The Comfort Is Killing Me
Marco:
I am typing away, blazing away, podcasting away on my 13-inch screen.
Casey:
That sounds super fun.
Marco:
I've begun some light travel in the sense of, you know, going from the beach back to regular life for a couple of weeks.
Casey:
So when is the iMac Pro due back?
Casey:
Do you have any idea?
Marco:
It's mattering less and less as I get used to the M1.
Casey:
Oh, here it is.
Casey:
Here it is.
Marco:
But I haven't heard back yet.
Marco:
The estimate still has, I think, another week on it at least.
Marco:
And, you know, being that it's Christmas week and I'm sure shipping parts and getting people's hours is all tricky this week.
Marco:
I told them no rush anyway, but, you know.
Marco:
it wouldn't surprise me if it's actually another week or two after this um but ultimately uh man every time like so you know so i'm using the m1 full time this whole week and doing you know my regular work doing some coding doing podcast editing and stuff and it is so fast like stop i don't want to know i don't want to know stop
Marco:
it's almost deceptive like you don't realize like how much faster it is at a lot of things because like you don't it's hard to quantify in benchmarks like some of the things that are faster about it but what you notice stuff that is that like with every Mac you've gotten for the last 10 years like certain things have just been slow the whole time or like certain animations were always jerky certain processes were just like always like you get a new Mac and it'd be maybe a little bit faster but not that much faster
Marco:
And then with this, certain navigation through apps, like navigating in logic, zooming in and out of waveforms and all my sound editing programs, it's just faster, like way faster, going from a few frames a second to 30 or 60 frames a second, like massively faster at certain things.
Marco:
I'm feeling, I think what I'm feeling is all that memory bandwidth.
Marco:
I think that's what's going on where it seems like
Marco:
the throughput of the system in certain ways has massively improved because certain tasks that... I mean, I don't know that much about the low-level CPU design stuff, but in general terms, modern processors are starved for things to do because most of the time they're waiting on something else.
Marco:
They're waiting on memory access or I.O.
Marco:
or network.
Marco:
God knows, they're waiting.
Marco:
They're waiting so long.
Marco:
And they can't frequently use their full power or their full capabilities 100% of the time or even close to 100% of the time because they're so often waiting on some other subsystem to give them the data they need and keep them fed with instructions and data to process.
Marco:
And it seems like the M1 architecture is just significantly better at keeping that CPU fed with stuff to do and with the data it needs.
Marco:
And I don't know whether it's the unified memory, whether it's the memory bandwidth, who knows what it is.
Marco:
But whatever, well, they know, but I don't know.
Marco:
But whatever it is,
Marco:
it makes a significant difference.
Marco:
And that's, I think, part of the reason why these feel so fast.
Marco:
If you look at the benchmarks, you can say, oh, it's whatever it is, like 30% faster, single-threaded, similar to machines, XYZ, multi-threaded stuff.
Marco:
But it feels like more than that because significant architectural things have changed and you can feel it in a lot of apps.
Marco:
And that is, I think, what's going to
Marco:
get me to most likely stick with this full-time and probably trade in my iMac.
John:
Not to prolong our usual pre-follow-up diversion any longer than it needs to be, but the one test that I saw that a lot of people posting videos about, you mentioned it as well, is zooming the timeline in Logic.
John:
So people know Logic is an audio editor.
John:
And if you can imagine it, it's having a bunch of horizontal stripes that show audio waveforms stacked on top of each other.
John:
Those are all the different tracks.
John:
So you have multiple people on a podcast that have different audio tracks, you know.
John:
Anyway, zooming on the timeline is like, you know, showing smaller and smaller portions of time in the same width of your screen or bigger and bigger portions of time.
John:
And if you look at that task, you know, so it's like rectangles of color with little waveforms in them.
John:
So it's not like graphically intensive.
John:
And you might think, well, like that should always zoom in and out quickly.
John:
Why would it ever take a long time?
John:
But if you watch people doing it on their, you know, tricked out Mac Pros with gigantic GPUs that crush the little, you know, the integrated GPU and even in the M1 MacBook Air.
John:
you'll see it being kind of jerky and when you see something like that it's like okay well it's not gpu bound because here here's this machine with this monster gpu that's it's being jerky here so it's not like we're waiting on the gpu to do something the gpu can you know do this no problem it's probably not cpu bound you would think because this is a fast cpu so then you start looking for things like marco was talking about like all right every component in this system
John:
can do this job well.
John:
I mean, you can run, like, an amazing 4K game that's doing these amazing graphics at, you know, 100 frames per second.
John:
Surely zooming some rectangles with some little lines in them is not taxing any part, but it's the combination of pieces that somewhere in this...
John:
in the connection between, okay, how is logic drawing the timeline?
John:
How does it draw the little squiggles that represent the waveforms?
John:
How does it redraw the timeline things?
John:
And how does that communicate?
John:
How does that turn into drawing calls?
John:
How does it affect memory access?
John:
And, you know, just how all the pieces fit together.
John:
Obviously, on...
John:
the you know on intel mac pro or on an imac pro and other systems there's some kind of hitch in that chain of things just because it's like well you know zooming the timeline it works well enough it's not like before marco got this m1 and a macbook air he was like oh i can't i can't edit in logic the timeline zooms too slowly it was just a little bit jerkier and you didn't know it was jerky until you saw oh look now it's not jerky anymore
John:
And that type of thing makes me think, it kind of makes me think of the Pro Workflow team.
John:
They talked about things like this where, what was it, some dialogue that was taking too long to come up?
John:
Do you remember this story?
John:
The Pro Workflow team said this story about how they were doing something in some video editor or something.
John:
It's like, every time I do this thing, I've got to bring up this dialogue and it takes three seconds to come up and I don't understand why I'm waiting three seconds.
John:
And it turned out to be, I forget the details of the story, but it was something you would never think of.
John:
It was like a bug in the video, in the GPU driver that was causing a dialogue to take a long time to appear.
John:
Because, I don't know, it was spinning his wheels doing something.
John:
And they, you know, because the Pro Workflow team had people saying here, here's the thing that annoys me in my workflow.
John:
Find out what the deal with this is and fix it.
John:
And, you know, they tracked it down into something that no one ever would have thought of, right?
John:
And they fixed it.
John:
Well, it seems like with the M1 Max, yes, they are faster and everything, but...
John:
For something like this, where you know the hardware on any modern Mac should have absolutely no problem zooming a timeline full of tracks, right?
John:
You know, especially since like on our podcast, it's not 700 tracks, right?
John:
It's a small number.
John:
So, you know, it's not like the hardware is too weak.
John:
So it's not the M1 advantage of it being a faster CPU.
John:
And it's not the integrated graphics versus the discrete because the discrete stomps all over it.
John:
And in the case of the Mac Pro, it's not memory bandwidth, because Mac Pro has tremendous memory bandwidth, much more than the M1 MacBook Air, as we talked about in past follow-up.
John:
But what it is, is how everything works together.
John:
And when Apple makes all the things, they can make sure much more easily and confidently that everything really does work together.
John:
And in fact, I'm not even sure they would have to do this work for the M1 Mac, because you know on iOS devices that they've been killing themselves for...
John:
a decade or more now to make what were started out as being relatively slow cpus and gpus show good animations on a dinky little phone on battery power right so they've already put in all of that work to get rid of all the hitches and the video drivers and the gpu and the cpu and the way redrawing works and all the other stuff and when and you know i'm not saying they just didn't have to do anything for the mac because apparently they did have to fiddle things around in terms of
John:
texture formats and special instructions on the M1 that aren't on the iOS ones to handle stuff that Macs do that iOS devices don't, but finally really controlling the whole stack and not having to rely on third parties for anything means that any kink that's in the system
John:
either has already been ironed out or can be ironed out pretty easily.
John:
And so that's what it makes me think when I see, I wish we could, we had a link to the tweet or whatever, but the animation showing, here's the most powerful Mac money can buy zooming logic timeline.
John:
Here's the $999 MacBook Air zooming the logic timeline.
John:
And you know, it's not power.
John:
It is just, you know, that thing where people feel like only Apple can do this because they control everything.
John:
It's like,
John:
well what's the benefit someone actually asked us this once in an escape what's the benefit of apple controlling everything and i'm going to chalk this up in that column and saying when apple controls everything and when they're using a tech stack that they that came up on a you know that was used to build phones on much weaker hardware i think you get results like this this is totally speculative but that is my guess all right so let's do some follow-up see now if i if i do a big diversion all of a sudden we're all ready to get the follow-up yeah yeah
John:
That's the secret.
John:
I just got to ramble myself and then be like, God, can we get the follow-up?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we have some information about the AirPods Max.
Casey:
And we start with some information from Barney, who writes, some clarity on your discussion tonight on the battery situation of the AirPods Max.
Casey:
Both batteries are housed in the right ear cup and use the yoke to conduct and pass the power into the left ear cup.
Casey:
And our friends at Snazzy Labs have a video that demonstrates this.
Casey:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
John:
yeah it's pretty interesting i mean uh last show we i realized that uh that that obviously there has to be an electrical connection because as mark pointed out that there's only a charging port on one side so yeah so electricity's got to get to the other side somehow uh i was surprised to see that both batteries are in a single side you'd think they'd split them up for weight purposes but i guess it's offset because i think all the electronics are in the other side um but yeah the electrical connection between the ear cups is kind of interesting uh
John:
the snazzy labs video didn't zoom in too much on it i would have liked to see a closer picture but it was described as like being kind of like brushes like brushes on an electrical motor you know like little metal things pressing against other pieces of metal so that the the yoke the the big stainless steel tube that you use to adjust that goes over your head that thing
John:
that goes into the ear cup into like this ball jointy kind of thing and then there's these little brushes apparently that rub against that stainless steel yoke and that's used to transmit electricity to the other side i mean this was this was just described verbally and shown at a distance on the video but we'll put a link in the video and you can check it out yourself but it's interesting both batteries in one side pretty weird and you look at the batteries and they're actually pretty small so i guess it's pretty amazing this thing gets 20 hours of battery life from these two postage stamp size battery packs
Marco:
Well, headphones don't need that much power.
Marco:
I mean, Bluetooth headphones for a while have existed, and even with the most ancient ones, with the most ancient battery technology, weight was never a big problem with Bluetooth headphones.
Marco:
They've always been able to be made pretty lightweight because they don't need very big batteries.
Marco:
Oh, by the way, speaking of these Apple AirPods Pro Max, I think I've decided to return them.
Marco:
I tried them earlier today because they would be perfect for what I'm doing right now.
Marco:
I'm away from my primary office for a couple of weeks and wanting to get work done, having to record and edit podcasts.
Marco:
And so I brought them, intending to use them a lot.
Marco:
And I used them all day today.
Marco:
And the comfort is just killing me.
Marco:
I can't do it.
Marco:
And as soon as I put on any other wired headphones, they're great.
Marco:
And I just don't have a place in my life where I really want amazing sounding but uncomfortable wireless headphones.
Marco:
And if I'm going to plug them in and use a wire, not only can I do that with other headphones, but it's better with other headphones because the wire is not so short and not in the way.
Marco:
Like with this one, if I'm at a desk using a mouse next to the laptop...
Marco:
the wire is just completely in the way because it goes down from the right ear cup into the right side headphone jack on on the macbook air and my map that's that's between the computer and the mouse if you if you were right-handed so it just it's just constantly in the way and the cable's too short so i can't like loop it around the back of the laptop and go around the left side it's too short for that but
Marco:
And so it's just like, if I'm going to use cabled headphones, I'd rather have it be a more convenient cable and a more comfortable headphone.
Marco:
And so the only way these would be useful to me is if I really needed wireless, great sounding, but uncomfortable full-size headphones.
Marco:
And I just don't.
Marco:
For all of my wireless contexts, the AirPods Pro are great.
John:
So I guess Apple is one for three on Marco Arment satisfying AirPod products.
John:
Because the original AirPods didn't fit your ears right.
John:
You love the AirPod Pros, but these ones, for the same reason, a comfort factor.
John:
And I guess secondarily, the wire thing.
John:
By the way, people who are wondering why Marco keeps talking about the wire on the Apple wireless headphones, it's because he's talking about monitoring during podcasting where you need to be connected by a wire for zero latency.
Marco:
Exactly, yeah.
Marco:
Or editing, where it's really...
Marco:
awkward and frustrating to try to edit audio when the playhead in Logic is a half second ahead of what you're hearing in your ears.
Marco:
It's very annoying.
Marco:
I've done it.
Marco:
It's not good, though.
John:
And yes, you could get an extension cable for the wire, but really, I feel like your main complaint... Well, I would characterize you have two main complaints.
John:
One, they're not comfortable on you, which is the same complaint you have with the original AirPods.
John:
And that, I feel like, is a thing potentially Apple can...
John:
address with better ear cups or whatever um and then two i think what your real problem is you already have tons of headphones that you spent years finding ones that you like so it's really a difficult competitive environment for the air the airpods max to come into uh if you don't already own three or four favorite set of over your headphones that you like maybe the max will have a better place in your life but for marco it's stiff competition
Marco:
Yeah, and I mean, if all you need is wireless stuff, and if you mostly don't need or want the AirPods Pro, like if you want something bigger than the AirPods Pro, and you never really need to use it wired, then they're great.
Marco:
Again, I'm kind of regretting how bad they feel on me, because I love the way they sound.
Marco:
And I like the functionality of the AirPods integration and smartness and everything, but
Marco:
that's all great it's it's for me it's just about these like weird physical things about it so hey if you know i've heard from a lot of people and seen a bunch of reviews where they say these are super comfortable so if that's you great if you think these are comfortable awesome good for you i'm proud of you i'm happy for you enjoy them i'm gonna enjoy my airpods pro in my 770s
Casey:
So Tiff isn't interested in them either?
Casey:
Has she given them a fair shake or no?
Marco:
Not yet.
Marco:
I'm going to see.
Marco:
We have a bit of time, so we're going to try that in the next few days.
Marco:
But most of what she does with headphones is also podcast related.
Marco:
So I don't think the result is going to be different.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
All righty.
Casey:
And then have you done extensive battery testing on the smart case, purse, underwear, whatever, for the thing that you're about to return?
Marco:
No, because it takes three hands to get them in and out of the thing.
Marco:
And I only have two.
Casey:
Delightful.
Casey:
Well, nevertheless, just FYI for the headphones that you're soon to return, the AirPods Max smart case makes little to no difference with regard to battery life as per 9to5Mac and from Apple's own support documents.
John:
Yeah, the Apple support document puts the details in here explaining like exactly what the timings are in the low power mode.
John:
And there is a difference between when it goes into super low power mode when it's in the case versus when it's out of the case.
John:
And Apple doesn't really spell this out.
John:
But if you look at it, you'll see what the reason is, is that when it goes into ultra low power, you can't use Find My anymore, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So if you just leave your headphones somewhere, you want them to stay in regular low power, not ultra low power for a longer time.
John:
So you can use Find My to find where you left your headphones.
John:
Whereas I guess Apple's assuming if you put them in the case and put them away, that's more of a deliberate move, showing that you're done using them and you're putting them.
John:
way at least that that's my thinking on the logic in the different times but either way uh even in the middle low power mode it takes a long time for the battery to drain so unless you're going to leave them there for days um it's not a big deal so you look at the timings yourself and see what you think but these things already have all day battery life and if you don't plan on leaving them unattended somewhere for days and then picking them up later uh i don't think you have to worry about it
Casey:
Now, Marco, I know that you are the world's biggest super fan of the LG Ultra Fine 5K.
Casey:
But I have bad news.
Casey:
As it turns out, it also has a fan.
Marco:
This, I haven't been able to verify this yet.
John:
Have you seen like any pictures?
John:
No.
John:
I looked for it before the show because I said, well, I don't have one of these, so I can't look for myself.
John:
But I said, surely there's a parts diagram online, and I could not find anything.
John:
So I was hoping Marco would be able to confirm this.
John:
But I have no reason to doubt Joseph Duffy, who sent this in, saying that the Ultrafine does indeed have a fan in it somewhere, and you can see it when the stand is removed.
Marco:
Once I get back to mine, I intend to check this.
Marco:
I think that's the most hilarious thing ever, if that's actually true.
Marco:
I guess one more vote in the XDR category or one more vote that both of these monitors suck in some way.
John:
Noise has not been your complaint about the LG 5K.
John:
You also mentioned that the LG 5K was revised in 2019, and we talked about this earlier off-air.
John:
You said that you have the older revision rather than the new one?
Marco:
Yes, there's actually been like four revisions of it, but only two like kind of official versions.
Marco:
The very, very first one where the serial number ends in A, that was the one, if you remember back when the Ultra Fines first launched in 2016, they had Wi-Fi interference problems and they quickly like recalled them and like added shielding around them.
Marco:
And then they released the B version that already has the shield, that basically shipped with the shielding.
Marco:
Mine on the back says A-B.
Marco:
which I think means it was originally manufactured without the shielding.
Marco:
The shielding was retrofit to it and then it was sold.
Marco:
I think that's based on my research.
Marco:
I think that's what that means.
Marco:
And those are all the ones that were that the video signal had to be Thunderbolt.
Marco:
It could not be
Marco:
a USB-C display video signal.
Marco:
It had to be a Thunderbolt video signal.
Marco:
And so it was never compatible with iPads or like the 12-inch MacBook or anything like that.
Marco:
And so a couple years later, they released a revised version that used a new generation Thunderbolt controller from Intel.
Marco:
I think it went like Alpine Ridge to...
Marco:
something else ridge i've lost track of the thunderbolt controller names but anyway it used a different thunderbolt controller and it could take usb c 5k input from ipad pros uh and that's i think i think the serial numbers like n and l or k for that one something like that i don't have that one so mine is the is the first generation model it is fixed for the shielding but it does not have the newest thunderbolt controller
Marco:
So it's possible that new ones are more reliable.
Marco:
Maybe they've fixed some of the glitchiness of the ports.
Marco:
But based on what I've heard from people who are reporting on their opinions and experiences with this monitor over the last couple of weeks, it sounds like most of them are not very reliable.
Marco:
There are frequent problems with image retention over time, with the electronics inside dying over time, with the backlights dying over time.
Marco:
So it sounds like it's just kind of, you know, an okay to mediocre monitor for a lot of people.
Marco:
It's not just me.
Marco:
And if I got a new one, maybe some of it would be fixed.
Marco:
And actually my current plans, I think probably involve getting at least one additional one for various practical reasons.
Marco:
So we'll see how that goes.
Marco:
But anyway, there are multiple versions and I have the first one.
John:
uh just to read out the actual serial numbers it's 27 md 5k l is the 2019 revision and 27 md 5k a was the original one and according to an article that we'll link in the show notes another upgrade of the the current 2019 l version is that it also has uh 94 watt power delivery with thunderbolt port so you can charge a connected macbook while you use it
Marco:
right mine was mine was before the macbooks went up in power so it supplies i think 85 watts max um also there is a firmware updater yes i have run it i have the latest firmware still sucks probably for the fan control uh and speaking of that tennis writes in to say that uh marco even after month of usage i didn't even know that the xdr had a fan until i listened to last week's episode of atp
Marco:
so we're sorry for telling people listening to the show that their xdr has multiple fans not just one yeah and i have heard from a number of people um i don't know if they want to be named but it's so i won't but i've heard from a number of people who use xdrs who have basically said either you don't notice the localized dimming at all like what you said john
Marco:
in regular use or some people have said you do notice it when you have like 100% black background on something and then something has to go over it but that that's relatively uncommon and easily fixed by making like if you have like a desktop background you shouldn't have it be pure black
Marco:
Well, I don't have that.
Marco:
I run my Mac in light mode.
Marco:
I have a light blue background.
Marco:
So that I wouldn't be likely to see, but it's hard for me to get over the localized dimming thing.
Marco:
I really don't like that.
John:
I am very suspicious of reports of people thinking they can see the haloing with their naked eye, and I'll tell you why.
John:
Go get an OLED TV, bring up a pure black background, and put some white text in the middle of it.
John:
With your eyes, you'd be like, wow, look at all that haloing.
John:
And you know the OLED's not doing haloing because individual pixels are controlled.
John:
But your eye sees haloing because it has bright light from these thin letters that blooms out.
John:
It's always going to look a little bit bloomy because that's how things look to our eyes when there's something bright white in the middle of a black background.
John:
Actually detecting the little square sort of, you know, the haloing due to the dynamic backlight is much more difficult to do with the negative eye.
John:
I don't doubt that people can do it under the right conditions.
John:
I'm just saying I've never seen it in real usage.
John:
And I know that whenever they test us on televisions, they always have to screw with their camera settings because it's very difficult to see with the naked eye.
Casey:
Real-time follow-up from the chat room.
Casey:
Shappi has put a link in to a picture of the fan in the LG 5K.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yep, there it is.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
I guess it does have a fan.
John:
Is that the A revision or the B revision, though?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
Can't quite see the serial number from the sticker.
Marco:
I believe they said earlier that they have the same version as me, though, so it's probably the A. I mean, usually Thunderbolt, I don't know what the needs of modern monitors are in terms of their internal circuitry, but Thunderbolt specifically, Thunderbolt controllers have usually run really hot.
Marco:
Have you ever had a Thunderbolt disc enclosure or anything like that?
Marco:
they almost all have fans because they run really warm.
Marco:
Like I've been trying out the last week or so.
Marco:
I have the CalDigit TS3 Plus Thunderbolt.
Marco:
Oh, it did come in.
Marco:
Yeah, I have that.
Marco:
I have a couple of minor issues with it, like the Ethernet port just doesn't work.
Marco:
And that's actually a fairly common problem if you look at reviews.
Marco:
Oh, cool.
Marco:
And yes, I've tried all of the support.
Marco:
I've tried their firmware updater.
Marco:
I've tried all the different things where you remove your network configurations and you re-add it and look for the Thunderbolt port zero, whatever.
Marco:
Yeah, I've tried.
Marco:
Trust me, I've tried all of it.
Marco:
It doesn't work.
Marco:
Simple as that.
Marco:
um and if you look at reviews a lot of people seem to get these things with dead ethernet ports anyway other than that it works fine so i'm gonna decide what to do about that later but um in the meantime i will say that it the whole thing is a giant block of aluminum and it gets noticeably warm and again this is true of all thunderbolt gear i've ever seen um i'm assuming thunderbolt chips just run hot like they they just seem like they're complicated things and they're non-trivial uh to implement and so they just run hot
John:
neat all right john your favorite pet project chrome is bad what's going on with that now this was actually i think this update actually had been put out last week but we just didn't get it in the show so there's obviously a bug report probably multiple but one main bug report of this at chrome where they're trying to get people to perform a series of steps to do diagnostics to try to track this thing down and
John:
If you are a developer and you ever had to deal with bugs like this, you know how frustrating it can be to have a bug that is widely reported that you can't reproduce and that you also can't even think of any reason why it could be happening.
John:
So here from Norberg at Google.com is this comment that we'll link to in the show notes that I thought was a funny glimpse into a frustration that I think most programmers have felt.
John:
It says, at this point, we have still not been able to reproduce the issue.
John:
We only have guesses as to what might cause Windows Server's performance issue that apparently occurs when none of our binaries are running and is reported to be resolved by removing a software package that does not present a UI.
John:
Ouch.
John:
I mean, that sounds passive-aggressive, but it's just like... I mean, but it's also just frustrating.
John:
I mean, you can, like I said last time, you can think of all sorts of plausible...
John:
ways that this could happen uh for example you think your thing's not presenting a ui but actually using some kind of off-screen buffer as part of some apple framework that you don't even realize you're using and the windows server is freaking out redrawing it you could be dragging a bug in the windows server right like all i can say we can take from this is that the chrome folks are on it they are just as frustrated as everybody else in the totally non-reproducible nature of this and i would also say that if you look at this issue i don't see a lot of
John:
action and movement and narrowing it down so i'm not sure how much progress they're going to make on this phantom bug and unless until unless people start really giving them until someone can reproduce it or reproduce it at least once and give them some kind of diagnostics it's going to be difficult to track this one down so i will be following this issue just to see in three or four years if anything ever comes of it but if you want to follow it we will we will have the link and you can see how it goes
Marco:
I think ultimately the best way for this to ever be resolved, if it's going to be resolved, is for Apple engineering to be able to get a machine in their hands that exhibits this issue consistently and then just sample it or whatever they know how to do so that they can figure out what is this coming from.
Marco:
Whether it's one of their problems or whether it's one of Google's problems, I think it's going to take Apple engineers to figure out what the problem is.
John:
I mean, I think I have faith in the Chrome engineers that if they had if they had access to a reproduction that they could figure out figured out pretty quickly whether it's their problem or Apple's problem.
John:
Right.
John:
Because they have the source code to Chrome and they have the source code to Keystone.
John:
And if they find out that everything's fine until we step into an Apple framework, then it goes nuts.
John:
They can say, well, that's not us.
John:
right and they don't know what the problem is but at least they know hey it's it's not us i feel like the other point about this is if you are if you're willing to believe that the develop the chrome developers are being forthright in this public bug report which i have no reason to believe they're not is that they're not doing anything chrome is not doing anything and they say oh it must be that really sneaky thing we're doing where we call this private api or inject some thing into some you know or do some exploit like
John:
They're not saying, yeah, it's that super dangerous, risky things we're doing and we'll look into it.
John:
They're just like, we don't think, you know, they haven't mentioned anything like that.
John:
So I really doubt that they're doing something very strange and nefarious.
John:
So it's just be a plain old bug where it's like, oh, we made a mistake in our program, like as in a plain old bug or a bug that they are triggering elsewhere in the system or neither of those things, which is also in contention.
Casey:
All right, so honorary fourth host of ATP at this point, Jonathan Dietz, has written in with some more clarification.
Casey:
Multi-chip module, MCM, or multi-chip package, refers to placing more than one silicon die on the same organic substrate.
Casey:
Intel, AMD, and Apple have all been doing this for years.
Casey:
A chiplet is – that is delightful.
Casey:
It's almost – Sounds delicious.
Casey:
Chicklet with gum.
Casey:
Yeah, it was chiclet.
Casey:
Is that what you just said?
Casey:
Okay, yeah.
Casey:
I was trying to remember what it was called.
Casey:
A chiplet is an informal term for the relatively small dies resulting from the disaggregation of a system on a chip.
Casey:
These smaller dies can then be combined into various configurations using a high-speed interconnect fabric and either conventional substrates or silicon interposers.
Casey:
Is that like some sort of kid slur at this point, an interposer?
Casey:
Anyway, to create multi-chip packages.
Casey:
AMD successfully executed a chip strategy with their Zen architecture.
Casey:
Breaking up a system on a chip increases the total die area, power consumption, latency, and complexity.
Casey:
The only reason why AMD went this route was because they were broke.
Casey:
And then conversely, Apple currently has preferred access to the most advanced manufacturing process available and the capital and engineering resources to help TSMC climb the yield curves if it comes to that.
Casey:
They're not going to give up on any of these benefits of integration until they are forced to.
John:
Yeah.
John:
This was a response to previous feedback we were getting about multi-chip modules and how awesome they are and how you can, you know, you don't have to make one big chip.
John:
You can do these multiple things.
John:
And this, the clarification is what the multi-chip modules is different than chiplets.
John:
Chiplets is what AMD is doing, but they're only doing it.
John:
I mean, being broke was hyperbole.
John:
It was a paragraph here that Casey skipped.
John:
They gave more detail about, uh, the bottom line is AMD is,
John:
was not in a position to make chips that are all on a single die, despite the fact that that is better.
John:
It's better in terms of, as you said, power consumption, latency, complexity, everything about it is better, except that it is harder to get access to that process or whatever.
John:
So if you're thinking that Apple's solution to making a chip for the Mac Pro based on ARM architecture is to do chiplets,
John:
That seems unlikely and if you're thinking it's gonna be multi chip modules That's the thing that Apple and Intel and AMD have been doing for a long time and it's subtly different than chiplets.
John:
So You know Apple I think it's putting a mildly to say Apple has access to the Preferred access to the most advanced manufacturing process Apple has all the money, right?
John:
They apparently have the best chip designs.
John:
They have tons of money, and they have partners that want that money from them.
John:
So they are first in line to get all the good stuff.
John:
The only thing holding them back is something we talked about in previous shows with the, what was it called, risk production.
John:
Apple can't really do that because anything they need chips for, they probably need millions of them.
John:
And so Apple kind of has to wait until the process is ready to make millions of something, whereas a small upstart competitor could, in theory...
John:
A small upstart like, say, Microsoft, which sells relatively few Microsoft service pieces of hardware, that scrappy little upstart Microsoft, maybe they could get access to a better process technology a little bit sooner than Apple.
John:
But even that is doubtful, depending on how ironclad Apple's contracts are about preferred access to the good stuff.
Casey:
And then Jonathan Dietz continues to school us, this time with regard to Thunderbolt hubs and controllers.
Casey:
OWC is taking pre-orders for a four-port, one upstream, three downstream Thunderbolt slash USB4 hub for $150.
Casey:
That should be shipping any day now.
Casey:
This is possible because Intel is finally making a Thunderbolt controller with more than two ports.
Casey:
The controller in question is the, quote, Goshen Ridge GHL8440 Thunderbolt 4 controller.
Casey:
And so there's a couple of links to the Thunderbolt hub, the previous Thunderbolt doc.
Casey:
And also there's an interview with OWC about Thunderbolt four, which I presume John has provided for us, including a nice convenient timestamp.
Casey:
So we'll put that in the show notes too.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Thunderbolt four is confusing.
John:
We talked about it before and how it's really just Thunderbolt three plus a bunch of things that you have to satisfy.
John:
So you can watch this interview if you want to get the gory details, but you know,
John:
For many past shows, many years, you were saying, why aren't there any good USB-C hubs that multiply the number of USB-C ports?
John:
This isn't that, but this is kind of that for Thunderbolt.
John:
So if your computer has one Thunderbolt port and you want more than one Thunderbolt port, you can buy this hub and like an old-fashioned USB hub, you plug in one thing into your computer and what you get is a box with three of those same things on it.
John:
And again, the only reason they're able to do this is because Intel finally made a Thunderbolt controller that does that.
John:
In theory, now that Thunderbolt is open, anybody can make a controller that does this, but the Intel ones presumably are the best that you can get.
John:
So there are many more options.
John:
And also, it's not just this $150 hub.
John:
There's also one called, what is it called?
John:
The Thunderbolt dock that has SD card reader and Ethernet and all the other stuff in it, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So these are ODC products, but they're just basically wrapping around an Intel reference design.
John:
And I suspect we'll see more of these coming out.
John:
So your CalDigit TS3 thing that you have, Margo?
John:
Yeah.
John:
This may be, I mean, this is certainly newer.
John:
I'm not sure it'll be better, any more reliable or less reliable, but it is certainly more capable in that you can actually multiply some of your ports now.
John:
And that may, for some people, solve some of their connectivity problems a little bit better than existing solutions.
John:
I ordered it this morning.
John:
Which one did you get, the hub or the dock?
Marco:
Yeah, I got the big dock thing because it's very similar to the CalDigit in its general capabilities.
Marco:
And if it works, I'm going to send back the CalDigit and just keep that thing.
Marco:
But it's so hard to know with this stuff, because I've had so many reliability issues with various USB-C hubs and dongles and everything.
Marco:
It's been such a mess.
Marco:
It's such a cheap, crappy category for the most part.
Marco:
And even before that, many people, including me, have had a hard time in the past finding reliable USB hubs, even just regular USB hubs.
Marco:
It's a product category that is full of a bunch of garbage and a couple of good ones, and often it's hard to know what the good ones are without just trying them for a few months.
Marco:
And then you know, like, oh, did this one that...
Marco:
Got great reviews.
Marco:
Did it actually work for me reliably?
Marco:
Or was it garbage after a few months like so many of them are?
Marco:
I eventually did find a good USB-A hub, but of course, once you know it's good, they don't make it anymore.
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
Anyway, this is why I hate hubs so much and why...
Marco:
I have so often preferred the desktop livestock because with desktops, usually you either don't need hubs because they have enough ports or you can get away with fewer or smaller or simpler hubs and there's more ports on the desktop itself where you can plug in your most critical stuff that can't be flaky.
Marco:
And then you can put your...
Marco:
iphone charger or whatever on the on the usb hub and thunderbolt promises allegedly to get a lot better at this you know thunderbolt products that actually you know have the logo and are officially licensed and approved those go through significantly more testing than most other stuff does especially most stuff in the usb ecosystem and so to be thunderbolt certified means something so i'm hoping that thunderbolt
Marco:
versions of these hub products are significantly more reliable and have a much higher chance of being good long-term than just usb c ones but the downside is of course not only are they much more expensive and they're usually significantly larger and i think almost all if not all of them require external power so that's that's all significantly less convenient for any kind of mobile setup or mobile needs but they also they all have like
Marco:
this massive bandwidth stuff.
Marco:
And so they have relatively few ports.
Marco:
And when I look at what I actually plug into USB ports, the only thing that I really plug in that needs massive bandwidth is a screen.
Marco:
Everything else, everything that's not a screen...
Marco:
is like a keyboard dongle or the cable that runs to my iPhone for Xcode development or like my sound stuff, but sound stuff is all USB 2.0 at the hardware level.
Marco:
It doesn't need 3.0 speeds for anything.
Marco:
Like that's most of what I'm plugging in.
Marco:
And so it almost feels wasteful to get a Thunderbolt port multiplier slash hub thing.
Marco:
when it's like, oh, you can get 40 gigabits per second for all this.
Marco:
It's like, yeah, but I'm going to be using that to charge my iPhone.
Marco:
That's really what that's going to be.
Marco:
Or it's going to be running this USB 2.0 sound module.
Marco:
This is not... I don't need massive bandwidth with a small number of ports.
Marco:
The laptop gives me that.
Marco:
I need...
Marco:
almost no bandwidth with a huge number of ports.
Marco:
I just want those ports to be USB-C for, like, cable convenience reasons.
Marco:
I don't even need them to be USB 3.0 half the time.
Marco:
So, but, you know, if this is what I have to do, you know, to get a bunch of ports is get one of these $250 Thunderbolt dock things and have it actually work well, then I'll take that.
Marco:
That'll be an acceptable compromise if that's my option.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So this is I mean, the big deal about this is that it actually does have more than one USB-C connector shaped hole on it.
John:
Right.
John:
So it multiplies them.
John:
But as you said, it's a waste because, you know, you don't need the 40 gigabits from those ports.
John:
But but if you just think of them as, OK, one of them, I need 40 gigabits and I'll connect something in my monitor or whatever to that.
John:
but the other two I don't, but just think of them as low speed USB-C shaped holes and they'll work fine for that purpose.
John:
I actually have a little bus powered Thunderbolt SSD, which actually does use some of the bandwidth, maybe not all 40 gigabits, but that's, it's nice to have that.
John:
I love bus powered drives because I hate those power adapters and everything.
John:
And USB-C is a nice connector for them and having it be Thunderbolt instead of
John:
actual usb gives it a higher bandwidth over it and this uh to let everyone know if you haven't followed the link already the dock thing that marco got has three thunderbolt 4 ports on it gigabit ethernet and then it has three usba ports on the back and one usba port in the front plus an sd card plus a headphone jack
John:
And yet it does have an external power adapter.
John:
So it's got a lot of ports on it.
John:
And if they all work reliably, like having four USB-A shaped holes on it, that should solve all your low-speed needs.
John:
And then you've got three of the high-speed ports, one of which is a monitor, and you've got two of those free for any random other USB-C shaped peripheral or for faster stuff if you happen to have a little portable drive.
John:
So it looks like a pretty good product.
John:
I have...
John:
an odbc usbc dock at work where i haven't been in ages um and it was flaky and slightly unreliable but only during the connect disconnect once everything was set up and working it was very reliable but since it was i'm using with a laptop i was constantly connecting and disconnecting and so yeah i would hope that the thunderbolt one would be more reliable than my usbc one was but i still have affection for it because when it was working it did give me all the ports that i was missing and it was nice
Marco:
Yeah, that's I'm hoping because like if the whole promise of Thunderbolt is to help laptops have most of the benefits of desktops like that's the whole the whole benefit here is like, okay, we gave up a lot when the laptops went to USB-C gave up a lot.
Marco:
But the promise is, oh, now you don't need all of your, quote, legacy ports to be built into the laptop because you can just turn this one amazing universal port into whatever else you need with these commonplace adapters and things.
Marco:
And I mean, there's a lot of problems with that logic, especially when you realize you don't always have your adapters with you or you don't have the right adapters and they all cost money and all that stuff.
Marco:
But that entire promise, the upside of that promise is predicated on the assumption that
Marco:
These adapters will exist, and they will work, and they'll be reliable, and there will be an ecosystem of good ones to buy.
Marco:
And that's been really hard to actually have happen in practice.
Marco:
It almost never has happened in practice.
Marco:
uh so if if the thunderbolt ecosystem is now finally getting to the maturity and and uh and to like a broad offering of products to actually make that dream come true then great if this can make our laptops work better and we have to use them more like desktops which a lot of people do that's fantastic i just i hope we're there because we keep being promised this and it keeps not quite happening for a lot of people
Casey:
One day, one day.
Casey:
Imagine they had like different cables with different ends for when they serve different purposes.
Casey:
Wouldn't that be amazing?
Marco:
Yeah, imagine if you could just look at a cable and know whether it would work or not.
Casey:
That would be so awesome.
Boom.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by ExpressVPN.
Marco:
Go to expressvpn.com slash ATP for an extra three months with a one-year package.
Marco:
There's lots of reasons why you might want to use a VPN.
Marco:
You might want to encrypt your traffic because you don't really trust your ISP of, you know, maybe they're spying on what you're doing.
Marco:
Maybe you're using someone else's Wi-Fi network and you don't trust them or their operators or their ISPs.
Marco:
This is the most common time I use a VPN.
Marco:
It's like, if I have to connect to like
Marco:
a hotel Wi-Fi or a coffee shop Wi-Fi or something like that, like when I'm out or traveling or something, that's when I use a VPN because I don't trust someone else's Wi-Fi network.
Marco:
They could do weird stuff.
Marco:
I don't want any part of that.
Marco:
And so ExpressVPN is the one I go to for that because it is super fast.
Marco:
You don't even realize you're on a VPN.
Marco:
There's no noticeable slowdowns or delays from having your traffic routed through somewhere else.
Marco:
You would think it would be noticeable and it just isn't with ExpressVPN.
Marco:
They're really good.
Marco:
And they're top-rated.
Marco:
CNET, Wired, countless other places, Raid Express VPN, the number one VPN.
Marco:
And with good reason.
Marco:
Their apps are super easy to use.
Marco:
I didn't have to worry about configuration or IPs or anything like that.
Marco:
You just install their apps, and it's one click to connect.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
And in this...
Marco:
And this time, it's kind of hard to know which of the ISPs and networks are not selling your data.
Marco:
Who can you really trust here?
Marco:
So when you want to be extra careful and you want to use a VPN, ExpressVPN is the one to go to.
Marco:
So go to expressvpn.com slash ATP right now, and you can arm yourself with an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free.
Marco:
That's expressvpn.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Visit expressvpn.com slash ATP to learn more.
Marco:
Thank you so much to ExpressVPN.
Marco:
Protect yourself today with ExpressVPN.
Casey:
I would like to tell you a story.
Casey:
I have tried Apple Fitness Plus.
Casey:
And I actually kind of really liked it.
Casey:
And now I don't know what to do with myself.
Casey:
It is not perfect.
Casey:
It is not without flaws.
Casey:
There's nothing that is so perfect that it cannot be complained about.
Casey:
Hi, John.
Casey:
But I actually really liked it.
Casey:
Now, Marco, as the more prolific exerciser of the two of you, have you tried this yet at all?
Marco:
I have not had a chance yet, no, because of all the various logistical things that we've been doing.
Marco:
But I heard it launched, and I'm actually looking forward to trying it.
Marco:
But first, I want to hear what you have to say.
Casey:
Right, so Apple Fitness Plus is their new exercise video streaming service thing.
Casey:
I believe it is part of the most expensive, what is it, Apple One?
Casey:
I can't even keep it all straight anymore.
Marco:
It's the Apple Two bundle.
Marco:
The One is the cheaper one.
Marco:
The Two is the more expensive one.
Casey:
Yeah, that's right, that's right.
Casey:
And it's I-I, not the new one.
Marco:
It's pronounced E. Yeah.
Casey:
The Apple E. So anyway, if you were to do it as a standalone thing, it's $10 a month or $80 a year.
Casey:
And if you get a new Apple Watch, you get three months for free.
Casey:
And guess who got a new Apple Watch just a month or so back?
Casey:
So I started my free trial.
Casey:
I don't remember off the top of my head specifically which exercises I did, but I've done it two different days.
Casey:
And I've done a sum total of, I think, five workouts.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And the workouts, like leaving aside some of the integration, which is, I think, the more interesting stuff to talk about.
Casey:
And we'll talk about that in a second.
Casey:
The workouts I thought were pretty good for context.
Casey:
And I think I've talked about this briefly and or obliquely in the past.
Casey:
But Erin has gotten considerably more into her personal health and fitness over the last couple of years and has been a very devout exerciser.
Casey:
And has typically been using this service called Beachbody On Demand.
Casey:
And you might know of Beachbody because of P90X several years ago.
Casey:
You might know them because they are definitely a disgusting, dirty MLM, multi-level marketing thing like Mary Kay and things like that.
Casey:
However, their exercise videos, taken only the exercise videos and none of the BS around it, they're actually, in my personal opinion, I'm not a doctor, I know nothing about health, they seem pretty good to me.
Casey:
And I've done a couple of different programs on there, and I've really liked them.
Casey:
So if you can leave aside, you know, oh, become a coach, become a coach, become a coach, sign people up, sign people up, sign people up.
Casey:
If you leave all that aside, which if you're just watching the videos, you don't really see any of that, I actually like them.
Casey:
And
Casey:
typically the programs I like to do are more like lifting weights with a little bit of high, what is, what is hit?
Casey:
High impact, high intensity interval training, I believe.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
That's it.
Casey:
That's it.
Casey:
Um, so I do those sorts of things.
Casey:
I recently completed a boxing themed program, which is a very not Casey thing to do, but I actually kind of liked it.
Marco:
Is it the opposite of unboxing?
Marco:
You take electronics and you put them into boxes.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So that's the context for which I'm coming to Apple Fitness Plus.
Casey:
I never have had a personal trainer now.
Casey:
I certainly have no interest in it with all the COVID stuff going around.
Casey:
And in a perfect world, I'd love to have a personal trainer, but I'm too cheap and too scared of the inside and too scared of other people.
Marco:
uh so i'm just doing this in a very amateur way you know they can do it over video chat right that's true this is what we've been doing like like tiff and i like our trainer moved uh before covid but we've been still using him just over facetime it's it's like an apple commercial before they even had their own fitness thing like we had apple watches like he can see the stats and we do workouts over facetime and it's totally fine and we've been doing it for like a year
Casey:
I probably should look into that at some point.
Casey:
But again, I'm just trying to establish context.
Casey:
So I came to Apple Fitness Plus, a very amateur veteran of a specific flavor of workout video.
Casey:
And so I thought, well, this seems on the surface like it's effectively equivalent.
Casey:
And so let's take a look.
Casey:
And once you upgrade to the latest version of iOS, in the fitness app, you can go in and there's a new tab in the center called Fitness Plus.
Casey:
And once you've enabled your free demo or if you've paid for it, then you get just basically a list of exercises.
Casey:
And I don't love a lot of the user interactions and setup in the fitness app.
Casey:
It's good, but not great, which is very typical of Apple these days.
Casey:
However, once you pick a workout, and in my case, what I was doing is I was using my iPad Pro hooked up to their $70 or whatever dollar it is
Casey:
um, USB-C to HDMI dongle and then HDMI into my TV.
Casey:
And I'm doing this all because this is in the bedroom where we do have an Apple TV, but it's one of the like OG pre-installable apps, Apple TVs, you know what I'm talking about?
Casey:
Like with the old remote, the old silver remote.
Casey:
And the reason I have that in the upstairs, I'm saying all this because I don't want to get email.
Casey:
The reason I have that in the upstairs is because we have a 1080, you know, semi-modern Apple TV downstairs and
Casey:
that is hooked up to our 4K TV.
Casey:
And as I've complained about several times recently, I've been waiting for over a year to get the Apple TV that's surely going to be refreshed tomorrow.
Casey:
And surely will have been refreshed tomorrow for every tomorrow for the last 365 tomorrows.
Casey:
And I've been waiting to get a new 4K one for downstairs and the 1080 will get bumped upstairs.
Casey:
Then I won't need to do all this junk with my iPad and so on and so forth.
Casey:
Because Fitness Plus does have its own dedicated Apple TV app.
Casey:
But nevertheless, uh, that was my setup.
Casey:
So I have an iPad connected to a TV and I've got my watch and I went in and I selected a workout and I, I, I knew that this is the way it was supposed to work, but all of a sudden my watch buzzes and I looked down and says, okay, you know, I forget exactly what it was, but it's okay.
Casey:
Strength with Greg.
Casey:
And it shows that on the TV.
Casey:
It shows it on my watch and I hit play on my watch.
Casey:
And sure enough, the TV starts playing, but again, it's really my iPad and
Casey:
And it's all integrated.
Casey:
You know, I control it with my watch, the TV changes.
Casey:
If I pause on the TV, the watch pauses its workout.
Casey:
It already knows what workout I'm doing.
Casey:
I don't have to go in there and say, well, I'm doing a strength workout and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
It immediately knows not only that I'm doing a strength workout, but I'm specifically doing strength with Greg for 20 minutes.
Casey:
So that's pretty neat.
Casey:
I like that so far.
Casey:
So then I start the workout.
Casey:
And up in the upper left, I can see, you know, like the progress in terms of time through the workout.
Casey:
In certain workouts, you can see, I forget what they call it, like a little bar that indicates basically, are you a worse exerciser than the other people who have done the same exercise or are you better?
Casey:
Ow.
Casey:
Yeah, which is motivating, but also a little unnerving.
Casey:
And especially because on the one I did that did have this bar, I wish I could remember the name of it and I forgot to write it down.
Casey:
But I was like all the way on the good end, which is really surprising because I'm not a terribly fit person.
Casey:
I mean, I do work out pretty much every day, but I'm still not the most terribly fit person in the entire world.
Casey:
um and so i'm all the way on the one end which makes me wonder i think you're you're significantly more fit than the average apple test engineer is what you're saying maybe or is it that i'm unfit and i'm working so darn hard in order to keep up that it's like wow you're kicking ass over here because i'm meanwhile i'm like
Casey:
you know, dying or whatever.
Casey:
But anyway, um, but you know, so they do this workout and of course it's like this beautiful, like Apple commercial basically in terms of the set and the staging and, and then the workouts I've done, it's typically like the main host, if you will, the trainer.
Casey:
Um, and then there's two other trainers in the, in the, you know, in the background and they're not like physically
Casey:
fill people, you know, they're not like the red shirts from Star Trek.
Casey:
These are like other actual trainers.
Marco:
They're just like dancing in the back.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But they're, they're, they're other, they're other like legit trainers.
Casey:
It's not like there's only the one star and then those knuckleheads off the street.
Casey:
Like these are other stars in the context of Apple fitness plus, but they're doing somebody else's workout instead of leading their own.
Casey:
Um, and so I start the workout, you know, I see the progress in the upper left and in the upper right, I see my rings, which is such a dumb thing.
Casey:
But I got to tell you, it is super freaking satisfying as you're doing this workout, watching your green ring go further and further around, watching your red ring go further and further around.
Casey:
It is deeply satisfying.
Casey:
And it's updating, I mean, perhaps not real time, but near as makes no difference.
Casey:
It seems as though it's real time.
Casey:
And so I'm just doing my thing, doing my exercise.
Casey:
And, you know, the host...
Casey:
or the trainer, I've had a couple of trainers now, and they're good.
Casey:
They're varying levels of cheesy, which is to be expected, and various levels of synthetic happy, which is to be expected.
Casey:
That's not unusual.
Casey:
But they're good, and they're personable and mostly relatable, and I enjoyed them, and I enjoyed the workouts.
Casey:
And in and of itself, if you're doing something to move your body and this thing is successfully making you move your body,
Casey:
And I'd say it's a success.
Casey:
But where it gets really freaking cool is during the workout, they say something like, oh, you know, your heart should really be racing or your heart rate should really be spiking right now.
Casey:
And sure enough, the heads up display that shows your heart rate, like highlights your specific heart rate instead of showing like your current heart rate of 120 beats per minute or whatever.
Casey:
It says, okay, your current heart rate is 120 beats per minute.
Casey:
By the way, your lowest heart rate was 70 and your highest heart rate was 160.
Casey:
I'm making up the numbers, but you get the idea.
Casey:
And this is changing on screen perfectly with the trainer saying, oh, your heart should be spiking right now.
Casey:
Your heart rate should be spiking right now.
Casey:
It's such a dumb trick.
Casey:
It's such a stupid thing.
Casey:
And really, I don't feel like it's that technically challenging a thing to implement when you own the whole widget.
Casey:
But gosh, if it isn't so cool to see as you're in the middle of this workout, it's just very, very, very cool.
Casey:
um and then another time the the host i keep calling them hosts i'm sorry the trainers um the trainer was like oh you should be closing those rings right about now or something like that i forget what they said and sure enough like the the rings in the upper right hand side of the screen they get they get much bigger and they start showing you you know or highlighting the fact that you're very close or whatever the case may be and if you close your move or exercise whatever rings as you're working out it does a whole animation and like sparklies and whatnot to call to your attention that hey you finished your exercise ring
Casey:
Um, which I, I, the integration is so cool and it is so, it's so silly, but so neat that if I smash the space bar on my iPad pro to pause it, sure enough, like I said a minute ago, the Apple watch workout pauses.
Casey:
And when I'm used to doing these beach body workouts, it is not a difficult thing to hit pause on both my watch and my iPad.
Um,
Casey:
But it is so convenient not to have to.
Casey:
It's so dumb.
Casey:
I know it's dumb, but it's so convenient.
Casey:
And then they also have really, really good music, which is not surprising from Apple.
Casey:
One of the funny things about the Fitness Plus workouts is that as you're selecting them, if you're looking through the title cards, so the super, super small view, like the gallery view,
Casey:
Um, so for example, I'm looking at try something new strength with another trainer, which is strength with Sam 30 minutes, pure dance.
Casey:
And so you see right there on the tin, what kind of music it is.
Casey:
And then you can drill in and you see that it's Sam Sanchez.
Casey:
It's 31 minutes, pure dance.
Casey:
Apparently it was new today.
Casey:
You'll need them at dumbbells.
Casey:
It's total body.
Casey:
And then if you scroll down a little bit, it has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine different songs.
Casey:
And they tell you exactly which songs they are, who they're by.
Casey:
And they give you a nice little thing to listen to an Apple music.
Casey:
If you were an Apple music subscriber, which I'm not because as much as Spotify is evil, I really like them.
Casey:
So, nevertheless, you can play the music that they play in the workout right there in your phone or your iPad.
Casey:
And additionally, they do like a little card, like a YouTube-style card on the top of the screen when the music changes.
Casey:
And all of it was just so incredibly, incredibly well done.
Casey:
And I really, really, really liked it a lot more than I thought I would.
Casey:
I have some complaints about the UI in the phone and the iPad in terms of selecting a workout, but any questions on the workout itself or any thoughts about that?
Marco:
Do they have a jam band version?
Yeah.
Marco:
No one can dance to that, Marco.
Casey:
Well, nobody can dance well to that.
Casey:
Unfortunately, they do have some like, some like chill.
Casey:
I gotta forget the other word for it.
Casey:
Downtempo is a genre that I can't define well, but I really like.
Casey:
This is like Massive Attack or Zero Seven.
Casey:
And I went searching for some of that just based on music, not based on the exercise.
Casey:
And unsurprisingly, the only exercises that had that kind of music were like yoga and stretching and stuff like that, which is perfectly fine, but not what I was looking for at the time, which was a bummer.
Casey:
But no, no jam band stuff that I saw.
Casey:
Although one of the workouts I did see has Never Gonna Give You Up as the first song in the workout, which I thought was quite funny, or whatever the Rick Astley song is.
Casey:
You know what I'm thinking of?
John:
It's one of the limitations, at least you can tell me it's a limitation, I think it is, that's been...
John:
Bothering me a bit about this, especially with the on-screen prompts and everything, is that it only works for one person at a time, right?
Casey:
That is my understanding.
Casey:
Coincidentally, Aaron and I had planned to do a workout together today, and we just didn't get a chance to.
Casey:
So I'm not 100% sure, but I am almost positive that that is correct, that I think whoever is the assigned person
Casey:
So for Aaron and me, you know, the Apple TV is signed into me by default.
Casey:
So I think having not done this, that other Apple watches in the vicinity would pick up the correct workout.
Casey:
But the things that are shown on the screen are specifically for me and my watch as far as I know.
John:
Yeah, that seems like the biggest gap for a version, too.
John:
It's not like people have giant gyms in front of their televisions, but very often, especially in these quarantine times and everything, one of the things that can motivate you to work out is someone else who lives with you also, like, you know, encouraging each other to do it.
John:
So if one person's not in the mood, they make the other person do it.
John:
But you can't kind of do the workout together if the feedback's only going to one person or if it doesn't track both of them or whatever.
John:
So it'd be interesting for you guys to try that to see...
Casey:
to see what happens if you try to do with two people in front of the television when you did the beach pod things did you do them just by yourself or did you do them with erin uh almost exclusively by myself and you know she'll be downstairs with tv uh in the living room in the apple to the good apple tv and then i'll be up again with my ipad upstairs uh we have done them a couple times together uh specifically the early boxing workouts we had done the first few together and then for uninteresting reasons ended up not being able to complete them together like they finished the program together
Casey:
But Beachbody has no sort of integration of any kind.
Casey:
In fact, from my limited experience, and again, basically all I do with the Beachbody app is go in, pick a workout and do it.
Casey:
Like I don't explore the app or anything like that.
Casey:
But my limited experience says that there's no real integration with the Apple Watch.
Casey:
They don't seem to really acknowledge that the Apple Watch even exists.
Casey:
It's just a straight up, it's like Netflix for exercise, right?
Casey:
Which is ostensibly what Fitness Plus is.
Casey:
But Fitness Plus has the music integration and the,
Casey:
workouts integrated in the apple watch integration and all that whereas beachbody has none of those things as far as i can tell now uh conversely i've never done anything with peloton and i feel a little scared bringing up peloton because i feel like they're really really devout fans and i don't want to upset any other groups i've already ticked off tesla and google and everyone else well i feel like on the scale of like totally fine to tesla or maybe joe rogan being the worst i
Marco:
Like Peloton on this scale is not very high ranked, but they're also not zero.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
But so anyway, I have not done anything with any Peloton.
Casey:
Everyone I know who has one, and I know a handful of people that have a Peloton device now, all love them.
Casey:
Like not just a little, they love them.
Casey:
And my limited understanding is that there's some amount of integration there, but again, I don't have one.
Casey:
I've never tried it, so I don't have any particular facts to share.
Casey:
But I think that there is more than zero integration with Peloton.
Marco:
Yeah, I've tried one for like two seconds once.
Marco:
I, too, have a few friends who have them, and they all love them.
Marco:
They have remarkable customer loyalty and seemingly customer satisfaction, as far as I can tell, just anecdotally.
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
yeah and this there's no question i think peloton is probably the most direct um alternative or competitor to this um but you know peloton requires you to buy the bike which is not only a pretty large commitment in terms of you better know that you're going to like it but also it's a ton of money up front and takes a ton of space in your house and so it's really like it's much more of a thing to get into than what apple's doing which is well take the stuff you already have and you know maybe like move the couch back a bit so you have some space to move around and do this thing which is
Marco:
It's significantly easier to get into, even though it might not reach the same levels of competitiveness and lifestyle change that something like Peloton might.
Marco:
This is more like the entry-level version of that, probably.
Marco:
But that's actually probably where there's the most room for improvement and where Apple can make the most difference.
Marco:
So I'm actually I'm very much looking forward to trying this.
Marco:
I don't know how much I will use it because, you know, I see I do there, you know, Tiff and I do the FaceTime with a trainer twice a week and many of the other days of the week.
Marco:
That's when I do my rowing workouts.
Marco:
So what I can see this being useful is maybe like one or two days a week, instead of rowing, I do this.
Marco:
Or if we are, you know, once we can travel again, if we're traveling and, you know, maybe we do it on those mornings where we can't easily do the other things or, you know, whatever.
Marco:
So I'm looking forward to just having this as an option that's always ready, that's always there so that
Marco:
If I need it or if I feel like doing it, I don't have to schedule with anybody.
Marco:
I don't have to rely on having any particular equipment with me.
Marco:
As long as I have my Apple Watch and any of my other devices that can play the video stuff, then that's good.
Marco:
I do share John's reservation about not having multiple people in the room support.
Marco:
Because Tiff and I often work out together.
Marco:
And to have this be so individual, I hope that's only a version one limitation and not something that they intend to keep that way long term.
Marco:
Maybe they didn't want to pay the in-app purchase tax.
Marco:
And so it has to be an individual to individual experience being transmitted.
Marco:
You know, remember?
Marco:
No?
Marco:
Nothing?
Marco:
No one remembers that from like two months ago?
Marco:
Anyway, I tried.
Marco:
It was a good joke.
Marco:
Anyway, no, it wasn't.
Marco:
So I noticed, I'm curious to get your take on this, Casey, with the experience of it.
Marco:
One of the things that people have reported so far that I don't know, I hadn't really thought about
Marco:
how they would do this but i was kind of assuming that the feedback loop would exist in some way and be a little bit more dynamic with like what they say on the video versus how you're actually performing and it sounds like that's not the case it sounds like it's just a static video and the video is the same no matter what you're doing and it's just overlaying your stuff on top of it is that right
Casey:
That is my impression.
Casey:
I don't know that for sure.
Casey:
And since I have the floor, let me give you a little bit of real time follow up on a couple of things you just mentioned.
Casey:
First of all, I believe that you do not have to buy a Peloton bike anymore.
Casey:
I think it's like obviously state or if my understanding is that it's really designed around having the actual device.
Casey:
But I thought that you could actually bring your own device to Peloton.
Casey:
So you set up like an iPad in front of your own bike or something like that.
Casey:
And it does work from my understanding, but the integration obviously is not there the way they're used to, and it's not really meant for that, but you can do it, I think.
Casey:
Second of all, you spoke about rowing, and one of the categories in Fitness Plus is rowing.
Casey:
Oh, that's interesting.
Casey:
20 minutes, upbeat anthems, rowing with Josh, 20 minutes, throwback hits, rowing with Anja, 10 minutes, hip-hop R&B.
Casey:
So you could absolutely, whatever your rowing day is next, set this up on your phone or your iPad or what have you and pop in your beloved AirPods Pro and you could row with one of these trainers.
Casey:
And I would really encourage you to try that in the same way that
Casey:
I think I was predisposed to like Fitness Plus because it's slotting into a very defined space in my life, right?
Casey:
I'm already doing workout videos basically by myself as it is, you know what I mean?
Casey:
And so I don't have the multi-person concerns, not to say that I don't echo, but you know, it's not a need that I think I have to fill because Erin typically has her own workouts, which are typically much harder than mine to do by herself.
Casey:
And then I have my workouts that I do by myself.
Casey:
And so for me, it's not a big deal.
Casey:
But I basically wanted something that will show me decent exercise videos and that I can do for somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes on an average day.
Casey:
And it's worked really well.
Casey:
And actually something I didn't bring up.
Casey:
And one of the things I really like about it is typically when I've done
Casey:
These Beachbody exercise, I'll go through a program.
Casey:
And so typically, you know, every exercise will be 30 minutes or 40 minutes or what have you.
Casey:
And it's the same trainer every day.
Casey:
And it's a slightly different thing every day.
Casey:
But you're doing the same basic idea.
Casey:
You know, with the boxing program, you're boxing every day.
Casey:
Now, maybe you were doing, you know, these moves this day and those moves that day.
Casey:
But it's always boxing.
Casey:
And that's fine.
Casey:
It's not a complaint.
Casey:
But one of the things I really liked was the second day that I did Fitness Plus Workouts, which was a couple days ago.
Casey:
I basically just went in there and said, well, you know what, I'm going to start with a little strength training.
Casey:
And I did, I think, a 10-minute strength workout.
Casey:
And then I did a 10-minute HIIT workout.
Casey:
And then I did a 10-minute core workout.
Casey:
And I kind of made this, like, you know, I almost felt like I was Link, you know, cooking at the little pot in Zelda game.
Casey:
You know, I was making my own recipe of my own workout.
Casey:
And I actually really liked that.
Casey:
I liked that I could, if I wanted to, do like a 30 or 40-minute work, you know, strictly HIIT workout or strictly strength workout.
Casey:
But it was really kind of nice to be able to just mix and match.
Casey:
And there's nothing in Beachbody that, like, prevents you from doing that.
Casey:
But that's not really, in my experience, that's not really what it's meant for.
Casey:
It's meant for you're going to do this program.
Casey:
You're going to do it top to bottom, start to finish.
Casey:
And you're going to do it in the order that they expect you to.
Casey:
And I've mixed and matched it before, but it's not as nice.
Casey:
And a lot of these programs are 40 minutes.
Casey:
And I only have but about an hour window of time that I've allotted for exercise.
Casey:
So I'm not exactly going to mix and match two 40-minute workouts in an hour.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
And so, yeah, for that reason, I've really, really enjoyed it.
Casey:
I feel like you actually had a specific question for me 20 minutes ago, but I've already forgotten what it was.
Marco:
It was about whether the staticness of the videos is something that's a problem, or does it feel like you're just kind of doing this in the void?
Marco:
Because one of the big advantages of Peloton, and I don't know how the other systems do it, but one of the big advantages of Peloton is that it has this live class mechanic and these leaderboards and everything, so there's all this...
Marco:
live and dynamic uh functionality so that you get feedback about what you're doing and it's it can be called out by an instructor or it can be integrated into some other functionality if if you're a competitive person which i'm actually not at all but if you're a competitive person there's angles to that that can appeal to you and everything with version one this seems a lot like you're just alone in the void right like it's is there anything to like draw you in besides your own satisfaction
Casey:
Not really.
Casey:
So there's that red line that I spoke about earlier, but literally all it is is an icon on a line.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
So it's not what you're talking about.
Casey:
It's not like, oh, good job, Blista, for doing that.
Casey:
Really good work.
Casey:
That's a throwback.
Casey:
If you don't know what I'm talking about, that's a throwback.
John:
But there's no... There's actually Casey's Apple ID as well.
Casey:
Don't tell him.
Casey:
No, it's not.
Casey:
No, it's not.
Casey:
But anyway.
Casey:
But no, there's no calling out or anything like that.
Casey:
To the best that I can tell, the videos are completely static.
Casey:
There's no real editing or real-time modifications.
Casey:
So if you're heaving on the floor and clearly not doing the workout, they're not going to yell at you or anything like that.
Casey:
The tough thing about...
Casey:
a trainer especially in a workout video is that for for me it's a very very very fine line between being like the life coach and being like synthetically upbeat be like yeah you can do this man you can do this you've got it just give me three more and like it's really easy with me to just go way off the deep end on that for me to just find it super gross and those are crappy trainers
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And then you can have like the super clinical, like three more reps, two more reps, one more rep.
Marco:
Those are also crappy trainers.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And so there's this very fine line where you have some amount of enthusiasm and some amount of like personality, but not so much that you're like, oh my God, like relax with this, you know?
Casey:
And I actually felt like the trainers have walked that line pretty darn well.
Casey:
They're not
Casey:
exceedingly like super crazy bubbly for the most part um but they're not robots either and they've they've dripped in like just enough of their personal histories as you're doing these workouts um that you kind of start to see them as people and not just trainers like as an example greg mentioned like offhandedly that he used to live in new york and now he lives in la and he made some mention about like some crappy apartment he had in new york or whatever the case may be and like the
Casey:
Obviously, I don't remember specifically what was said, and it doesn't really matter.
Casey:
But that's nice to have this human connection with these trainers so that you feel like they're people.
Casey:
And no, they're not saying, you know, let's just pick it up or, you know, oh, great job on this one.
Casey:
But at least there's enough personality to them that you can tell that they're people.
Casey:
And actually, interestingly, I forgot to mention...
Casey:
If you go looking through the Fitness Plus app or the Fitness app in the Fitness Plus tab, as you find a trainer, they'll talk about their brief history and whatnot.
Casey:
And prominently is a link to their Instagram account.
Casey:
So you can presumably follow them on Instagram.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And also, I should note, I'd heard rumblings, I forget where, that they were instructed to learn at least the basics of sign language so they could greet or say goodbye with sign or say thank you with American Sign Language, which I've seen a little bit of, which I thought was really cool.
Casey:
Also, there's a pretty diverse cast of trainers, which is great.
Casey:
And one of the strength training exercises I did was with Amir, who had lost one of his legs due to an accident.
Casey:
So, like, here it is.
Casey:
I'm huffing and puffing doing these leg workouts with two perfectly functional legs.
Casey:
And this guy is down a leg and is still instructing, which I think is super cool.
Casey:
Like, I don't know.
Casey:
Maybe that's lame or not very woke of me.
Casey:
But I think it's cool that they have people that are differently bodied that are able to not only participate but instruct on these workouts.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And it's been really great.
Casey:
And there's some British people on there.
Casey:
There's obviously a bunch of Americans.
Casey:
Those are the only experiences I've had so far.
Casey:
There very well could be other cultures and whatnot.
Casey:
But again, I've really, really been impressed with it.
Casey:
I don't know for sure if I'm going to stick with it, but it's a pretty good chance that leaving aside iCloud Storage and Apple Music and all the other things that come with the bundles,
Casey:
I would probably, I'm almost sure that I'm going to pay for at least Fitness Plus because I've been really, really impressed with it in the short time I've spent with it.
Marco:
And when do you just give up and get the whole bundle?
Marco:
I mean, I don't know.
Marco:
When do you just buy Apple II?
Casey:
I probably will, to be honest, but I haven't sat down and like, you know, looked at it and looked at what I do and don't want from the bundle, from the e-bundle and see if it's worth it.
Casey:
But my expectation is I probably will do exactly that.
John:
You're probably already in the black in terms of how much you would spend based on that stuff, especially if you start factoring in iCloud backups of kids' iOS devices, which will become more important as they get older and get actual data.
John:
This whole Fitness Plus thing, we talked about it before when it was first announced and released, but just hearing you talk about it again, it reminds me of what a...
John:
What a weird technological middle ground this is, right?
John:
So we have things like Peloton, which is kind of a different thing.
John:
We can put that aside.
John:
But for all the tech and controlling this whole tech stack, if this really is as Casey described it, it's like a fancied up version of the VHS aerobics videos my mother would do.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
Absolutely.
John:
You'd rent the VHS tape or buy it, more likely.
John:
You'd stick it in, and you'd have the instructor encouraging you to go on.
John:
And it's the same tape every time.
John:
Now, obviously, this changes, right?
John:
And they have different instructors and different classes, so it's better than just that one tape, but you could, in theory, keep buying new tapes, right?
John:
And Peloton...
John:
It's slightly different than they have the live classes, but a lot of the, you know, the live classes aren't every moment of the day.
John:
So they're, you know, the pre-recorded ones as well.
John:
But now I'm thinking of something that is at the other extreme.
John:
We have the VHS tape on one side and the other extreme is not Peloton, certainly not Apple Fitness Plus.
John:
It's something like Wii Fit.
John:
Right.
John:
Where it is entirely interactive because it's a video game.
John:
And if you do start lagging and slow down, like the whole point is constant feedback.
John:
You're doing this poorly or you're doing really well or keep up with this or whatever.
John:
And, you know, granted, there's rubber banding and all the other.
John:
things they use to try to match your skill level.
John:
But it is 100% interactive with what you're doing in that if you don't do the exercise or don't do it well or satisfactory, there's no question about it.
John:
Whereas if you put in a VHS tape and you just get tired and sit in front of the tape eating Oreos, the tape doesn't know.
John:
right it just it just keeps playing right um and fitness plus it sounds like what they've done is well it's like the vhs tape but we have an overlay of your info and we can highlight it at certain points um which is kind of a shame because a very basic choose your own adventure style interactive thing where like depending on how well you're doing the second half is either more intense or less intense right
John:
Or even something as simple as it looks like you're really slowing down and struggling based on the accelerometers in your watch.
John:
So we will cut to the part where we slow it down and give you some encouragement and tell you what to do if you're having trouble.
John:
Just anything.
Marco:
Yeah, modify, make it a little bit easier.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Like there is – I'm not saying go full Wii Fit because that's obviously – it's not people on video.
John:
It's computerized thing.
John:
And, you know, things like where they – with the balance board where you're trying to do some exercise and they're showing you where your center of gravity is and everything like that.
John:
You can't have that level of interaction with actual humans who at some point have them be in front of a camera because you can't have them do every possible thing that they might need to do.
John:
But you can have some sort of – I don't know, like –
John:
dialogue tree or whatever, where depending on what you're doing as detected roughly by the accelerometer that you're wearing on your wrist and your heart rate monitor and everything like that, have a few branching paths.
John:
Now, maybe they do that because Casey's only done a few of these and if they do it seamlessly, he might not even notice if you just stay within the happy path.
John:
It could be they do do those divergences, but I feel like that kind of interactivity is exactly what Apple should be doing along with what they're already doing, which is, hey, let's integrate all the devices we already have and the multi-user thing because...
John:
like peloton i mean whether you have the bike or you get your own bike it's only one person on a bike so you got to have two bikes no matter what and once you have two bikes you got it's it's instanced right it's that's their sharding mechanism you got two bikes you got two screens you got two pelotons you're fine the whole point of this one is you got one big tv and especially if it doesn't do any forking you have two people in front of it like
John:
I know it gets more complicated when you have multiple people in front of TV and how you can adjust to multiple people or whatever, but that I feel like is the challenge.
John:
That's the middle ground between full interactive Wii Fit, where it's a literal video game that's reacting to you in real time, which is difficult to do.
John:
And by the way, Nintendo does have their Fit Ring thing, which is a similar type of exercise.
John:
not that kind of exercise a similar type of endeavor of interactive fitness but you've got that way over there and you've got the totally non-interactive vhs tape over there and in the middle of this do-at-home technologically powered workout is something like apple fitness plus and i feel like they need to move more towards the interactive side of things to not necessarily the gamification side of things because you know i feel like peloton may appeal to a different type of personality than apple fitness plus does but
John:
Certainly, everyone can benefit from something like a workout being tailored to them better.
John:
It's why you might pay an actual human to help you do workouts because they're literally a human and watching you and saying, okay, I can tell that you're struggling or here's what you're doing.
John:
No computer program or pre-taped forking path thing is going to do as well as an actual human, but you want to do better than the VHS tape.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And something that Marco said earlier, I think, is extremely astute, which is that, you know, some of these, especially like the HIIT exercises, those typically don't require any sort of equipment at all.
Casey:
And if you're the kind of person like me that when you travel...
Casey:
or whatever that was called when we went to other places, is it called travel travel?
Casey:
Is that what it was called?
Casey:
It's been so long.
Casey:
Uh, when do you travel, you know, you could hook up to like a hotel TV and do a hit exercise, a hit session or whatever, and do that with nothing but the stuff you already had in your, you know, go back, which is really convenient and really cool.
Casey:
And again, you know, you could do this with beach body just as much.
Casey:
You could do it with Apple fitness plus, but I don't know.
Casey:
I just, I really enjoy the flexibility of it.
Casey:
Um, I keep obliquely mentioning some complaints, um,
Casey:
I don't love the information architecture within the app at the top.
Casey:
It shows like all the different kinds of exercise you can do.
Casey:
And then it shows you like more of what you do and try something new and new this week, which is fine.
Casey:
And they do have a beginner section, which is great for, for people that have never done this sort of thing before.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I don't love that when I'm trying to figure out something to do, I'm just like blindly clicking around.
Casey:
I feel like,
Casey:
It would be cool if I could, for example, filter by how long I want to spend, which I can do once I decide what exercise I want to do, but everything starts with what exercise do you want to do?
Casey:
And then you can figure out, okay, who do you want to do it with?
Casey:
How much time do you want to spend?
Casey:
Et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
And I wish there was a little more flexibility in that regard.
Casey:
But all told, the app is not bad by any means.
Casey:
I don't like that when it's on the iPad hooked up to a TV, it's using mirroring.
Casey:
It's not presenting on the TV.
Casey:
So like if I hook up Plex to the TV, it's taking up the entire TV.
Casey:
Whereas I'm getting the vertical letterboxing when I use Fitness Plus because it's just mirroring the iPad display to the TV.
Casey:
It's not playing properly.
Casey:
And something that I've heard a lot of people complain about that I haven't tried myself is that AirPlay either doesn't work or is similarly – what is it?
Casey:
Pillbox, Pillarbox, whatever it's called –
Casey:
And then I think there was something else that somebody had said that they had tried where they got audio only, but no video, presumably because of DRM.
Casey:
I tried taking some screenshots.
Casey:
And of course, all I got was the HUDs, the heads up displays because the video was DRM and so it was blacked out, which is really frustrating.
Casey:
Um, but in the grand scheme of things, like, again, I was definitely predisposed to like this because I'm taking something that isn't, you know, a hundred percent by Apple, but it's largely doing the same thing.
Casey:
And I'm replacing it with something that is a hundred percent made by Apple.
Casey:
They own the whole widget top to bottom.
Casey:
And of course I enjoy it.
Casey:
Of course the production value is ridiculous.
Casey:
Of course the music is not only well chosen, but you know, extremely good quality.
Casey:
It's not just some silly canned music that they bought from, you know, the, the, the,
Casey:
shutterstock of music or whatever online.
Casey:
It's all extremely well done, extremely pretty, extremely well shot, etc.
Casey:
I was predisposed to like this, and guess what?
Casey:
I really like it.
Marco:
I wonder if they can use Apple's market power and connections to get a couple of occasional guest trainers that are celebrities of some kind.
Marco:
Can I have Joe Pesci talk me through a workout?
Marco:
Or Eddie Vedder?
Oh, God.
Ooh.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Flatfile.
Marco:
You've definitely experienced data onboarding, but you probably haven't heard that term.
Marco:
Think back to when you needed a CSV template to import data into a web service, or the one time you had to email an Excel file that might have had sensitive data.
Marco:
There are problems inherent with data onboarding.
Marco:
Companies spend exorbitant amounts of money trying to fix it, usually with implementation and services teams.
Marco:
Luckily, our friends at Flatfile are solving data onboarding for companies of all sizes.
Marco:
They've just interviewed over 100 companies and compiled a report called the 2020 State of Data Onboarding that quantifies this hidden business cost.
Marco:
Not surprisingly, 96% of their respondents ran into problems when importing data.
Marco:
23% said it takes weeks or months to migrate their customer data.
Marco:
So while you may not have heard of data onboarding, chances are you or someone you know has experienced it.
Marco:
Want to check out their full report of the 2020 state of data onboarding?
Marco:
Visit flatfile.io.
Marco:
That's flatfile.io.
Marco:
Thank you to Flatfile for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So I was looking through the show notes doing my pre-flight pre-flight a couple hours ago, and I noticed something interesting in the show notes.
Casey:
And it reads, John is thinking of upgrading to Big Sur.
Casey:
Talk him out of it.
Casey:
And that was really interesting to me because I am thinking of upgrading to Big Sur and would like someone to talk me out of it if necessary.
Casey:
To quickly set the stage, for me, my laptop, my MacBook Pro, is on Big Sur and has been since shortly after it launched.
Casey:
But my iMac Pro is not.
Casey:
It is still on Catalina or whatever the hell came before.
Casey:
And so I haven't upgraded it for fear of messing with something that's mostly working.
Casey:
John, what is the new shiny that is getting you to ask this question?
John:
Actually, before we get to that, Marco, are you thinking of Granite the Mixer?
John:
I mean, you're already using it now on your M1, right?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
On the M1, I'm already using it.
Marco:
On my iMac, I was not using it.
Marco:
And I even told the AppleCare people, like, if you have to do a reinstall, please keep it on Catalina if you can.
Marco:
But that being said, I am also torn on this issue.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
For most of the last month or whatever it's been that I've had the MacBook Air, I've been going back and forth.
Marco:
When I still had the iMac also, I was going back and forth between the iMac and the MacBook Air.
Marco:
So iMac and Catalina, MacBook Air on Big Sur.
Marco:
And whenever I would go back to Catalina, I wouldn't miss anything about Big Sur.
Marco:
It wouldn't seem weird.
Marco:
Everything didn't look ancient or outdated.
Marco:
There was nothing about Big Sur that I missed when I would go back.
Marco:
Absolutely nothing.
Marco:
Big Sur is a really weird sideways move.
Marco:
Some things are a little bit better.
Marco:
Some things are a little bit or maybe a lot worse.
Marco:
It has a lot of weird rough edges in its new design, which I've complained about many times.
Marco:
It's a weird OS.
Marco:
And a lot of things just don't work as well.
Marco:
A lot of things work slightly better.
Marco:
It's weird.
Marco:
But I think it's telling that when I would go back from it,
Marco:
go back to catalina for a while there is like nothing i would miss about it you know see also the touch bar like i have the exact same touch bar it's like i can use it it's fine i guess i don't prefer it and then whenever now that i want a laptop that doesn't have the touch bar i don't miss the touch bar at all not even for a second there's nothing about the touch bar that i miss now that i don't have it anymore and so you know looking at big sur it's not that great honestly and
Marco:
However, that being said, also using Big Sur like it's functioning like I'm able to use it.
Marco:
I'm not constantly hating it.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
And Catalina is not great.
Marco:
Catalina has always been a train wreck.
Marco:
I've had so many problems with Catalina over this past year that I've never had the previous version of macOS, just in terms of general system stability, performance, and I don't think it was Google Chrome at fault, all sorts of craziness with Catalina that's just been awful.
Marco:
It's an OS full of weird subsystem bugs and performance problems.
Marco:
And Big Sur still has some of that, no question.
Marco:
But Big Sur is the one they're actually working on right now.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure Catalina has stopped receiving any meaningful engineering attention.
Marco:
And so when you have a really rough OS release like Catalina was, and the engineers all move on a year later to the new version, and there's no more bug fixing happening to the old one,
Marco:
The strongest reason to stay on the old one would be if it had reached a more stable point than the new one.
Marco:
I don't think that's actually happened with Catalina.
Marco:
I don't think Catalina's latest version is any more stable than Big Sur.
Marco:
I have no fewer problems with Catalina and it's like, you know, whatever it is, 0.4, 0.5, whatever it's reached.
Marco:
That is just as stable or buggy to me as Big Sur, you know, 11.0 and 11.1 have been.
Marco:
I don't think there's much reason to stay on Catalina because Catalina wasn't very good and never reached that good or mostly good point that you expect an OS to reach once it's being replaced by a newer OS.
Marco:
It never reached that point.
Marco:
So you're not really taking any steps backward because Catalina never went forward.
Marco:
So from that point of view, I say the update doesn't actually matter that much.
Marco:
The main areas that has affected me are simply its design changes, which again, I think are a mixed bag, many of which are significantly worse, some of which are fine.
Marco:
Um, and some, some minor functionality changes like the way, um, like stupid stuff, like the way searches now work differently.
Marco:
That's the standard, like, you know, command F to find stuff in most apps now works differently and is clunkier.
Marco:
Um, the, a command option F, like the main search box in something like mail or notes, um,
Marco:
now works differently and is clunkier.
Marco:
And in Mail, it even searches different things by default.
Marco:
So there's stuff like that with the built-in apps or the built-in UI widgets that are still a little bit rough.
Marco:
But the OS as a whole, Big Sur seems...
Marco:
not worse than catalina in like stability and system services and performance and stuff like that in my experience so your mileage may vary but for me it's kind of a toss-up i'm not super motivated to update my imac too big sir but i also don't really know what i'm waiting for because catalina is not good either
John:
Yeah, that's kind of my question about, you know, I guess the horde of what I was saying.
John:
What am I waiting for?
John:
Why have I not upgraded already?
John:
Am I afraid that I don't want to upgrade because I have software that's not compatible?
John:
Well, no, I don't.
John:
Am I afraid that, like, you know, there's some...
John:
some amazing new feature that i need that i desperately want to have not really but like well there's two two main threads here one of them is like what marco said um big sur is where the development's happening new versions of big sur are coming out and each new version brings with it hope that whatever it is that's annoying you will be fixed or better right um
John:
um but and the second thing is uh new features that i wanted which i'll get to in a second but uh getting back to the original question what's what's stopping me upgrading is a pain in the butt takes a long time if it goes wrong you have to restore from a backup that takes a long time it's just it's just a whole thing right and given my podcasting schedule there's never a good time to like destroy my computer accidentally right um i already did that once when i had the the you know
John:
coincidentally the big sir beta that hosed my firmware that took me a million years to figure out that was a big disaster that's a pain so my thinking and the reason this topic is in here like well over the holidays i'll probably have a big hole in my podcasting schedule because no one wants to podcast around the holidays so that's a good time finally there'll be a good time for me to dive in and upgrade and my thinking is the same as marco's like i
John:
It's not, well, not quite the same.
John:
Like the whole idea is like, I don't want to leave because everyone's telling me that Big Sur has stability problems because it's new, but Catalina is rock solid.
John:
Well, my experience with Catalina hasn't been rock solid, but it hasn't been bad either.
John:
But on the flip side of that, I have Big Sur running the other computer in this room and I don't have any problems with that in terms of features of stability either.
John:
So it seems like it's like a lateral move in terms of stability.
John:
Normally you would think the OS that's been out for an entire year would have really settled down and got installed and the new one would be flaky.
John:
And in my experience, the one that's been around for a year, stability and features and everything and bugs seem fine.
John:
And so does the one that just came out, Big Sur.
John:
And is it because Catalina never really got that stable or is it because Big Sur actually is very stable and it's 0.0 and 0.1?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But either way, it doesn't feel like a risk in that regard, right?
John:
The UI stuff I know is going to annoy me because it annoys me on the other computer that has Big Sur on it, right?
John:
But I do know like this is the end of the line for Catalina.
John:
Like maybe it'll get security patches and new versions of Safari and that's it, right?
John:
And, you know, every once in a while I'll see like a program come out that's Big Sur only and I'll be like, oh, I can't run that because I'm not on the latest thing.
John:
So I'm getting that itch to go to the latest thing.
John:
And as I mentioned before, the new features that I actually care about,
John:
things that are making me want to go to big sir one of them casey just put in the notes and i'll steal it from the new version of messages it always annoyed me that the mac version of messages couldn't do all the things and yes i know it's weird and has you know ui shows or whatever but i'm i want to just get that updated in the hopes that again that's the that's where all the development effort is happening mac messages has not had much development effort poured into it over the past couple of years and now that it's newly what is it is a catalyst i forget
John:
Yeah.
John:
Now that's newly catalysted.
John:
I'm hoping that'll get better.
John:
But the second one, this is going to sound dumb, but it's going to be predictable for me.
John:
The main feature that's making you an upgrade is that I think about what my big Mac Pro does most of the time and mostly what I have to...
John:
babysit it doing is because i don't you know i'm not using it for hours a day i use it during podcasting and i use it you know during the day to do my own computer stuff or whatever but like unless i'm in a big project unless i'm working on one of my apps or i'm trying to make a destiny video or whatever but most of the time the computer is just kind of like hanging out doing its thing but one thing it does do every day every week every hour uh you know
John:
is it backs itself up right and it's not backing up a lot because i'm not producing a lot of new data each day but i do want to have a recent backup so every week it does a super duper clone and every whenever it does a time machine back up to two different locations and it's been annoying me how long it takes to do an incremental time machine backup of my four terabyte drive with a hojillion files in it
John:
And I have seen from personal experience that Time Machine and Big Sur, because of it's taking advantage of new APFS features, is much, much, much faster.
John:
In fact, this is way down in the show notes.
John:
I need to scroll to find it.
John:
We'll put a link.
John:
Casey, scroll way down to get this.
John:
Arctectica, in its Big Sur review from ages ago,
John:
did a benchmark of how long does it take to do the initial backup and then an incremental backup in Catalina versus Big Sur.
John:
And the difference is pretty big.
John:
You know, for a local backup, the initial backup took 44 minutes in Catalina and 16 minutes in Big Sur.
John:
This is apples to apples, same computer, same number of files, same everything, right?
John:
A local backup took eight minutes on Catalina and two in Big Sur.
John:
I'm assuming these numbers will scale proportionally.
John:
And a network backup was one hour and 52 minutes versus one hour and 15 minutes, right?
John:
So Big Sur is way faster at doing incremental backups.
John:
And this is important to me because one of the things I have my computer do is while I'm asleep, it wakes up, it mounts one of my internal hard drives as a time machine backup, goes back to sleep.
John:
And I'm looking at how long that's taking and I'm like, geez, like it takes a long time or sometimes there's another backup already running and it tries to stop that backup and that takes a long time and the cleaning up step is taking a long time.
John:
And I'm like, what I wouldn't give for my time machine backup, you know, speeds to be cut in half because they just seem unreasonable.
John:
And I know I have a lot of files.
John:
And I understand that just like the main problem is like it's spending most of its time figuring out what is it that I need to back up.
John:
And you can see it, especially when I when I do my like nightly one, because there's more stuff that's built up the preparing to back up step.
John:
And especially since it's doing to a spinning disk, the preparing to back up step is like, I need to figure out what changed since the last time I did a backup.
John:
And then eventually it figures it out and it's like 100 megs of stuff and writes 100 megs of stuff fairly quickly.
John:
Not as quickly as you would imagine because you think copying 100 megs of stuff would take two seconds, but a reasonable amount of time.
John:
I think it spends like 10 to 20 times more time figuring out what needs to back up and that's exactly where the new version of Time Machine and APFS ends.
John:
on Big Sur excels in that it has a more efficient way to figure out what has changed since the last time I back up.
John:
At least that's my understanding of what's making it faster.
John:
But either way, the benchmarks show that it's getting way faster.
John:
So that's probably the most demanding thing my computer does.
John:
Again, when I'm not editing video and not compiling an exode, doing backups is the most demanding thing.
John:
And I don't notice the demand, like my fans don't get any louder, my computer doesn't get any slower.
John:
But what does happen is I notice a little time machine icon, like it is right now,
John:
with a little arrow in my menu bar.
John:
And what it means is, oh, I was going to put my computer to sleep when I got up and left it, but I should just let it finish its backup.
John:
So I don't put it to sleep.
John:
I just leave it and it'll, you know, I don't have it set to go to sleep by itself.
John:
I'm like, I'll come back later when it's done with the backup and I'll put it to sleep.
John:
And I come back later and it's still not done.
John:
And then I go back and I have lunch and take the dog for a walk and I come back later and it's still not done.
John:
I'm like, oh my God.
John:
And then I just give up and put it to sleep.
John:
But now I haven't completed a backup.
John:
it's it's frustrating to me so big sir big sir is attracting me with apfs apfs accelerated time machine backups of all things and the messages app i suppose and other new apps and so i'm tempted to take this holiday break slash week slash whatever to be the time when i do all my last backups and
John:
do the big update and hope i don't hose myself and find out all my you know programs that might be broken even though i think there aren't any of them there's always one or two hiding somewhere and deal with all that stuff and update it and i was hoping one of you would tell me don't do it because is 11.1 even out yet yeah anyway i i i haven't heard anything bad keeping me away and i do want faster backups i've just been afraid to bite the bullet casey what is what's attracting you to it besides messages
Casey:
So messages in part because it's – oh, yeah, 11.1 is out, huh?
Casey:
Messages in part because it is so kind of messed up on Catalina.
Casey:
But I have come to really, really like – I forget the name of – it's called pinning in the user interface, but I don't know if it has like a marketing name, but –
Casey:
I've come to really, really like the thing in iOS 14 and in Big Sur where you can put a group or you can move someone so that they're always at the top of the messages list.
Casey:
Always.
Casey:
So for example, on all of my devices except my iMac, Erin is the very top of the list on messages.
Casey:
Always, always, always.
Casey:
She will never move because I've put her there.
Casey:
And then I have like a handful of other people.
Casey:
It strikes me as very – what was it?
Casey:
Like top nine or whatever on MySpace.
Casey:
I would never really use MySpace, but you know what I'm thinking of?
Casey:
It was like you would put your bestest friends up there.
Casey:
And that was like very political from what I gathered.
Casey:
Well, anyways, it's kind of like that.
John:
It's top six on the phone, and I do the ping as well.
John:
And here's the problem I have.
John:
You can tell me if you have this problem as well.
John:
So I put my family –
John:
As the top, I have my wife and my two children.
John:
And then I have my parents.
John:
And then there's one spot left.
John:
Oh, that's the worst.
John:
Yep.
John:
So who gets... And you don't want it to not be symmetrical.
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
And so you can pick another relative.
John:
But then what I... Like...
John:
So you think you're ranking them.
John:
It's like, OK, well, my family should be there first because that just makes sense.
John:
I message them.
John:
And then for the next rose, do you prioritize people in terms of your relation?
John:
Like, oh, it should be my parents or something like that.
John:
Or do you put people there who are the people you actually message more often?
Casey:
For me, I have nine now in my phone, and it's funny you say that because for the longest time I had six.
Casey:
I have Aaron, a group chat that's between my parents and Aaron and me, my three brothers, excuse me, my two brothers, or three of us total, my two brothers and myself.
Casey:
I count good.
Casey:
My two brothers and myself, that's the top row.
Casey:
And then the two subsequent rows are almost entirely group chats, but generally they're just the people that I'm constantly either wanting to send things to or just happen to talk with all the time.
Casey:
Uh, and so that, that represents the next two rows, but what it's funny that you bring up the, the empty space thing, because for a long time, I felt like I wanted to move from two rows to three rows.
Casey:
So from six to nine, uh, of these pinned messages, but I, I couldn't come up with an even three for what I wanted on the new row.
Casey:
So I just didn't do it until I finally came up with what I felt like was the good next row of people, you know, or of group chats as I think the
John:
The other thing about doing it based on frequency is if you really do message them frequently, they'll be at the top anyway, right below the pin ones because that's how it prioritizes.
John:
So I spent a long time trying to figure out who should be in these top ones.
John:
Like I feel like you have to put your own family as the top, top ones just because –
John:
Like, I mean, you do message them all the time.
John:
Like, why not have them be static?
John:
But everything else, it's harder because I have group chats, too.
John:
And I'm like, yeah, but they're always at the top anyway because they're active.
John:
So why do they need to be pinned?
John:
And group chats have a different kind of icon.
John:
It's not just one person's face and everything.
John:
It's actually causing quite a problem.
John:
It's like home screen rearrangement.
John:
Don't get me wrong.
John:
I love this feature.
John:
I'm glad it's there because I like having the known place where you could touch things.
John:
But it's not very flexible, and it really tickles the sort of –
John:
whatever, the part of my mind that wants things to be, like, arranged symmetrically and have no blank spaces and whatever.
Casey:
Yeah, and, you know, somebody in the chat is saying, pinning an entry in a list is rather boring as a big macOS release feature.
Casey:
Like, on paper, I understand the point, but this genuinely has been extremely nice, and I've really liked having it and having it consistently across all my devices, except my iMac Pro.
Casey:
Now, with that said, even though I do love messages on Big Sur,
Casey:
One of my favorite bugs, almost as much as the MMS bug, which I'm still fighting here and there, is if you happen to be on a Big Sur Mac and if you hit command N in messages to create a new message and type someone's name, like for me, I'll type Marco.
Casey:
And then if you hit enter,
Casey:
Because it drops down, you know, it highlights, you know, Marco's phone number, which I will read now.
Casey:
No, just kidding.
Casey:
It highlights, you know, Marco's phone number, and you would hit enter in order to actually compose the message to Marco, at which point the first responder should be the thing at the bottom, potentially, or at the very least, you could tab to the message space at the bottom.
Casey:
But what ends up happening in Big Sur is that when you hit enter, it just clears it.
Marco:
Yeah, I've hit this every time.
Marco:
Like every time I have to create a new message, I have to do it like two or three times.
Casey:
Yep, every time.
Casey:
You can click on the list and clicking works no problem.
Casey:
But if you try to arrow around, it doesn't work.
Casey:
And if you try to just hit enter and accept the top answer, it doesn't work either.
Casey:
And it drives me crazy.
Casey:
But other than that, I really like messages on Big Sur.
Casey:
And so that's one of the things I'm really interested in.
Casey:
I think, had I properly done any research, I probably could come up with some other examples.
Casey:
But you know, this is even dumber than the messages thing.
Casey:
I really, really have come to like BitBar and its recent, I'll call it a replacement, although it's not really called SwiftBar, which is basically a re-implementation of the same thing.
Casey:
We've talked about this in the past, I believe, but basically you can run shell scripts and it will put the results on your menu bar.
Casey:
I really, really like it and it really works for me.
Casey:
And Swift Bar in particular is really nice because it's been completely rewritten and it seems to work a lot nicer.
Casey:
Well, one of the features in Swift Bar is that you can use SF symbols, which is this like kind of sort of font that Apple provides in order to let you use like these different glyphs in place of like emoji, for example.
Casey:
It's similar to emoji, but not exactly the same.
Casey:
It's mostly about like things that you would find in a user interface.
Marco:
Oh my God, it's the new wingdings.
Casey:
Yeah, in a lot of ways, yeah, it really is.
Casey:
But anyways, one of the features in SwiftBar specifically for Big Sur is that you can use SF symbols.
Casey:
And so those work really, really nicely because I like to have a monochrome menu bar.
Casey:
And when I use emoji, which I could do in BitBar and I could do in SwiftBar and Catalina,
Casey:
It's adding color in a place that I don't particularly want color.
Casey:
Yes, this is a dumb thing to get worked up about, but hey, have you met us?
Casey:
So anyway, well, I really like that you can use SF symbols in Big Sur.
Casey:
And so I would really like to do that.
Casey:
And the corollary of putting all my devices on Big Sur is that then I could stop all these, you know, if I'm on Catalina, emit emoji.
Casey:
If I'm on Big Sur, emit SF symbols and clean up all my scripts, of which there's only like three of them.
Casey:
But still, that would be nice too.
Casey:
And it's these dumb things that...
Casey:
I know I don't really need any of this, but it would just be nice to have it.
Casey:
And so, yeah, I'm thinking that since none of you are doing what I wanted you to do and tell me, for the love of God, don't do it, then I'll probably be doing it sometime in the next week or two.
John:
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing.
John:
I think the reason all three of us are thinking about it is because no one is saying, oh, my God, don't upgrade.
John:
It's going to hose everything.
John:
None of your software will work.
John:
It's incredibly buggy.
John:
Everything will break.
John:
It's super annoying or whatever.
John:
It's like it's a known quantity because we all have Macs that run it.
Yeah.
John:
You know, as Marco would say, it's fine.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, like I'm using it full time for the next two weeks and have for the last week.
Marco:
And yeah, it's fine.
Marco:
Like it's I don't love certain parts of it, but I didn't love Catalina either.
Marco:
And therefore, like I'd rather at least be on the one that they are still working on.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Same, same thing with the messages thing.
John:
It's a catalyst app with weird, inconsistent, non Mac like behavior, but you know, they're not working on messages in Catalina and that thing has a bunch of weird behaviors too, even though it was a Mac app and it's missing a bunch of features.
John:
So even though the one in Big Sur is, you know, buggy and strange, they're going to keep working on that.
John:
I hope that that's the hope anyway.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And, and also like a different way to look at it is like holding onto an old OS and
Marco:
is itself, it's kind of a friction point.
Marco:
It's harder to do that over time.
Marco:
There are things that will require the new OS that come out all the time.
Marco:
Apple certainly pushes it hard.
Marco:
Holding on to the old OS over time becomes its own downside and its own amount of work.
Marco:
And so there has to be a good reason that you're holding on to it.
Marco:
And if you're just on Catalina, if you're on something older than Catalina, there's lots of reasons.
Marco:
But just going from Catalina to Big Sur, there doesn't seem to be any strong reason besides the UI annoyances of Big Sur.
Marco:
But those aren't that big of a strong reason.
Marco:
And I'd rather be on the one that they're fixing the bugs for.
John:
Apple's really working on me with this release because not only do I have the red badge on system preferences that I can't get rid of because apparently you have to install an MDM thing to use the software update dash ignore thing.
John:
Apparently that only works if you have like a mobile device management profile installed or something, which is annoying.
John:
Delightful.
John:
But on top of that, there's a bug in Catalina slash the Catalina Mac App Store where...
John:
Oh, yes.
John:
It shows apps like, hey, there's a new version of Keynote.
John:
And so I have two updates that it wants me to install, but they're for Big Sur only things.
John:
So I can't get rid of those update badges in the Apple menu either because the Apple menu says you have two new app updates.
John:
And if you go try to update either one of them, it says you can't install this.
John:
It's for Big Sur.
John:
Like, OK, then stop showing it to me.
John:
And because apparently Catalina is not getting any more bug fixes, I don't know if anyone's ever going to fix that either.
John:
So I have multiple daily badges.
John:
If I peek in the Apple menu, I'm reminded.
John:
And down in my dock, there's a little red number one on system preferences.
John:
And it was tricky.
John:
Sometimes it's, you know, like there was a software update recently, our security update for Catalina.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's in system preferences.
John:
And I don't know if I would have ever seen it because I think it's still just sort of one.
John:
And when you go there, you have to make sure you don't click the thing that says, hey, update to Big Sur, because that's the only button that's visible.
John:
And then this is a little like text, like a little blue web like link that's like, oh, and there are also some other updates that you might want to look at.
John:
And those are the ones that update Safari and update, you know, security or whatever.
John:
So just being in this weird limbo state with Apple nagging me to update is annoying me.
John:
And so I feel like the path of least resistance is probably too.
Marco:
bite the bullet and go big sir we'll we'll check in next week to see if any of us have had any disasters if anyone has had the guts to actually do this or if we're still just thinking about it we are sponsored this week by linode my favorite place to run servers whether you are working on a personal project or managing your enterprise's infrastructure you deserve simple affordable and accessible cloud computing solutions that allow you to take your project to the next level
Marco:
linode is an amazing web host they are what like i've been there so long they are what used to be called a vps host a virtual private server now this is just called cloud computing or cloud hosting and linode has it all from you know regular of course you know computing instances that you can use these virtual machines with linux to develop deploy and scale all your applications whatever you might need to all sorts of other cool stuff like like a managed s3 compatible block storage option all sorts of you know network
Marco:
load balancing services backups specialty configurations like if you need GPU compute machines or high memory machines or anything like that Linode has all that for you I've been a customer of theirs for about a decade now and I just am so so happy there I run all of Overcast there I have a total of
Marco:
I think about 30 instances at Linode and it's just been great.
Marco:
Whenever you need support, they've been wonderful.
Marco:
The performance and the value are always great.
Marco:
Check it out at linode.com slash ATP and you can get $100 in free credit.
Marco:
Or if you don't want to type in that URL or don't remember it, just remember to text ATP to 474747 to get instant access to $100 in free credit.
Marco:
Once again, that is linode.com slash ATP or text ATP to 474747.
Marco:
Create that free account right there on that page.
Marco:
You can get started with that $100 in credit on Linode today.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my servers, for being just an amazing web host that I've been with for such a long time and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
Chris Lennart writes, Okay.
Casey:
I am not the right person to ask about this, and I'm glad to have you two around.
Casey:
I don't feel like I notice HDR in video really at all, which is probably because I'm not aware of what to look for.
Casey:
The only thing I notice is the rest of the screen dimming as I'm watching an HDR video.
Casey:
So what is it that I should be looking for to see this pop or to see what makes it so much better?
Yeah.
John:
It's not the rest of the screen dimming.
John:
It's the thing you're watching being brighter.
John:
I know it seems like the same thing, right?
John:
So the reason I put this question here is because it's an interesting overloading of the HDR term, right?
John:
So HDR video, when we talk about that, the easiest way to think about that is if you think about non-HDR video as having a brightness level from like 0 to 100, where 0 is black and 100 is white, right?
John:
HDR video in very oversimplified terms is like, now imagine the white went to 200, right?
John:
And you're like, wait, it's already white at 100.
John:
How can it be more white?
John:
Well, it can just be brighter, right?
John:
I mean, like turning up the brightness on your screen, right?
John:
So say you've got a white screen on a non-HDR and the white is a brightness level of 100.
John:
Imagine you could turn the brightness up even more and it would be 200, right?
John:
There's more to HDR than that.
John:
But basically, the dynamic range between the brightest thing on the screen and the darkest ring is wider in HDR video, right?
John:
And the darker on OLED is not getting any darker than black.
John:
So, you know, none more black, right?
John:
But the brightest is brighter, which is why when you watch HDR video and it has some sunlight or a highlight or a sparkling thing or whatever, it seems like the rest of the screen got dimmer in comparison because the bright highlights are much brighter.
John:
Like, to...
John:
To compare, like the UI on my Mac that I'm looking at now, the UI on the Pro Display XDR using Apple's profile is 500 nits.
John:
Nits is a level of brightness, right?
John:
They show the whole UI in 500 nits.
John:
So if I make 100% white, it's white at a brightness level of 500 nits.
John:
But this screen goes up to 1600 nits.
John:
If they did the UI at 1600 nits, you'd burn your eyeballs out.
John:
You don't want to be looking at white terminal windows and white web pages at 1600 nits.
John:
It's too darn bright.
John:
I think a lot of us have had, especially in the days of LED backlights, monitors that you could buy, especially third-party monitors, where you could turn the brightness off way brighter than anybody ever wanted.
John:
It's like staring into the sun, right?
John:
But for video, where you're trying to watch something cinematic or whatever, the reason HDR looks so much nicer and better is...
John:
you're not putting, it's not like a white webpage that's on the screen in a movie.
John:
It's like, you know, a sunset and the little sun part of it is super bright and that looks more sparkly and bright.
John:
And that's why HDR video is more stunning.
John:
Now photos, Apple use the same exact word for the similar reason for photos when introduced HDR, smart HDR photos, but that's slightly different kind of dynamic range.
John:
So when you've got, when you're taking a picture and you want to expose a sensor to some light,
John:
If the sensor doesn't have any light hit some part of it, that's just black, right?
John:
If you're lucky.
John:
But sensors can only take in so much light input.
John:
So after a certain amount of light over a certain amount of time, eventually the pixel just says, I'm just white.
John:
I'm overloaded.
John:
This is how much light you can send me, right?
John:
And that, you know, in film parlance, that exposure of saying, how much light are we letting through the aperture and how long are we exposing the sensor to that light?
John:
um like like a piece of film if you just take in and expose it open the aperture entirely and expose it to light and just hold it there for 15 minutes everything's just going to be white right because it'll just be completely overloaded like whether it's film or a sensor or whatever right and that dynamic range that sensors can handle it's like i can handle this much light input before i go full light and of course black is just black right
John:
And sometimes when you're taking a picture, like a person standing in front of a window, the window has bright sunlight coming through it.
John:
And so you take a picture and the phone has to figure out, okay, if you want to see this person's face, I have to expose so I get enough light from this person's face so that you can see it.
John:
And that means I have to keep the shutter, quote unquote, shutter open for a certain amount of time to gather enough light from this person's face so you can see their eyeballs and their nose and their mouth and everything.
John:
But once you've done that and correctly exposed their face, the light coming from the window behind them has overwhelmed all the pixels that it hit in the sensor.
John:
And now the sky outside that looks blue to human eyes looks totally white in the picture.
John:
So the sky is what we call blown out, overexposed, because the sky was so bright that it totally overwhelmed those pictures, but you needed to leave the shutter open for that long and expose it to that much light so you could see the face.
John:
If you did the opposite and exposed it just for a short period of time so the sky looks blue, the person who's standing in front of the window, their face looks like it's totally in shadow and like black and you can't see their face.
John:
You've surely seen this in photos.
John:
If you take a picture of somebody in unfavorable lighting and you expose it wrong, either the sky is blown out or the person's face is too dark, right?
John:
HDR photography is a way, it's kind of like exposure bracketing, which I think we'll also put a link in the show notes to this thing, is where they do multiple exposures.
John:
One where they leave the shutter open a short amount of time to get the blue sky, and then they take another picture where they leave the shutter open a long amount of time to get the face, but now the sky is white.
John:
And sometimes they do multiple pictures at different exposures, one right after the other, and then computationally combine them so you have a blue sky and a person's face that you can actually see that's not in shadow, right?
John:
But think about what I said before.
John:
None of that has anything necessarily to do with, oh, make the white brighter than it was before.
John:
It's just about exposing a camera element directly
John:
variable amounts of time than combining it into a single picture so you get a higher dynamic range as in oh that if you had exposed it long enough to get that face now the sky would be white but if you expose it short enough to get the blue sky now you can't see the face we're going to do both of those so you have you were able to
John:
make the pixels be more have a larger dynamic range make them not be so sensitive like oh these poor pixels they get they get so much light in them they just blow out entirely right and so that that's why especially if you're looking at smart hdr photos on a iphone that predates having hdr capabilities at all the brightest thing in that picture is still just going to be that white at a level 100 right
John:
So hopefully it will look better and that things will be exposed better and, you know, things won't be blown out and you'll be able to see all the things you want with the computational photography.
John:
But they use the same term for it, HDR, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the whites can be at a level 200 instead of a level 100, right?
John:
So that's why it's confusing about, oh, I had a quote unquote HDR picture, but it doesn't look as impressive in HDR video.
John:
Chances are good that that picture that you took, the brightest element in that picture is only whatever, 500 nits or whatever level that the camera is taking that picture at.
John:
Whereas HDR video, depending on the video source, the brightness can go up much brighter.
John:
Now, the final thing I'll say about this is that HDR video is complicated by the fact that the HDR standard, like all the various, you know, Dolby Vision or HDR10 and HDR10+, there's a whole bunch of standards for HDR video.
John:
The standards go up to brightness levels that I'm pretty sure no actual man-made device can do.
John:
No $30,000 reference monitor, no nothing, because they go really, really high.
John:
Like, they're not as bright as the sun, but I think it goes up to like 30,000 nits or some ridiculous number.
John:
right that's how bright you're allowed to go but when you make video like make a movie or whatever the person who makes the movie can choose what is how bright will the brightest element on this screen be and if you look on youtube you see tons and tons of videos of people saying okay
John:
So a new version of the movie came out or say some recent movie, a Marvel movie just came out on Blu-ray and they have an HDR edition and they will measure.
John:
OK, well, we play this whole movie.
John:
And during the course of the whole movie, here is a graph of the brightness levels.
John:
And they could say, hey, this this Marvel movie, nothing on the screen is ever going to be higher than 600 nits.
John:
so if your tv can do 600 nits on on well there's there's different if you have an oled it can't do that brightness on the entire screen just on a small area but anyway they can tell you it doesn't go over 600 sometimes they'll give you an hdr movie where the max brightness is not really any brighter than the non-hdr version because that's how it was mastered and it's like well why did they get to label that as hdr like oh well you can see there's this one little thing that for a second goes above the levels of the sdr video but it's not that impressive
John:
Whereas other movies will say in this one bright scene, it goes up to 1200 nits, right?
John:
That's baked into the video that you're getting because the video tells you how bright, you know, based on the HDR standard, each thing should be, right?
John:
And so I have no idea what the capabilities of the phones are.
John:
What is the maximum brightness of the iPhone 12 screen?
John:
But you have to always match that up with, okay, what the video that I'm looking at is...
John:
how encoded in that video what is the brightest element that it's trying to display and as long as this thing is trying to display a brightness that is within the range that the phone actually can display you're getting the full experience but chances are it's possible that you're watching a video that has a maximum brightness of 1200 nits and the phone just can't do 1200 nits and so you won't see that right so hdr is complicated um now the only final question i have for two of you because i don't know the answer to this one is
John:
do the new iphones with hdr screens take photographs in which the brightest element can be brighter than the non-hdr things in other words can i take a photo of the sun and when it gets displayed the sun in the photo will be encoded as a brightness level of like 800 nits or something that's higher than it could have been normally
John:
I don't know the answer to that.
Casey:
I don't think so.
Casey:
Yeah, neither do I. I don't think so either.
John:
I don't think that's the case.
John:
Yeah, and I'm not entirely sure because you can take HDR video with that same sensor.
John:
So it seems plausible to me that that could be done.
John:
But in general, the challenge in photography is not, hey, how bright can I make the brightest element?
John:
The challenge is how can I correctly expose it?
John:
Everything in the frame so you can see what you need to see because you really don't want the bright sun blowing out everything in the foreground in a photograph.
John:
Whereas if you're taking a movie of a sunset, maybe that is what you want.
Marco:
There's a few other concerns with photos that have nothing to do with the sensor.
Marco:
Well, they actually might.
Marco:
So one concern is video is lower resolution than photos.
Marco:
And so it's possible that the sensor or the image processing pipeline might be able to do a certain degree of HDR bracketing to get the super big range.
Marco:
that might be possible to do on video, but not photos, or to do it quickly, or to do it, you know, without other trade-offs.
Marco:
Other practical concerns might be, like, I don't know if the storage format, like, does Heaf and Heek, do those support the storage of HDR data?
Marco:
Are there existing standards in place, like,
Marco:
if a photo is shot in HDR, but then it's viewed on a non-HDR screen, are there standards in place for the file formats and the display pipelines and everything to display an acceptable version of that without it looking like it has the wrong gamma set?
Marco:
It's super dark or super gray.
Marco:
Is there...
Marco:
Is there the infrastructure in place to do that?
Marco:
But then also, from a practical standpoint, the way HDR video is displayed on iPhones and the Pro Display XDR is, as you said, John, like, these displays can peak for a second or two or for part of the screen at this higher brightness than usual, but it can't sustain that forever.
Marco:
Or, you know, in the case of an iPhone, like, if it did sustain that forever, you might have battery problems because, like...
John:
it's it's area it's not time period like so the way it's rated uh is you know like on oled tvs they can do their maximum brightness on a 10 window they call it where 10 of the screen is white and that's where they can reach the maximum brightness and as you go up from more than 10 of the screen being white the maximum brightness goes down down down until like on an oled screen uh how many nits does it put out when it's 100 when it's just entirely white from edge to edge versus how many nits does the white square put out when it's a 10 and there's a big range there
John:
But still, at 100%, it's higher than the SDR, the usual SDR television level of nits that people would comfortably watch something at.
John:
So the XDR is similar in that it can only do 1,600 nits on a limited range, which is strange because it's not an OLED.
John:
But I think the 100% coverage is still like 1,200 nits, or maybe it's only 800.
John:
either way it's brighter than you ever want to look at trust me you do not want to crank up like there's a reason they put it in 500 nits um and that's 500 nits maximum by the way so that's 500 nits if you have the brightness turned up all the way like on your keyboard if you hit the brightness thing that's 500 nits so i'm not even looking at 500 nits now because i do not have my brightness on max because you know it's nighttime i blow my eyeballs out right so you don't have to worry about uh
John:
You know, it won't be bright enough for you, except maybe when you're watching like a movie or television or whatever that actually tries to put elements on screen that are that bright.
John:
But at a certain point, like, you know, movies of the sun are one thing, but there's a reason we don't go outside and stare into the sun because you don't want it to be literally as bright as the sun.
John:
We'll all go blind.
John:
Right.
John:
So we do want it to be a more dramatic experience, but we don't want to actually damage our eyeballs.
John:
So there is a balance there.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And I can imagine there's all sorts of complexities with applying this to photos where you have to consider things like, what if someone sets one of these photos as their wallpaper?
Marco:
Does it have to always show that brightness?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Oh, interesting.
Marco:
You know, what if they put it in a widget?
Marco:
You know, what if they display a photo like this and they just leave their screen on and they leave their phone on the desk, full brightness, and they leave the screen on for a while?
Marco:
Like, what happens?
Marco:
Does it dim after a while?
Marco:
Like, there's all these, like, UI and practical considerations so that anywhere that you're not seeing HDR applied yet, it might just be because Apple still wants to figure that stuff out or they have to wait for, like, the HEAF standards body to get the next encoding standard out to specify...
Marco:
dynamic range properties in photo formats or something like that.
Marco:
There could be lots of other reasons besides straight up hardware ability on why you might see HDR in videos before you see it in photos or in different ways or in limited ways.
John:
I talked about this when I first got my XDR way back when, about going to the screensaver and system preferences and seeing one of the screensavers that plays video and making it play HDR video.
John:
And what you would see is the little preview of the screensaver in that tiny little window.
John:
And that tiny little window was HDR.
John:
There's a whole article that Apple put up recently about they have some...
John:
acronym for this they call it edr or whatever but basically the ability to have a screen that is essentially a regular quote-unquote sdr mac monitor with maximum of 500 nits but then in any region any individual region of the screen they can say but in this region we're going to show the full hdr range right and that's their software stack that's allowing them to do this obviously the hardware can do it you know because you can make anything any brightness you want but they're
John:
the display driver software mac os software stack is able to handle this situation and it looks freaky because your entire screen looks normal but then there's this little tiny window that looks almost like surreal where like everything is just brighter in that little tiny window as it shows like an italian countryside like wow it's like a portal through my my plain computer monitor into the real world where everything is bright and sparkly and it's it's kind of cool um i've
John:
I don't actually know the answer to this.
John:
Again, maybe people will write and tell us, but I suspect that my iPhone 12 Pro is able to take pictures with a higher dynamic range than the UI is displayed in.
John:
Because when I go through my photos, if you look at them in the UI, it's like whatever sort of 500-nit equivalent, whatever the iPhone UI is shown in.
John:
Again, subject to your brightness settings, yada, yada.
John:
But in the UI, in a scrolling table view, I see my photos.
John:
But when I tap on one and it shows the photo exclusively on a black background...
John:
I do think it suddenly becomes brighter.
John:
And yes, I know it's on a black background, so of course it looks brighter to you, but I think there's a little flash where it goes from SDR to HDR.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
I might just be imagining it.
John:
It's really hard to tell with my eyeballs.
John:
The other thing is that I think the maximum brightness of the iPhone 12 screen is not that high.
John:
It's not 1600 nits, I'll tell you that.
John:
OLEDs in general have lower...
John:
uh, peak brightness than, uh, uh, LED backed LCDs, right?
John:
So the phone is OLED.
John:
There's no way it's getting to 1600 nits.
John:
I don't think, unless it's way easier to make them brighter and small things.
John:
And just for battery life reasons.
John:
Um, but my monitor has LED backlights and that can get much brighter.
John:
So, uh,
John:
So maybe the HDR is not that much brighter than the SDR on the phone, but I think the camera actually is taking pictures.
John:
And because it's Apple end to end, when I bring them into photos on my Mac, I think it's the same deal where when I'm looking at them in the UI of photos, they look like normal photos.
John:
Like they don't look blown out.
John:
They don't look weird.
John:
But then when I put them full screen on a black background, maybe it goes into HDR.
John:
So yeah.
John:
more work needs to be done here but sorry for this long answer chris but the the the reason i put this in there is because i do know the answer to your other question which is why the heck what haven't we had hdr photos for a year and that is a different thing that happened before we any of us had hdr screens that was basically taking multiple exposures and combining them in you know with computational photography to make a single picture where you get this you know the bright thing exposed and also the dark thing exposed so you can see all of it which
John:
Yeah.
John:
What they're trying to do is say, get the constricted pupil view of the sky and the dilated pupil view of the face and put them in one picture.
John:
And that never really happened in real life.
John:
But that's what we want to see in a picture so we can, you know, get the benefit of it.
John:
And that happened long before we had HDR video or anything.
John:
And it was called the same thing because it's the dynamic range they're able to show.
John:
The sky was really bright and the face was really dark, but we got a photo out of it where you can see everything.
Marco:
Real-time follow-up, this is totally doing HDR on photos.
Marco:
So I got my 12-minute here, and I'm looking through my photos, just some recent sunset photos.
Marco:
And when you have the sun in a picture, like a sunset, the difference is very obvious.
Marco:
So when you're swiping through the photos in the Photos app, before it's been on screen for a moment, it's SDR.
Marco:
And then when you've opened one up to full screen...
Marco:
if you pause for a moment, it like brightens, it fades up and it's pretty clearly doing a transition from an SDR version to an HDR version.
Marco:
And like, it looks like the entire tone map of the picture changes and it is dramatic.
Marco:
So it is, it looks way better when it loads in and it's definitely significantly brighter than the turning screen.
Marco:
And the whole screen does not change brightness.
Marco:
Like if you look at the other UI elements on screen, they don't change brightness, just the photo does.
Marco:
So this is definitely doing HDR with photos on not even the 12 Pro on the 12 Mini.
Marco:
So it looks pretty cool.
John:
The tricky part is you do need to have a picture where there was something in the picture that was brighter than can be represented.
John:
Because I was just looking at some indoor pictures and they don't do that or they do that to a lesser degree because generally indoor is more dim, right?
John:
So like the way you want it to work is, yeah, the sun and sparkles are super bright.
John:
But if you just take a picture of like...
John:
you know i'm just taking a picture we've been taking pictures to put in for our christmas cookies and our in paprika which are used to manage our recipes so if i put a bunch of christmas cookies on a plate and take a picture of them under indoor lighting nothing in that really just oh wow it's so bright because guess what the cookies weren't it's sparkling like the sun they were just in indoor light so it helps if you get an outdoor picture um in the mac version of photos on catalina anyway
John:
i'm not seeing any kind of pop in full screen but also i see that there's still a ui when i try to go into full screen showing me the little explore bar on the bottom so i'll investigate a little further like i'm glad that you see them pop just like i do i couldn't tell if it was an optical illusion based on the black background but it makes sense
Marco:
no it's totally a thing and and so it's not only is it very very visible when you have like a sunset or something where you have the sun in the picture it's also very visible when you have your example from earlier if there's a window in the picture and it's an indoor picture like i just had two where like the window brightens up as as it loads as i'm taking you know a picture of like my home pod and there's the window in the corner goes whoop like it's just super bright yeah
Casey:
That's interesting.
Casey:
I just found a photo in my camera roll that does that.
Casey:
I was standing in the garage and the girls were on the edge of the garage.
Casey:
And so behind them is the outdoors, but I'm standing kind of sort of on the indoors.
Casey:
And yeah, when you tap on it,
Casey:
you see it kind of fill in and get even brighter.
Casey:
And you're right.
Casey:
I always thought the rest of the screen was getting dimmer, but it's very clear in this particular example.
Casey:
And I'm not going to put it in the show notes because for several reasons, including I don't know if it would work.
Casey:
But nevertheless, as I tap in, you see that the picture shows up in like a standard range, like you were saying, Marco, and then all of a sudden it fills in and gets considerably brighter with the high dynamic range kind of turning on after just a moment.
John:
Yeah, I think actually I think it shows that you don't even have to go to a black background.
John:
If in the grid of photos, I'm looking at like a highlight on my son's back from shining in from the window.
John:
And it looks dimmer there than when I just tap on it once.
John:
And now it's HDR, but the background is still white.
John:
And I tap again and the background turns black and I don't see a change.
John:
And so I think it's just the zoomed in view that is HDR.
Casey:
Actually, that was a shoot.
Casey:
That was a video I was looking at, not a photo.
Casey:
My bad.
John:
We will continue to experiment, but I'm pretty sure that the phone, it's the same sensor taking the video and the photos, and I'm pretty sure it's trying to do as much HDR as it can.
John:
Subject to two things I said before, which is...
John:
Number one, how bright of a brightness is encoded in the source material?
John:
You can choose that as the director of a movie or as the person who writes the camera app or whatever to say, look, I'm never going to put in a picture that demands a higher brightness than X number of nits.
John:
Number two, can the device you're showing it on actually show that many nits, right?
John:
So those are the two things that combine to figure out what the picture is actually going to look like when you look at it.
John:
So for all I know, this phone could be encoding something that's 3000 nits, but I just have no devices that can show that.
Casey:
Wes Chamnus writes, is there a way to prevent an application from stealing focus within macOS?
Casey:
For example, when I launch an application to do tasks, but I return to the one I was working from, the newly opened application steals the focus and averts my keyboard input.
Casey:
A couple of examples of this that I've experienced, the freaking surprise video in Skype for bootleg listeners.
Casey:
It is not uncommon for me to be in the midst of typing when Marco initiates the call and me hitting the space bar hits the default button in Skype, which is stolen focus, which is start the call with video on.
Casey:
And it drives me bananas.
Casey:
And I don't know if this is related, but I am a devout spaces user.
Casey:
So I have multiple virtual desktops pretty much anytime I'm using any of my computers.
Casey:
And
Casey:
oftentimes this has persisted across several machines across several os's i will swipe you know do the three finger lateral swipe to go to a different window and make it active and then all of a sudden after i'm done the entire screen will bounce back to the to the screen the the display will bounce back to the screen that i was on previously going back to the app i just left for reasons i've never understood so yeah how do you fix this guys because i wish i knew
John:
So in general, you can't.
John:
This has been a problem forever.
John:
I mean, it kind of makes sense in that, as you can imagine, in a GUI operating system, there are calls that you can make in the various GUI frameworks to bring Windows to the front.
John:
This is a really important part of...
John:
the operating system you couldn't write applications if they couldn't do this right because hey what if you're going to bring up someone hits command s in your app and you have to bring up a save dialogue you want that save dialogue box to be in front and have the input therefore there must be apis to make a window bring to the front and give it the input once those apis exist apps can call them and when apps call them
John:
they do that and so if an app says hey me bring me to the front and give me the input that's what happens and yes it's annoying when you're doing something else and some other app is like no wait me me me bring my window to the front give me input uh and you're like well shouldn't they not be able to do that doesn't it know that they're not the front most app but like there sometimes there's legit reasons for them so the apis do exist and
John:
Since they exist, apps will call them.
John:
There is no magic system-level way to make that happen.
John:
Apple could build one with some weird heuristic and set of rules and configurable thing.
John:
But in general, what we're relying on is application developers to not make their apps do things that are annoying.
John:
It's like if you download an application and it just emitted a loud honk every five minutes, you're like, is there some way to prevent apps from emitting a sound every five minutes?
John:
It's like, yeah, well...
John:
Apps can make sounds.
John:
And in general, you shouldn't make your app just honk every five minutes.
John:
But if you have an app that does that, your only recourse is to complain to the developer or stop using the app.
John:
And so this thing in general is one of those annoying things that apps shouldn't do.
John:
And the only way it can really be the fault of the OS is if the app tried to do something like three seconds ago and you switch apps.
John:
And because something is so slow, the system call finally gets through the framework and the OS finally services it and says, oh, I'm bringing that to the front for you.
John:
But in between that time when it initiate that and now you're in a different app, right?
John:
It's not easy to prevent entirely.
John:
It's not always the fault of the app developer, but in general, it's an antisocial thing for apps to do.
John:
There are many antisocial things for apps to do.
John:
This is not a problem that can be solved by any individual developer, and it's really not a problem that can be solved by Apple.
John:
So the solution is if an app keeps doing that, complain to the developer or stop using it.
Casey:
Yay.
Casey:
Finally, Anonymous writes, what's the best way to back up my photo library?
Casey:
I use Apple Photos.
Casey:
I pay for increased storage so it backs up to iCloud.
Casey:
I'd like to have a physical backup as well, but my photo library is larger than the storage space I have in my MacBook Pro.
Casey:
What's the best way to get the library onto an external drive?
Casey:
I'm guessing I can't use Time Machine in this situation.
Casey:
I don't even want to talk about this.
Casey:
I feel triggered because my situation is so awful.
Casey:
So one of you, please handle this.
Marco:
I got it.
Marco:
I got it.
Marco:
don't worry it'll be okay casey um the answer here is you know if you don't have a machine that can fit your entire photo library on it uh then obviously you can't back it up because you don't have a copy of it now there are lots of ways to get a copy of it that can fit on it i mean one way is you can use an external drive and have an and you can relocate the system photo library to be on that external drive now granted
Marco:
This is a laptop that this person was talking about, so that's kind of inconvenient if you ever go anywhere.
Marco:
So that's not a great solution.
Marco:
You can do the solution, which I've seen and done, where you can duct tape a drive to the screen lid that's just always plugged in.
Marco:
But that's also not a great solution.
Marco:
But it does work.
Marco:
You lose a port, but it does work.
Marco:
But another way to do this, if you at all can get yourself another Mac that can always be on and that can have a giant external hard drive plugged into it.
Marco:
Old Mac minis are great for this.
Marco:
I know this is an expense.
Marco:
And the good thing is it doesn't need to do much of anything.
Marco:
It only needs to be able to run macOS,
Marco:
run icloud photo library and in the photos app be logged in like to your icloud account and then run backblaze or time machine whatever however you want to back it up be able to run that that's a great solution one that i have used myself many times where like and one that i'm actually using right now because right now i currently don't have a working desktop that has enough space to fit my photo library and so i have the you know limited optimized storage version on my laptop and
Marco:
And then over there in a closet is an ancient Mac mini running, I think, high Sierra or maybe even low Sierra.
Marco:
I forget.
Marco:
It's not recent at all.
Marco:
But that's running iCloud Photos and it's backing it up to Backblaze.
Marco:
And it downloads the entire thing onto a giant external hard drive.
Marco:
And it's wonderful.
Marco:
That is the solution I would recommend if you don't want to like...
Marco:
you know, junk up your laptop with external drives or deal with anything complicated like that.
Marco:
If you can at all find or if you already have an old Mac that functions that can have a big drive plugged into it, put the photo library on that and back that up.
John:
Yeah, and if you don't have a second Mac and you just want to put it onto an external drive, you can do some shenanigans by making another user account and making the system photo library for that account be logged into your Apple ID but be on an external drive and all sorts of stuff like that.
John:
There are ways to kind of get around this, but the bottom line is you need to have –
John:
You need to have enough hard drive space somewhere where you can store it.
John:
And if that place is only a disembodied external drive, it's not going to do you any good unless you're constantly connecting that drive to your one and only Mac, right?
John:
Otherwise, it's not getting any photos onto it, right?
John:
And if you're going to constantly be connecting to your Mac, why not just make that your photo library, right?
John:
So if you don't want to deal with the multiple accounts, which honestly, I'm not even sure if it will get angry up at you if you do that, but in theory, it should work.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Having a second Mac sounds like, where is that big expense?
John:
But like, you could just wait until you get a new Mac and then your current Mac becomes that second Mac, right?
John:
And the good thing is you don't even, as far as I know, you don't even need to run photos on it.
John:
You just need to have, like Marco said, be logged in.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Actually, do you even need to be logged in?
John:
You have to set up the account with your Apple ID.
John:
But the advantage of using iCloud photo library is that Apple makes it basically that background daemon as part of the OS.
John:
And they will just run in the background and constantly be pulling down photos from iCloud if you tell it to get the originals.
John:
And then the contents of that Mac become backupable.
John:
by any service that can read the file system, right?
John:
So you don't have to do anything.
John:
Like I do this in my house, like my wife's computer used to be the computer that had the family photo library on it.
John:
Now I do it all on my big fancy Mac Pro, but I didn't turn it off on hers.
John:
Hers is still set to keep originals.
John:
So even though I'm doing everything on my Mac,
John:
I know that anything that goes into that library eventually appears on her computer.
John:
She doesn't have to do anything.
John:
She doesn't have to launch photos periodically.
John:
She just exists having a Mac with her because it's on her Apple ID.
John:
And anytime I go over to that computer, and by the way, they're on an external drive on her computer.
John:
It's an iMac, but still, the photos are on an external drive.
John:
Anytime I go over to that Mac and I launch photos, the photos are already there.
John:
Like I don't have to wait for the past, you know, three weeks of photos to download or whatever they already did in the background.
John:
And she hasn't been running photos.
John:
So I think it just pulls them down by itself.
John:
And of course that computer is being backed up.
John:
And when that computer gets backed up, it backs up the external hard drive and it's all part of the whole big backup vortex thing.
John:
Right.
John:
So, you know, it's like in, in some ways it sounds, uh, you know, onerous to have to have a second Mac just to be, to babysit that external hard drive.
John:
Um,
John:
But it actually is a pretty good solution.
John:
Like it's the type of like extra redundancy that you get for free, especially if you have desktops.
John:
If it has the hard drive space, just have an account signed into the Apple ID with iCloud photo library turned on, set to download the originals.
John:
And now you have a little bit of extra peace of mind, assuming you're also backing up that computer.
John:
And even if you're not backing it up, if you had three computers in the house and two of them were doing that and neither one of them was backed up, you still have two extra copies of all your photos on those two computers if they're stationary and they have enough hard drive space and they're just sitting there downloading the originals all day.
Marco:
Yeah, because the point is like once you have the the iCloud photo library like fully on a Mac, it's just a bunch of files in a bundle.
Marco:
And so even though it's not organized in the best way, sorry, Casey, it is still like you still have your pictures there as randomly named garbage files like the data is still there.
Marco:
And if you ever needed to reconstruct a nicer folder structure from them, you could pull data out of the XF data from the files and you could actually have a script that would make all that stuff.
Marco:
There are options for that if you ever needed them.
Marco:
But yes, the point is step one is somehow get a computer set up so that it can fit the entire iCloud photo library on one of its disks somehow and then go from there.
John:
And in case people don't know, this is since iPhoto and the current version of iPhoto, when you launch the app, if you hold down the option key, it will give you a dialog that says, what photo library do you want me to look at?
John:
I think you can also just double click the photo libraries in the finder.
John:
But anyway, option during launch on photos is how you get it to use different libraries.
John:
So if you did move your library to an external drive and you launched it and it's like, hey,
John:
I don't know where your photo library is.
John:
Like, you can pick the new one or whatever, but, like, option is how you can switch between them.
John:
And I think that screen also lets you pick the quote-unquote system library, and that's the only one you can use with iCloud Photos on that account.
John:
Correct.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So, don't forget about that one.
John:
And it's tricky with this whole, like, hold down the option key.
John:
Like...
John:
You want to hold down the option key usually between the time that you've launched the app and the time that the app has finished launching.
John:
Sometime in there.
John:
Sometimes if you hold down the modifier before you open it and you end up doing an option double click or an option click, that can end up doing weird things.
John:
Not really for option, but for other modifiers like command, command shift, command option.
John:
you can accidentally do weird stuff like if you command option click on an app in the dock it's not going to do what you think right i was just trying to launch the apple holding down command and option and it opened the enclosing folder it's like i know just so launch the app and then quickly hit down option it's a little race you can play with yourself
Marco:
Or just move the photo library and then launch the app and it will freak out and ask you where the heck it went.
Marco:
So you can also just do that.
Marco:
And that's the same trick, by the way, that whenever I am setting up a laptop and I want it to only use a certain amount of gigs for the photo library, I create what used to be a sparse bundle.
Marco:
Now I'm using an APFS shared volume with a size quota.
Marco:
And so you can say, all right, 50 gigs.
Marco:
I'll let you use 50 gigs.
Marco:
So I make a volume called Photos.
Marco:
It's an APFS shared volume, so it shares the space of my main disk.
Marco:
I cap it at 50 gigs, and then I move the system photo library to be on that virtual disk.
Marco:
And then it will never exceed 50 gigs.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
It's a wonderful little hack.
Marco:
Anyway, thank you to our sponsors this week, Linode, ExpressVPN, and Flatfile.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly at atbit.fm slash join if you want to join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
Marco:
So long.
Casey:
So what is going on with your monitors, man?
Marco:
Well, I've made some decisions.
Marco:
Not the ones that you want yet, but I basically decided.
Marco:
So here's what's going on.
Marco:
I know that I'm a desktop person at heart.
Marco:
I love desktops.
Marco:
I always have.
Marco:
I always will.
Marco:
Right now, though, I'm at a point in my life where I'm doing a lot of bouncing back and forth between two places.
Marco:
i am really appreciating this new laptop that i have it's very very good like it's it probably qualifies to replace the 2015 macbook pro as the official best laptop ever made i i only haven't named that yet because it's it's still it's still young i i gotta give it time
John:
Because they haven't come out with the 15-inch M1 or 16-inch M1.
John:
Once they do that, maybe it'll pull them the lead.
Marco:
I'm not sure.
Marco:
Honestly, I love the 13-inch for so many reasons that are likely, and the Air specifically, that are likely to stay 13-inch Air only.
Marco:
So number one, being fanless.
Marco:
I love that.
Marco:
And I know...
Marco:
No one's hearing the fan much on the 13 or the Mac Mini.
Marco:
I know that.
Marco:
But the fact that I will never hear the fan, period, no matter how old it gets, that's very nice.
Marco:
I also, as I mentioned earlier, really like not having a touch bar.
Marco:
I really, really like it.
Marco:
I love that I can just reach out and hit one button.
Marco:
So often I am making minor adjustments to volume or brightness or things, and being able to just reach out and tap a button is so much nicer.
Marco:
Then having to hit that little touch target on the touch bar for a first.
Marco:
Oh, sorry.
Marco:
Touch bar fell asleep.
Marco:
So I'm watching YouTube video.
Marco:
Got to tap it first to wake it up because I don't even know where to tap exactly until it's on.
Marco:
And then I can at best do one more tap if I do the tap and hold thing, you know, to drag it around.
Marco:
the touch bar but so i love not having that i love the fanless nature of it what always kept me away from the the previous air like they fixed the keyboard and now it's super fast and so because it like they they fixed so much about it and they brought elements of it up to a level that is fine for me
Marco:
Right now, this is my primary computer, and the only things that I really miss about my iMac Pro are the screen size, which I can fix somehow, whether it's the 5K or the XDR or whatever.
Marco:
The ports, which I can maybe, hopefully, fix with one of these new Thunderbolt docks.
Marco:
We'll see how that goes.
Marco:
And the fact that it's always on and always in the same spot with all the windows in the same spot with the same size windows, that is annoying when I'm going between plugged-in mode and unplugged mode.
Marco:
It is annoying that all my windows have to change sizes and they move around to different places.
Marco:
And then when I get back to the big screen, they're all too small and in the bottom corner for some reason.
Marco:
And yes, I know there are utility apps that can help me with that, which I might look into, but...
Marco:
So, you know, there are parts of it that I don't like just being a laptop hybrid setup, but a lot of the things about what has irritated me about previous laptop setups before is either greatly reduced or gone with this new setup.
Marco:
Just because the hardware has gotten so much better now.
Marco:
And this hardware is really, so far, satisfying my needs.
Marco:
I have not hit anything where I'm like, man, this is terribly slow.
Marco:
I need the bigger one.
Marco:
And if the bigger ones come out and they have roughly the same cores, but just more of the high-performance ones, which would basically mean very similar overall performance and very similar single-threaded performance, but just higher multi-threaded performance...
Marco:
I'm actually not entirely sure how much I would go for that based on the value I get out of this being small, light, and fanless.
Marco:
I really like that.
Marco:
And having no touch bar.
Marco:
Very much like that.
Marco:
I really don't see myself going for a bigger laptop in the near future.
Marco:
I'm just loving this too much.
Marco:
So the only thing is whether I get a desktop or not.
Marco:
And that's still up in the air.
Marco:
For the desktop side of things, I am very much into, at least for the time being, when I have this kind of mobile need, I am really enjoying having it just be a laptop.
Marco:
And the fact that we left the beach for a couple of weeks and I'm able to just take my computer home
Marco:
not in a giant carrying case with wheels and have to, you know, unplug a whole bunch of cables and, you know, like unplug one cable and take this little tiny laptop in my backpack.
Marco:
And I just have my computer and I have all of my stuff on it.
Marco:
And like, it's, it's all set up.
Marco:
So like there is a lot of benefit to this lifestyle.
Marco:
And so with so many of the negative parts of laptop universalism like this, with so many of the negative parts of them reduced or eliminated with this, with modern hardware, uh,
Marco:
I think I might try it for a while.
Marco:
There is significant value here to me.
Marco:
And so if that is the case, I think what I'm going to want for a while at least, again, probably not forever, but what I'm going to want for a little while is a monitor at the beach, a monitor here, and a laptop I bring between them.
Marco:
maybe a mac mini i bring between them i don't know that that could also work um but the current mac mini it's basically the same computer as this plus a fan but it has all the same limits it's still 16 gig or two terabyte limit so that doesn't really buy me much it does add the ports you know it does fix the port situation slightly um but ultimately i'm i'm thinking better off just sticking with this macbook air just using this for a while and and having a monitor keyboard mouse set up
Marco:
wherever I need to be.
Marco:
That's a lot easier to replicate that than it is to haul an iMac back and forth.
Casey:
I wonder, to a degree, if a Mac Mini would work in this scenario.
Casey:
It totally would.
Marco:
But why?
Marco:
It's not better enough than the Air.
Casey:
Yeah, that's the problem.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
That's the problem I'm struggling with is other than fixing your ports...
Casey:
I'm not sure whether it really buys you in the grand scheme of things.
Casey:
And it takes away being able to use it on the boat or in the car or whatever, you know, anywhere that's not a monitor.
Marco:
Well, I don't need that.
Marco:
On the boat, I listen to podcasts, I drive the car.
Marco:
But the fact is, like, if the Mac Mini could go to, you know, 32 gigs of RAM and four terabytes of disk, we'd have a different story on our hands.
Marco:
But it can't.
Marco:
And so that doesn't really buy me anything.
Marco:
Like, that doesn't really lift...
Marco:
enough limitations off of me and frankly i'm not feeling a lot of limitations like really screen size and and and the port and mon and the port situation that's that's it that's that's the limitations i'm feeling and those are actually addressable like as much as i complain about the lg it's working for me for the last week i did i did everything i need to do it's fine the ports on it i just don't use the ports on it and the screen wobbles like crazy and i hate every minute of looking at it but other than that it's fine
Marco:
And it's not that expensive relative to all this other hardware.
Marco:
It isn't that much money.
Marco:
If I wanted to get a second one of those and have the two locations just be LG 5Ks and keyboard and mouse, and that's it.
Marco:
I could totally do that and have an amazing mobile situation.
John:
That's a good excuse for you to try the new revision of the 5K.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
I have thought about that, honestly.
Marco:
This is the direction I'm probably going to go.
Marco:
Or I could get an XDR for the primary place that's used more often and put the 5K in the less used place.
Marco:
Because then I wouldn't need to buy a new 5K.
John:
That's a big step up in price.
Marco:
But same number of fans, apparently.
John:
Well, I know.
John:
We only saw one fan in the LG.
John:
There's definitely more than one in the next year.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
Really?
John:
Don't tell me that.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
Yes, multiple fans.
John:
They're all silent, just like apparently the one in the LG that you didn't know was there.
John:
You need to put your hand behind the monitor.
John:
See if you can feel air coming out.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Once I get back there, I definitely am going to do this.
John:
Maybe it's got a fan, but it's entirely blocked by the stand.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
John:
You're just futilely blowing air into the back of a piece of plastic.
Casey:
Or it's already full of sand.
John:
All right.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Check for spider eggs.