The Benevolence of the Powerful
So we are recording at an unusual time for the second consecutive week.
What's going on here?
It's my fault, because I got COVID.
That is super unfortunate.
Yeah, yeah.
I don't want to make a big hairy deal out of it, because fortunately, I've been lucky enough that I'm recovering well, and no one else in my family got actual noticeable symptoms, really.
So that's what's going on, but I'm almost done with it.
And I basically just, you know, normally, I didn't know...
Whether to even mention this publicly or not, it's kind of embarrassing.
Certainly to be a liberal person who thinks they're responsible and to get COVID, there's some degree of shame in it and embarrassment in it.
But...
I decided to tell everyone anyway, just in this very quick thing before we get started on all the tech BS that we normally talk about, because I thought it was a lot safer than it was to be in the place that I was, you know, occasionally going to a restaurant and stuff.
We live in a small town where there were previously zero known cases total.
And so...
I was going into everyday life with a risk profile as if it was very safe.
And fortunately, it seems like almost no one in the town got it.
As I had to make all those phone calls to everybody, which is not a fun thing to do, saying, hey, I got COVID and I saw you sometime last week, so you might want to get tested.
I was under the continued assumption in my mind that I was still at the same risk level as I was in the summertime.
And the reason I'm saying this publicly on the show is that I want all of you out there to not make the same mistake I did and assume that you're currently at the same risk level that you were at in the summertime.
I haven't been paying enough attention to what's been going on recently.
It is everywhere right now.
Anything you were doing to keep yourself safe in April, you should be doing now.
Things should be way more shut down than they are based on number of cases, exposure everywhere in huge parts of the – at least the US.
I haven't been paying attention to much of the rest of the world yet.
Be careful.
Be more careful than you have been all summer because –
What's out there right now is way riskier and in way higher numbers than you might have been assuming these last few months.
Please be careful.
We're lucky.
I'm almost done with it.
It seems like no one else got it from us, thank God.
if any of these things went a little bit differently, it could have been a lot worse.
And so please learn from my lack of accurate risk assessment and, uh, really be very careful.
I, I, you know, we're heading into Thanksgiving.
My family has canceled our plans for obvious reasons, but,
a lot of people are doing the same thing.
I would suggest considering that because again, we're, we're lucky that our symptoms were mild and that we didn't seem to infect anyone else along the way, but that could have been very different.
So yeah, please, everyone, please be careful out there.
I just want to add that I don't think you have anything to be ashamed of.
I think that despite all the measures that we've all taken to try to do what we think is right, I would guess that every single person probably in the entire United States, maybe even in the world,
has been in scenarios where the only reason they didn't get infected is because nobody around them was infected.
Like it is very difficult to sort of never put yourself in a situation where you might get infected.
All of us are relying on basically luck to say, well, that one time when I hung out in too close quarters for too long while walking the dog with somebody, the only reason I didn't get it is because my neighbor Jill didn't have COVID, right?
Or the only reason I didn't give it to Jill at that point is that I didn't have COVID.
Nobody is 100% safe 100% of the time.
So we're all trying to do the best we can.
And the fact that you got unlucky, unless you're doing something egregious like going to bars every night, which you weren't, I think you shouldn't feel ashamed of anything.
It's bad luck.
We're glad you pulled through, right?
And I think all of us, if you think, oh, well, that happened to Marco, but he wasn't careful.
Nobody is careful enough to be sure that they're not going to get it unless they're just living like a hermit and literally never leaving.
And then even then, who knows?
So if you think you don't have to worry about it because you're not going to be a dummy like Marco, Marco wasn't a dummy and it can happen to you too.
Well, I was a little bit of a dummy in the sense that like we had been going to indoor restaurants sometimes because we thought our town was safe, you know?
And the reality is like I've, you know, through all my contact tracing that I've been doing, I've
I have found almost nobody else who had it at all.
I have my likely risk narrowed down to one interaction with one person who had it that lasted about a minute.
And that, as far as I can tell, is the most likely place I got it.
And it's that easy.
Like, that's all it could be.
But see, the thing is, a little light doesn't go in on your ear that tells you when you've been infected.
So you're just guessing.
And it's the best you can do.
Like, every time I go to the supermarket, I think, look, I've been going to the supermarket because that's where the food is.
And we do have to buy food.
But there are other people here and I'm trying to stay away from them and everybody's wearing a mask in my town.
So like we're doing all the best we can and we hope the ventilation is good and we're spaced out in line and we're doing all the things.
But the bottom line is I know just like for a fact, if I was unlucky and I paused too long to get the peanut butter and the person next to me breathed out real hard and they had COVID, like, you know, it's just luck of the draw.
You don't get it instantly from one little germ.
The longer you spend, the more confined places.
Like we kind of know what the risk profile is, but I don't think any of us have the kind of life where we can say,
I'm never going to go to the grocery store anymore.
Right.
I'm never going to go outdoors anymore.
Like, I'm certainly not living that way.
I'm doing the best I can within the constraints that I have.
But, you know, for example, my wife goes to the office because she can't work from home at her job.
And they've allowed people to go back in the office in limited amounts or whatever.
Every time she goes into the office, she's bringing home everybody who was in that office with her in socially distant masks scenario, so on and so forth.
So.
Unfortunately, there's no way to have zero risk, which is why I feel like you were doing more or less the best you can.
Maybe you slacked off a little bit on going to the restaurants, which was a thing you didn't necessarily need to do or whatever.
But I don't think you should feel shame about that because the shame is not a useful thing, right?
It's certainly not a great feeling.
I'll tell you that.
And that's the shame of having to admit to myself and others that I got this.
Knowing that I didn't have a 100% perfect safety record was...
something that I underestimated.
Like I underestimated how bad that would feel and how, how much of a fool I would feel like in restaurants.
Like, Oh God, I got it.
Like, I can't, I can't believe why did we have to go to a restaurant?
Like, I can't believe, even though, by the way, it seems like I didn't actually get it in the restaurant, but it's, it's, it's very strange.
I mean, and, and if you think like the system will save you in some way, like we'll work for you in some way, we'll tell you when people have it.
I can tell you, at least in New York, that's not happening.
Guess how many contact tracers have gotten in touch from the county health departments?
Zero.
Guess how much good the contact tracing app on my phone has done?
Zero.
In either direction.
I wasn't notified of any exposures and I have, as far as I can tell, no way to submit my exposure.
I'm lucky that I live in a small town and I know everybody.
And so I've just been calling everybody and messaging everybody.
And I contacted the mayor and the fire chief and everybody.
Oh my goodness.
Because it's a small town.
Everyone knows each other.
Everyone knows me.
I know everyone.
And so I was able to get in touch with...
probably almost everybody who I would have seen that week.
And the only reason I found any other case of it was that some of the people I contacted told me, oh yeah, we got it a couple days ago.
And I was like, thanks for letting me know.
And that's it.
And so like,
The system is overwhelmed in so many ways, and the system is not going to save you here.
So take matters into your own hands and be way more careful than you think you need to be.
And no place is safe.
Even if you, like me, made the stupid decision that your small, isolated town with almost nobody in it would be reasonably safe since you never heard of anybody there getting it,
Well, someone's got to be the first.
Please be very, very, very careful.
All right, let's start with some follow up.
I don't know if speaking of editing, this happened to get cut in the edit or if it just wasn't in the spot people expected.
But we had a lot of people reaching out asking, hey, you never said what watch you were wearing, Casey, when it took or excuse me, what watch band you were wearing when it took a dive off of the roof of Aaron's car and cracked itself on the pavement.
I did say it.
It is quite possible it either hit the cutting room floor or I think we might have gotten in like 17 different tangents as we are wont to do.
And so maybe it wasn't exactly what you expected.
In all fairness, I recorded and edited last week's show with 101 degree fever.
So...
It might not have been my best editing job ever.
Right, exactly.
So if you wanted the answer to that question, you could have listened to the bootleg and you can get access to that at ATP.fm.
But to directly answer the question, I was wearing, I always forget the name of it.
It is the original OG Sport Band, not the solo loop or the sport loop or whatever it is.
Yeah, Sport Band.
The Sport Band, so the one with the clasp.
I cannot recall a time, and I wear the sport band almost always when I have a watch on, and I have a watch on almost always.
I cannot recall a time that one has ever just fallen off of my wrist like that.
And I swear to you it did.
If either one of you two knuckleheads told me this story, I would have been like, yeah, right.
But I swear to you, that's what happened.
So yeah, it was the traditional sport band.
It's never happened to me before.
And I don't expect it would ever happen again, but it was just colossally bad luck.
So it is what it is.
Million and one shot, Doc.
Exactly.
I'm sure that's a reference.
I don't know what to.
All right.
YouTube DL, my beloved, my beloved, beloved command line app.
It's back, baby.
It's back on GitHub.
This is such great news.
This is extremely great news.
So let me get the kind of compulsory disclaimer out of the way.
I love GitHub, but GitHub has some troubling aspects to it.
Most specifically, they continue to work with the United States.
Really gross.
What is the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement ICE?
Wait, they do?
Yeah.
Yes.
In what, in what context?
I don't, they, I think they do on prem for ice or something like that.
I'm not a hundred percent sure, but my understanding, maybe I'm wrong.
That's gross.
But my understanding is they've been doing this for years.
They have been called out on it and they basically said, tough noogies don't care.
And that's super gross.
And I just want to start out by saying that right out, right out front.
Um, but leaving that aside, which I know is not easy for everyone, but for the purposes of this conversation, we're going to leave that aside.
Um,
I am super pleased and excited about their response.
So they put a blog post up a couple days ago as we record, and it is called Standing Up for Developers, colon, YouTube DL is back.
And in this, they talk about how
So it's a lot here, and it is worth reading.
It's not that long a post, but there's a lot there.
But basically, there was a DMCA takedown request that was – and jump in when you're ready, fellas – that was citing a specific clause that makes everything for GitHub a little more complicated.
And I don't know if it's really pertinent what that clause was, but suffice to say they had to go through a lot more process than normal.
And working, I guess, with the EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, they came to figure out, oh, actually, this is not really a reasonable request.
And so once there was a GitHub commit, which we'll put in the show notes, that fixed the thing that the RIAA was most upset about, once that commit took out the code that the RIAA was, or really the URLs that the RIAA was upset about,
GitHub re-established or reinstated the official YouTube DL repository as though it had never left, which is super, super excellent news.
I'm really, really excited about this.
And beyond that, GitHub has said, we're going to change the way we handle these sorts of things.
We're going to give more advance notice.
We're going to give developers a chance to react to the takedown requests and perhaps fix the actual problem.
And they've also said that they're creating, or if not creating, then they're funneling a million dollars into a developer defense fund in order to help developers who can't really fight off the entire recording artist industry of America.
What is it?
RIA?
Industry.
Yeah, Artists Association.
Association of America.
Although I think maybe a different A word might be better filled in there most of the time.
Yeah, for real.
But the point is, GitHub is putting a million bucks of their own money or Microsoft's money or somebody's money to start this developer defense fund.
Again, I'm not saying GitHub is a perfect entity by any means.
But I do think that this response, it's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good.
And I'm really pleased with it.
I'm glad to see YouTube DL is back.
Yeah, this shows a few big things.
I mean, number one, can you imagine the crap storm that must have fallen on GitHub as a result of taking it down to prompt this level of correction from them?
So number one lesson is, if you make tools that a lot of nerds use and your product's main business is appealing to nerds, you better make sure you defend those tools on your platform.
But also,
This is less about GitHub having a change of heart and much more about the EFF having made a really good counterpoint or counterargument about it.
Really, GitHub has gotten a lot of the credit for this, but the credit falls almost entirely on the EFF.
They basically, on behalf of YouTube DL...
filed with GitHub this incredible counterpoint piece, basically saying, this is invalid with this legal precedent for these legally sound arguments.
And if you don't support the EFF yet, please set up a monthly donation to the EFF.
I don't care how much you give them.
Give them something every month, though.
They are so important to our industry for so many reasons.
They have fought in court many major battles that have benefited us.
You're listening to this as a podcast.
They've helped us directly by fighting podcast-related patent lawsuits and other BS people try to throw at podcasting.
Chances are, our listeners out there, if you had to pick one podcast
good cause to donate to that was maximally relevant to your field as a computer nerd it's hard to find something better than the EFF to add to your list of who you give money to every month so please add them to your list um but that being so and I also you know some charities have like you know different kind of mixed mixed bag records on things you know they maybe you can feel good about some of the stuff they do not all the stuff they do
I can't think of a thing that EFF has been on the wrong side of.
Like, I just can't.
They are so above board and they, like, if you are a nerd, chances are they represent your beliefs and priorities very well.
So, give to the EFF.
Anyway.
So yeah, what happened here basically was the EFF stepped in and said, okay, the reason that the RAA picked that said that the DMCA applied here doesn't actually apply.
Here's a whole bunch of evidence to back that up.
GitHub, you know, undo this, please.
And I assume that was part, one of many parts of the crap storm that GitHub was receiving that made them really turn around on this.
And so it's a great victory, I think, for lots of things here.
But in particular, we owe a great deal of thanks to the EFF.
Yep, agreed.
John, no thoughts?
I'm surprised.
No, I mean, everything came out well.
I think the most important role of things like EFF, I also give money to them, is because in our legal system, if you're just like the developer of YouTube DL, it is...
disproportionately onerous for you to try to fight this that's why you need something like the eff who's staffed with you know they have money from people who give them money and they're staffed people who do this type of fighting all the time they have the experience they have the expertise they have the money they have the time right it's a countervailing force against the raa which is like all we do all day is find people and tell them to stop what they're doing because they're infringing on our rights or whatever it's
Sometimes they are infringing on their rights.
Sometimes they're not.
But when they're not, it's so hard to fight back in any way.
It's just too much, right?
And I think some credit goes to Microsoft slash GitHub for being open to the EFF's argument.
Because in the end, EFF can fight the battle, but Microsoft's on the line.
or GitHub's on the line for hosting the stuff, right?
So they also have to have sort of the corporate will and or the savvy to know that it's a really bad look if you're supposed to be like a haven for developers and then you just let them get screwed by the RAA, right?
So it's some combination of pragmatism, but also some amount of being willing to read the EF argument
and go with it even though there are plenty of gray areas and you can say whatever you want but until it's tested in a court who knows right so uh i give some credit all around i'm glad this came out the right way it seems so ridiculous though like when we were talking about it that like i kept thinking there was something i was missing about circumvention but like nope i wasn't missing anything it was just it was just literally like the dumbest possible thing you can imagine you've got urls to copyrighted videos and you read me in your test suite or whatever and you know
That's ridiculous.
So I'm glad in the most extreme ridiculous case, we have enough people fighting the good fight to turn this around.
Yep.
This is very good news.
I'm very excited about it.
I think it was John last week had asked for somebody to find for us where it was that we did predictions on chip names and Cameron Dierdorf came through with a link.
So John, who's the winner?
Yeah.
it's marco he nailed it he got the exact name m1 uh this when were we discussing this part of the reason we couldn't remember it 2018 october of october of 2018 was one of the many recurring conversations we have at r max and you know we said what do we think it was an ask atp actually uh you know what what do we think it will be uh will be called i think cameron's the one to send in the question
And my guess was they would just keep going with A's because, hey, A for everything, A for Apple, that works.
That was not the case.
Marco came in with the M's and he was so convincing that both me and Casey were like, yeah, now that you say it, that seems like the obvious thing to do.
Casey also mentioned R as a possibility.
But by the end, I think Marco had turned all of us around and said, yeah, M. And that was my recollection of it.
It was like, didn't we say M was like the most obvious one?
But I couldn't remember who had come up with that.
And it was Marco.
He also predicted letter suffixes.
uh you know m1 c m1 s m1 you know i think we i think at the time i said they haven't used z yet because they hadn't yet but yeah um so there you go um 2018 m1 predicted by marco well done sir all right tell me about our max and touch please
This was a big story because there's lots of interviews with Apple execs about the new M1 Macs, and we're going to talk about them later too.
And one of them, this is, where was it?
Was it in the Independent?
Yeah.
It was Craig Federighi and John Ternus.
And here's a quote from CFED.
I got to tell you, when we released Big Sur and these articles started coming out saying, oh my God, look, Apple's preparing for touch.
I was thinking, whoa, why?
We had designed and evolved the look for macOS in a way that we felt was comfortable and natural to us, not remotely considering something about touch.
So lots of people are citing that and saying, all those stories you said about touch max coming because Big Sur was like spacing things out.
Here's CFED saying, yeah, we did the spacing.
But it wasn't because of touch and that he was surprised when people kept thinking we were preparing touch that not remotely considering something about touch is the money quote here.
Now, here's the thing.
Lots of people have cited the idea that Apple says one thing and the next year they do something different or whatever.
I think this is different in nature because it's not saying that we think touch is a bad idea at all.
In fact, this doesn't say anything about the future because Apple's never going to comment on future products.
So Federighi is not saying...
We're never going to make touch Macs.
We think they're a terrible idea.
What he is saying is when we did all that stuff to Big Sur, we weren't doing it because of touch.
Now, we're probably not going to have time for this topic today, but probably in the next episode, we'll talk about this.
The obvious question that comes to my mind after reading that is like, okay.
If you weren't doing that for touch, then why the hell were you doing it?
Because it doesn't make any sense.
Otherwise, why are my icons so far apart in the menu bar?
Why is everything so huge?
Anyway, we'll talk about Big Sur later, but I'm willing to take Federighi at his word that...
The changes in Big Sur were not remotely considering something about touch.
Like I find it baffling because I can't think of any other reason to space things out like that.
But that's what he said.
And I see no reason for him to lie about that.
Because like I said, he didn't say there are no touch max coming.
He just say the Big Sur changes were not because of touch.
Time will tell.
I can also point to, like, so many of the issues I have with Big Sur are things like hover states.
There's way more, like, things that are hidden by default, and you have to hover somewhere to get them to be revealed, and different, you know, modes that expose themselves on hover and stuff.
And that's something that just doesn't work with touch.
There is no hover with a touchscreen.
So if you were designing something for touch...
you would never in a million years use hover states for anything.
Whereas hover states feel like Alan Dye's favorite tool to use to hide anything, to solve any design problem.
So they've gone way in the opposite direction, actually, with this.
So really, you know, this is not a UI design for touch.
This is just a bad design.
Yeah, more on that in a future episode, probably, because I think we do have more to say about it in specific details.
But yes, that's definitely true.
John, what's the next version of macOS?
We discussed this on the show a while ago, and I think there was another instance.
I can't remember what the hell we said.
So here's the question.
It used to be macOS 10 with the big Roman numeral X, you know, 10 thing, right?
And then eventually they dropped that, and it was just macOS.
And in Big Sur, they changed the version number from 10 to 11, right?
So it was macOS.
Big Sur was macOS 11.0, right?
Yeah.
And as we've discussed in past episodes, the question is then, does Apple stick with Mac OS 11 for a while?
Because they didn't really brand it as 11.
We know the version number is 11 because we could find it, although there was that point where 10.16 was in the mix as well.
And we've discussed that in past episodes as well.
But the question was, do they stick with 11 like they did with 10 and do 11.1 next year and then 11.2 the year after that and 11.3 the year after that?
Or do they switch to an iOS style numbering scheme where macOS 11.0 is this year and then next year is 12.0 and the year after that is 13.0 and so on and so forth?
We think we have the answer to that question because Apple just released macOS 11.1 beta.
which means they're probably going to spend the next year doing 11.2 11.3 11.4 and then next year they will do 12.0 so there you go problem solved yeah i'm glad they're doing it this way i think it'll it'll make things a lot simpler to conceptualize and discuss and market even though it is going to be a little bit weird that they're going to be offset from ios forever now like it's never going to match up skip numbers and catch up you know they could sync them up if they wanted
Yeah, I guess they could, but I don't think they will.
They did it with iPadOS.
iPadOS, the very first version of iPadOS, coincidentally exactly matched the version number of iOS.
How did we get to, where did we end up?
It was the buzz off from the reporter, is that right?
That's what it was.
OK, so last week or maybe in the weeks prior, we talked about a viral clip where a reporter had allegedly said a four letter letter expletive and then off because that's what the little video viral video had captioned it as.
But in reality, if you close your eyes and listen, he said buzz off.
And there is apparently a name for this.
It's the McGurk effect.
I should have known this because I learned about this from my brother when he learned about it in school, and I just couldn't pull the name from my head.
Now, the McGurk Effect technically, we'll put a link in the show notes to a YouTube video and the Wikipedia page explaining it.
Usually the demonstrations are you see a human being's mouth moving, and the mouth makes like an M or an F sound, and depending on what the mouth is doing, the audio sounds like an M or an F because our brains are trained to, you know,
look at the way people's mouths are moving to figure out what it is that they're saying.
It's not a thing that we consciously think about, but it happens, right?
But the more general case, and the one I was talking about with the brainstorm green needle thing, is you don't need to see anybody's mouth moving.
It is merely audio, and like in the buzz-off slash F-off clip,
Text is the sort of the nudge, right?
Because the text in the F off video said F off.
And because we know how to read and could see that text, it made us hear an F instead of a B. And someone sent a really, really good variant of this.
You two probably haven't looked at this, but I invite you now to both look at this.
It's a TikTok.
and it plays some audio, and it has, let me count them, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight different things.
Eight different things that they're saying, okay, this audio, which one of these eight different things do you hear?
Listen to this audio in this TikTok, and look at the first item, and you will hear the first item, and look in the second item, and you will hear the second, and look in the third, you will hear the third.
If you think it's a trick, look at them in random order.
Go in reverse, random, whichever one you were looking at, that's the audio you will hear because our brains are weird.
Please try it now.
oh this is not how i saw this going this is like a techno thing what is going on just look at listen to the audio what is happening pick any one of those things to look at and look at them in turn until you hear it guys my brain is broken i mean it doesn't work without the the visual aspects oh my god my brain is broken i don't like this at all it isn't isn't it upsetting this is deeply upsetting i don't this is the worst nightmare i've ever had in my life
Oh, my God.
That is deeply upsetting.
It's terrifying.
Oh, geez.
That's messed up.
Why did you do this to me?
It's like those optical illusions that even once you know the trick, you cannot see it the right way because our brain's just like, no, that one is in shadow and that one's in light and they're clearly not the same color.
And it's like, you can show yourself that they're the same color with, you know, like convince yourself with a little cutout and a piece of paper.
When you take it away, your brain's like, yeah, no, you're never going to see them as the same color.
And this is one of those things.
We know how to read and we've been doing it our whole life and you just look at one of those words and you will hear it.
As clear as day, you'll hear it.
That is deeply upsetting.
Listeners, if we haven't already, if Marco hasn't already piped it into the episode, don't click the link.
Don't do it because it is nightmare fuel.
Oh my God, that's so terrifying.
Wow, that's wild.
That is very cool, but extremely terrifying.
And now that we've embedded TikTok in our show, it is time for TikTok to die.
Now the boring old people have come in and taken it over, and now it's no longer relevant to young people.
Our government is bored with that, so don't worry about it.
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All right, I have a weird discovery that I'd like to walk you guys through.
And this came from me doing my middle of the month taking all of my photos off my phone tea ceremony.
And so if you recall, the process by which I do this is I use photos, although as it turns out, I could use image capture.
I use photos to create a new photos library on my Mac.
I have it download or import all of the photos on my iPhone.
I then export the unmodified originals.
Then I run my bespoke Swift command line app to send those to the Synology, renamed and filed as I see fit.
And then I will typically use image capture to go into my phone and just bulk delete the photos that I don't want, that I've just imported.
Right?
Makes sense so far.
So I went to do this, and I couldn't delete...
any of my photos and image capture and for the first time i when i don't recall ever having seen this before it next to casey liz's iphone it had a little cloud icon uh-huh well that's weird i wonder what that's about but i was on my laptop at the time which i just upgraded to big sir so big sir so i uh thought okay i'll just try again you know the next time i'm at my um at my imac pro
So the next day I sit down in my iMac pro and I go to do the same thing.
I go to, you know, hook up my iPhone to image capture and I look and it's got a cloud icon.
Huh?
Well, what's that about?
Do you guys happen to know what that's about?
Do you not have your phone set to download all originals to your phone?
Do you have it set to optimize storage?
Well, but that doesn't matter because I don't use iCloud Photo Library.
Do you use PhotoStream?
Yeah, do you have PhotoStream on or off?
I do, but it's always been on.
That's always been the case.
Is your phone still downloading stuff from the iCloud backup and it's not done yet?
No, I use the once called iTunes, now called Finder backup.
I mean, it's a cloud icon.
Clearly, it's trying to talk to you.
If only the people who made this computer had some way to communicate with you other than tiny icons.
Tell me about it.
So here's the thing.
So I thought, huh, let me look into this.
So I go into, where did I go?
I went to settings.
I went to photos.
Huh.
There's this section called iCloud Photos.
And it's on.
And I don't remember turning that on.
So, hey, everyone, I'm using iCloud Photo Library now.
And I didn't even realize it.
So I think what had happened was during launch day, I forget specifically what it was, but I remember in the haste of like, you know, switching phones and downloading everything and so on and so forth.
I got told that, oh, my iCloud is running out of storage.
And I'm starting to use iCloud these days, not for iCloud Photo Library.
Well, I am, as it turns out, but I didn't know it.
But I've been using iCloud for things like my gift-wrapped library, which is not that big, but I'm putting more and more stuff in notes.
I'm putting stuff like Solver documents in iCloud.
And so I'm using more iCloud than I had been.
And so in the haste of just getting through this, you know, day of transfers and so on and so forth, I said, okay, fine, just give me that $1 plan, whatever, fine.
And I guess maybe during that process, it decided to opt me into iCloud Photos.
Maybe I tapped something and I didn't realize it.
I'm not here to say that Apple did anything nefarious, but it was just funny to me that apparently, unbeknownst to me, I am now using iCloud Photo Library for all my images going forward.
So the next step, which I haven't done yet, is to actually embrace it and set up a proper photos library on my Mac and start sucking in all the stuff from the Synology and so on and so forth.
But given the amount of grief I've gotten about not using iCloud photo libraries, imagine my own surprise when I go to that settings screen and see, huh.
I'm using iCloud Photo Library.
Who knew?
I didn't.
Your accidental activation actually has a nice side effect because within your current workflow, the thing where you take your photos off your phone once a month, during that month, the photos, if without iCloud Photo Library, are just on your phone.
So if you drop your phone into a lake halfway through the month, you've lost 15 days worth of pictures that are on your phone.
But now those are in the cloud for you.
So there you go.
I also love that you felt so strongly against iCloud Photo Library that all it took for you to literally just change your mind about it and move to it was one setting having been changed.
I mean, he didn't do it intentionally.
You could literally just toggle it off with two clicks.
But that's not the real library, though.
That's the thing.
That's just the pictures he takes on his phone.
Right.
Yes.
Yes, that's true.
And baby steps.
It's baby steps.
It's like a picture of conviction here.
Like, I'm not going to use iCloud Photo Library, damn it.
Unless I accidentally turn it on and I'm unaware.
Yeah, I guess now I'm all in.
I don't consider this honest goodness buy-in until I do what I described a moment ago, which is I take all of the photos from the Synology, make a duplicate on my iMac, and
Yeah, and that's a big thing that you should really think about and plan out.
But in the meantime, what you've unintentionally done is improved your current system by shoring up one of the weaknesses.
That is true.
That is true.
So I thought that was quite funny.
Please not give me any more grief about it.
The point was to have a good laugh with me and then everyone be quiet, please.
Okay, moving on.
Yeah, that'll work.
I have some other new things in my life.
I ordered new Apple Watches for Aaron and I.
And I wanted mostly, since I know these watches are old now and nobody cares, I wanted mostly to talk about a couple of things.
First of all, have you guys ever done the courier service that I thought knew in the last like six to 12 months, but maybe it's older than I realized?
Are you familiar with this at all?
I sure wish my area had it now.
Yes, I bet you do.
And they don't.
They did.
I have used it for an Apple TV once.
But I can tell you right now that as of this past week, they do not offer the courier service in my area for either phones or laptops.
Well, I didn't try phone or laptop, but I did try the now one or two month old Apple Watch Series 6.
And I was going to buy Aaron one and me one.
And I was looking at the shipping options.
And depending on what band you get and what model you get, the shipping was anywhere between very quick and not for a month.
And so what I did was I was looking at the other different options and I realized, wait a second, it said, you know, same day delivery or something like that.
And I was doing this in the morning time.
So I thought, huh, let me see what that is.
And so sure enough, do you guys happen to know how much this is?
Because I do, but I was expecting it to be far more than it actually was.
Do you know how much this is, Marco?
I think when I did it for the Apple TV, it was something like eight bucks.
It was absurdly cheap for what it was.
It was $9.
So I spent darn near a thousand dollars on Apple watches.
You bet your ass I'm going to spend $9 to get that thing couriered over to me.
Um, so yeah, so I ordered, I don't remember exactly what time it was, but it was somewhere around eight or nine in the morning.
And, uh, the nearest available delivery window was like four in the
and i think it was four to six i think i have that right and sure enough at like 4 30 ish uh the courier i start getting you know like notifications in the apple store app and i start getting like text messages from apple saying hey you know the courier has been assigned the courier is picking up your thing the courier is on its way um actually in the apple store app they had like a live map you know much like many of these delivery services these days
to show exactly where the courier was which was super cool um interestingly a no touch option did not seem to be allowed they specifically said in several different places that somebody needed to be there to pick up the order um so this this you know very young gentleman came to the door he had his mask on i had my mask on because i knew he was just down the road you know a minute before because i was watching him cruise to my house like a stalker
and so anyway um he just handed me the bag he didn't ask for id or anything like that um and then went on his way and interestingly there were a couple interesting things about this first of all they gave me the standard like very very wide apple store bag you know not very deep very very wide because it's for these watch you know boxes that are that are huge um but i guess because strictly speaking it had been shipped they had two of those huge gigantic like
lithium ion battery be careful stickers on them you know what i'm talking about like you and 234 notifications whatever yeah i forget you know what i'm thinking of i forget exactly what it is but yeah those like big red and white ones um and then i looked at the sticker and sure enough apparently it was postmates that delivered it
Which was interesting to me because I had no idea Postmates was in my area.
I thought it was still only in like the New York and L.A.s of the world.
I didn't have a clue that it was all the way out in Podunk, Richmond, Virginia.
But apparently Postmates was what delivered it.
And it was easy peasy.
It went really, really well.
And I would definitely do that again for $9 if I'm spending the kind of money I was spending today.
Or a couple days ago.
So it worked out really nicely.
Very, very quickly about the watch.
Um, the watch hardware we've covered, it's very nice.
The, uh, the blood oxygen, oximetry, whatever pulse ox thing.
It's nice to have that on my wrist.
You know, that's good.
And it's very good for Marco.
It's good for me too.
Uh, I got the, is it the solo loop, which is the sport band without a clasp?
Is that what it's called?
So did you get the size right on the first try?
I did.
Whoa.
Here's the thing.
Here's the thing.
First of all, I'm ordering literally two days ago.
And so because of that, I have had everyone's refinements to their strategy that I've been made privy to.
Yeah.
Don't get it super duper.
Don't get the little paper thing super duper tight on the wrist.
Just get it kind of tight on your wrist.
And more than anything else, I'll have to dig up this link for the show notes.
But Grubers, here's what you have in a sport band, you know, the class sport band.
Here's what you're probably going to want in the solo loop.
And that was spot on for both Aaron and me.
And that worked out really nicely.
So I am, I believe, a six in the sport band, or excuse me, in the solo loop.
And I think you and I, Marco, were in the same hole in the sport band.
So on the smaller, because I'm using a 40 millimeter watch, on the smaller of the available sport bands, when I clasped it, it would be two empties and then where the pin goes.
I know this is hurting you to not use the right terminology.
I'm so sorry, Marco.
Two empties.
It's like they're beer cans.
Yeah.
Yeah, right.
Well, you know what I'm saying.
Yeah.
And I think you and I were the same size.
No, I'm on the... I have one empty followed by the pin, but I, too, am a size six in the solo loop.
But honestly, I haven't been wearing my solo loop.
I've been back to my regular sport band.
Oh, interesting.
Why is that?
I don't know...
And if it's just like the way the sizing works on me, but the sport band is just a little bit more comfortable for me.
And I find the loop to be a little hotter because the sport band, because it has the little excess tail that tucks under it and because it has the whatever nine holes in it, or you can even go even holier if you'd like with those Nike ones.
There is some degree of ventilation that you get because you don't just have a one-inch wide strap of rubber on your entire wrist.
You have small gaps where it pushes off from it because of the spacing of the tail or the holes let some air in or whatever.
And so it's slightly more ventilated with the regular sport band.
The solo loop almost fits too well.
And so as a result, I find the solo loop less comfortable.
I also find just the way it works out with sizing for me right now that like sometimes during some parts of the day, the solo loop size six is a little snug for my comfort, but the size seven is way too big all the time.
So I think I'm maybe possibly like a little bit between sizes on the solo loop, whereas the sport band just works out better that way.
And one of the great things about the sport band is like if you find yourself between two sizes, you always have the option of subbing in.
If you're one of the middle sizes, you have the option of subbing in like the long or the short side if both of them can kind of fit because then the different length of the excess tail will actually give you a slightly different fit between each pair of holes.
Mm-hmm.
And so like sometimes you can kind of fake a half size by swapping out to the different tail.
You have no such option like this with the solo loop.
You know, whatever size it is, that's the size it always is, period.
So if it fits you well, which it sounds like yours does, then great.
But I'm unfortunately not one of those people.
And so I'm very totally fine to be back on the regular sport band with the pin.
i feel like the biggest difference between the the solo loop and the regular one is that the solo loops necessarily are you know intentionally elastic it has to get big enough for you to get your hand through it right um and so once you you know the material itself is pulling at you if you have solo loop size so that it doesn't press against you with its elasticity it's too big right it has to actually be against your skin in most places but
But a solo loop that is against your skin, unless you are extremely lucky, is actually its elasticity is pressing it against your skin.
Whereas if you get a regular thing sized the right way, I feel like a regular thing that doesn't have as much elasticity, if you get that sized right, it doesn't feel like...
the elasticity of the band is causing it to squeeze your wrist right it's whatever hole you put it in and it's not going to get it's not trying to get any smaller than the hole you put it in whereas the solo loop is always trying to get like a little bit smaller if it's snug on your wrists so i can imagine as someone who can't stand having anything on their wrist that even that just tiny bit of elasticity makes it feel like the band wants to be smaller than it is and that can be annoying
Yeah, mine fits ever so slightly looser than I would prefer because I actually prefer it to be a little bit tighter, but it's not to the point that it bothers me or that I notice it most of the time.
Getting the watch on and off is fine.
I use the Studio Neat Dock, one of the original Studio Neat Docks, so I don't have any issues with like laying it flat on the charger because the charger is held upright.
All in all, I really like the solo loop.
It is a lot lighter than the sport band, which in and of itself, I mean, day to day, I don't really notice, but you can tell the difference if you're paying any attention.
But I really like the solo loop more than I expected.
And hypothetically, the next time I wash Aaron's car, my watch won't go catapulting off my wrist, which would be an improvement.
Very quickly, the brightness of the watch, I feel like I do notice, particularly in the daylight.
And otherwise, it's just, it's very nice.
And it's worked out real nicely.
And I'm really glad to have blood oxygen readings taken all the time because I'm super paranoid.
So, yeah.
So, hey, you know those watches that came out like two months ago?
You should probably think about getting one.
They're pretty good.
Who knew?
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All right, let's move on and talk about M1 Mac performance, if we can, please.
So since we've last recorded, embargoes have dropped.
Geeks have been benched, I guess I should say.
And as it turns out, everyone is saying, holy smokes, these things are fast.
So break this down for me, one of you.
Maybe we can start with Marco.
Are these really that fast?
Is it possible for these to be that fast?
It sure is, and they sure are.
And it's amazing.
So, you know, I was kind of extrapolating in last week's show based on the A14 scores in Geekbench, you know, and then knowing that the M1 had twice the performance cores, basically trying to extrapolate, like, what do we think the performance will be?
And I think I was roughly correct, but it's actually even better than I predicted.
I think I didn't predict quite how high the single core would be.
But regardless,
It's so much better than most of us would have assumed that this could be in this power class, basically.
The M1s that we have right now, we basically have the same computer in three different enclosures.
It's not that different between the Mac Mini, the 13-inch MacBook Pro, and the MacBook Air that we have.
They all have the same processor, roughly, and they all just have different thermal characteristics, basically.
The peak performance of the MacBook Air is the same as the other two performances, and then the MacBook Air just thermally throttles down.
If you push it really hard for more than a couple of minutes, it'll start getting a little bit slower.
But even in its throttle-down state, the MacBook Air is still faster than...
i think almost every laptop or if not every laptop that apple's ever made so it's worth going through the actual numbers here just to like you know we have preliminary numbers last time it's like well someone submitted these numbers but who knows if it's real or whatever and they looked like they were in the ballpark so we believe them but now we have the official numbers and it's correct so speaking of geekbench uh single core macbook air is almost 1700 1687 and that varies so we just round up to 1700 right
The previous champion single core performance was 1200 and change for the iMac, the 5k iMac with the low core count or whatever.
So single core, it's big, right?
Multi-core, as Marco predicted last time.
The only things that can beat it are the things that either have more cores or are much bigger and hotter CPUs with the same number, of course.
So the only thing faster in multi-core is the iMac Pro, the Mac Pro, and the 5K iMac with eight cores, right?
Yeah.
which means that the macbook air with no fan is basically faster in cpu than every any lap mac laptop that april has ever sold right we worried about maybe it won't keep up in multi-core nope it does don't worry about that um one of these articles from mac rumors did the thing that we were talking about was like let's let's try an m1 mac but with everything emulated
uh you know an apple silicon emulating x86 is still faster than every other mac in single core right just you know that's how big the lead is in single core when you add the overhead of emulation nope it's still the fastest mac ever so if you're worried like oh i'm gonna get an m1 mac but if i use mostly programs that haven't been ported they'll be slow no they will still be faster than literally every other mac in single core ever like the mac pro anything name any mac at any price
it's it's ridiculous right uh like a matt panzerino tech crunch did the benchmark we were asking for which is what about unzipping although he should have spelled zip with an x on xip what about unzipping xcode is it fast at that and we were wondering is that io bound is it multi-threaded blah blah blah no it's super fast at that the m1 max are the fastest max you can buy if your goal is to unzip multi-gigabyte xcode things they're taking somewhere around five minutes whereas a mac pro was taking 10 minutes
It's really ridiculous.
The disk speed, our predictions on that were more or less correct as well.
It's basically twice as fast as the old one, because as Marco said last week, the old one was slow.
The old one wasn't great SSD, right?
But even just compared to the best SSDs available in other Macs, the M1 Macs have really good IO performance.
So...
If you're waiting for us to get to the downsides of these machines, don't hold your breath because they're exactly as impressive as we thought they would be.
And honestly, this is like third degree backlash to the backlash to the backlash.
I still remain surprised that people who are not in the Apple industry are surprised because it's like they hadn't been paying attention.
It's like they haven't been listening to ACP for five years, right?
Yeah.
Every time a phone would come out, we would look at the phone and the beginning was like, let's make fun of John's 10-year-old computer by saying, oh, I got a new phone and my phone has a faster CPU than your 2008 Mac Pro, right?
And then eventually it was, the new phones have faster single-core performance.
than any of our Macs.
And then eventually it was the new phones have faster single power performance than any Mac you can buy at any price, right?
That all happened, right?
So to think that they were going to introduce a Mac that was somehow slower than that didn't make any sense.
We always knew it was going to be like this.
It's just a question of how much and to what degree, right?
And so...
you know it still doesn't take away from the performance but that's why i think you see some of the stories where people's initial reaction kind of like the initial iphone reaction from blackberry which i think gruber said it was like this can't be real like because if you're not paying attention to apple and you're just you know you just tangentially catch wind of this story and they're like apple releases a new mac laptop with no fan that is faster than any mac laptop ever sold and it costs 999 like whatever is it that's ridiculous it must be some custom tailored benchmark thing nope
They really, really are that fast.
Some more fun stuff from Panzer's review.
One of the tests was rendering five minutes of 8K video at 60 frames per second.
The M1 MacBook Pro used extremely little power to do this task.
Just 17% of its battery was used to output an 81 gigabyte 8K render, right?
So they...
they rendered this thing this this is not about like we're not saying time because timing it was good too but it's like how much battery do you use to render out this 8k file the the macbook pro you the yes this is the m1 macbook pro not the macbook air use 70 of its battery to do this the 13 inch macbook pro with an intel processor could not even finish the task on one battery charge
So it used more than 100% of its... It's like, this is where we talk about performance.
It's like, yeah, but does performance really matter?
Battery life matter?
Not only is this thing doing things faster, it's doing them with, like, hugely more battery life.
This is Neil Hyatt Patel saying that someone in his life, I'm assuming it's his wife, Becky, or maybe not, says, I purposely bought Becky a maxed-out Core i7 MacBook Air a few months ago because she has to run one Windows app for work.
this uh i7 macbook air scored 2867 in cinebench with the fans you know up running at max the whole time the new macbook air just silently scored 6803 so like you know i'm gonna get you a maxed out i7 macbook air because you really need to do this and it's you're getting like two to three times the score in a computer with no fan it's ridiculous
um two more superlatives and i think i'll be done i tried to pick out the most ridiculous ones this is from anatech this we'll put this link in the show notes and it's a great article if you want to read about a deeper dive into what the cpu can do they were doing anatech in typical fashion they're doing all sorts of you know every benchmark you can possibly imagine they're somewhat limited by which benchmarks are natively compiled for arm at this point but they were doing the best they can right um
So this is, and Anatech is not just comparing them as other Macs.
They're saying like, industry-wide, what is this like, right?
All right, so then they're doing the Mac Mini in this case.
The 2020 Mac Mini is at least 50% faster than the 2017 MacBook Pro with a Radeon Pro 560 in the Basemark GPU Benchmark.
So that's a MacBook Pro with a discrete GPU.
So they're benching the Mac Mini against the biggest GPU, not the biggest GPU, but one of the discrete GPUs in a MacBook Pro.
The newer MacBook Pros will do better, of course, but keep in mind that this is an integrated GPU with the entire chip drawing less power than just the MacBook Pro's CPU, never mind its discrete GPU.
So it's not even fair to compare these because not only does this thing draw less power than the MacBook Pro with a discrete GPU that it beat, what they're just comparing is the power of the SoC
to the power of just the CPU.
They're not even adding in the power used by the actual GPU that they're benchmarking in.
So any sort of power comparison that you see for these M1 Macs where they say, oh, the M1 was using this amount of watts, and then this computer's CPU is rated at this amount of watts.
But the GPU, if it's a discrete GPU, is a whole other chip that has its own power draw.
It's fairly ridiculous.
And finally, this is SPEC, the SPEC benchmark SPEC, all caps SPEC 2017.
This is comparing against a CPU that actually beats it in some way, right?
In the overall new SPEC 2017 integer and floating point charts, Apple Silicon M1 falls behind AMD Zen 3 in integer performance.
However, it takes an undisputable lead in the floating point suite.
While AMD Zen 3 still holds the lead in several workloads, we need to remind ourselves that this comes at a great cost in power consumption in the 49 watt range, while Apple M1 is using 7 to 8 watts.
Good grief.
So the only CPU that could beat it was using basically 50 watts, right?
You know, more than five times the power draw to barely edge it out in integer performance, but still lose to it in floating point.
The M1 is an absolute monster.
Every single Mac that uses it benefits from it in exactly the ways that you would think.
And the battery life is 100% real.
So if you had any reservations about these Macs for performance, noise, heat, temperature, battery life concerns, I would say you can put them by the wayside.
The compatibility issues and so on and so forth still exist, but wow, these are good computers.
Yeah.
Well, but do we know that?
Because none of us have one, right?
Yeah.
We both have them.
Didn't Marco do you have one?
I've had it for about two hours now.
I've had it for a couple of days so I can give you a little bit more impressions of it.
Remember this is going to be the homework laptop so I'm not actually going to be the one using this but of course I am the one that set it up.
so i did have time to use it during the setup process which actually is fairly instrumental because if you can think of what it's like when you set up a new mac laptop there are a bunch of parts of that that are actually fairly stressful uh migration assistant itself if you're using that which i did can be fairly stressful to the computers involved right
Depending on how you do it and how they're connected over the network and how much stuff you have and so on and so forth.
But it's not uncommon to hear the fans spin up when you run Migration Assistant on a laptop.
Obviously, I didn't hear that on my MacBook Air because it has no fans.
When it was running Migration Assistant, I picked it up and put my hand on the bottom to feel if it was warm.
It was room temperature.
There was no discernible difference in temperature whatsoever from feeling the bottomless thing during migration assistant.
I also ran software update because like whatever it is, 11.0.1 came out and this machine didn't ship with it.
So it needed to run software update.
When you run software update, it's not uncommon to hear your Mac laptop's fan spin up.
But this has no fan, so you didn't hear that.
When it was running software update and installing the operating system or update thing, I felt it with my hand, and it was room temperature.
Like, you know...
It's not to say these things can't get warm.
So there's plenty of YouTube videos you can watch.
It's like, OK, now I'm going to run this massive CPU, GPU benchmark for 20 minutes at a time.
How hot does it get?
It does get warm, but A, not nearly as warm as an Intel laptop.
And B, the thermal throttling penalty of this MacBook Air seems to be about 15 to 20 percent in worst case scenario.
as measured by work output so one of the ones i saw was doing like a cinebench benchmark and i did the same benchmark over and over and over and over again to see how the performance dropped so the first one was about 15 higher than like the 10th run right and remember that 15 think of that 15 you're losing for thermal throttling in light of how much faster this macbook air is than all those other things we just listed before it's almost nothing and then the macbook pro and the mini don't throttle at all seemingly not only did the macro pro and many not throttle at all supposedly
But the fans apparently are so low RPM that you can't even hear them.
Gruber claimed to literally have never heard the fan, which is a claim that I can understand as a fellow old person with Marco's Airport Extreme that he gave me that has a fan in it ostensibly, but I literally cannot hear it.
Like you can make everybody in the house be totally quiet.
I can shove my ear like up to the thing.
I can't hear the fan.
And so I'm willing to believe that there is a fan, but that it can't be heard by 40 something year old people in a normal house.
Right.
So it's all pretty amazing.
The thing that Craig Federighi was bragging about in the thing in the keynote about wake from sleep.
you know i i tested that uh and it's like the thing about this i have a work laptop i use all the time when i lift the lid on my work laptop the screen comes on instantly so i'm like well what do they mean by wake from sleep instantly don't you know the problem with a work laptop it's all locked down right so i have to type in my password or use touch id or whatever to unlock it anyway right because it you know if you close the lid it locks up right
So I'm like, when I lift my laptop lid, the screen always comes on instantly.
So how much faster can that be?
The thing that I had not accounted for, and I mostly blamed on weird work stuff where I have to like, you know, connect to the VPN.
And I don't know what I was blaming on, but just assume, oh, this is just always slow because of work stuff.
But whatever it is, on this new MacBook Air, the thing that is blowing me away is how fast it unlocks with Touch ID.
i'm in my work laptop i'm forever putting my finger on the touch id thing and then just waiting and my finger is just on it i'm like come on come on see that my finger's there see it see my finger see it unlock see my oh there it goes okay my finger spends so much time on that touch id sensor in my work laptop because i'm waiting for the computer like the screen is on i lift the lid the screen is on instantly and i see a little face and a little thing that says type your password or use touch id and i put my finger on the thing immediately and then i gotta wait
for the computer to get around to deciding to scan my finger.
This MacBook Air, it's like if you brush your finger against the thing, it unlocks.
It is always ready to read your finger.
It's like a phone.
You know when we had phones with Touch ID?
You'd take out your phone and put your finger on the Touch ID thing, and it would unlock instantly.
You wouldn't wait around with your thumb on the Touch ID sensor going, come on, phone, come on, come on, read my finger.
Oh, there it unlocked.
This is like that, and it is glorious.
Do you have it there with you right now?
uh no my kids have it next time you have it try changing the screen resolution oh what should i what is it non-native it's instant there is no flash there's no fade through black what it's just boom it's as if you're resizing a window i gotta try that yeah i didn't i i mean i set it up for them i just to finish my story i did the migration system put all the stuff on it everything worked flawlessly uh
All the software, like I ran, I launched the first Intel app, it prompted me to install Rosetta, I did, it installed it, it ran, like, compatibility has been 100% perfect, even before I started downloading the, you know, ARM optimized versions of various apps.
I'm sure there are caveats for like, you know, depending on what app you use, maybe it doesn't work that way if you're doing development work with a bunch of Unity stuff and none of that is ported like that.
So those are all absolute valid concerns.
But for my specific use case, which is have a laptop that kids can use to do schoolwork on.
you would never know this wasn't intel it is so fast everything runs fine and it's just like you know my kids were looking at it like why did you get another one of the same laptop i'm like it's not it couldn't be any different i don't think they've noticed that the fan isn't there but like if you if your kids are on like zoom all day
like the fans kick on right it's just annoying to have the fans going and just and just have that not be an issue and not have it get get hot because it shouldn't be all they're doing all day is they're they're using web browsers they're in zoom they're maybe launching google docs or microsoft word that's all they do this is super light work i should never hear the fan on that intel one and i do and this one no fan very fast i love it thumbs up right up until the kids drop down the stairs and break it
We have some real-time follow-up from Jason Snell who says, and I'm quoting, holy hell, that display resolution changes instant.
Yeah, I'm telling you.
It isn't something you do very often, but you know what it looks like from all the other Macs.
It fades to black for a second.
All the windows reload and pop into a different place.
It's clunky.
It takes a few seconds.
For some reason, this is now instant.
it's just this is and it's so weird because it's not as if ios devices had have a specially optimized path for resolution because they never i mean i guess they do when you change the zoom factor but that's like just doesn't like all of springboard restart when you do that yeah i don't know well i'm here's the thing like all bets are off in terms of what you what the expected behavior of a mac is because as i tried to express to my kids
even though it looks the same on the outside it's got the same keyboard and a very similar screen what's inside is like entirely changed it's not just they took one chip out or replace it with a different one everything is different all those chips that control the io and you know the ram like if you you can just compare the motherboards i'd be surprised that you know if there's only a handful of chips that are in common for things like wi-fi or whatever but who knows right it's it's just an entirely different machine it's yes it's very much like an ipad shoved into a max case right but
And the sort of performance characteristics or what's slow and what's fast or what it can do with what amount of effort, it's just an entirely new set of rules that we'll just have to get used to.
Yeah, I mean, that's, to me, the most shocking thing about this so far.
Yeah.
And this just doesn't seem to have any.
I guess the catch is you can't virtualize Windows right now, which for many people is a really big deal and for many people doesn't matter at all.
So as long as that is not a problem for you, there seems to be pretty much no other catch.
Yeah.
those ports will happen you have to wait for them oh photoshop's not out for arm yet uh but like there's a beta for it or whatever oh homebrew says it's not going to have a version out for a while oh docker doesn't but but like we imagine in the next year if you care about this which is you know not not the general use case of just especially for a macbook air of just using gooey apps but if you care about the unix stuff that will take a little while to come but it's not like the machine it's not like you have to buy a new mac then
The software will come eventually and you'll have it.
But if you spend all day using Docker and Node or something, don't get one of these Macs and then be freaked out that you can't use Docker and Node.
But if you buy one of these Macs now and use it for web browsing and email in a year, it'll do all that stuff and it'll do it super fast.
Yeah, and the only other major downside is that not the entire lineup has this as an option yet.
If you want a desktop with a built-in screen like an iMac, or you want an expandable desktop like a Mac Pro, or you want a 15-inch laptop or a 13-inch with all the ports, they don't satisfy those needs right now.
But they will.
Give it a year, and I think we're going to have almost all those major needs solved.
I bet by this time in 2021, we're going to have the 16-inch, we're going to have the iMac, we're going to have most of the range covered.
Yes, there's going to be machines with more than 16 gigs of RAM.
They're going to get to that.
But it seems like so far...
And what John just said, that's a big thing.
Having the software be a little bit shaky for a while as everybody adds compatibility to everything is going to take a while.
It always does.
This is the nature of a transition.
But on day one, it's really good.
And
It feels unreal.
The amount of speed you get out of these things, just to add one more little benchmark, I did some overcast build testing, and on my 10-core iMac Pro with 64 gigs of RAM...
Don't tell me this because we have the same computer.
Don't tell me this.
We got to go, everybody.
Thanks for the good show.
Thank you.
Bye.
64 gigs of RAM iMac Pro plugged into the wall.
It's like 160 watt CPU.
56 seconds to build overcast clean.
So 56 seconds on my new MacBook Air with no fan.
It takes about 39 seconds.
And when it thermally throttles, the worst I could get it to be was about 49.
So in the worst case scenario, throttling, it's only 12% faster than my 10-core iMac Pro.
And in the more common case, it's more like 30% faster.
Now, hold on right there, though.
You paid, and you don't have to give me an exact figure, but somewhere around like $6,000 or $7,000 for that iMac Pro?
Yep.
And how much was this MacBook Air?
$1,400 or something like that?
$1,500, something like that?
God bless.
I know the iMac Pro is a little older, but golly.
And here's the thing about the $1,400 MacBook Pro.
The $999 one...
Probably wouldn't do that any slower.
Yeah.
I mean, the only difference is half the RAM.
Every other part of it is the same speed.
The CPU is the same speed.
The RAM is the same speed.
The SSD, you know, like, that's why the 999 one, not that I recommend people get that.
They should get 16 gigs of RAM if they can possibly afford it, and they should, you know, whatever.
But, like...
It is.
That's the amazing thing about this.
That's the thing we learned from all the people testing.
We were wondering, oh, is it clocked higher?
Is it this or that?
It seems like the answer is no.
All of them have variable clock speed as, you know, adjusting for temperature or whatever.
And you can get readouts on what they are.
And it seems like it's around 3.2 gigahertz throttling down to like 2.8 or whatever.
But they all do that, and the only variable is cooling.
And the penalty for cooling, as Marco noted, the penalty is you are only 12% faster than your giant 10-core iMac instead of 30% faster.
Right.
And I'd take that.
That's fine because I love not having a touch bar.
And so that's currently a very nice thing right now.
So I took this out of the box about two hours ago.
I ran migration assistant to transfer things onto it.
I installed a bunch of software.
I ran these benchmarks and I installed big software like Xcode and logic, like, you know, massive installations, many gigabytes of downloads and unzipping and, and yes, unzipping Xcode and, you know, all these massive operations running these benchmarks.
I must've run it nine or 10 times at least.
Um,
i haven't plugged it in yet i haven't unwrapped the power brick yet it's still in the box and it's currently and and i've had it sitting here like with the monitor on full brightness because i only rock that way and the battery is still at 60 full do you remember during the setup by the way like mac os if you've set up a mac recently it throws up a notification that says oh uh since we're just setting up your mac things may be less responsive until we finish this optimization process
what they're basically telling you is like photo analysis d is going to run and spotlight indexing is going to run and they put a notification in a couple years ago or whatever that tells you that you may notice some degraded performance and it's like uh no i won't because normally you'd think like oh i'll hear the fans spinning up or things will feel slower or whatever and that just never happened so the dialogue was there the notification was there but none of the effects
that i could feel were there from this supposed like oh i'm i'm doing spotlight and indexing now so your things might be slower it was amazing yeah i've also been totally ignoring when like for instance when you run migration assistant it suggests you plug it in uh yeah right and then also like when you install logic it says you should really plug into a power source before installing logic and i just ignore those and plow right through and then it's done 45 seconds later or something and the battery has lost less than one percent of its charge like it's not it's fine
So to play this back, these computers, so far anyway, are not extraordinarily expensive.
They're extraordinarily fast.
And even for the software that isn't updated for it, this is not the journey from PowerPC to Intel from, you know, a decade plus ago.
Even stuff that's still compiled for Intel is just as fast as it was, if not faster.
This is the no compromise computer, isn't it?
Well, again, with the compatibility concerns, but yeah, the future looks extremely bright.
One of the great quotes from – I think it might have been in that independent article with Federighi and Ternus was – I think it was Federighi saying – the interviewer asked them about what do you think about these new computers or whatever.
And the quote is, we overshot.
It was like we had a goal.
We were trying to make something that's at least this good.
It turns out we overshot.
We made something like it's not like this was this was their target and they met it.
They, you know, because this is way they didn't need to make these this good.
There's no reason for the cheapest Mac that they sell to be faster than the most expensive laptop they sell.
Why would you even make that as a goal unless you're being super ambitious Steve Jobs style or whatever?
They just wanted something that was better than Intel and had a bright future, but these things are...
phenomenal right and it shows the most in these cheapos right because here's the thing when they make the high-end ones don't expect the high like the current macbook air is so much faster than the previous one the new mac pro is going to be way faster than the old mac pro but the margins will narrow i feel like potentially depending on how they fudge you know benchmarks with special like fpgas or whatever right
Because it's more impressive when the sub $1,000 thing is like the fastest Mac ever in single core than it is when the $6,000 one is.
Because the $6,000 one is going to be the fastest Mac ever by a large margin.
But you expect that because it's $6,000.
We talked about this with the, you know, which Macs do you think they're going to roll out first?
And we always framed it as like, well, if they roll out the low end, won't it be embarrassing for Apple if their cheapest Mac is faster than their more expensive one?
And here we are.
And yeah, in some respects, it is quote unquote embarrassing that the cheapest laptop they sell can do a whole bunch of things way faster than the most expensive one.
But I think I feel like Apple is willing to endure that to say, but yeah, but we sell that computer too.
Like that's us too.
You know, we're not afraid of embarrassing our current products with our new products, especially since we're going to replace those other ones soon anyway.
And we're not worried about, oh, well, no one's ever going to buy a 16 inch because if you need whatever, 64 gigs of RAM or a four terabyte or an eight terabyte SSD or whatever, or you need to run some Intel program.
you can't do that on these because those are these are the low-end models so you still have to buy that like kind of like how they still kept selling the uh the trash can max some people needed them for certain things they needed to do and even though we felt like that computer is a dud you're still able to sell some of them and obviously apple wants to replace them asap but whatever the calculus was that was in their head if they had rolled out the top end first and gone down it would have like saved this sort of
weird situation we're in where how does it make any sense that your slowest computer is now your fastest computer i don't understand it doesn't make it but you know we're all fine with it because like i'm telling everybody i know who's like what computer should i gotta keep telling them to wait now i just want to like send out the carrier pigeons
fly go buy macbook airs they are amazing your weight has paid off buy these computers now because the the the macbook air i feel like is like the best performance deal of macs that have ever existed and will probably never be beat because we will never have this discontinuity from we were so slow for so long and then we made this huge limp leap and on the cheapest mac that they sell that has a screen i'm sorry mac i keep excluding you i know you're cheaper
Yeah, I mean, and this, to me, like, this feels kind of like when we got SSDs in the sense that, like, in my computing life so far, there are only a very small number of performance jumps where when you first use something, you're like, whoa.
Like, you actually really notice the difference.
Yeah.
That does not happen very often.
You know, usually we get incremental progress.
We're lucky if we get a processor that's like, you know, 20% faster than the old one we had from a few years ago or whatever.
Like, it's hard to, in computing, it's hard to have major jumps like this.
It doesn't happen very often.
Well, it's kind of like in the days with like 286.
If you had a 286 and you got a Pentium, you got that kind of jump, right?
Because in the early days, we had bigger leaps, but it's been a long time since you go from like your 386 to your Pentium and have your hair blown back.
And this is like that again.
Exactly.
And the only time I can think of in recent memory that we had a jump like this
was when we went to ssds but going to ssds was a very like long and painful and expensive transition and and many fronts yeah and they were expensive like you had an ssd you had to get a tiny one and they cost a whole jillion dollars so yeah it was amazing but the reason it took so long is because they cost so much money like well but i've got a lot of data i can't get an ssd this is like if ssds came out and they were cheaper than spinning hard drives for the same number of bytes
Yeah, cheaper and way faster.
Like, my first SSD was 160 gigs.
And so, you know, you had to split it up.
You had to have, like, all right, we'll have the SSD for, like, the OS and maybe, like, you know, the cache folder for Bridge or Photoshop or whatever.
And then you'd put your main data on your hard drive so it's not to take up all the expensive SSD space.
Yeah.
You had all these hacks and everything, and it was a long, painful transition before we – and many people still haven't fully made the transition because it's so expensive still.
SSDs are still way more expensive than hard drives even today.
This is on that level of a transition in terms of how meaningful it is to the performance and balance of these computers.
Except the downside is way less, way, way less.
And the downside will be totally gone within probably a year.
Like, you know, the main downside is basically what John said earlier.
Like, yeah, not all the software works yet, but that's going to be gone soon.
not works not all the software works at maximum speed some software doesn't work at all like for the unix stuff that needs to be compiled but you know regular mac programs if you're listening to this and you don't know what unix is don't worry about it right because regular mac programs you don't need them to do anything just run the intel versions it's fine
But this is just such an incredible gain.
As a Mac fan and as a fan of computers, this is so exciting to me.
I'm so happy with this.
It has blown me away.
And I will, you know, once the big ones come out, I do still, I think, want to be in the 16-inch size class for my laptop needs.
So once that comes out, I will probably go back to that size.
But I am super excited for this to progress and to keep going, you know, to see what the rest of the lineup looks like.
Super excited now to replace my iMac whenever the time comes, which I was not excited about before, but now I very much am.
i'm i'm very much looking forward to this time and and it's it's a great time to be a fan of computers right now one of the fun benchmark that panzer did was uh he did an app launch thing uh which is the thing that i used to do in mac os 10 versions to see because they would brag about improving app launch or whatever so he's got a dock lined up at the bottom of his computer with a ton of apps in it like spreading the whole width of his screen and he just takes his cursor from right to left and goes click click click click and clicks each one of the apps right and
And just goes from one end to the other and launches all the apps, right?
And they bounce like once, like one bounce done, one bounce done.
Like as he clicks behind him, the apps are all finishing as his cursor moves along.
It's phenomenal.
It's like, how are they launching that fast?
why what is the is it just the cpu is i mean is the ssd a little faster maybe stuff got pulled into cache but it's only got eight gigs of like it's inexplicably fast like it's phenomenally fast now some of that is the new computer effect right and some of it is if you've launched them before you get cached or whatever but i can tell you from long experience of doing that exact experiment i've never seen performance like that even on ssd max right so whatever apple's doing keep doing it
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I love it like this is the week that Apple has lowered the App Store commission, and we're an hour and a half in before we get to it.
All right, so let's properly introduce this.
Just today, this morning, even as I woke up, which usually these things seem to happen later in the day,
Apple has announced that if you meet certain qualifications and in certain circumstances and if this and if that, that you can, as an app developer, get them to only take 15% cut off of your sales rather than 30.
And the short, short version of this is it's for small businesses that earn up to a million dollars per year.
But there seem to be a lot of, well, what abouts and oh, waits and so on.
At least at first and on the surface, this is a very welcome change and one that I'm quite surprised to see Apple make.
Yeah, that quite surprised is putting it lightly.
I mean, I have been saying for years, as many Apple commentators and developers have, there's no chance they're going to ever lower that commission from 70-30.
No chance at all.
I've been trying to talk you down on that ledge because every time you bring it up, I say, well, they did lower it to 85-15 for subscriptions.
And you're like, yeah, but.
And so, you know, like the explanation, the obvious explanation is, what's changed recently that Apple would be doing this?
the app stores are running for so long and they haven't ever changed their cut and in recent years they did the 85 15 and then very recently you know just today they did this thing hmm could it be the congressional attention they're getting could it be the antitrust lawsuits against google could it be you know companies like epic having big fights with them like
You know, sometimes, especially very fervent Apple fans don't like the idea that there is any sort of countervailing force to Apple, whether it be government intervention or companies like Epic making a big stink and throwing tantrums and filing lawsuits.
But without pushback, Apple, as evidenced by the many initial years of the store, is not motivated to change anything.
And now, there's a little bit of motivation, and we see a change, and I think it's great.
Yeah, I mean, and there's a lot of details to this that are worth knowing, but the gist of it, that most developers are now going to have 15% across the board, is really quite something.
And I think, and this is not the kind of thing they would have decided over the weekend.
I mean, this is the kind of thing, this has probably been in the works for a few months, if I had to guess.
And
this has a meaningful impact on the stock perception for their services revenue.
Now, that being said, and so all that is to say, it's a big deal that like, it isn't just like Apple, you know, out of the goodness of their heart, just giving us more money.
They are also going to take a hit to a degree in this because they make a lot of money from after revenue.
But the way it's structured is that only the,
developers who make less than a million dollars a year get this new commission if you make over a million dollars a year through the app store after their cut then you're still paying 70 30 or you know the 85 15 on the year two and above subscriptions just like just like we put before
And it turns out that the App Store has very much a long tail effect for revenue.
So if you look at the total amount of money that Apple is going to keep at the end of the day, most of that money comes from a small number of very, very big, very profitable companies and apps and games and stuff.
So...
Apple, like this is not a huge amount of sweat off Apple's back because most of the money they make from the app store are from the epics and, you know, Netflix's and HBO's of the world.
It's from those massive companies.
And the commission on all those things is not going to change because those companies all make way more than a million dollars a year from the app store.
What this does change is for that giant long tail of developers like me who make less than a million dollars a year from the app store,
We just got a raise, basically.
Again, this is something that I never would have expected Apple to do because, quite frankly, they didn't need to.
There has been all this pressure on them for antitrust regulation and everything, and all the big companies that are going to apply this pressure to them, they're not getting this cut because they make too much money.
So this won't help them at all.
And I don't think this will relieve a lot of pressure from Apple with the regulatory stuff, honestly.
I think the only way to relieve that pressure is to allow other forms of in-app purchase in apps.
That's it.
Anything short of that is not going to relieve that antitrust pressure.
But that's something I think that would cost Apple way more than this.
Because all those big companies would do it.
And then Apple would lose all their revenue.
This is a very shrewd move for exactly the reasons you said, that it makes a lot in terms of number of people.
It makes a lot of people happy because there are way more developers making under a million dollars.
And to be clear, it's under a million dollars in profit, not revenue.
Way more than making under a million than over, right?
So number of people who are happier today, huge number.
It doesn't cost Apple that much money because they make most of the money off of the whales, like the big profit makers.
And...
those two things like in you know when we're talking about antitrust and stuff yes there is the you know legal aspect of that but there's also the political and optics aspect of it and despite apple saying oh we charge 30 that's what everyone else charges it's a good thing to be able to say the next time they're grilled to say hey we you know 90 of our developers just got their revenue share cut in half from you know
from 30 to 15 and look at all these testimonials from developers who are happy and so on and so forth those optics matter despite the fact that we all know what did apple really give up did they give a ton of money they gave up some they gave up a non-zero amount but they didn't do like what marco said oh you know you can use a different payment method to really cut into it right um and so it's good to be able to have that in your quiver when someone starts leaning on you again now all that said
In the end, this type of dynamic where there's a company, in this case a tech company, that we think may have too much power and is using that power to do things that are good for it at the expense of other people.
That's the whole government effort of let's look at these companies that have lots of money and lots of power and let's make sure they're not...
They're not making the world worse for everyone who's not them in some way.
Antitrust is a specific instance of that, but in general, the government is always looking at that in terms of regulation.
If that activity of looking into it and asking them hard questions and considering what we might do about it causes that company to say, what about this?
What about if we do like this?
And you look at it and go, that pleases me a little.
Hmm.
You haven't changed the power dynamic because Apple was and remains in the exact same position as they were in that they're voluntarily doing that.
They're voluntarily doing that to try to avoid someone making them do something presumably worse.
They haven't given up any of any iota of their self-determination by doing this.
So if you're worried that this company has too much power, they still have all that power.
All they're doing is being a benevolent dictator of the app store and say, we bestow upon you an additional 15%.
Right?
But you haven't changed the fact that they are the only app store.
They require the payment.
They make the rules.
They can change the rules.
None of that has changed.
So fundamentally, and this is what lots of people are screaming about,
fundamentally nothing has changed in the dynamic, but practically speaking, people are happier and people get more money.
This is exactly why you do this move.
Do it voluntarily rather than digging in your heels and refusing to change anything in the hopes of heading off something that could be much worse, right?
So...
I think this change is great, despite the fact that it will not help me at all because my apps don't make any money anymore.
So I really wish they could have done this back for the three days a year ago when my two dinky Mac apps made some money.
But oh, well, now maybe I'll get 25 cents a week instead of...
15 or 5 or whatever anyway um but yeah this is going to make a lot of people happy it's a move in the right direction but it's still not fundamentally changed the power dynamics right now you could argue that the fact that they did anything shows that there is some power on the other side of that
And that's true.
But relying on the benevolence of the powerful is a bad strategy long term.
And that's the situation we're still in right now.
So I'm glad that we have some benevolence.
I like it.
It's good.
But I don't like relying on that benevolence as the only thing keeping the situation from getting much worse.
Oh, completely agreed.
And that's why... This doesn't really solve many of the problems of Apple's position with the App Store.
But it is nice.
To be on this side of it, it's just a nice thing for them to have done.
And I know it's not... Again, this is not charity.
I know this was to serve a political purpose.
And it will serve that purpose very well.
You think about the different angles of this.
They're now going to be able to say...
All the different small businesses and individuals, they've helped with this and how much they contribute to the economy with all these small businesses.
So as future antitrust pressure and government pressure and regulatory pressure, as more stuff falls on them in that area –
They're going to be able to point to this and say, look at all the good we've done here for all these other small businesses.
At the same time, because they've made public these terms and they have this million-dollar threshold below which you get the benefit, they've also kind of helped alienate anybody who tries to complain about it.
Because if you complain about this, what you're saying is, I make more than a million dollars from the App Store every year.
And it's kind of a bad look in PR in certain circles.
So it's a very smart move what they've done here.
And I'm just happy to be on the good side of it.
But certainly the PR here, there is certainly some utility to this for them that is not lost on them.
And finally, while I am slightly complaining about things here, I love what they did here.
But the way they implemented it is a little bit odd to me and creates some weird incentives.
So normally, the way progressive taxation or progressive fees work, and this is the way U.S.
income tax works this way, is normally if you say that the amount you make up to X is taxed at this percentage, and then anything above that is taxed at this percentage, those are structured in such a way that
when you cross that threshold between the two percentages, you don't suddenly pay the higher tax rate on everything you made before.
You only pay the higher tax rate on the marginal difference between that threshold and your total income.
So there is no amount of money that you can like, by making a dollar more in revenue, you take home less total.
That, that would be weird.
And we create perverse incentives.
Um,
What they're doing with this is kind of doing that in one way.
So if you cross a threshold for the rest of that year, you pay the regular 70% or you get the regular 70% instead of the 85.
So say you cross a million dollars in October, then in November and December, you're going to pay 70, 30 instead of 85, 15.
But you still have the money you made the rest of the year for all the other monthly payouts that were taxed at the 85, 15 rate.
But the way this program works is you only get the 85-15 on your first million if you made under a million dollars in the previous year.
So if you cross a million, yes, it is progressively taxed for the rest of that year, but then the entire next year you get 70-30 split, even if you end up making less than a million for that whole next year.
So there is a weird incentive that like, if you are going to make a little bit above a million, it's basically, if you're gonna make between 1 million and 1.2 million or so, it's,
you actually have an incentive to maybe stop making money if you're going to do that near the very end of a year.
Because if like in December, you're going to cross over a million, you're actually better off pulling your app from the store and just not making any money so that you stand at that threshold so that for the entire next year, you don't have the higher tax rate on your entire income.
So I don't I'm not entirely sure why they have this structure with this kind of like you have to make under a million in the whole previous year to qualify thing because that creates this weird perverse incentive.
So I hope they iron this out.
I mean, it's that way because it makes them more money because they want they want 70 30 for the whole next year because they think, oh, you're turning into a whale.
Like what they don't expect is to you to cross over a million in the next year to make like nothing.
So they say once you cross that threshold, you're now in the category of the 70-30 people.
And this set of rules makes Apple more money than the one you described.
Exactly.
That's the advantage.
But if they would just tax the first million at 15% and then anything above that at 30%, that would be a much simpler...
system.
And it's clear they know how to do that because they do that for the first year that you were just describing.
It's not like they don't have the ability to do that because of some quirk of their accounting system.
No, they do that for the year when you cross a million.
Right.
And I think Microsoft even does that.
There's some other store that does that for their app store or something similar to that.
So
I don't know why they aren't doing it that way, which would eliminate any weird perverse incentives to not earn more money.
But I hope that they have some very good reason for that and that they can fix that reason and get rid of that weird limitation.
Otherwise, this is a very good thing and I'm very happy to see it.
The other thing that this made me think of, related to our past discussions about the App Store and the Cut and actual Apple's past actions, and this has analogies in general government, not just the government of app stores.
In the past, we've discussed the idea where Netflix got a secret sweetheart deal, so they didn't have to pay 30% because Netflix was huge, and they did this deal with Apple that was kind of an open secret that, hey, Netflix is not paying 30%.
Because they're a big company and big companies get special deals with other big companies.
And many times I've described that as that's the way business works.
And it's true.
Like if you look at any kind of business, if you're going to buy one or two little widgets from a company, you get a certain rate.
But if you're going to buy 10 million of them, you get like your own special sales team and they schmooze you and you get a better rate and you can negotiate.
Right.
Right.
Big companies have power.
That power manifests usually in them getting better deals with other big companies.
And so every time, you know, Netflix or whoever got a sweetheart deal for the App Store, it's like, hey, why don't I get that?
It was part of the whole antitrust thing of Apple saying we treat everyone the same.
Like, we know that's not true.
You treat big companies differently.
And I don't think that's outrageous or ridiculous because that's true of everybody that Apple works with, all the companies that Apple works with.
depending on the power of that company whether it be a supplier for parts and how exclusive that part is or whatever there are power dynamics between companies and it makes perfect sense for big companies to get better deals right so one way apple could have gone following the sort of capitalist business ethic uh ethos is you know we're powerful companies we're butting heads here or whatever um if there's some big company like say epic or pick whatever whatever big company you want microsoft like whatever big company that is important to the app store adobe you know i'm not
no i don't know it's that's different because nobody has something going on anyway um they could have said okay well we need to keep these big companies happy so let's strike a deal with microsoft to get office onto the mac and we'll give microsoft a smaller cut right you know and that type of arrangement that i'm describing that apple has done at various times you know the netflix example is real but microsoft is hypothetical i don't know um
is the opposite of what they're doing here.
Because this is like saying, okay, on the App Store, we take a 30% cut.
But once you make more than a million, we take a 15% cut.
And if you make more than a billion, we take a 5% cut.
That kind of progressive tax system where the more you make, the less you pay, it's like the American income tax system.
in reality, right?
If not in law, but sometimes also in law, right?
And that type of system makes a certain kind of sense that we're all used to, which is, oh, but they're Netflix.
Of course they get a deal.
You're not Netflix.
You can't negotiate a special deal with Apple to get a lower rate.
Why should you get a lower rate?
And the argument from the people, from the little people has been,
but Netflix can afford to pay more.
The 15% that I'm not getting and Netflix is getting is the difference between me being able to be an independent developer and me having to get a different job.
Whereas with Netflix, it's a question of what their stock price is and their profitability and so on and so forth, right?
So that's the argument we always make is like that percentage means more to the smaller person, which is why I think most people agree that a more reasonable and fair tax system is if you're making barely enough money to survive, you should have a lower tax rate than someone who's making gazillions of dollars.
Again, with the progressive tax rate.
Oh, your first million is taxed like this, but your million and first dollar should be taxed higher.
And you can't cry poverty and say, oh, but my million and first dollar was charged at 5% higher.
I can't live anymore.
It doesn't, that's, you know, so that's, that argument, like, we don't cross these worlds of like, oh, real life versus the App Store or whatever, but they do cross over.
And what Apple has done here is recognize that, I mean, previously had, I don't want to make this political, previously had a flat tax, ostensibly a flat tax, 30% for everybody, caveat, asterisk, double dagger, so on and so forth, as we say, right?
And one direction they could have gone is the big companies are going to have bigger deals and we're going to codify that.
We're not going to just do a special deal with Netflix.
We're going to say, look, once you make $300 million, you're down to 5% cut because we want big companies to sell lots in our store.
That helps our revenue.
That helps our stock price.
And for all the things that we talked about, how this is actually a very smart thing for Apple to do because it doesn't really hurt them,
Part of the goodness of this arrangement is the opposite of that.
They're giving the cut to the people who need it the most and the people who will hurt Apple the least, like that's right in there.
But still, it doesn't change the fact that they're giving the cut to the people who need it the most.
The most numerous people and the people for whom it will have the largest impact, right?
And you think like, oh, a million dollars, if you're making a million dollars, you're rich.
If you have a five person company, a million dollars might not be enough to keep your head above water.
So we can argue about what the right threshold is for a company selling software, right?
But certainly for individual developers, if you're making a million dollars in profit off the app store, you're fine.
If you're a 20 person company, you make a million dollars a year off the app store, maybe you're not fine.
But the trend is in the right direction.
Like that line, the slope of like, we went from flat tax to a line tilted,
I'm glad the line didn't go in the other direction, which would be, you know, the big companies get the break.
And feel free to make whatever analogies to broader government you want.
I'm trying not to be super political here, but I feel like you can make your own conclusions.
I don't know.
I feel like this is...
This is a thing that can cost Apple not a lot of money, but can reap incredible amounts of positive PR and positive feelings.
So why not do it, right?
You know, if all of the money is made on the whales, which I think you're right, it absolutely is, then...
Yeah, let's give the little guys a little boost.
And it's really not going to cost that much.
It won't really change the bottom line.
And everyone's going to think we're so benevolent and so wonderful and so great.
And hopefully some of the people who think we're so great now are the people in government who are really looking at our finances and looking at our behavior and wondering if we're being fair.
Well, of course we're being fair.
This is what you guys said earlier.
Of course we're being fair.
We gave more money to the little guys.
What else could you want from us?
And so, yeah, I think this is this is something that should definitely be applauded without question.
But it is not a lot of effort to earn a whole lot of good PR.
And if I'm an Apple shoes, I would have done the same thing.
But I don't know.
I still feel like other more substantive, substantive, whatever that was, bigger changes.
Yeah, that other bigger changes would have been more useful.
But I'm not going to kick a gift horse in the mouth.
This is still excellent.
And I applaud them for doing it.
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And thank you to our members who support us directly.
You can do that at atp.fm slash join.
We will talk to you all next week.
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.
And if you're into Twitter,
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S, so that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-
Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Can you give me a moment to shed a little light on something that's on the verge of ruining my marriage?
And I say that mostly jokingly, but not entirely.
I've been complaining and moaning a lot lately about this weird issue that started for both Aaron and I when we got our iPhones 12.
And that is that, you know, many of our friends and pretty much all of Aaron's family are on Android.
And from what I can tell, when we are shooting SMSs back and forth between one of us and one other Android person, everything works great.
But in a lot of cases, we're in these group messages, which I believe are, strictly speaking, delivered over MMS.
And these group messages are two or three iPhone people and two or three Android people.
And both of us are having consistent problems wherein one of us, well, we're not always in the same groups, but oftentimes we are.
So like family groups, for example, and I, and let's say there were 10 messages sent iPhones and Android phones.
My phone will receive five of them.
Aaron's phone will receive seven of them.
And they are, they're of course not the same, you know, two batches of text messages.
Um,
I don't
So if you're a person who works at Apple, I will put a feedback in the show notes.
Can you please, please do something about this?
Because it's driving me crazy.
And I joke about it ruining my marriage.
But seriously, it is killing the two of us.
Can you please do something about this?
Please and thank you.
This is what Apple gets for not making FaceTime an open protocol.
The SMS system, as we all know, is primitive and old and weird or whatever.
But because it is the sort of open standard of messaging, if your phone doesn't work with it, your phone is broken.
You're like, oh, iMessage, iMessage is great.
Yeah, but everyone doesn't have iMessage.
It's like, well, why doesn't everyone have iMessage?
Well, it's because it's just an Apple thing.
Well, if you want everyone to have iMessage, you can't have it just be an Apple thing.
uh and if you don't want everyone to have iMessage you may make damn sure that the one thing everybody supposedly has no not whatsapp the one thing everybody has uh works and in our country that's sms the sort of lowest common denominator um yeah so that's crappy when bugs like that happen and you can imagine why they happen it's like well but who pays attention to sms like how many times are apple employees using sms they're probably using iMessage way more
And that's the problem.
And that's, that's the thing that really, that really bugs me about this is I feel like this is widespread enough.
Cause like I said, I've complained about it on Twitter and people have said, I thought it was an AT&T issue at first.
And then people on like Verizon and other American carriers said, no, no, no, no, no, it's me too.
And then I thought it was an American thing or something.
And then people in Europe were like, no, no, no, no, no, it's me too.
Then I thought it was an iPhone 12 thing.
And some people on like iPhones 11 said, no, no, no, no, no, me too.
But I talked to a couple of Apple people about it and,
they were like, wow, I never send SMSs ever.
And I'm like, oh, my God, I cannot hit my face.
I cannot facepalm harder when I hear things like that because it's like this is the biggest issue I have with Apple is not dogfooding or not dogfooding everything.
Like, yeah, they dogfood iMessage, but they don't dogfood SMS or group MMSs or anything like that.
Does anyone at Apple really and truly use their tube and their assistant?
Because anyone who has really and truly used their assistant knows it's a piece of garbage compared to other assistants.
Or maybe that's the other side of this coin is they dog food too much and they don't see what the other side of the fence looks like.
And they don't see how much better the Amazon tube is than theirs.
And it's very frustrating because...
Here's a phone that is possibly my favorite iPhone ever, and I cannot reliably receive messages from friends and family.
It is an internet communicator.
That was one of the three pillars, wasn't it?
An internet communicator, and it is not communicating.
It's driving me crazy.
SMS isn't the internet.
Yeah, fine, fine, fine, fine.
And just to get in front of everyone, no, I am not going to convince all of my friends and family to get WhatsApp.
I don't want WhatsApp.
I don't use WhatsApp.
I do not have the clout, the wherewithal, the desire to convince everyone else I know to use WhatsApp.
It's not happening.
Those are boil-the-ocean strategies.
Any strategy that involves getting everyone you're related to to do anything related to technology is basically a no-go, unless you're going to buy it all for them.
And even then, if you were going to buy them all iPhones, I bet some of them would reject it.
Oh, I've offered iPhones to like, so as an example, Aaron's youngest brother is on Android.
His fiance is on an iPhone and I have offered to literally give him my 11, which I just got repaired.
I think I mentioned on the show, I just got repaired brand new screen on it.
I've offered to literally give it to him and he doesn't, he's not interested.
He just doesn't want it.
So, anyway.
A couple weeks ago, we made brief mention of this last episode, but it might have hit the cutting room floor.
A few weeks ago, my name is T in the chat wrote something about what had ended up happening last week, but we didn't have time for it.
My name is T wrote, after show request for... I can't do this this time.
We keep bringing this up when we're two hours into an episode and it's like, Marco, please summarize 10 years of podcasting in the next five minutes.
Fine.
Let the record show.
I was interested to hear this.
I have four Fisherman's Friend half cough drops left.
I can't do a huge segment right now.
What you've got here, Casey, is what I call one of the topics that ends up getting pushed down in the list.
It's a big topic.
If we're going to talk about 10 years of podcasting, we're going to need time to do it.
It's also a little bit navel-gazy, and usually there's more pressing news.
So these topics, there's a lot of them that I have like that that end up in the topic list, and they just end up getting pushed down over time.
And by leaving this an after show, it's like each time it's like this time we're going to be able to do it.
Even if Marco was 100% healthy, two hours in is not the time to talk about, to summarize 10 years of podcasting.
So my name is T. It's a tall order for us to tackle your thing.
We'd have to really wait for like the summer when there's no news, but we have so much frigging Apple news that we don't probably have time to reminisce about being podcasters.
Fine.
I tried.
I tried again.
Nobody loves me.
It's okay.
Do you want to just do titles then or do you want to talk about your cases?
I need to just tell the people about the cases because they keep asking me about it.
All my cases haven't arrived.
My iPhone 12 cases.
I'm supposed to talk about iPhone 12 cases that have the bottom exposed and how much I like them and so on and so forth.
But my order is like, I don't know what's taking so long.
My one order said it's supposed to arrive in 15 business days, which I hadn't noticed before.
And we haven't reached 15 business days.
So it's not overdue yet.
But
I don't have all my cases.
I have not found a case that I super duper like.
I guess I can do a quick, you know, brief review of the one I have.
I got the Senna case, S-E-N-A.
It's a leather case.
It has an exposed bottom.
It's got metal buttons.
The metal buttons are textured, but I knew that going in because you could see it in the photos.
Pros, the leather is super grippy and tacky.
I love it.
Like the Apple ones are always slippery when you first get them and then they get broken in.
This one right out of the case, very grippy leather.
um and of course the bottom is exposed and it's good and the corners uh look good on it they're not fraying or anything like that cons the buttons are way too hard to press for me if you like firm button presses this is your phone because they are super firm presses like if you're worried about these buttons getting accidentally pressed in your pocket probably not going to happen with these ones but they are so hard to press that i almost immediately took this case off and just threw it away
One thing I noticed about that case in particular is like when I got it, I noticed that when you look on the inside, like when you have no phone in it and you're looking at the inside of the case.
Which is all you're doing because you don't have a phone.
Yes, that's why I had a lot of time to do this.
Like where the buttons are, the inside of the buttons is the same material and seemingly at the same thickness as the rest of the case.
Whereas if you look at an Apple leather case,
where the buttons are there's like a thinner like rubber kind of membrane material there instead of the whole full thickness leather so i'm guessing that's something you need to look out for as like how to make the buttons feel better and be easier to press or not yeah and so this is this is granted it's a personal preference and if you like stiff buttons this is the one for you i wanted them to be separate like stiff buttons
i don't know maybe if you have accidental presses a lot you don't have to worry about this but like here's how stiff buttons manifest to be terrible like when i have my phone sitting on like the sideboard when i'm in the kitchen doing dishes and i want to turn the volume up and apple stupid airpods don't provide a way to do that i've got to walk into the i got to walk into the the your watch does yeah my what i don't know i know i know i'm just saying
i gotta walk into the other room and what i want to do is just reach down it's laying flat face up on on a little table thing i just want to reach down to it and press the volume button seems like a simple task but if it requires a ton of pressure now i have to get a firmer grip press hard but make sure you don't have your opposing finger on the power button because you'll take a screenshot and it's actually hard to do now not so hard that i can't struggle oh my little muscles i can't do it it's just annoyingly stiff
I want to be able to just do it thoughtlessly.
And now I have to like concentrate a little bit.
The second thing is the texturing on the buttons is way rougher than I thought it would be.
I thought it would be like kind of like a little bit rough or whatever.
I wanted them to be smooth.
I'm like, oh, if they're a little textured, that's fine.
But like you could file your nails with this.
You could probably, you know, you could probably escape prison with one of these things.
But just like rubbing it on the bars, eventually you'll get through.
very rough texture and the buttons stick out sort of proud of the case a lot more than the apple ones do the apple ones are recessed a little bit so you know they're not entirely recessed they do stick out a little bit but i like the more recessed thing um and finally in terms of the leather quality even though the feel of this is great and it's very tacky which is what i want
the leather does seem to be, I don't know, thinner or there's less of it or less durable.
Cause I've already got like some Mars on the back of it, some scratches that I can see.
And the way the leather bunches around the curves, like it's not overall as nicely sort of gathered.
I put a link in the, I put a photo in the show notes.
I don't know if we'll put it in show art or whatever, but it's like, it's a picture of the Apple leather case showing the volume buttons and the cutout for the ring silence switch.
And the Apple ones, every curve is just smooth.
There's no like wrinkling or bunching like in any of the curve parts.
Everything is rounded over.
The buttons are recessed in a little rounded over area.
This thing, the ring silent switch, is like someone just took a razor cookie cutter and went slam and just cut out a slice.
The edges are sharp and it's just like there is no sort of rounding over of it at all.
It's just like they slice right through the thing.
And so you can see all the different layers of the case, right?
So that aspect of it is both.
I feel like it feels a little bit cheaper, probably less durable, and also doesn't look as nice.
That said, it's still on the case because you know why?
It's got an exposed bottom, and I like that.
I did consider going back to the Apple silicone case because having used the swipe up on the exposed bottom for a while, I mean, I used it without a case for a while, so it shouldn't be new.
It's like, isn't it the same swiping up from the bottom without the case versus an exposed bottom?
It's the same edge the whole time.
But I have to say that
even without a case it is less satisfying than the old rounded over 11 to swipe up from the bottom so i did have the thought that's like well you liked every other aspect of the silicone case better better except for the bottom swipe and it wasn't quite as tacky as this so why not just switch back to the silicone one but instead i'm like well let me wait to for my next leather case to come so i can try that one out but it hasn't arrived yet so
if you're looking for me to endorse a case that i personally like that has a bottom cut out as native leather i cannot endorse the senate case but you might like it if you like rough metal buttons that stick out a lot and are hard to press if you have one of those like hand grip exercise things like the like the the springs between the two like grip you know lines that you put your your hand around you know
If you like those, maybe you'll like using these buttons.
And maybe they'll soften up more over time.
They haven't softened up so far.
I don't know.
So I think this is not a bad case.
It is just not to my taste.
And it's not to my taste in ways that I was not able to ascertain by looking at the pictures.
Or if you have to break out of prison.
Yeah.