oh i'm sorry you're right you're right you're right i apologize it is specter you are right so it is the james bond villain but anyways uh no it it was a really good black friday deal and we bought it and it sounds like utter trash and it looks fine i'm sure it's not filled with spyware
Casey:
Well, it's actually not a smart TV.
Casey:
It doesn't have any sort of smart features, which is good as far as I know.
Casey:
But I think having a legitimate like Apple, what was the person that kept asking for an Apple television?
Casey:
Yes, thank you.
Casey:
Call me Gene Munster.
John:
Poor guy is going to be remembered for.
Casey:
Yeah, well, it's so true.
Casey:
So call me Gene Munster.
Casey:
But I think it could be interesting, even leaving the dashboard stuff and smart home stuff out of it.
Casey:
I just think it would be cool to see Apple do a television set.
Casey:
I don't see it happening, but I think it would be interesting.
Casey:
So I'm going to go with that as my answer.
Casey:
I feel like I've been picking on John a lot recently.
Casey:
Marco, what's your pick of these three?
Marco:
First, I must relay this quote from Hooft in the chat.
Marco:
No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to buy...
John:
That line delivery makes me think you've never seen that movie, Marco, but that's fine.
Marco:
I've seen all the Bonds except for, I think, one or two.
Marco:
Anyway, in the context of which of these products would I want Apple to release, that's a different question, right?
Marco:
And if it was products that I want them to release, maybe I'd go for the TV.
Marco:
Although, the thing is, a smart TV with great audio capabilities, well...
Marco:
I already have great audio capabilities covered from other people if Apple doesn't make it.
Marco:
I don't have, covered by other people, a really great TV with software on it that I can trust.
Marco:
That's something that I would like to have other people enter, and Apple would be a good maker for that, I think.
Marco:
Although, they're never going to do it, and they shouldn't do it for lots of other reasons.
Marco:
The 3D printer with built-in object store, like the App Store...
Marco:
I wonder how useful that would actually be for most people because, you know, 3D printers can't print anything.
Marco:
They can print lots of different types of shapes from a small variety of materials.
Marco:
But that's very different from being able to print any random object.
Marco:
There's lots of sophistication and material needs and things like that that they just can't achieve just because they just didn't practice the way they work.
Marco:
So they have great uses, but they're great...
Marco:
narrow and and still fairly specialized uses so i'm not necessarily sure that would be super necessary or beneficial um a sophisticated easy to fly camera drone with 3d scanning capabilities casey you're right that i mean for the most part you know most drones are pretty good these days and so i'm not sure what apple would really add to that but
Marco:
The question here was not, what should Apple make?
Marco:
It's what should they focus a lot of R&D on in order to not make like the car, right?
Marco:
So that's a different question.
Marco:
And so the question in my mind is, well, which of these things, if they invested in heavily and then failed to produce a product, how would we benefit from the R&D in their other products?
Marco:
So a smart TV with great audio for controlling a smart home.
Marco:
Well, we already pretty much have all those parts.
Marco:
Apple already makes really great displays, really great speakers, and an okay home control system.
Marco:
So that I don't think would be super necessary.
Marco:
A 3D printer with an object store, I don't see where else that would fit in their lineup.
Marco:
Now, a drone with 3D scanning capabilities...
Marco:
Now we're talking.
Marco:
Now that is something that actually has a role in the lineup.
Marco:
They already are doing things like AR with LIDAR and stuff and 3D scanning and integrate with cameras.
Marco:
That's just good for cameras, for things like autofocus and things like that.
Marco:
So ultimately, I would rather them dump a whole bunch of R&D into that option, the sophisticated drone with 3D scanning capabilities.
Marco:
And if they happen to actually get 3D scanning capabilities working in something,
Marco:
which honestly should just be your iPhone.
Marco:
And I think we're already part of the way there.
Marco:
Uh, that's something that I actually would find useful in the sense.
Marco:
And we've talked about this before.
Marco:
Like I would love to be able to capture a 3d object and send it like in an iMessage or
Marco:
or post it on Slack, or put it up on a webpage as a weird image, like the USDZ format, something like that.
Marco:
I would love to be able to do that, to be able to treat 3D scans the same way we treat images today, where they're just easily back and forth, supported everywhere, capture on one end, send it to somebody, have them be able to view it in some kind of AR view, because that would allow you to see objects...
Marco:
better you know the way they are in the real world you know remotely and it would allow you to have a better sense of scale of objects because that's one thing that's really hard to tell with photos and videos is it's really hard to tell like how well how big is that in practice and i would i i'm just i'm very much looking forward
Marco:
You know, when we talk about all the research Apple's dumping into AR and stuff, I am interested in almost none of it.
Marco:
And I'm excited by almost none of it.
Marco:
And I think almost none of it has a super great future.
Marco:
But something, you know, as simple as take a 3D scan of this thing and send it to my wife and say like, hey, can we, you know, will this size table fit next to our couch?
Marco:
I'm out somewhere and it looks interesting.
Yeah.
Marco:
I can see uses for that.
Marco:
Or you're looking at a product page on an online store and you want to see like, hey, how big is this thing?
Marco:
Let me visualize it being held in my hand.
Marco:
That kind of thing I see great uses for.
Marco:
So all that to say, I would go for the camera drone R&D money fire option here because I think the 3D scanning and everything, I think that would have the most usefulness in their other products that they would actually be shipping.
John:
Of all the AR things, you pick like stuff that we can almost do now and don't pick the killer apps, which is names over people's heads and directions when you're walking around.
John:
So out of this very strange list of three things...
John:
I'm going to nix off the drone thing just because I feel like the drone part of it, the flying thing part of it, doesn't really have any place.
John:
And Apple's already doing the 3D scanning stuff without the drone part, so I feel like that's not going to help much.
John:
The 3D printer, I mean, maybe Apple's industrial design lab probably has lots of experience with 3D printing prototype objects or whatever, but I don't, you know...
John:
Like if they did that and didn't release it, maybe it helps their industrial design group.
John:
But I think they're already traveling that path again.
John:
They don't need this project to help them go down their road.
John:
They're already doing that with their rapid prototyping.
John:
I'm sure they keep up with the latest and greatest and all that other stuff.
John:
I think the smart TV is the one because although Apple does have lots of home automation stuff, one thing that Apple continues to lack is any home product with a screen.
John:
right i'm not counting the apple tv right because it's not actually the screen like they don't have like a home pod with a screen on it and i think a lot of the things that people would use a kind of home hub voice assistant thing for are augmented by having a screen even if it's just as simple as glancing over and seeing a cute picture of your kids plus the time and the weather it's easier to glance at that or a recipe in the kitchen or whatever than it is to ask your faceless cylinder for it right
John:
and if they made a smart tv they would be forced to make what is what does a ui look like that's not an apple tv ui what is a home you know home hub you know controlling your smart home but with a screen we know what they think it looks like on the phone on the ipad and the mac and it's stupid and bad right we don't like the home app but if they had to make something that was expected to be shown on
John:
a television set for controlling your smart home they'd have to rethink that ui and that project gets scrapped but then they sell us the shrunk conversion kind of like the you know the original home pod was supposedly according to rumors part of the apple's television set project that got scrapped what we got out it was the home power product which wasn't a television by any stretch but some of the work they did transferred over so i think they made the smart tv and scrapped it they could say well now we basically have all the pieces to make essentially a big home pod with a screen so let's make that and that i think is a product that apple should have